Want to know how to create an online course and make money while you sleep?
This is the article and video you need to get you started!
The fact is that there is a cap on how many people you can see.
There are only so many hours in the day and there is so much to fit in.
Of the 168 hours that we have in a week, we have to:
- connect with our family
- connect with clients
- keep moving forward on our bigger goals
When I was a practitioner and became maxed out on clients, I found I was getting burnt out. Seeing so many clients didn’t leave a lot of room for creating my bigger goals.
You might be at the stage where you just want to fill your books. Or you might already be there and need more cash flow. You might just want to leverage your time.
You can be in any of these cases and in any of them you have the opportunity to make money while you sleep by creating a course.
Course creation does take time, but only one time.
You create a course in one hit and then it goes out automatically. So if you are trying to fill up your books and aren’t having a lot of success, but you are the person with the freshest amount of knowledge, you can take parts of that knowledge, put it into a program or an a course, and share that knowledge to make you money literally while you’re asleep.
I wake up most mornings with a notification telling me I made a certain amount of money while I was sleeping. This money comes from programs and affiliate payments that I receive from other companies, and it happens automatically.
As practitioners, one of the ways we can leverage our time so we can see the people we’re truly here to help and still continue to make money is to offer e-courses.
How to choose a topic
You might think you don’t have anything to share that would work as a course. But once you start sharing, you’ll notice that you have so much information in your brain. It’s like opening the floodgates once you start.
Think about your particular interests. You might be into skin, or PCOS, or have a new modality. When someone asks about it, you don’t want to only share a tiny bit – you want to have an in-depth conversation!
Well, that’s exactly what an e-Course is – an in-depth conversation about a particular journey or a particular subject that’s been broken down into chunks.
Here are just a few examples of topics you might create a course about:
- thyroid health
- gut health
- anxiety
- growing your own food and medicine
- blood sugar and weight
- hormones
- reading food labels
- bookkeeping for health care workers
Anything that you know about, anything that you might give advice on, or help someone with is a topic you can create an e-Course around.
You may be full of lots of ideas. If you have multiple ideas, start with the one that you have been asked about before. That indicates there is some interest in that topic, and someone might be willing to pay for information.
If you mostly get people coming in for colds and flu and that kind of thing or family health conditions right but what you really love to do is female hormones, that wouldn’t be the best commercially viable idea for now, because you are known as the “family health” person.
So start with something you have a foundation in – use your current “celebrity status,” what you are known for – for your first course.
Once you’ve got some money, some people, and some feedback in, you can move towards creating something new on the topic you’re really excited about in the future.
Confirm interest before you create your course
Once you have your topic (and I mean one topic – don’t try making three courses all at once!), you don’t have to create the whole course upfront. Many people who are pushing out courses do not create the whole thing at the beginning.
Instead, be like some of the best marketers in the world and put out your product for sale with some marketing information to see if anyone would buy it. You want to register interest. As soon as people are interested in it, then you know you’ve got people who are actually going to buy it.
How to market your course
So first you want to get your idea and then you want to share it with people in a way that is benefit-driven, not fact-driven.
For instance, perhaps I’m going to do a blood sugar course. I could say that in this course you will learn:
- about your blood sugars
- how your kidneys look after it
- how your adrenal glands and corticosteroids look after it
- how your pancreas looks after it
- about testing
But that’s not really what people are interested in. They want to know what’s in it for them. Instead, talk about the benefits the student will get when they complete the course, such as:
- being empowered by having knowledge about how their bodies work
- being able to take the course at their own pace
- can share information with their loved ones
- feel better as they learn to manage their blood sugars properly
The first list is facts and the second list is benefits.
Create your sales page
When you’re ready to share your course with people, the first thing you do is create a sales page. The sales page should be benefit-driven. It should talk about how students will feel when they’ve done it and what they are going to experience at the end, not about the information they’re going to be given and not the modality you are using.
Explain what they will get from that particular modality, what they’re going to get from the information they receive, the feelings they’re going to feel, and the changes they will experience.
Share your sales page
Your sales page can be as simple as creating a page on your website, or even just an opt-in form made with MailChimp (or any other email service). The opt-in form is where somebody puts in their email address to request more information.
Once you’ve created your sales page or opt-in form, you can share that around. You do need to share it around. You can’t just create a course, or an idea for a course, and not share it because if nobody knows about your course, they can’t sign up.
So first you create your sales page, then you share it and find out if people are interested. If more than one person puts their email address in there, it’s time to make the course.
Create and host your course
There are many methods you can use to create your course, but one of my favourites is a post-it note method. Essentially you just grab a whole bunch of post-it notes and quickly write down all of your ideas about what you could put in your course. Then you put them all out on your desk, on your floor, or on a mirror or wall. Then you can move them around into a journey that you want your client to take.
If you’ve done any research or background in adult learning, you’ll know that there’s a logical sequence for different types of learning styles. Some learning styles are auditory – people want to hear it. Some are visual – they want to see it or have it described to them in visual terms.
Others are kinesthetic. For that, you want to put all the auditory stuff that people have to listen to at the start, then put all the visual stuff after. Make sure you talk to them throughout, maybe making a PowerPoint presentation. You may want to create a downloadable – something printable. Towards the end, add a call to action to do something.
Remember to start with the simple stuff and work into the more complex stuff.
Tools for creating your course
There are some really cool tools available now that we can use to create a course.
One of my favourites is Loom. Loom is a great tool because you can record anything on your computer screen, you can show your presentation, and record your voice at the same time. And it’s free!
If you prefer an auditory style, you don’t have to make a video, you can create an audio recording instead. Audacity is an app you can use to create audio files for those who prefer to listen to podcasts (or if you just don’t want to be on camera).
