The creation of paid online courses.
At the time of writing I have in the pipeline As many as 4 online courses.
These are online video courses that I plan to deliver to my audience soon, which will complement the other 17-18 courses that I have already created, and to make sure I don't miss anything, I have signed up for 3 online Masterminds overseas.
Someone occasionally peeps in, looks out, and asks me how I can Creating so many online courses for my clients, How much time do I put in and how do I at the same time continue with my education.
It's not that I'm a super-fast typist or someone who shoots 10 hours of video and then has the footage edited by some collaborator, absolutely not.
The same goes for my training; I organize it according to precise, scheduled appointments: when you study an online course you just do that, as if it were an appointment with a client.
In this way I can efficiently manage every commitment, not to mention that everything I produce as a Valerio.it is conceived, created and finalized solely and exclusively by yours truly.
Another important consideration, which I came to some time ago, is that today it doesn't always make much sense to create some giant online courses With the risk that no one will ever digest them.
If I review at the fruition of some programs I had created 5 years ago, I see with regret that only a very small percentage of paying students completed the longer online courses.
The problem with online courses.
I'm in it for paid content, it's the 50% of my business but it doesn't have to take the 50% of my time and it doesn't have to be that way for my students.
Time is the most scarce and nonrenewable resource we have. All of it.
From Mark Z. to the mailman who brings you Amazon packages, everyone has the same time and the same inability to renew it. Every day there are 1,000 things to do, and this has in short created the misperception that many entrepreneurs have of their work, coming to the conclusion that they have no time to train.
More and more I get requests from professionals and entrepreneurs who think that time should be spent just working their heads off without training, without understanding marketing (in my specific case), with the result that everyone wants to delegate, only to realize that they don't have the money to do it and don't know what is being done for them.
How to structure your own online course.
With less and less time to study and more and more the need not to fall behind, I have long realized that any online course can be structured in two ways:
- Super-fast online courses to be consumed in 2-3 hours.
- Super structured online courses, perhaps with 30 hours of video, but extremely modular, which you can access as needed to consult the part that interests you.
In the first case, these are extremely specific paths that go to hit and solve a single but important problem, with a quick solution and without necessarily having to get to the point of telling the life, death, and miracles of each topic.
These are also the easiest courses to sell because the goals, outcomes, transformation, and oppositions are clear and the audience they are of interest to is well defined.
On the other side we find the more structured online courses and content-rich, they are more complex to make and perhaps a little harder to sell, but they usually have a much longer life.
For example, updates aside, my Master's degree in Social Authority is on sale now for 5 years and it doesn't stop producing results for my students (and fair profits for me).
In this case, the demand, audience, and promise are quite different from the first type seen just now. These kinds of online courses include strategies that last over time and offer a multi-disciplinary approach.
Here the subject matter is more imposing than in the ultra-fast courses. It starts from a more general assumption to arrive at a well-defined outcome, such as monetizing social.
This kind of path is approached by people who have very serious intentions and less urgency; they are entrepreneurs who want to form and build a solid and lasting foundation that they will draw on from there on for years to come.
They want to create a permanent culture on the subject, and perhaps develop their own point of view.
How to make an online course.
There are several ways that I have used in the past and, for one reason or another, they are all extremely effective.
Let's quickly look at them together.
- On-camera video course. A classic, go in front of the camera and talk to your audience, perhaps using a digital or flipchart. You explain your content by looking at the lens and talking to your student as if they were there in front of you.Here you need a couple of good lights, a microphone and a video camera, an SLR or a smartphone. All in all, things that can be found quickly or that you already have.
- Video course with slides. If you are afraid to stand in front of the camera or if your course requires screen viewing--I'm thinking of tutorials for software, for example--this is the best solution. I use Screenflow to do screen capture and record all the audio.
- Webinar. Why not speak in the room or with live slides? So you can also answer your students' questions. Not only that, this technique then allows you--if you structure the content well--to split the recording of your webinar into videos that will go into an online course.I use LiveWebinar for webinars, but almost any platform you can find on the market today is fine.
- Text only. It goes back a little bit, before the advent of YouTube and streaming, and I really like this. It may be because I enjoy writing but even more so reading and studying on content that I can quickly come back to as often as I want.You can create a PDF or an e-mail sequence or even have a course area where texts take the place of videos. I have many friends who choose this route, such as Valerio Conti, Marco De Veglia and André Chaperon.
- Audio. I am a big fan of podcasts and audiobooks. This way I can easily digest a lot of content while doing something else, like driving, relaxing with my eyes closed, eating...Making an audio course is super easy. All you need is a good microphone (the best cheap one is the Samson Meteor you can find on Amazon) and a computer, or your smartphone with a few apps to record voice notes, and a good headset. The most important thing is quietness around you.
You have to be in a quiet place to record and-if you are not super used to speaking off the cuff-you have to prepare texts to read first. Unsuitable for super practical tutorials and courses.
These modes are all effective, and each will have, for each of us, its own positive and negative aspects.
Often the choice of which mode to adopt for creating our online courses falls on what is most "in our wheelhouse" or from the technical skills we already have or the resources we can deploy.
In any case, no one prohibits us from making a "mix & match" of all these ways to create our online courses, such as by shooting an on-camera video course, with some video slide lectures, an in-depth webinar, a written appendix and then recorded in audio.
There remains the problem of content distribution and organization, and it is no secret that they are the Italian brand ambassador of Kajabi what I consider to be the best platform for creating online courses and for those who want to sell information, partly because in itself it includes everything you may need: Web site, mobile app, community, hosting, video hosting, blog, memberships, course area, shopping cart, payments, CRM, email marketing...
If this is of interest to you from this page you have the opportunity to do a free 4-week trial period and access my online tutorial course in Italian completely free of charge.