Episode 332: How to plan your first online course
In this episode, Fiona discusses the process of planning an online course and choosing the right methods and tools. She also talks about the importance of mapping out the content in a systematic manner. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Understanding the target audience
Evaluating existing revenue streams
The planning stage
Selecting the best content delivery methods for each lesson
Considering the tools needed for filming or recording
Mapping out a timeline for content production
Scheduling the course launch and allowing time for testing
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
The first thing you want to get clear on is why are you doing this. What is the objective? What is the metric that you'll measure success by? Whatever success means. Success might mean to you, “We launch and 40 people buy the course overnight.” It could mean we launch and we are going to cap it at 70 people and we sold out, or seven people, or whatever it is. You want to think about, is it sales? Is it brand credibility? Is it a way of testing the market? Why are you doing this?
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Welcome to episode 332 of the My Daily Business podcast. This is a coaching episode, and this is an important one if you have ever considered creating an online education piece. That could be an online course, it could be a webinar, an eBook, or an actual physical book that you're selling online. It could be any online education part as an element of your business. You could be a product-based business, but decide that I have a lot of people asking me how to do it. I'd like to create something that helps them do that. Even if you're creating an app, I know a lot of people are like, let's create an app, not an online course. No one uses online courses anymore and everyone just uses apps. Whatever it is, there's still a process of how do I plan this out. How do I start doing it? That's what I'm going to be sharing with you.
Before we get stuck into that, I want to of course acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which I record this podcast. And that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. And I pay my respects to their elders, past, and present, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.
The other thing I wanted to mention is that Group Coaching enrollments have now closed. If you didn't get in, I'm sorry, we are not opening it again until next year. However, we will be shortly opening the course and coaching program, which is a nine-week live coaching program for Marketing for Your Small Business. If you're keen to get onto that please head over to marketingforyoursmallbusiness.com and you can find all the information about that. If you're in Group Coaching, you get that stuff for free. Let's get into today's coaching episode.
One thing I should mention is that I'm recording and this is going to sound so wrong because of a very sore tongue. I managed to bite my tongue hard last night accidentally while I was eating something and now I have a massive ulcer. I'm trying to record this whilst it hurts to talk, but such is life. I wanted to talk about how you would map out an online course. It doesn't have to be an online course, it could be an app, it could be some other online program or an eBook, there is a process for how to go from, and lots of people ask me about that. Or I think I could teach people about that to have it up and running. I know that there have been for like 10, 12 years now, so many places to go to check out how to create an online course.
There are gazillion YouTube videos and I think I watched a lot of these before I started my own online courses like five or six years ago now. A lot of them were helpful, but a lot of them went into the actual tools and which platform is better and whether should you use Thinkific or Kajabi. I think that is great, but it also distracts you from doing the work that needs to get done regardless of which platform you choose. I thought today I would go through what you need to do if you're mapping this out. This is also still applicable whether you are writing a book or doing webinars or like I said, pulling together an app or whatever it is, or even doing like a live workshop. All of these things will have to be thought about.
As usual, I am just riffing. I have written a couple of notes, but hopefully, it makes sense if you're going through this and you're reading and you're thinking, “I'd like to ask her one more question about this,” you can always reach out to us. I'm on Instagram at mydailybusiness_ or on TikTok, mydailybusiness or on Threads or hello@mydailybusiness.com. If you want to go old school and emails are fine. The first thing that you want to think about, and I should have mentioned, we have a bunch of online courses. I have done this, we sell our courses, and they continue to sell, and I feel like I'm coming from a place where it's not just like a pie in the sky like I could think about how to do this.
It's like we've done this and done it repeatable had this same step repeated for every single course that we've brought out and it's worked and we sell those courses. If you're interested in any of our courses, head on over to mydailybusiness.com/courses. But the first thing that you want to do, and you'd be surprised how many people don't stop to do it, is to consider why you are doing this. What is the actual objective of doing this? For some people that might be credibility for some people, it's a way of sorting your ideas out before you create actual products around this stuff. By-products they mean a physical book. Maybe you're testing ideas with like an ebook or a e-course, I feel like very old school saying e-course.