If you are aiming for a kinesthetic style, or you just want to create something downloadable and tangible they can take away for that particular week or lesson, there are a lot of options, such as:
- colour-in pictures
- checklists
- quizzes
- self-assessment questionnaires
- workbooks
- worksheets
- play sheets (editor’s note: ??)
- instructions
So for instance, if you are doing a course on blood sugars, your outline (or your post-it notes) might look like this:
- Week 1: Video on the symptoms of blood sugars
- PDF downloadable checklist of where hidden sugars are in foods
- Week 2: Share where blood sugars are actually coming from and what tests are helpful
- PDF around how to find your pancreas, how to test your own blood sugar at home
- Week 3: Dive into how blood sugars change your mood
- PDF mood questionnaire to identify how they are affecting your neurotransmitters
You’re taking people on a journey from the simple to the more complex. Whether it’s visual, auditory, or kinesthetic, you’re taking them all the way through.
How to host your course
At the end, you package that up and put it somewhere online.
Some places you can put it on the internet very easily and inexpensively, are:
- Teachable – this is an online tool where you can put all of your content and you don’t need your own website. You can accept payment there as well through PayPal or Stripe. All you have to do is share it to let everybody know that your beautiful piece of work is there (sometimes that’s the hardest thing – we’ll do a video on that another day!
- Thinkific – similar to Teachable
- Kajabi (more expensive, but a beautiful third-party platform)
- Simplero
- Kartra
If you are using WordPress to run your own website, you can use a plugin, such as:
- Zippy Courses
- AccessAlly
- LearnDash
You can run courses on Squarespace as well just by creating the content in a password-protected area of your website, then you just share that with the members of your e-Course (note that this would be the same password for all students as opposed to the individual access provided by the tools above).
How to accept payment
Once you’ve got your content, you put it on your platform. Once it’s on the platform, you can share it and accept payment. Taking money depends on whether you have either a PayPal business account or a Stripe account or some other method of payment.
If you have a WordPress website, you can use a plugin like WooCommerce or LearnDash.
Once you’ve got those mechanisms set up, you can create little notifications so that when you wake up in the morning you find out how much money you made while you’re asleep. One of my favourite things is when my phone pings and lets me know what I made yesterday through my book sales, my courses or my memberships. It is an amazing thing to be able to share my knowledge and know that people have it available to them whenever they choose.
Other considerations
Pricing
Should you charge per module or as a whole package?
When you consider how much your course should cost, you can base it on how many hours you spent on it plus other costs. Take your hourly rate as a practitioner for the amount of time you took to create all of the content, plus any costs for graphic designers or virtual assistants, and determine how much this course cost you before you set your price.
Your price also depends on what you’re actually creating, and how you want to sell it. If it’s an in-depth eight-week program you might sell that whole program for $1,000. If your target market can’t make a single payment of $1,000, you might think about creating a plan for them to pay $150 every month for 10 months or something similar. Be clear that they are not paying per module, it’s a payment plan for the sum of the whole program.
The two biggest objections to things like courses are “I don’t have enough time” and “I don’t have enough money.” So take care of that second one right away and offer payment plans to make it easy for people to buy.
Length of Modules and Lessons
The length of your modules and lessons really depends on your client. Some are really detail-orientated people. They want to hear all of it, watch it, read every single piece of a publication from front to back, and then implement it. They want to write notes on it and do all of the things.
But not everybody is into all of that from a lesson-learning perspective. Humans generally can only actually remember the best part of seven minutes of what we’re actually listening to, so the maximum they’re going to actually absorb is about 23 minutes of each hour.
So how can we create the amount of information that somebody can use to create a change? Rather than just vomiting up a whole bunch of information to them, how much content do you give them?
That 23-minute mark is about how long you will be able to retain someone’s attention. So consider chunking down your information into 23-minute bite-sized pieces. And then follow those up with actionable content like a PDF, an audiotape, or some type of challenge.
Beta course testing
I’ve been asked about whether to run a pilot group through your course for free or at a lower price in exchange for feedback. I did that in the beginning and it was absolutely a mistake in my opinion. That beta test is still your content – it is still thirty thousand dollars worth of information that you got from college that you are distilling in a way they can understand. And it’s still costing you money to create and be present in that program.
So if it’s costing you money, you need to be paid for it and you need to make a profit.
Use your knowledge to create passive income
I think that we are in such an amazing information-rich and knowledge-rich profession. Our knowledge base is huge and something like 80% of people are on Google searching for things. If you’re there with your very specific knowledge about your very specific stuff, you have an opportunity to change that person’s life.
Irrelevant to the money aspect, you’re able to be on your purpose by being there and sharing your knowledge. E-Courses have created a really great opportunity for us to share in a way that we are remunerated for, and what we have to say is valued.
Remember that thirty thousand dollars worth of your education and experience is distilled into your course in a way that your clients can understand. And instead of just seeing one person at a time, you can a whole subset of the population.
When you speak about how much a course costs, is that based on how many hours you spent on it plus other costs yeah so I’m of course actually costing you money so one it will cost you the time it takes to create it if you are
Remember, you only have to do this content creation once, and then you can earn that money over and over. Once your e-Course is finished – that’s it. You then just have to tell more and more people about it.
Create Your First E-Course
To get started with creating your first e-course, I have created a short self-study training for you. It includes 8 modules that cover the ins and outs of planning, creating, and promoting your very first e-course.
Check it out here: DIY E-Course For Practitioners
Hi, I am a Clinical Psychologist and am finding your videos really helpful with regards to exploring options of developing retreat programmes as well as online courses. Thank you!