In this episode, Julie shares her 14 favorite tools for creating your online course (and videos) and then marketing it. Bookmark this list because you’ll come back to it over and over again.
In this episode, host Julie Hood shares her 14 favorite tools for creating your online course (and videos) and then marketing it. Bookmark this list because you’ll come back to it over and over again.
Be sure to catch the July 2021 Kajabi special pricing… get 3 months for only $99 (that’s just $33 a month) & get Julie’s bonuses to get your course business up and running!
What are the bonuses?
Sign up here for Kajabi and then get on the list here for the bonuses from Julie!
Creating Your Course
Marketing Your Course
Hello there and welcome to the course creators HQ podcast. I'm so excited today is going to be a speed round of seven of my favorite online course creation and marketing tools. So I can't wait to share them all with you. You'll definitely want to bookmark this episode. 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. Oh, this is going to be such a fun episode. Make sure that you grab the notes for this episode. You'll want to go to coursecreatorsHq.com/51 that's course creators hq.com/ 51coursecreatorsHq.com/51 I'm going to speedily run through a whole bunch of tools for you and you won't want to try to keep up with it all.
So just go there to get the links to the different things that I'm suggesting for you. And before we get started, though, I have to tell you about this amazing special that Kajabi is having. I've never seen something, this good coming from them for their pricing. So it's July, 2021. If you're listening to this episode later, just kind of fast forward through this part.
But if you're listening right now and you've been thinking about getting started, this is an amazing place for you to get going. Kajabi is giving you three months of access to their tool for only $99. So that's just $33 a month to get going. You get 90 days to get your course running and get it started selling before you have to pay the regular pricing.
So, because this is so good, I'm putting together a huge list of bonuses that I'm giving out for everyone who signs up using my partner affiliate link. So what are these bonuses? First off, you get a one-on-one coaching call with me for 30 minutes to talk about your business. That's a $150 value. And then I'm going to give you my six steps to build your perfect mini course class that I've offered in the past.
You get also 90 days of workshops with me for free on in July. We're going to talk about effortless email marketing, for course creators. So what to send, how to send in and secrets for making it all work together in August, we're going to do a sales page creation secrets for course, creators. So how to create and design your sales page so that wows your students.
And then in September, we will have joint ventures, for course, creators the secret sauce to use other people's lists to find your perfect students. So you can see, I tried to make this just an irresistible offer for you because I really want you to jump in to this deal. And there's two links that you need to use. The first one is to sign up for Kajabi.
And then the second one gets you on my list so that you get all of these bonuses. So jump into those in the notes. At course, creators hq.com/ 51. All right, let's get to these amazing tools that I want you to consider using in your business. The first one, obviously let's talk about where you can be hosting your course. So if you are on a super tight budget and you need to get started for free Thinkific will let you create a course,
just one, but they'll let you create a course for free and get started with their tool. So if you're okay with it's a little bit more challenging to set up on Thinkific than some of the other tools, if you're okay with taking the time to figure it out, that can be a great place to get started. And obviously I just talked about Kajabi.
It's my favorite from a student experience. It not only has the best time for your students as they're going through their course. It's an all in one. So you get not only your course hosting, but you also get your website, your blog, you get an affiliate program, you can do your email newsletter, you can do podcasting. They just added that.
And then they're also adding in the next couple months, paid newsletters and also coaching so that you can do all of this all inside one tool. So it makes your life a lot easier. So that's where I send people to host their course. One of those to either Thinkific or Kajabi, second is recording and editing, editing a video. So there's a couple of different tools that you can consider using the first one is ScreenFlow for the Mac.
If you're on a Macintosh, that can be a really fantastic tool to use. If you're on a PC, I use Camtasia and use that to record all of my videos, or I will also sometimes use zoom because everyone knows how to use zoom. Now you can hop on and record on there, but then if you're on a PC, you can use Camtasia to edit.
Both tools can also use the Adobe creative cloud. Now there's a pretty big learning curve, but some of you may either know how to use those or have some relatives or friends that can help you with that. So Adobe creative cloud is another option and then a slightly less expensive tool is the Mojave video suite that let you record an edit. So those are a few of my favorite recording and editing tools.
As soon as you can try to outsource this it's so time-consuming, there are better ways for you to be spending your time, but every now and then I need to go in and I need to do something myself. So I will have these tools available so that I can go in and edit a quick video to get it uploaded. Okay. Number three is to use Google docs and Google slides to create your documentation,
to create the presentations. If you're doing voiceover presentations for your course, and both of those are free. So there, it's similar to Microsoft word and Microsoft PowerPoint or keynote on the Mac. But if you don't have those, you can use Google docs and Google slides for free and even better. You can share them with the rest of your team. And it's really easy then to work on these documents together.
Okay. Number four is a ring light to improve your videos. And I've heard these lights described as a Botox and a light. They really do make you look fantastic on video. So I've linked to my favorite one. The one that I use for all of my videos, number five is a tool to help you with your presentations. So coming up with those PowerPoints in those slides,
it's Invado Elements, and it's a membership where you can download presentations. They have lots and lots of other things too, but the presentation files can be really helpful to get your branding together and get started. And then a second set of branding tools that I really like are at funnel gorgeous. They also have presentations and slide decks that you can purchase. And then they also have some more,
really good tools to help you with branding your whole website and your, and your course business. So that's funnel gorgeous also has some great tools to purchase. And then number seven, the last set of tools that I want to share with you is make sure when you're recording that you're using a microphone. So if you're recording from your phone or your iPad,
you can use something called an Irig mike. And I like those. It's a little lapel mic that you can put on your shirt and then it will make your video so much better. If you're recording from your computer. I like the ATR 2100 USB mic. That's a, I'm using an ATR mic to record this podcast and your students will put up with videos that aren't fantastic,
but if your audio is terrible, they won't necessarily want to listen to all of your lessons. So make sure you get a microphone. The big thing to pay attention to is what plug is on the end of the microphone. So make sure that it will fit into whatever it is that you're using, whether it's your mobile phone, an iPhone, your computer,
look at the end, you might need some kind of adapter to make it fit. So just check that when you're purchasing your tools, make sure you've got the plug, that it will plug into that. So that was our really quick seven types of tools that you can use to create a really fantastic course. And now let's talk about marketing and some of the things that I would recommend.