But in an online course, it could be that you want to go into retreats and workshops, but again, you're testing this idea out first. It could be that you want to make sales and that you've bought into the idea of passive income. And just a note about that, passive income is not always passive. If you have things up and running and then you've got systems to support that, then it can be passive. But these things still need to be updated, they still need to be looked at. I don't know if there's such a thing as completely passive income and I also think that people think they can throw anything together and suddenly people will come and people will buy 10,000 copies of your ebook. It doesn't always work like that.
But I also think you want to create something good and in order to do that, you then need to also be updating that and checking that it's still relevant at least every six months if not every year. there is a lot of work as well at the start of doing this. For example, our Marketing for Your Small Business course, which we are in the process of updating, we update every couple of months because of social media statistics and other things that come into play. for example, we are updating it at the moment and now we'll be including Threads and Spill and other social media platforms that have popped up in the last couple of months. But to do that first that involved weeks and months of, of writing content, scripting stuff. I had a wonderful videographer, Bianca Fusca, who I often recommend Bianca Fusca Films is her website.
She's an incredible editor and videographer. She did a lot of the direct-to-camera stuff. Then we had to edit things later. There's a lot of work at the front of doing a big course, for example, that is one of our biggest ones. It's $997. It's not like, “It's completely passive.” But having said it, if you set things up correctly, then definitely when I hear a thing on my phone and it's somebody's bought that course, I haven't had to do anything in that exact moment. However, there has to be work done up front and then there is work continuously. I just wanted to put that out there. The first thing you want to get clear on is why are you doing this and what is the objective. What is the metric that you'll measure success by?
Whatever success means. Success might mean to you we launch and 40 people buy the course overnight. It could mean we launch and we are going to cap it at 70 people and we sold out or seven people or whatever it is. You want to think about, is it sales? Is it brand credibility? Is it a way of testing the market? Why are you doing this? Is it a way of reducing your time? Because maybe you spend a lot of time in like Instagram DMS getting back to people all the time about something and you think, if I created a course about that, I could just send them straight to a course and I wouldn't have to spend hours and hours doing Instagram DMS back to people. That's the first thing, consider why you are doing this.
The next thing is to consider your audience. Who is the ideal audience for this course? And it might be a few different audience groups in there, but in each, you want to think about where are they coming from, like where are they starting from. Do they have knowledge about this stuff already? Are they amazing and already well on their way and they're just coming to you for a refresher or for an upgrade? Are they people that have no idea about what it is that you are about to teach them? Where are they coming to you? Have they already done some education around this and then they're coming to the uplevel, have they never done anything? And they're coming to you as a starter and then they'll maybe go somewhere else to uplevel. You want to be thinking about what their whole journey looks like in terms of moving from, let's say you are teaching people how to cook Vietnamese food.
Are they moving from a home cook that wants to start a business doing this? And then is learning this? Are they a person that literally is just doing this for fun? Where are they and where are they going after they invest in your course or your program? The next thing to consider is your existing revenue streams in your business and how this eBook or course or program or whatever it is going to tap into those. Think about your audience, most of your audience who you want to do this program or whatever it is, your book or whatever, are they aware of you or are they coming in brand new? The other thing to think about is like I said, do they already fit into a revenue stream? Let's say you have Vietnamese cooking, I love Vietnamese food.
If anyone has a great Vietnamese cooking course, please let me know. But let's say you already own a kitchen and homeware shop. You sell kitchen products, maybe you did some competitions or you did some newsletters, or you did some stuff about Vietnamese cooking and people were super into it. Let's say you are either of Vietnamese origin or you have been trained in Vietnamese cooking, you're like, “What can make a whole course about this?” I'm going to be selling people's products for my store in the course. Like, "Hey you are going to need a good walk or you're going to need a good this type of pan or this type of kitchen utensil." You are selling to people that already work with you in terms of coming into your store.
They're already a new newsletter or is it a brand new group that you're going after? Therefore your marketing tactics are going to be slightly different. In some cases, you're going to have a few different audiences in different stages of the buyer cycle. You may have people that have already worked with you who are going to upskill in a particular area, they're going to buy the course. And you might have people who are brand new who have never heard of you. The course or the program is the way in which they come into your business. For example, with us Marketing for Your Small Business is a standalone course. However, we also have clients who do one-on-one coaching and also buy the Marketing for Your Small Business course. It can be two different groups in the buyer cycle when you're looking at your audiences and which stages they're in and how the course or program is going to help them in their life somehow.
