Critical Success Factors for Creating Online Courses

And in terms of a course that's easy to create, that's very much dependent on the depth and breadth of the material you need to produce to teach the topic. And that in turn depends on what your audience is looking for.

Luckily there are a few simple rules of thumb you can use to identify what type of course will have the most demand and be the easiest to product.

Buyers of this type of course are looking for a broad set of skills that can help them in their career.

Sometimes that relates to doing their current job better. More usually it's to gain new skills that will help them in a new role or the next step up on the ladder in their current role.

Examples of this would be doing an online MBA, a functional skills course or a coach certification. 

People who buy Professional Development Courses typically want to gain as broad and as deep a range of skills from the course as they can, since anything they learn has the potential to be helpful to them in their future career.

They choose their provider of this type of course based on the perceived value future value to their career of the skills they'll acquire and to a certain degree the prestige of the course provider (a Harvard MBA will help their career rather more than a course from their local college for example).

The third type of course is an Outcome Based Course.

Buyers of this type of course are looking to learn a skill in order to achieve a specific result. Their motivation is less about the skill itself and more about the result it enables them to achieve.

An example of this type of course would be a business owner doing sales training in order to get more customers (rather than a salesperson wanting to become better at at their profession of sales).

Because buyers of Outcome Based Courses are interested in the results they'll get from the skills they acquire rather than the skills themselves, they ideally want to learn the minimum possible to get the job done and achieve the maximum benefits.

In other words, any time spent learning skills that aren't absolutely necessary to achieve the outcome they're looking for is viewed as a waste.

Buyers of this type of course make their selection based on the perceived return on investment they'll get from the course (how much the outcome they're looking to achieve is worth vs the cost of the course) and how how confident they are that the skills they'll acquire through the course provider will definitely lead to the outcome they're looking for.

The three types of course are summarised below:

You might be worried that by making your course more specific and focusing on only one aspect of the bigger set of skills you can deliver that you'll shrink the market for it and have lower sales. but in fact the opposite happens. 

When people buy courses to help them achieve an outcome they're looking for something as focused on that outcome as possible. Buying a broader course to achieve just one of the many outcomes it covers is a bit like buying a full toolbox just because you need a new screwdriver. Typically it feels like a waste if you do it, and you worry that the screwdriver won't be as good quality as the one you could buy specifically on it's own to do exactly the job you want done.

So although focusing on a very specific outcome shrinks the market, it makes you exponentially more likely to get buyers who want that outcome. 

And, of course, it's a lot quicker and easier to create a course based on one outcome than a more general course.

Typically there are two potential audiences of buyers for courses: 

There's no one best audience for everyone, just the best audience for you.

For most of us, selling to individuals (e.g. small business owners) is going to be our fastest and easiest route to success.

However, if you already have established relationships with corporates it can be relatively easy to get them interested in courses.

However, if you don’t have good connections already it can be very hard to break into a corporate - especially right now when access is limited due to the pandemic. The sales process is much longer and complex and you'll probably be required to make your course compatible with their existing systems. 

So if you're starting from scratch or don't have those pre-established corporate connections, focusing on individuals (either end consumers or small business owners) will be your most probable route to success.

While they offer you the big advantages that you can reach clients with your courses anywhere in the world and those courses can be bought and delivered 24/7 - those same factors apply to your competitors too. In other words, with online courses you're competing against everyone else in the world who sells the same type of course as you.

In order to succeed with online courses it's vital that your course stands out and is clearly different and better (for some people) than the others on the market.

There are five primary ways to make your course stand out from other similar ones:

In practice, most successful courses use a combination of ways of differentiation.

Mark Dawson's course on Facebook Advertising for Authors, for example, stands out partially because it was the first and is still one of the few courses on Facebook Advertising specifically for fiction authors. But it also benefits from his personal credibility as a highly successful author having sold millions of fiction books.

And while surveys, interviews and other forms of research can help, the only real way to know if your audience will buy a course is to offer it for sale.

The best way to do this is to follow a "lean" approach to developing the course.

With a lean approach you develop a "minimum viable product" that delivers the results your customers are looking for without the bells and whistles and presentational niceties and offer it for sale to your hungriest potential customers as soon as possible.

With an online course, you can do this by running a paid pilot.

With a paid pilot, you offer to deliver the initial version of the course in a "rough and ready" pilot version to customers who are happy to get the content, give you feedback, and help shape the course.

In return for being guinea pigs for the course, they usually get a significant discount on the target price, plus they get to work with you directly as you develop the course so that it's certain to meet their specific needs.

Usually a paid pilot is drip fed week by week - either as training videos or delivered live by webinar or video call.

This sequential delivery means you can offer the course for sale as soon as you've pulled together an outline of what will go in the course. You don't need to actually create all the course materials before selling it.

Of course, you have to be confident you'll be able to create each module of the course in time to deliver it to your paying customers. And it's wise to keep a week or so ahead of your promised delivery date for each module just in case illness or other problems strike.

But the key is that you can offer the course for sale before you've created the bulk of it. And you can deliver the course using simple technology like a live webinar or hidden pages on your website - you don't have to build a complex fully automated infrastructure for the course.

That means that you can test whether the course will be viable before making large investments in time and money to create it.

In the worst case, if the course doesn't sell well enough to justify creating the rest of it, you simply refund the early buyers (and ideally gift them something else to thank them).

In the best case, the course will sell quickly and give you the confidence to push ahead full steam developing the remainder of the pilot course and then updating for the full course.

Following this approach you take a lot of the risk out of course development. And you also ensure that the course you develop is much more likely to meet the needs of your clients.

The first step is to choose a  topic that will be attractive to buyers and easy for you to develop.