So the first one is I want every single course creator to have an email newsletter so that you are connecting with your audience. And if you're not using something like Kajabi, that is an all-in-one tool that has that built in. I really like convert kit. It also gives you landing pages as part of convert kit. So that's one less tool that you have to purchase separately.
And for all of you, sharp-eyed folks out there, you will notice that my email newsletter is not uncovered kit. I use something else called drip, but I don't recommend it to folks. I think convert kit is a much better place for course, creators to put their newsletters. And then number two, I use audacity to create this podcast. And for all kinds of audio editing,
it is a free tool. There is a bit of a learning curve with it, but I'll tell you one of my secrets. I only learned enough that I can use it to create this podcast. Like, I don't know everything it will do, but I know how to record. I know how to cut and paste and edit and move things around.
I know how to connect it to my microphone. And then I export it for the podcast and I know it'll do a ton of other things, but I just stopped and said, you know what? That's all I really need right now. So that's all I'm going to take the time to learn. So that's number two, number three, to create a year's worth of social media posts.
I use a tool called missing a letter. And the best thing about it is that it pulls content. So I will put in my podcast episode and it will pull in nine different phrases and, and concepts from the post for me. And then I go in and I edit it and I can add images. And then it spreads them out for the rest of the year,
post them on all my social media accounts for me. So each of these podcasts episodes get a year's worth of promotion. And it only takes me about 15 minutes. So I really loved missing letter. And then another tool that I use a lot for social media is called social bee like the, the bee in a hive, social bee. And basically what it will let me do is create a category of posts.
So I have a category of all the freebies that I give out, and then it just keeps going through the list and posting them over and over again. So every week or two, I get promotions out to get my freebies and take out people signed up so that I love that feature for giving me that recurring posting. Now I've heard in the past from other people that some of these tools can potentially hurt your social media engagement.
And, and I don't know if that's true or not. Here's how I look at it. If I didn't use these tool, these posts would not happen. So I'd much rather have some posts out there that when you, as a reader, as a listener, when you come across my social media accounts, you see some things that I've been doing,
I'd much rather have that. Then I'm using doing all these manual posts that I don't have time to do. So I don't know if it makes a difference, but I've been using them. And just to make sure that I have content coming out, but I wanted to give that warning in case it could affect any of you. I don't know, talk,
talk to some other social media folks who are more savvy than I am and see what they have to say about it. Okay. Number five is a Snappa for creating graphics and yes, you will notice I'm not recommending Canva here. It's a tool called Snappa and personally Canva kind of drives me crazy. I gotta be honest. Plus you have to pay for every other thing that you come across in there.
So it just, I, it doesn't work the way my brain works. So we use a tool called Snappa. It is a paid tool, but I can also get all of my team members on it. So they all have access to our graphics and our social media, and we can go into old ones and pull them up and edit them really easily.
We have our branding all set up in there, so that it's super easy for us to create graphics really quickly. So it's called Snappa and I use it just about every day to create something number six, for tracking links. And this is where I want you to keep track of what people are clicking on. So you're going to create different links to different things.
And then you can go back and look and say, Ooh, how many people clicked on this link? How many people clicked on that link? So if you have a WordPress website, I know some of you do, there is a plugin called pretty links light, and that's what I use. I have almost a thousand links now set up that I'm tracking and following,
and it just makes all those long ugly links, super easy to, not only for you to remember, but also for you to track and see how many clicks you're getting. If you don't have a WordPress website, you might want to use something called re brand li that's, rebrand li and it lets you set up your own link tracking. It's think it's paid.
If you want to have your own domain name and use it. So rebrandly for tracking, and then number seven for a project management tool consider using a Trello. I use it with all of my team members so that we can track what we're working on together in one spot. And what I like about this, if you haven't used Trello before, it's sort of like having a bulletin board with a bunch of post-it notes and east post-it note is a project,
and you can have conversations with your teammates about what's going on. You can link to information, you can attach files, and it also has a search function. So I can search everything that I've had the team doing over the last couple of years and get back to the different projects and the things we were working on. So love Trello for doing that.
And you can even email into Trello. So that also is really fantastic. So those are seven of my favorite tools for marketing, your course, and yes, this was definitely a speed episode. So you'll want to go back to the show notes, to get all of this information coursecreatorsHq.com/51 in order to get the links to all of these different tools and check them out in case there's anything there that could be helpful for you.
So thanks so much for listening. I hope you had fun with this speed round and I'm looking forward to connecting with all of you who ended up signing up for Kajabi using my link so that we can do all the workshops together over the next few months. So, so glad you're here. Thank you for listening. Thank you for subscribing. Or if you're on apple podcast,
it's following. Thank you for reviewing us. If you got something helpful today, I would really, really appreciate a five-star review on your podcast app. It helps us get in front of more course creators. So thanks so much for that. Or if you happen to come across someone who you think might be interested in a podcast or in a podcast about course creation,
please send them my way. I really, really appreciate that. So thanks so much for listening. Have a fantastic week And we will catch you on the next episode. Take care.