The next stage is planning this out. The best way to do this I've found is with post-it notes and a wall that just makes it easy and it also makes you able to move things around easily without having to start from scratch or rub things out on a whiteboard. What I do with Post-it notes is I'll have three different colours. The first is the section or module or a big idea for part of the course. That might be a particular colour. Underneath I'll have another colour for the actual lessons in that module or in that section of the course. I'll have another colour for worksheets or PDFs or ongoing learning or links and resources. Let's say for example, I'm going to move away from Vietnamese cooking because I'm not an expert at all in cooking or Vietnamese food, I'm going to move away from that, but let's use something that I am reasonably skilled in, which is podcasts.
We have a course called How to Start a Podcast. When I was pulling that together, I had looked at other people's courses, I had looked at a lot of resources that were out there and what they were teaching much like online courses was a lot about the equipment like which podcast microphone to get, which podcast platform to be on. They weren't teaching the actual process of setting up a system so that you can have a podcast, not just launch it once but launch it and then put out an episode every single week or twice a week or three times a week or whatever the frequency is that you have. A lot of the podcast courses that are out there are how to set up a podcast and how to set up your home studio or soundproof things, but they're not like afterwards it's almost like the wedding industry.
There's a lot on like getting married and there's I guess there is also a lot on like staying married, but in the podcast world, I felt like there were so many things out there on how to create a podcast and which equipment to use but not how to set up a process to keep going every single week. When I was coming up with the podcast course, I went through this exact same thing. I thought about why am I doing this, and what's the objective. And part of the objective for that was that my podcast had launched and had done pretty well and people were asking me for a lot of advice about stuff and I was answering the same questions over and over and over. I was like, I could make an affordable course that would give you all of this information.
Again, this is a course that we're updating now that I've had the podcast for some time and no more. But in terms of planning that out, I had to think about firstly, “Why are people starting a podcast?” Let's start there. Also what information do they need to know about me to feel like okay with going along with the rest of the course? Also, is there anything at the very front that they need to map out? A time schedule for when they're going to work through this course and a welcome video about, “Hey, this is me, this is what I've done and this is what I'm going to share with you” and prepare them. In the next section, if I think about those post-it notes, I had a section for welcome and then I had a next section for preparation.
I was thinking about the history of podcasting, what is podcasting, what does it mean, how has it changed, how has it evolved, and what do people expect from podcasts now? And ask the person going through the course to define why they're starting this. Again, like I've just asked you why are you doing an online course? It was to think about why are you doing a podcast. Is it to practice talking? Is it to get in front of certain people and you can invite them on as a guest? Is it to increase your brand credibility? Is it to then get speaking gigs out of this? Is it to there are a million reasons that people start a podcast and it was also looking at statistics around podcasting and how to get found and podcast and all sorts of things?
There was like a starter stage, like a thinking stage. It went into the next stage, which would be to plan how many episodes you want to put out a week. What software are you going to use? A whole bunch of things around planning. if you imagine those post-its, I was thinking of all these different lesson ideas and I was putting them up under the module that I thought that initially they fit under. But what's good about Post-it notes obviously is that you can move them around, especially if you're doing this on a big wall or a table or something, you can plan it all out, have your key module themes or main ideas and then underneath there have your lessons and then underneath have like what are the takeaways?
What are people doing to action this information that they've just learned? Is it a worksheet? Is it pulling together your first list of, for example in podcasting, your first list of guests that you'd like to have? Is it then pulling together information about all of those guests and how you're going to tick off when you've contacted them? Almost like a mini CRM system for you. I pulled that together. You have your modules, then you have the lessons, and then you have the takeaways, whether that's a PDF or a link or further reading or whatever it is. And then you want to just sit on that for a while because sometimes you can think, this totally makes sense, you would have that information before that. But the best part of a good course is that things happen in a system or in a way that is easy for people to understand and also to build upon like it's compound learning that you're doing in a course.
You want to know that if you start in module one by module five you are learning in each module, but you're also building upon that learning each time. What can happen is you pull together your post-it notes, got your modules, you've got your ideas, you've got your tactics or lessons and then the takeaway work that they need to do before the next module. And like I said, you just let that sit, resonate, maybe leave that up on your wall for a couple of days and then come back to it with fresh eyes and think, is this the right step-by-step approach or do some of these lessons need to be changed out? You've got to lesson in module five and that's an important thing to know at the very start.
