10 Steps to Create an Online Course and Make Money while Sleeping

You know Udemy? or Coursera?

Their founders and people who are teaching on these platforms are making millions of dollars every year, they are becoming the legends in education.

Why not you?

In today's technical world with so many possibilities, almost every next person can be a teacher and start teaching his/her own course online without having a physical school or academy.

That's cool?

Yeah, it is and even I am thinking to create some free courses on Udemy. Why free?

Don't worry, I will answer this question in the below section and you will understand how you can make money creating free courses online:

1. Know Your Expertise

Before grabbing the course content, or starting your research, you have to know your own expertise. As when you are aware of your inner talent, you will have wings to fly.

As creating an online course is not that hard thing, today everybody can use some free screen-capturing software and perform some basic actions to create a course. But, in reality, this type of courses are not able to help you make huge money.

You have to hold expertise on whatever topic you are going to create a course on and when you are 100% sure about your experience, you can take the first step.

I recommend you to create a course on your real-life experiences, your work or whatever you think you know better than others.

2. Know Your Audience

When it comes to selling your online course, the number one hurdle is not knowing where your students are, and what is your actual audience.

So, the 2nd step is to research your audience and note down their platforms, have data about where your audience is interacting on a daily basis so that you can showcase your online course on that platforms.

Guess what, if you have created an outstanding online course and you are selling it in the offline market? nobody will touch your pad.

They will pick a handbook, and forget about your online course. So, try Facebook groups, LinkedIn profiles, and Twitter lists to find an audience for what you are creating a course.

3. Pick A Course Creation Template

Without a template, you can't create an online course like a professional and when your course is not a professionally created course, you will end up investing your money on promotions with zero sells.

So, before creating your course in actual, you should pick a template and that template can be from these basic categories (I have created for you):

• Screen recording and voiceover
• Recording your own self with screenshots of the course material
• Teaching on a billboard while recording yourself

These are the three basic and widely used templates to create a course that actually sells. So pick your favorite template and do your best to adopt as much as you can.

As your students will love to hear your voice with live examples that you can record with a screen recording software. I would recommend you to pick this way and create your online course like a professional does.

4. Finalize Everything and Create Your Course

Now as you have a list of basic things like your skill (topic), your audience (students), template (course creating method) its time to create your whole course.

Sit down and have everything prepared. Like your microphone, lights and a cup of coffee that will keep you up for creating the whole course in one run.

However, there are people who have to spend their months on creating just one course, so if you are spending some days on your first online course, you should stay calm and keep doing it.

I recommend you to use sticky notes and create a list of course material with what you have to cover while you create an online course so that you will have ease of creating the course in less time.

5. Market Your Course and Create Hype

In today's crowdy world, chances are the course you have created is the same copy of another course which is being purchased by your audience.

Now what?

No, you don't have to send your course to the trash, you can still achieve success and sell your course like a champion.

All you have to do is create some hype and invest some dollars on marketing your course by having your own self in the promotional video and tell people why your course is better than other courses in the market.

This way you will have some eyeballs looking at your course.

6. Ask Experts for Shoutouts

As you already have invested to market your course online, now it's the time to reach out to the influencers and experts in your niche/industry.

Ask them to talk about your course and tell their followers about your expertise. Some of them will ignore you, some of them will help you and some of them will ask you for money.

It's better to pay them and those who are ignoring, ignore them and get the free help from those who are agreeing to give a shoutout for free.

In my experience, when you create a course people start looking at you as a scammer or a person who is not earning himself and selling courses to earn money.

So, you should have the material to show as proof of your expertise on the topic you selected to create an online course for.

7. Pre-sell Your Course

Now you have your name around the market, prove your metal here and let's pre-sell your course by joining a group of like-minded people or creating a campaign on Kickstarter.

You can also simply create a landing page and post social media updates about your course pre-selling offers.

You can also advertise your course and have the experts share your pre-selling offers. Those offers can be like a free bonus class for those students who are buying your course before its release and even a free ticket for your next course can be a life-saving offer for your online course.

8. Offer Discounts

Who doesn't want to grab some discount offers?

Like I shared that Udemy is providing education to people and everybody on the platform is earning money in one and another way.

What they actually do is: They offer huge discounts by selling best courses under $10 and even many of the courses are available to watch for free.

That's awesome, right?

Why you should take the train after everybody else?

You should offer huge discounts on your course and before the launch of your course (at least 1 week before) offer huge discounts and sell your course at 80 to 90% off.

9. Give Certificates

Don't forget to hire a graphic designer to create an outstanding certificate for your online course which can be utilized to change student name and scores.

This is what will help you to engage more students, have more students to your 2nd course and create an evergreen word of mouth advertising funnel.

Your certificates can be as simple as a primary school's certificate, so don't worry about getting them printed.

Send virtual certificates and give them in PDF format with high resolution so that your students can get them printed at their own.

10. Create Another Course

After some time (like 2 or 3 months), you can create another course on a relative topic to your first course and let the same audience purchase your 2nd course.

You can do the same things again to create another outstanding course that can help you make money while you sleep.

Just make sure that you are not getting out of the way as if your first course was about saving money, your second course should be about investing money not how to wear a bra.

I hope this article helped you a little and I am looking forward to writing more about such topics.

Just stay with me and I will keep you updated with more ways to make money while sleeping.