🗣️ Transcript
Hello, hello! It’s Glen. Welcome to this very first lesson, called: Why Create a Course Anyway?
And here’s what you’ll learn:
- 3 of the best-known benefits of online courses
- Why all the “course hype” is so unhelpful
- 3 “hidden” benefits you don’t often hear about
So let’s get started.
Since you’ve joined a programme about course creation, I figure you’re already sold on some of the benefits. So let’s remind ourselves of the best-known.
I’ll tackle the most obvious one head-on. M-O-N-E-Y – money.
Building a course gives you a product that you can sell to make money.
And because it’s digital there’s really no practical limit to how many copies of that course you can sell, so the potential is huge.
Also, the cost of sale is negligible. There are no materials to buy. There’s nothing to manufacture. No box to deliver to anyone’s doorstep.
It’s an attractive proposition, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Next, creating an online course can save you a ton of time, particularly if you have a business where you trade your time for money.
Because a course gives you something other than your time to sell.
And if that means you need to sell less of your time to make a good living, then you can use that extra time to do something else. Work with more clients, take more time off, learn to speak Swahili, whatever you choose to do!
Naturally, building a course also takes time, so in the shorter term you’ll actually have a bit less time. Obvious but still worth stating.
The other big benefit is that you can increase your impact.
So if you have a process you follow that gets good results for people, turning that process into a course means you can help many more people than you could working one-to-one.
You can also help people in different timezones more easily – people all over the world.
And a course gives you something to offer people who can’t afford your main service.
Combine all three of these benefits and you get this dream future where you’re making tons of money, working just a few hours a week and having a positive impact on large numbers of people.
And it’s this sunny image that fuels a lot of the hype around online courses.
Lots of people in the online course industry want to persuade you this win-win-win scenario is easier than it actually is.
The result is that some people, who probably shouldn’t create a course, are persuaded to do it.
And other people, who probably should create a course, are put off the whole idea.
But if you can see through the hype, some worthwhile combination of these three benefits is definitely within reach.
Not only that, but some more hidden benefits of creating a course are on the table too. So let’s talk about those next.
The first one is that you’ll improve your delivery.
There’s no doubt in my mind that if you turn what you know into an effective course, you will get better at what you do day-to-day.
You’ll discover improved ways to explain certain concepts. You’ll invent better tactics and strategies for helping people reach certain key milestones.
In fact, you’ve probably heard this quote before:
You never really know something until you teach it to someone else.
― John C. Maxwell, The 360 Degree Leader: Developing Your Influence from Anywhere in the Organization
And it’s so true!
The second hidden benefit is that you’ll boost your credibility.
Because in case you haven’t heard, courses are the new books when it comes to establishing yourself as an expert.
Publishing a book used to be a major credibility booster. These days self-publishing has diluted that to some extent.
But having a professional online course to your name is a big tick in the credibility box.
If nothing else, it shows you’re serious about your topic. After all, you’ve gone to the effort of distilling your expertise into a product. No small feat!
The third hidden benefit is that a course will increase your visibility.
That’s because having a course for sale gives you lots of opportunities to market yourself and your business.
Every time one of your students gets a good result or makes a nice comment about your course, it’s something new to mention on social media.
You can talk about topics from your course on social media or in a newsletter, and then say: “If you want to go deeper on this, why not check out my course?”
It also becomes easier for other people to drop you into conversation. If your topic comes up they might say “Oh, so-and-so actually has a really good course about that”.
And then you become known as the name behind that course.
Okay, I hope this lesson has given you a more rounded view of the benefits on offer to intrepid course creators.
Now is a good time to think about which of the benefits above first drew you to the idea of creating a course, and which will be the most important going forwards.
When you’re ready, I’ll see you in the next lesson!