Let's move that to module two. That's a good thing about using Post-it notes is that you can move these things around. That researching stage and the planning stage are so important. In that stage, you might also decide that you're going to do some surveys or some validating of your assumptions. And that could be having a phone call with somebody who you think would be the perfect fit for this course. It could be showing somebody, here's my plan, this is what I'm going to do, what do you think? It could be doing a survey like if you were going to start a podcast, what are the key things you'd want to know? What would you want to know first? Or you already have a podcast, what are the things you wish you'd known at the start?
You can get a lot of information there that may also change your plan. What you don't want to do is have your plan and then just go helpful leather, creating all the content, putting it all together and then being like, I should have asked somebody about that. Or having somebody who's a perfect fit for your course say, “I wish you'd included this”. And it's like, I could have included that if I had had a bit of input at the very start when I'm planning it out with the post-it notes that I can move all around. That's the planning stage. Once you have that, what I like to do is just put it in an Excel sheet. I'm very fan of Excel or Google Sheets and I would have literally module one, lesson one, lesson two, lesson three, and lesson four and then fill it all out.
I'm knowing, module one is about this, and lesson two in module one is about this. You have a table of sorts to be able to then go, which brings me to the next stage, which is to consider with each of those lessons, what type of lesson are they? Some may be a video lesson, some might be an audio lesson, and some might be both. Some might be a direct-to-camera lesson where let's say in the case of Vietnamese cooking, you are cooking like you are showing, this is roughly how much oil or this is how you oil a pan, or this is how you do the smoke flavour.
I'm just saying you need that module, that lesson in that particular module to be recorded in a kitchen or in somewhere that you are cooking. Other modules might be just you talking over some slides, like a slide deck. And you can do that with a whole bunch of tools, which I'll get into in a second. But you want to look at that table and for each lesson be considering what is the best delivery of that? Is it just narration over a slide deck? Is it direct to the camera? You are talking directly to the camera. Is it filming above you? Let's say you are chopping up vegetables and you're saying that the vegetables need to be chopped this way or this is a good way to hold your knife when you're chopping the vegetables for your Vietnamese cooking.
You need the camera to be filming literally your hands chopping something. You are mapping it out because if you then need to outsource and get a videographer in, you have a plan of like, I was thinking that for this particular lesson when we're talking about how to cut up coriander, I would love for you to be like filming that from above. If you're not going to outsource that, then you need to figure out if are you using a lightbox. Are you using some mechanism like the selfie sticks and everything else to be able to film your hands chopping up the coriander or tearing it apart or whatever in a certain way? Those things all need to be mapped out because again if you don't have a plan for that, it can get messy later on when you're like, I thought this was going to be so much easier, but I've got 12 videos that I need to shoot with my hands and I have no idea how to do that and didn't even think about that.
I'm trying to take photos of my hands and then put that into a slide deck and it just gets, it can get messy and not professional. you want to think about in that table, you've got your modules, you've got your lessons, and then you've got another column which is about how is this presented? Is it direct to the camera, you just talking to a camera? Is it you narrating over a slide deck? Is it a series of montages or vignettes? Is it filming from above, or from below direct? this is where you want to think and visualize what is the best thing that's going to help your person who's going through that course or that program learn. Again, I have bought a few in my time fitness programs, in England I did the Insanity workout with Shaun T and I loved it, I loved all of it every single day it was insane.
But that was a great program in the way that it was pulled together. I have bought other fitness programs that are literally like PDFs and I think that is a bad way to teach fitness or to teach any exercise because you need to see how somebody is doing it. It's not enough, I don't think of just seeing images like flat images or photos of somebody doing something. I think it works so much better when there is a video of somebody doing something. I go to see a physio and do clinical parties with them every single week and they have a great app that they use. There are people, with all of the exercises, they're like, “Hey, I've put your exercises into your app” and it's easy to be able to see and to play the video again and again.
Even if it's like a 32nd video or ten-second video of how that person is twisting and what are they doing. You want to make sure that whatever way you are creating the content is going to help people have the best experience because then they're more likely to refer, you tell other people about it, and finish the course, which is a huge thing. you really want to be thinking about whether is it best for me to be having a conversation with somebody like interviewing someone on Zoom style and having that as part of the course. Is it best for me to just talk? Is it best for me to be sharing my screen while I'm using a particular software program that I'm teaching them about in the course? It's important to not miss that step, which is to think about how is this going to be delivered.
