Create an online course your clients will buy and finish

Be honest about why you want a course

Your reason decides how you create it and how you sell it.

• Everyone has a different reason for making a course, none of them are right or wrong, and the way you create it and then sell it will change depending on which one is yours.
• If your reason is that you need money now I would say don't make it, because a course is a big job that adds pressure on top of a full diary, and building on your existing financial structures is the faster way to bring revenue in.
• If your reason is that you do not have enough clients a course will not fix that, because the cause sits in your marketing, so look at your messaging, niching, visibility, lead generation, discovery call process and conversions first.
• If your time is capped and you love the one-to-one, a group course can help you reach 10 or 20 or 1,000 people, and that is a strong reason to go ahead.
• Additional income is a perfectly good reason too, as long as a course is the right pathway for both your practice and your clients.

Make what your clients already want

Check whether there is demand before you build a single lesson.

• Research here means finding out whether there is a market for what you want to create, which has nothing to do with reading journal articles on your topic.
• People buy what they want and what they need, so if nobody is saying they wish someone would make this course, then I would not make it.
• I learnt this the hard way when I built a marketing course for private practice, loaded it with templates, tools and live calls, and found that no one wanted it because a lot of therapists do not like marketing.
• When I stopped and listened, what they wanted was clients along with a predictable way to get them, so I stripped the program back, gave it the title Clients On Demand, and it sold out the first time I opened it.
• It is easy for you as a trained professional to know what your clients need, but they cannot buy something that does not make sense to them, so meet them where they are instead of leading with what you know they need.

Place it in your business model first

The course fits inside your wider practice, so start from the vision.

• The course sits inside your broader private practice services, products and business model, so decide where it belongs and what you want it to lead into before you build anything.
• The best way to answer those questions is to revisit the vision in your business plan, and if you do not have one yet, mapping a basic plan gives you the parameters and framework that stop you feeling overwhelmed and scattered.
• Choose your format by thinking about the outcome your business needs, the outcome you need and the outcome your clients need, rather than deciding you want a course in Kit or Kajabi and working backwards.
• The format that comes out of that thinking tells you how to deliver the course, which is why this step comes before any recording or writing.

Design for the 12 percent problem

Most buyers log in and start, and very few reach the end.

• The average completion rate of a self-paced online course is 12 percent, which means that for every 100 people who buy yours, 12 will finish it.
• In my own resource library the people who used about 2 percent of the content saw little change in their business, while the ones who used over 80 percent included one who hit seven figures within 18 months of working with me.
• Attention is usually the culprit, because a client appears or an important email lands and the course never gets picked up again, which happens to me as someone who buys three or four courses a week.
• Course completion belongs in your KPIs, so ask what the duration, format, deliverables and transformation would need to look like to reach 50 percent, or even 100 percent.
• My Programmed Passive tool walks you through researching, testing and mapping a program that works, and it is included inside my Skool community, which is $7 a month with the first seven days free.

Map, create, then pilot it

Steps five to seven, from content map to honest feedback.

• Map your content from three perspectives, what you want it to do, what the business needs it to do and what your client needs it to do, and that is how you end up with a course people want and come back to.
• By now you may see that the course you first imagined is different from the one you need to create, which is a good thing, because the first is what you are passionate about and the second is the practical nuts and bolts.
• When you create the content, whether workbooks, worksheets, checklists, pre-recorded videos or audios, keep in mind that you want someone's confidence and self-esteem lifted by what they learn or do with it.
• Before it goes on your website, pilot it (marketers call this beta testing) with a small group who give you honest feedback in exchange for access.
• Ask how easy it was to use, what results they got, whether they would recommend it, what they would change and what was tricky, then polish it with that feedback and start your marketing.