Here’s how to avoid some of the most common mistakes that new course creators make when trying to create their first online course. Listen in to make sure you avoid them!
Here’s how to avoid some of the most common mistakes that new course creators make when trying to create their first online course. Listen in to make sure you avoid them!
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Today, let's continue our online course creation series. And I've got a couple stories to share with you to help you avoid the most common mistakes. I see course creators making every single day. So let's make sure that's not you and jump into today's 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. Hello. They're So glad you could make it for episode 11, the top six mistakes when creating your online course, and you can find the show notes for all the links that I referenced Today at coursecreatorshq.com/11. So after almost 20 years online today, I want to share some hard earned knowledge with you along with a couple of favorite stories to help illustrate my points and to make sure you grab your free training on whether or not your course idea is any good.
You can find that coursecreatorshq.com/idea. So first up, let me start by sharing a story. So have you seen the Pixar movie called Up it's an adventure movie car and cartoon from 2009. And it's all about how a widower named Carl accidentally teams up with a young adventurer, similar to a boy scout named Russell as he ties thousands of balloons to his house and attempts to fly away and go up.
So along this adventure, they also come across a dog named Doug. And one of my very favorite scenes in the movie happens when Doug who is fitted with a special color so that he can actually speak and not just bark, he's bragging about his master going on and on and on about how great he is. And then in the middle of a thought,
he turns away and with huge eyes looks and says loudly squirrel. And Doug is very famously and obviously easily distracted and finds it hard to focus. So our family famously will discuss with each other, how we are getting distracted and calling out the squirrel. And the first mistake then that I see a lot of course creators making is that they do not focus on their course and give it just one transformation.
They hop from topic to topic and want to talk about everything and they leave their students kind of lost. So don't be Doug, the dog keep your course focused on the transformation that you're providing for your student. So now let's talk about that for a minute. That was distracting the dog, and I have two huge Oak trees in my backyard. So it's a huge attraction for the squirrels.
And in fact, at one point I had five squirrels stationing each other around my yard and through the trees and in the leaves. And it was fun for me to watch, but have you ever actually paid really close attention to how a squirrel operates? They hop from spot to spot the dig for a second, and then they hop to another spot and they keep jumping around,
digging through the leaves, they'll pause and eat for two seconds. And then they hop around some more. And honestly, they never seem very organized when they're hopping around from one shiny interesting spot to another. And then only once in a while, do they actually seem to find any acorns? And so this is the second mistake that I see a lot of course,
creators making. They jump from one shiny object or new tool or new idea to another for their business, but they never actually finish anything. Mistake. Number two is following the shiny objects, but never finishing your projects. It's when you finish that, you can actually start seeing the returns on the investment of your time and your money into these different tools and topics and projects.
So I don't want you to be Doug the dog, or I don't want you to be like the squirrels in my backyard. Keep your eyes on the prize and finish one shiny object at a time. The third mistake I see is when someone jumps into course creation and decides they're going to hire all the experts they can find all at once. They know they have a lot to learn.
So they jump into the deep end of the pool. They take every single free course and hire every expert that comes along their path. But the problem here is that if this is you, you will get so much advice and I'll tell you a lot of it will be very conflicting advice that you'll end up spinning in circles. You won't know what to do when and every webinar or coaching call will send you down a different path or in a different direction until you feel like you're completely overwhelmed.
And the worst part is this also keeps you from finishing because you're so busy jumping around from one project to another, from all these different experts. So here's my suggestion on how to do this. And one of the things I actually prefer that my coaching clients do, I want you to pick one expert or one course at a time, complete it all the way through until you have reached the end,
do what this expert says. So you can get a benchmark of results from them. And then, and only then can you try something different and see where another expert might take you that way you have numbers and benchmarks to compare against you'll know if something is better or not, because you know what your baseline is, you know, what kind of results you're getting now.
So it's really easy then to try something new and see if it's better or not. When you're trying to do everything at once, you just end up being confused and overwhelmed and don't actually accomplish anything. So the fourth mistake, and this is actually a big one that I see too, is trying to put everything, you know, into your very first course.
And it's actually the worst possible situation for your students because they don't want to know everything. They want you to be the curator. They want you to give them the best stuff you have. They want you to tell them the best way to go so that they don't need to make a lot of decisions. They just want to do it in the least amount of time to get from a to B.
So if they really wanted to know everything, they could just go out to YouTube and watch hours and hours and hours of videos and go search on Google and find all of this different information. But they are trusting you as their instructor to tell them exactly what they need and in the best order. So I'll give you an example of this. I took my first podcast course,
and of course, you know, we needed to get equipment for recording our podcast. It's actually one of the top questions that new podcasters ask. They want to know which microphone is the best, which one should they buy? And so my instructor could have taken the time to tell us all about the different microphones and given us the pros and cons of all of them and the pricing and said,
okay, now pick which one you want to purchase based on that. But he didn't. He said, I want you to buy this microphone, get this arm so that you can hook your microphone to it, and then get this filter to put on the microphone. And it'll plug right into your computer. I want you to go to Amazon. I want you to order it today so that we have it in a couple of days and we can get started recording right away.
And it was such a relief because I didn't have to make big decisions. I didn't have to try to figure it out myself. He did all the hard work for me. All I had to do was go purchase. So think about that as you're putting your course together, where can you save your students brainpower? Where can you help them so that they don't have to make decisions and you can help them by just telling them what to do.