The next thing, and I think this is where people often start with when they haven't done all the other stuff, is to think about the tool for delivery of your course. It's not just the delivery of the course, but it's what else you need to film the course or create the course. It may be looking at things like screen recorders. For example, we have used it in the past, I have to say for pretty much all of our courses, I just use QuickTime, which is a free screen recorder. It can do audio-only screen and audio it can do a whole bunch of things and it comes free with Mac. I used that purely because it was free and it was easy to use and I had known how to use it 'cause I used to always do tutorials.
This is before Loom came around and I had also looked at Screencastify at the time, but it was really expensive and it didn't have like a high, didn't allow you to have like a lot of data on there unless you like upgrade it all the time. I used QuickTime on a Mac to record my screens for most of the courses. Now we do use Loom, we use a paid version of Loom and that is a great screen recorder. Canva also allows you to do this now. If you're already paying for Canva Pro may as well look at like how can I do the presenter view on that. And then you can choose to have yourself as a little circle icon down the bottom. You're like your face is on there and you're talking as you talk people through whatever it is that your screen is recording, whether that's a slide deck or whether that is a program or something else.
Or it could be, for example, Zoom is another thing? A lot of people already pay for Zoom. If you're already paying for it, look at how you might use that for your course. Again, you can just do a screen share on Zoom and be working that way. You could be interviewing people on Zoom and sharing that video of like two faces side by side or however many people you're interviewing side by side and putting that into your course. But also you want to be thinking about whether are you going to invest in a videographer or an animator or an illustrator who's going to help you bring this course to life. I know that at the start when we were doing these courses, I was trying to do it as cheaply as I could, especially because I didn't know if they were going to sell, especially with Marketing for Your Small Business.
That sold out well. The first time I did it, I was shocked. The reason that I was doing that is largely because I was going on maternity leave with my second child and I wanted income to be coming in whilst I was not technically working. I was looking after a child, the hardest job ever. I did that besides the videographer who I would happily pay again and again because she's fantastic. Bianca Fusca Films, if ever you need a videographer, she works with people, even in different states and everything else she can edit amazingly, even if you've just got iPhone quality video content. But besides her cost, it was just my own cost of pulling it together. I didn't have anything fancy, I was just again, screen recording on my Mac using QuickTime.
But you want to be thinking about if you are going to invest, and where is your money going. Are you going to invest in a studio where you can do a lot of this stuff and make it look very professional? I have a client who recently invested in a studio to create a bunch of core stuff and was able to do that just by filming, using their own camera, but in a professional environment. There was lighting and good sound and the backgrounds and everything looked amazing. there are lots of places that you can go and do that. The other thing you might want to invest in is a stylist or somebody to set up the background or the set. If you're doing interviews and you want to make it look very professional with two armchairs and all of that, it could also just be investing in equipment.
It could be making sure that you get a good quality microphone or a lapel microphone if you are doing some filming that you need that it could also just be a normal microphone that you have attached to your desk. It could also be things like a good webcam. I use the Logitech Brio and it definitely makes you look a lot more professional than just the normal camera that's in a Mac. It could be getting a ring light. I mean it could be all sorts of things. You want to think about whether have you got the tools when you look back at that list that you wrote, I'm going to do that direct to camera, I've got to do that where I'm like filming my hands, chopping up vegetables. Have I got the tools to be able to do that?
Because trying to do makeshift things at the 11th hour is not a great plan, it's better to go, I'm going to research that or borrow maybe you've got a friend who's done this you could borrow, or even you could go in halves on the equipment if you're not having to use it all the time. You could be like, let's just buy this together and then whenever we both need it, we just use it. Or it could be, I'm going to go full professional and I'm going to call in a videographer and a stylist. The other thing to think about is the cost around stuff like hair and makeup if that is something that you're going to outsource. Also things like, it seems simple, but flowers or anything else that you want.
When I filmed mine, we bought some lovely fresh flowers on the desk and we had lighting and other stuff for the director's camera videos that needed to be done for Marketing for Your Small Business. It's a lot of things to think about in the tool selection that you need to be able to do. Another thing that you might think about is using your iPad as a teleprompter. I know some people like to script everything and then have it running as they are facing the camera to have that teleprompter stuff running. You can use a whole bunch of software programs on your iPad now you can also use them on your phone. I know there are actual tools that you can buy as well that clip onto stuff so that you can read it as you are filming.
