As you now know, the $185.2 billion online education industry is about to grow even larger as a part of the $22 trillion longevity economy.
You also know that I started teaching online course creation back in 2007, and this is my first new take on the topic in several years. Of course, the fundamentals remain the same, and so do the mistakes and pitfalls I will help you avoid.
While creating online courses is no longer a “new” approach to digital business, that’s okay. Given the general mainstream acceptance of online education, there’s never been a better time to get started creating and selling high-impact online training to satisfy the “long life” learning needs of older people.
Let me give you a quick overview of what you’ll be learning in these lessons, which also serve as a roadmap for creating and selling online courses. It’s essential to see how everything fits together from beginning to end, and the process breaks into five distinct phases.
Designing Your Course
The first phase is designing your course, including the vital preliminary work you’ll do as an online education entrepreneur. The next lesson will cover the key concepts.
This first step is critical. You mustunderstand the core concepts of creating digital content as a “product” and the mindset of the online training entrepreneur. So, you’ll discover the growing role e-learning plays in an aging society and the fundamental principles for creating a course that older people want to spend money on.
You’re also going to figure out how to choose an in-demand subject. When it comes to adult education, you obviously can’t force people to learn what you think they should learn. This isn’t grade school or even high school. You’ve got to teach them what they want to learn.
Next, we will get into positioning your course and your offer. It’s critical to differentiate yourself with unique positioning in the marketplace when you’re selling any kind of information, even if someone else is basically teaching the same thing. You’ve got to stand apart and strongly resonate with your ideal prospect in a way your competition does not.
Then, you’re going to learn how to create a learner profile. Who exactly are the people you’re trying to teach in a specific context? What problems or pain points exist that a training program can fix? What are their learning styles? These are all important questions you need to answer before you start trying to sell.
From there, you’ll discover how to identify learner objectives and the ultimate emotional benefits that your prospect is trying to achieve through your training. Adult learners are obsessed with what’s in it for them, just like they are about purchasing anything else.
You must identify the pragmatic benefits people seek while tapping into the root emotional motivations that drive the specific desire to learn. Very few people will pay you based solely on a strong love of learning.
Next up, you’ll develop learning objectives. Once you understand the real-world benefits your prospective learners seek, you can design your training program to satisfy specific, concrete goals.
Choosing a Business Model
The second phase is figuring out your business model. While you might be great at teaching, an excellent writer, or a confident content creator, business may not be your strong suit.
On the other hand, you might be a hardcore entrepreneurial type who isn’t well-versed in instructional design and creating engaging content. Even then, you might not understand exactly how each business model operates optimally for the training you envision.
You’lll take the learning objectives you identified in phase one and tie them to a specific business model. There’s more than one way to create a business around online education, and you’ll discover several approaches combined with the context in which they’re most appropriate.
When you clearly understand the right learning objectives, you can figure out what model will work best for your specific learners. For example, will educating your prospects naturally lead to a purchase of something else that you make happen through the act of teaching?
If so, you can charge less for the initial training and attract more customers. These are the types of variables and scenarios that you’ll dive into.
Testing Your Minimum Viable Product
While the hype has died down about the lean startup movement and the concept of the minimum viable product, it’s mainly because the principles have been essentially baked into the digital business world. That means there are plenty of valid ways to test the hypothesis you come up with when trying to identify a market of learners and a topic people are willing to pay for.
More importantly, there are several ways that you can figure out if you’re on the right track before you actually go through the process of creating the whole course. In fact, I strongly recommend that you do not create an entire course before getting appropriate feedback.
First and foremost, you have to figure out if people will respond to your offer. From there, prospects can give you feedback that allows you to adapt your course materials in real time.
Developing Educational Content
The fourth phase of the process is actually to develop content — the point that too many novice course creators begin with. Too many people just dive right in and start creating lessons, only to end up with a product that doesn’t hit the mark because they didn’t approach course creation like a “real” teacher would.
A traditional teacher is in a classroom and has feedback cues, such as puzzled looks or nods of understanding. The digital equivalent of those cues is vital to understanding whether the way you’ve designed the course and are presenting the material is viable.
Here are the subtopics we’ll explore:
Research and identify content source material.
Where will the subject matter expertise of your training program come from? Is it based on your knowledge and experience? Or does it come from research and synthesis, which means reformatting multiple existing sources of information? Keep in mind that’s exactly what a traditional teacher or professor does. Do you need to partner with one or more credentialed experts? Each of these is a viable approach, and we’ll examine each one.
Identify activities and exercises to make the training come alive.
Activities and exercises are the tools you use to make lessons concrete and applicable to the real world. Or you can provide a real-world road map that shows people how to apply the topics to achieve their goals. Anything that makes the lessons more concrete and tangible will aid your students’ success.
Identify course topic areas.
Now that you know what people are trying to achieve and become, you know what you need to teach. Many people get this entire process backward and start with topics they assume people need to be taught. This is one of those classic mistakes I’ll help you avoid.
Develop your course curriculum.
Now, you take the topics you’ve identified and weave them into an overall curriculum. Not only should your curriculum have a dominant theme, but it should also tell a story that leads to clear understanding and the ability to take informed action.
Choose a Content Production Strategy.
Are you going to create this content yourself? Or are you going to outsource it strategically? Deciding how your educational content will be produced now and in the future is a crucial aspect of being an education entrepreneur.
Launching and Ongoing Marketing
Finally, phase five is launching and marketing. When introducing a course, the offer is almost more important than anything else. This is the time to plan how you’ll introduce your new course or membership site to the world for the first time and how you’ll build momentum from there.
The research you’ve already done on learner benefits will be directly applied to your sales materials for the launch and ongoing marketing. This is the beauty of selling information because you are baking the marketing directly into the product itself.
This is also where the Leading Expert methodology kicks in. You’re positioning yourself or your brand as a source of subject matter expertise. But what draws your ideal prospect to you will be the unifying values and attitudes you express while demonstrating your authority.
Programs Specifically Tailored to Older Adults
The five phases outlined above are best practices for creating training for any adult learner. There are additional best practices to take into account for older adults, and those will be specifically addressed in these lessons.
Remember that intimately understanding your ideal older consumer is the starting point for selling any kind of product, service, or experience in the longevity economy. This is the foundational first step that the Empowerment Marketing Framework gives you, and it’s imperative when creating online training.
Again, the best products in the world have the “marketing baked into them” by design. This is especially true of online courses and membership sites, so make sure your foundation is strong from the beginning.