That's one of the best things an instructor can provide in their course. Okay. So mistake number five is getting lost in the messy middle of a course. The beginning, when you're deciding to create a course, it's the fun part, because it's so exciting to think about what's possible and what you want to do. And the end is actually pretty easy too,
because you can see the light at the end of the tunnel. And you can imagine it being finished. You can imagine helping your students and seeing your course complete, but boy, that messy middle is where your course just might die. Really terrible death. The middle is where it gets hard. Remember when you had to run a mile in gym class,
did you guys have to do that too? I hated those sessions in a gym class, cause I'm not a runner, but about halfway through. I remember my lungs would start burning. I couldn't get my breath. My legs would hurt and I just really wanted to stop. But that gets in the way to when you're creating a course, because you get into that messy middle,
and you just want to stop and move on to the next shiny object. So my suggestion for you is when you get started, I want you to have a plan for what you're going to do when you hit the messy middle, before you even start, figure out how you're going, going to handle it. What are you going to do? Do you have,
I have a coach who maybe can help you through that? Who can coach you through it, or maybe you have a friend who is a really fantastic cheerleader, or you decide you're going to have a special reward for yourself. When you get through the messy middle, what is it you're going to do when that messy middle of the project takes over and threatens to derail you?
Now, mistake number six is trying to do it all yourself. And listen. I am a huge proponent of figuring things out and not having to overpay for help. And in fact, when I started, I was a mom with a little one and we were living off my husband's salary. So I couldn't afford to hire a bunch of expensive assistants. So I had to learn it all myself,
but I will just tell you that takes longer. And depending on your situation, you might have to do that. But if there's any way that you can get a hold of some capital to invest in helping you get your course going and get it across the finish line, I want you to jump on it. So I remember one expert I was listening to who said,
if you don't have money, go to McDonald's get a part-time job and make a few hundred dollars to put into your course business. And so your course will be better. And you'll probably be a lot happier too, as you're getting help with the things that you don't like to do. And here are two things that I highly recommend. You hire out your video editing and your graphics creation.
And why is that? Because video editing is incredibly time-consuming when it's done well. So you might be able to get either a high school or college student who's studying video. They'll be really savvy with the tools and they can make your videos shine and look really good. And probably at a less expensive right rate than a professional editor. Another challenge with finishing your course is all the graphic design that you need.
So if you're using presentations, you'll have to get those designed. Plus you'll need a thumbnail images for each of your modules in each of your lessons, and you want them to look good and be consistent in the graphics and the design. And so that sends the right message to your students. I highly recommend a service called Kappa. I've partnered with them to get you on limited design projects for one low monthly fee.
And typically it's $399 a month, but I've partnered with them so that you can get started for just $249 a month for unlimited graphics projects. So you can hire them to do all of your design at once. So if you go to coursecreatorshq.com/kapa that's K A P A Kapa with just one P and that will take you to a Google form to fill out so that you can get a more details on their unlimited service for $249 a month.
So I hope that's helpful for you and can help you get your graphic design done all at once. So there you have it, the six most common mistakes I see course creators making, and let's do a quick recap. Number one is don't be Doug the dog and have your course be unfocused, stay focused on the transformation. Number two, don't be a squirrel and finish your projects before you jump onto the next one.
Number three, don't work with more than one expert at a time. Number four, don't put everything, you know, into your first course. Number five, don't get stuck in the messy middle and number six, don't try to do it all yourself. So today's quick win for you is all about determining where you should host your course. If you started looking around,
I'm sure you've seen all the tools. There are so many that it can be completely overwhelming. Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific, Podia. It goes on and on. So I've pulled together several questions for you to ask yourself to help you narrow down the options and hopefully save yourself some money and some headaches. So go to coursecreatorshq.com/hosts to download the free workbook and the training on where you should be hosting your course.
And remember all the links and resources for this episode can be found. At coursecreatorshq.com/11 So I have one last request. Could you please hit that subscribe button in your podcast app, if you learned anything valuable or useful from this episode, I'd really appreciate a five-star review. They me doing a happy dance and I really, really appreciate it because what happens is when the podcast apps see positive reviews,
then they will suggest this podcast to other potential course creators. So thank you for listening. Thank you for subscribing and thank you for reviewing that's the end of the official episode. And for this week's extra behind the scenes content that I like to add onto the end. I want to tell you quickly about some real life launches and what we've noticed this week.
So we've seen a four different launches bomb this week. Almost no sales across several different projects by different experts and they all just tanked. And I'll do an episode all about what you can do when your launch doesn't work. But in this case, I wanted to share one common thread in case it's helpful for any of you. So right now I'm recording this in the middle of October, 2020,
and the entire world is on pins and needles right now, waiting to see what is happening with the US presidential election. And it kind of feels like everyone is just holding their breath and waiting to see what's going to happen. And the problem right now is that the audience is so distracted that I don't think they're thinking about the future or thinking about fixing problems that they've got right now.
They just aren't buying. And the only way I would have known this is because I have a network of course creators that I can compare notes with. We share intelligence about our sales, and we could see this pattern going across the board. And so actually it was a big roof leaf to realize it wasn't anything specific that we were doing that didn't work with our launches.
It was just the climate right now. So even though several of the experts are veteran course creators, it wasn't something specific that they did wrong. So I really hope you enjoyed this episode and I can't wait to connect with you next time. When we get back to talking all about marketing your Online course, so have a great week and thanks so much for listening.
Catch you next time.