A Beginner’s Guide to Creating an Online Course

Are you a skilled trade professional or knowledgeable about effective time management? No matter what field you’re in, your expertise has value, and it can bring you solid income!

Want to know how? That’s pretty easy – just turn your knowledge into an online course and start selling it online.

Course selling has become a huge market. And the best thing about it is that almost anybody can enter that market today.

This guide will explain how to create an online course step by step. If you’re new to all this and don’t know where to start, this is exactly for you.

1. Think of a course topic

This is probably the most important thing you need to do when developing a course. If you choose the wrong niche, then chances are you’ll not be successful. Fortunately, there’s an absolutely fail-safe way to choose the one that’s right for you. And, as you might have already guessed, the best niche is what you do best.

Your area of expertise can be literally anything – marketing, painting, cooking, or even pet care. However, just having deep knowledge is not always enough. Not to get bored halfway through course creation or get burned out, choose a topic that you’re truly passionate about.

In fact, you need three things to create a successful training product: knowledge, experience, and passion. They comprise a three-part rocket needed to make a good course:

2. Decide on the format

Now that you know what your online course will be about, it’s time to think about its format – whether it will be a series of video tutorials, a set of documents and presentations, or an online slide-based course.

Of course, it’s up to you to decide, but keep in mind that the more multimedia and interactivity your course has, the more appealing it will be for your potential learners.

There’s a big variety of course development software on the market that lets you create interactive, multimedia-rich content with quizzes, drag-and-drop and hotspot activities, and role-play simulations. However, different tools will have different learning curves.

So, if you’ve never used such apps before and are not ready to invest loads of time in exploring the tool, opt for an authoring tool that’s intuitive and easy to use.

3. Plot your course

No matter which format you’ve chosen, you need to create a course structure. In other words, you should divide your course into several modules and organize them in a logical manner.

Think about what you want to teach and formulate the main goal of the course. Next, split your goal up into several learning objectives – what learners should be able to do after they complete the training.

If you’ve set up the learning objectives correctly, it will be easy for you to align them with their respective training modules, as in this example:

You might also want to break modules down into shorter sections.

4. Write a script

A good script is essential for a successful course, whether it is audio narration for a training video or an on-screen text for a slide-based course. Here are a few tips that will help you make the script as great as possible.

• Deliver relevant content. Make sure all your content sticks to the point. If you want to go deeper, provide this information as additional resources.
• Follow the logical sequence. Keep ideas in sequential order, so learners can get a clear sense of them and retain the information longer.
• Write the way you speak. Avoid difficult sentences and heavy paragraphs. Write with a conversational tone and use your learners’ language so they relate to the information.
• Use examples. When it fits, use practical examples to explain the concept so your audience understands it better.

5. Add graphics

To make your course even more engaging, add pictures, charts, and other kinds of infographics that correspond to the topic. For an instructional video, you can also add annotations, graphs, and captions. These will help you maintain your learners’ attention or highlight a significant point.

6. Deliver a course to your learners

Now that you’ve created a course, you’re ready to go to the next stage – deliver it to your end users. If you have a website, blog, or social media page, you can start selling it right away.

However, you’ll have to deal with some challenges, such as payments and promotion. So, if you want to avoid these issues, opt for a course selling platform that will handle all this for you.

Final words

It’s a wrap! Now you know how to create a course and start selling it online. With a good amount of expertise in some topic and the right tools, you can establish a real business that will bring you great revenue and be scalable.