How much time do you spend reading up on your industry news or doing training? Whether in the form of books, blogs, or talks, it costs you a lot of time to keep up with new techniques, better technology, reported surveys, and the like. So why not make extra income from all this learning?
Capitalising on Your Knowledge with a Course
When you develop a course, you draw on formal training and related information but you also put in your own learning from hands-on experience. And this mix is what is really valuable. Is it time to value what you’ve learned — and put a home study course or live webinar program together?
A home study course can be in the form of video streaming hosted on a marketplace, or video streaming (private download).
The most popular video course marketplace is Udemy.com, which works on profit share, but is hard to make much money as it relies on attracting huge numbers at a lower cost.
Secondly, a private video/PDF course download can be set up at Digital Goods Store (Amazon S3 service), or a number of other choices including SkillShare (fussy), FetchApp, Payloadz and Gumroad. (See selling digital goods: digital download review here).
And thirdly, the way I prefer is to set up your own course with templated sales pages and control the pricing. There are lots of tools, from Kajabi, Teachable and Thinkific (all similar) to Thrive Apprentice/Themes for WordPress. Thrive Apprentice creates the webmaster some work in set-up, but beneficially, does not need a hefty upgrade once you buy the suite. Have as many courses and up-sells as you like!
So, after a fair bit of research into the best type for you, try not to lose sight of your end goal… developing the course ready to deliver.
Developing Course Content
The two things you most need to remember are:
- Keep an ordered list of all elements of your course, so it is structured logically.
- You’re charging for the content, so go over the videos/written sections/audio three times: once for clarity (get a friend to do this too), once for grammar, and once for learning outcomes.
If you’re creating videos, then other important elements to check are Lighting, Sound, and Transitions (you can add titles between scenes). Jump cuts in a video are never a good look!
If you need to edit videos for a course, I recommend the amazing software Descript, which also does screen recordings. Or the other cloud-based editor I like is Invideo, which has templates and is ideal for fancy course trailers.
Pricing your Content
Remember, do not discount the value of your wisdom and learning. We all think it’s easy to find information on the Internet but to learn about a valuable topic in-depth in a logical order… that is something worth paying $$ for.
If you put in some personalised coaching or live group sessions, the total cost of your program can be removed from apples to apples comparison and become a uniquely shaped pear. Be un-com-par-able.
