In this episode, host Julie Hood breaks the “cone of silence” on what it really takes to create and market an online course. Use these 7 secrets to help you get your course up and running without getting stuck in these pitfalls.
In this episode, host Julie Hood breaks the “cone of silence” on what it really takes to create and market an online course. Use these 7 secrets to help you get your course up and running without getting stuck in these pitfalls.
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Episode 21 - 10 Time-Saving Secrets to Course Creation
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KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. It will probably take you longer than you think.
2. It’s tougher to keep it simple.
3. You need either time OR money.
4. You can waste a lot of time figuring out the tech.
5. Little things can make a big difference.
6. Tracking is your friend.
7. The rewards from seeing your first sale and the first student succeed are like no other.
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Hey there, welcome to the course creatorsHQ podcasts. And I'm so excited because today we are going to break the glass and share some of those secrets that no one tells you about creating and selling online courses. So I hope you enjoy this episode. Thanks for being here and let's get to it. Get to It. Welcome to the course creators, HQ podcast,
helping you navigate the latest techniques for creating and marketing online courses. And now here's your host Julie Hood. Hey, so we have started the countdown to the topic and title challenge into the next version of the 24 hour course creators. So I'm hoping you can join us for one or both of those. The challenge is free. You can go to the show notes or topicandtitlechallenge.com and get signed up. I'm so excited. We're going to have five days of training, and then I'm going to do some masterclasses over the weekend, all to help you get your topic and your title figured out, and they are essential to having a course, that's going to work and going to sell for you. And today I'm excited about this episode.
So let me tell you a quick little story. When I was a child, I used to watch the reruns of a show called get smart. And it was a parody at the time of spies and sort of the CIA. And they always had this really hilarious part where when they needed to talk about something super secret, they would pull down the cone of silence.
And they'd all be inside this cone of silence, because the idea was that no one could hear them inside the cone of silence. So today I want to break the cone of silence for you and share seven things that no one normally tells you about creating an online course. So thanks for being here. Hope you enjoy this. Let's get to it. So number one,
creating your course will probably take longer than you think. So just things come up. It's, it's more complex than we think it's more challenging than we think. And, but it doesn't have to be impossible. It doesn't have to take you forever. That's part of the reason why I created 24 hour course creator is I didn't want people to get bogged down in all those things that sort of get in their way.
I wanted to simplify it down to the very minimal that you needed to get going. So here's a couple of things to help you with this first, get some kind of guidance and help at whatever level you are at. You know, maybe it's just buying a course. Maybe it's getting some coaching wherever you are in your business, be sure. And some kind of guidance.
Now, when you're looking for an EPS expert to work with, make sure that they have some way to get your questions answered, whether it's a Q and A call or individual calls or email questions, you want to have some way to get that specific help that you need. And then the second thing is make sure that they can help you with the tech side of things because,
and you don't want it to be just using their system. I've seen that from a couple of the experts that are out there. Now, they want you to jump into their specific system that they've created, which from a business perspective is great because they get ongoing revenue for you from you, but it may not necessarily be the best idea for you. Just depends.
Make sure you look into that and remember that you're not exactly paying for the training. What you're paying for is to save you time and save you headaches and frustration. You want your experts to help you get past some of those things. So you don't waste a lot of time on questions that they can answer for you. And then a couple quick tips to find some hours in your day,
grocery delivery and or pickup. My favorite way to save time, don't be wandered around the grocery store, or just either pick up your groceries or get it delivered. You can save a couple hours a week with that. Number two, control your Netflix, bingeing, and boy, are they good at this? You know, the next episode starts and you just keep watching and watching and watching and you get either end up staying up too late or spending too much time on it.
So that's when you decide that, Hey, I'm going to get this course created. That's one place to, to add in some stopping times for you, maybe put a reminder on your phone after an hour or two that you're going to stop. And then here's one that I recently discovered is that you can get up in the morning and start working before you do your morning routine.
So sometimes I will literally get up and crawl out of bed and just get started on stuff. And I'm always amazed at how much I can get done in the first hour or two before I've made the coffee before I've done my normal morning routine. There's a lot that can happen there. And so try it out. See if that works for you. If you want a few more episode 21,
and I'll put the link in the show notes goes to the episode that we did about 10 time-saving secrets to course creation. So hopefully some of those will also be here helpful for you. So number two, it's tough to keep it simple because focusing your topic is essential, and this is really why we're doing the topic entitled challenge. I want to help people focus in and not try to tackle these unbelievably huge courses that they don't actually finish.
And that students don't really get through. Steve Jobs has one of my favorite quotes. He says, simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean, to make it simple, but it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains. So I can't wait to help you move mountains with your online course and reach a bunch of people and improve their lives.
So number three, you need to either invest time or money. And this is especially important for the marketing side of things. So it always amazes me when people get ready to set up an online business and they don't have any money at all to invest. Because if you think about it, if someone was going to create a brick and mortar business, they would know that they'd need to have some capital to get their business going.
