How to Launch a Course for Free
/If you know me, you know I like to move fast. From hiring to pushing content out into the world, I go before I am ready and make decisions quickly, I lean on gut intuition, I pivot at lightning speed on instinct, and I believe that done really is better than perfect. With all of this extra time you might be finding yourself with it’s the perfect time to launch a course!
So today I am beyond thrilled to share how we launched our latest course in 7 days and generated $3,310 in the first 30 days. I am also going to walk you through ways to launch your first course for FREE.
Yep. Over the course of 7 days you have the opportunity to conceptualized, map out, record, and put your own spin on a new course. So let’s dive on in!
RESOURCES/PLATFORMS YOU WILL NEED
Thinkific - this is our go to platform for selling, marketing and launching all of our courses.
Canva - we created all of our slides, workbooks and downloads inside of Canva.
START WITH THE END RESULT
The first place to start when creating an online program is determining an end result. One of the main questions I get asked over and over is some iteration of how to start a social media business, or what tools I use, or how I picked my name or theme or how we land new clients. Pay attention to the questions you get asked more than once, because that is where you hold to power to impact and inspire change.
Now before you trick yourself and think: well, yeah, I get asked about XYZ all the time but there’s already a million programs out there about that…
I am of the belief that there’s enough room for everyone in the online world. If you’re an expert in an area or have the ability to share your experiences and knowledge, you can start a course.
When you’re considering the course you want to create, think about what your customer will get out of it. I always start my courses by picturing the end result: what value will someone receive by purchasing, completing, and applying this course to their own life or business?
For the Start Creative training, we wanted to give participants a simple process to plan, create, launch, promote, scale, market AND land their first customer in 30 days. Sounds like a lot, right? But the whole program can be completed in under a few hours… like in ONE day.
Here’s the thing about starting with the end result, it gives people a ruler to hold up to your course to say, “Did this program live up to the promise?” It should be a really clear and simple yes or no and not deviate based on people’s perceptions or definitions of success. If you don’t give people that ruler of a promise, then they will hold your program up to their own idea of success and so it’s really important to paint that picture well for them.
WHAT SHOULD YOUR COURSE COVER?
Coming up with the idea for Start Creative was fairly simple for us. It came from one-on-one consulting work and seeing a common theme. All of our consulting clients had the same questions and it became clear that if I was able to bottle it all up into one training it could help more women launch their dream business.
Creating a course doesn’t have to be this enormous undertaking where you offer participants the moon and the stars and everything in between. I would argue that we all know more than we think — we all have expertise in some area that could benefit others.
So before you start Googling or doing a ton of research about what people WANT to learn about or what else is out there or what the recent data show, first, sit down with a good, old-fashioned pen and notebook and do a brain dump. Literally write down all of the information that’s living in your head based on your experiences or profession or background.
What do people come to you with questions about? What do they commonly want your help with? What do you know? What have you learned? Write it all out. For me, I started a Google Doc and created a list of what steps we took to launch Let’s Get Social.
Let me give you one tip — if you only hear this listen up — DON’T OVERCOMPLICATE IT. A course doesn’t need to be this giant directory that answers every question on every topic in the world. Truth be told, I am most attracted to programs that are SUPER simple, and that’s how we build ours out, too. I want people to get through it in a day or two so they can get results faster.
WHEN TO DO YOUR RESEARCH
So once we determined the course we wanted to create, I first do a big brain dump of what I know and of my process, THEN I do my research on other similar programs out there. For Start Creative, I looked for other courses that taught how to start your own digital business and specifically tried to find if they were lacking anything that I could offer.
Don’t let the research consume you but DO take a few minutes to see what’s on the market to give you confidence to put your own mark on it. Look for feedback or reviews, and see if there’s anything specific you can fill in holes for or add a new spin to.
START CREATING
The first step in actually creation the content is breaking it down. After coming up with our end result and making sure it was specific, measurable, relevant, attainable, and timely, we broke the overarching goal into 5 main steps that would then become the modules.
Go back through that brain dump you did and start organizing the information and laying out each step logically so you can see that start, middle and end that will naturally become the main structure of your course. Each step is a significant piece of the puzzle to launching a business, and they are: planning, launching, marketing, creating and pitching — makes sense, right?
And this doesn’t mean that we did just 5 huge lessons or modules, within each step, there are smaller sub-steps that we then broke down and listed out so that a user can quickly and easily consume the exact content they need vs. watching hour long modules waiting for that one piece that they really needed. We try to keep each lesson between 5 and 30 minutes because it’s easier to complete and consume.
WRITE A SCRIPT
After laying out the main modules and the lessons within them, we started creating the scripts. I write my scripts in Google Drive and start typing the EXACT information that I need to communicate. I write as though I’m having a conversation with a friend, which makes it a whole lot easier to record and easier for viewers to follow because it’s an approachable tone.
If you struggle with writing in this way, one idea is to voice record yourself teaching or explaining something and then either get it transcribed by someone for a few bucks or sit down and re-listen and make a script based on your recording.
I’ll take those paragraphs and break them up into small chunks that will be the narration of each slide on our presentation. I go slide for slide giving 1-3 sentences per slide and create that script right in a Google Doc. The nice thing about scripts is you don’t get flustered and you can deliver specific content in a really quick and concise way.
CREATING SLIDES
Once we build out the scripts, I create the slides. I use Canva to create these slides and use our brand colors and fonts throughout the slides.
Since I had the scripts done and written out, it’s easy to transfer the information and topics to slides. The slides should be incredibly simple. They should really only have a handful of key bullets or short and sweet sentences on them covering the main takeaway or point.
Creating the slides should be a relatively easy part of the process if you have a decent template to work off of and note that this is NOT where you totally rewrite the script and purge all of the information that you have.
TIME TO RECORD
After the script was written and the slides were made, everything was good to go to start recording the course! When the time came to record, Hazel was running all around the house and Aaron was blasting the TV on level 1000. So I decided to rent a co-working private room and lock myself in there for 5 hours to record.
It only took me 4 hours to record each little lesson and I used Quicktime Player to record my screen and voice.
UPLOAD YOUR CONTENT
After recording was complete, I uploaded each lesson of my course to my FAVORITE platform of choice — the only one I’ve ever used for my courses — Thinkific. I saved all the files while recording into a folder on my computer and then once they were all recorded and edited down, then I took the time to upload, add descriptions, choose a cover image and so on.
This is the most fun part of the process because you get to see it all come to life and Thinkific makes it look so beautiful and professional for you. They take all of the hard work out of it and help you create a beautiful, easy-to-take course for your students. I can’t recommend them enough.
Voila! That’s all it takes to create a course. You can always make edits and changes down the line, so don’t stress about going over it 102 times before you push it out.
THE BIG PICTURE
Remember, nothing is final, so it’s better to get it done and out there than to hold on to that information that could bring so much value to others. Not sharing something with the world because it isn’t perfect yet isn’t what legacies are made of, friends. Taking messy action, sharing imperfectly, and being bold, THAT’s what I want my legacy to look like. I can’t wait to see what courses you create and use to change the world — all it takes is a little tapping into your gifts and knowledge, some planning, and a chunk of time to put it all together.