It's thinking about all of that stuff. Then the next stage is to consider the timeline to produce all of this. When are you going to do this? Also, are you going to put this for sale pre-order and then build it out only if people buy or are you going to do it all and then get people to buy? Now there are pros and cons for each. I have to say that with Marketing for Your Small Business, I did not build it until I had people paying for it. I did a pre-order and it was quite a decent amount of time until you got the video, which until you got the course. It was like, “This course is coming, it's coming in six weeks” and you can purchase it now and pre-order and you'll be getting all the stuff at the end of this month or whatever the month was that I'd decided.
I wouldn't necessarily say that's a great idea in your first instance because the only reason I did that is that I'd already been running Marketing for Your Small Business as a workshop, a live workshop, and I'd been running that for years. I knew I had all the content already written, I had all the worksheets done, and I had all the slide decks done, but of course, I had to change some of them because it's different delivering it live where you can say a lot more or people can ask questions versus delivering it on an online course where people are doing this as a self-paced thing. There is a pro to doing that because you get the money upfront and then you build it out. But also I would say that if it's a first course and it's not a huge investment I would build it out first and then test the market.
You could even build it out you can do drip feed, so you could build out the first two modules and get people to pay and then build out the next one before they are onto that part. If it's like it's delivered weekly or it's delivered every fortnight, then you've got to fortnight between modules to build it. That could be stressful, especially if life happens and things pop up that you didn't expect, but whatever way you've got to think about, you have to create a timeline. When are you going to create all of this content? For me, I put it on pre-order, and I had a bunch of sales, which was lovely and it gave me the confidence to then go, we can do this, it'll sell. But I then didn't leave that much time for myself to do this.
Poor Bianca, who again works at Bianca Fusca Films, came and we did 13 videos in one day. I was also pregnant and heavily pregnant. when I was recording a lot of this stuff, I was very breathless and I was having to stop a lot of the time to just take a breath and have a glass of water or stretch my back or whatever it is. Again, I wouldn't necessarily suggest doing it that way, but with every other course that I've created and then mapping out a timeline, this section is going to take more time, I'm going to map out two weeks to create the content for that, or this section is going to take like five minutes, I can map that out or I'm going to film it all in two days and then I'm going to outsource an editor to chop it all up.
But then you'll still need time to approve that to edit. There are always edits again that need to be made. There are lots of things that need to go back and forth. Always leave a bit of buffer time, but creating a schedule is going to really help you. The next thing to do is to decide on the platform that you'll have to deliver the course on. This is again where most people start from, they think about the tools and they think about, I'm going to go in Kajabi or Thinkific or whatever it is before they map all the other stuff out. what can happen is then you choose a platform for delivery and you pay for it. You pay for it first before you even have your content ready. You're potentially paying for months when you haven't uploaded anything.
You should only ever start buying it or start it when you have the content to upload. Otherwise, you're paying for months. Some of these places are quite expensive for a subscription when no one can buy it from you yet because you haven't uploaded the content. When you're thinking about the delivery platform, you want to be looking at the types of content you've decided on. Direct to camera, audio, worksheets, eBooks, and making sure that that platform supports the uploading of those or that it's very easy for people to find that information. The other thing you want to think about is whether or not it matters to you if the platform has other things available to it. For instance, if you're drip feeding content, you might decide that in every week that you drip feed that content, you also want like three different emails to go out and you want a whole bunch of like sequenced emails or trigger emails or student does this, therefore they get this email.
Some platforms will have that easily as a very easy add-on or part of what you're paying for, other platforms will not. You want to make sure that I've thought about this whole journey for the audience and have thought about what they're getting from this and what support they might need. Again, you might have like opt-in hours or office hours where people who are doing the course can come every Tuesday at this time and ask any questions and other people may not have that option. You want to be thinking, well is that hosting on that same platform that I'm paying for? Or is that like a separate Zoom link or how does it all work? Other people also want to be like, “Okay, the online courses make up a huge part of my business, therefore if I'm paying for this platform, I may as well like build my whole website on that platform.”