They need to buy the building. They need to pay the licenses. You know, if it's a restaurant, you have to buy all the stuff. So really with an online business, there are quite a few things that you have to pay for, or even pay for for a while, until the business starts making enough money to cover those expenses. So there's a minimum sort of number that you need to have to pay for hosting,
to pay for email newsletter software, to pay for your website, that sort of thing. And then the second piece of this is if you don't have a lot of money to do this, you can spend your time on it. So that was when I started way, way back in the day. I did not have a ton of money to spend on getting out in front of my audience.
So I did a lot of leg work by myself. I did a lot of manual connecting with websites and working with them directly and it can be done. It just may take a little bit longer, but that's okay because you've got the time. So that's number three, number four, you can spend a lot of effort trying to figure out the tech.
So if you are not a tech person, if you're one of those folks who just regularly wants to throw your computer out the window, I want you to just hire somebody to help you with this, because it will hold you back so long. Make sure when you do this, that you get them to give you all of the logins to everything that they create for you,
and that they give you all the original files for the different things they're creating. So for example, if they're doing graphics, they may be working in Adobe and there'll be some original files, and then there'll be the output files that they create for you. And you want those originals in case you want to go back at some point and change something. You want those originals.
So also just if you have not had a chance to check out the free training that I have on where to host your course, I will link to that in the show notes too, at coursecreatorsHQ.com/44. And it will have a training that I did kind of talk about the different places where you can host your course, okay.
Number five little things, a can that make a big difference when you're putting your course together. So having the right title, improving your copywriting and really tweaking your sales page, maybe that means adding a section to your sales page with some testimonials or adding another new section, talking about what's inside the course, like really spending some time on some of these little things can make a big difference,
even finding a way to connect with your potential students in a new way. So the challenge this time is brand new for the way that we're selling 2,400 course creator. So I'm really curious to see, I think it's going to be fun to actually get to talk to people ahead of time before we do the actual course to actually work with them during the challenge.
So I'll let you know how that goes on the back end of the launch. And then I want you to keep trying things. So even if a certain thing doesn't work, let's figure out how we can tweak it and come up with a new approach, something new to try. That's part of the challenge is keeping your motivation and your excitement up. Even if you're not getting the results that you want right off the bat,
keep trying, keep jumping in and, and see what new things you could do that could actually help. And even if it's something little, it might make a big difference. And number six, that I rarely hear anyone talking about, but I think it's essential. And this is that tracking is your friend. And by that, I mean, keeping track of what's working and what's not working tracking numbers for your email newsletter.
So watching open rates and unsubscribe rates, one of my biggest clients, we have a daily meeting to talk about the numbers and look at what's open rates, unsubscribes, what kind of sales we're getting, you really want a way to know where your leads and your clicks are coming from oreven is something getting a lot of clicks. Is it really popular?
So a couple tools that I'll share with you, and I'm actually going to do a whole episode about this later, but I'll give you a quick highlights so you can get started if you want to, if you have a WordPress site, which is what I use for a lot of my tracking, I use Pretty Links lite, and it's a plugin.
And like right now I have 843 links of things that I am tracking to see what works, what gets clicked on what it is that y'all like to click on and go forward with another tool that can help out is rebrandly.com. That's R E B R A N D L Y.com. It's a paid service, but it's not too much where you can set up your own tracking links just through their tool.
And then the last tool I want to mention is leadpagesonline.com, which is what I use to track my conversion rates on my landing pages. So I can watch and see how well different pages are doing. I can tweak it and then see the new rates and see if it works better. So it's a really easy tool to be able to do some different testing and tracking.
So tracking is definitely your friend when you're trying to figure out what's working and what's not. And then number seven of the things that I wanted to share with you today is that the rewards from seeing your first sale and your first student succeed, or like no other, anywhere, that feeling you get, when you know that you have helped someone with what you know,
that you've helped them get through a problem, get to a new solution. It's just an amazing reward. And on top of that, if there's that boost, if you can start earning money from it even better. So while you're helping people, it's just really fantastic. And I wanted to end with that because that's why we're doing all this. You know,
we really want to, I, and I truly believe this guys when course creators spread their knowledge and share what they know with the world. We make the world a better place. People have better businesses. People have better family lives, they have better personal lives, whatever it is, you can help them with that's your gift that you were given. And I'm so grateful for you for sharing it with the world and doing all this hard stuff to make it happen.
So thanks for listening. I hope there were a few ideas in here that maybe you hadn't heard before, that you can implement and take forward with your course business. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd appreciate it. If you could leave us a five star review, they help us rise in the rankings and then we're able to help more course creators. So I really,
really appreciate that. Thank you for listening. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for reviewing. And last thing I want to end with, I really hope I will see you at the five day challenge starting on June the seventh, 2021. It is at topicandtitlechallenge.com. We're going to have a blast connecting and helping you figure out what your topic and your titles should be.
So jump in with us and I'll talk to you then on June the seventh, otherwise we'll next week for the podcast. Thank you for listening.