For example, Kajabi, which is what we use for our courses. I don't think it's the best, it's great at what it does, but if you wanted to, you could build your entire business on Kajabi. You could pay a flat fee each month and then be having all your products on Kajabi. You could also have your website on Kajabi, you could have all your emails coming outta Kajabi. I mean it can really do everything if you want it to be doing. However, we already had Squarespace set up Squarespace commerce, and ConvertKit set up. There are all these other things. In a way, I guess if you wanted to streamline everything, you could try and find a platform that will do everything for you. Or if you're just testing the markets, you might decide I'm going to go with a cheaper platform.
Kajabi is quite expensive. You can go with a cheaper platform and just test it. Again, it depends on whether you want it to be branded with all your colours or whether you are happy to just have it branded with the bare basics from another platform. If they've got a green background, you're fine to have a green background as long as your products are up and it's easy for people to access. You also want to be thinking about like how accessible this is. For example, Kajabi has an app, so if anyone is watching the course, they don't have to do it on a desktop or an iPad. They can do it on their app using an iPad I guess, or their phone. Some of these places will, like I said, not make it easy to upload a variety of files for each module.
Let's say you want to have not only the actual video content, but you want to have an audio of that and you also want to have a transcript of it and maybe you want to have some other things that they can download. Some platforms make it easier than others to do that. You want to be thinking about which platform we're going use and also does that platform integrate with the tools that we already have in place. For example, Kajabi does not speak to Squarespace very well, what we have to do is a whole bunch of workarounds and then what happens is that every time you have a workaround, you are at risk of one platform, not updating and then the workaround not updating and then the other thing not updating. And suddenly you're having to do a whole lot of manual input of something that should be really automated.
We have had to do that and which has led me to look at all sorts of different options. Again, if you were going to just use one platform and have your courses on there, plus your website, plus your emails, that would be easy. If you have an established business though, or if you have like say a Shopify site, sometimes it's not that easy to integrate things. You also want to be thinking about that because if you've only got like seven or eight people signing up for a course, that's fine. If you're manually inputting things between where they sign up and where the course is housed or if you have thousands of people doing it, it's just not scalable for you to be manually inputting information or to have lots of different workarounds happening.
Because like I said, every time you add another workaround, you're adding risk to things failing, especially if you're trying to automate and reduce the time. This also goes to the whole passive income if you have to constantly be checking these things, it's not that passive. That's the next step, to think about what platform am I going to use. A lot of these platforms have Facebook groups attached to them. For example, Kajabi has a massive Facebook group attached to it, and that might be a good thing to join before you start paying or sign up for a trial period with like another email address and then get into those Facebook groups because you can ask a bunch of questions from people who are using the platform. And you can see also a whole bunch of complaints that people have about that platform.
It's not from the platform itself, which is going to be saying, “We are perfect and there's nothing wrong with us.” If you go into those Facebook groups, you can see real issues that people are having with that platform as well as the people that have done well on that platform. Or you can just ask a question like, I'm thinking about this or that, or “Hey, I'm trying to do this on that platform”, or I want to be able to do this. I want to be able to have a forum for all my students to like chat. Is it easy? Has anyone set one up? Can I see how you've done yours? There's a great opportunity to utilize those Facebook groups to do that. That's one of the last steps is to decide on the platforms.
I know that some people will be like, “No, that should be the first step.” But I think what you want to do is figure out what is the best delivery for your audience from your course, and then what is the best platform to house it rather than looking at the platform and then changing your course to fit the platform rather than the other way around. The last thing is to schedule everything into your calendar, down to your launch day. Obviously, you want a bit of time before your launch to test things and you want to choose a couple of people, maybe their friends or family that are going to test this for you. That is important. I know with Marketing for Your Small Business, I had my friend Natasha Ace test a whole bunch of things and that was important because she found things that I somehow missed and they would've gone out to market like that.
It's important that you check all of these things. But of course, we're not going into how to launch or market your course. This session was about how to plan an online course. I hope that has helped and if you have found this useful, I would love it so much. If you could take 10 seconds even and leave us a review on Spotify or Apple or wherever you listen, it just helps other people find this podcast. That is it for today. If you want to look at this in text format, you can find this particular episode over at mydailybusiness.com/podcast/332. And of course, if you want to check out our courses, you can do that at mydailybusiness.com/courses. Thank you so much for reading, I'll see you next time. Bye.
