🗣️ Transcript
Welcome to the first lesson in this module about setting your trajectory, which asks the question: What Do You Want from Your Course?
And we’re going to start digging deeper into your reasons for creating an online course.
So here’s what you’ll learn:
- The big mistake many first-time course creators make
- Why building a course is like buying a house
- How what you want from your course affects your approach to your course
Ready to get started? Great!
Building a course is a lot of things – it’s exciting, it’s challenging, it’s creative. But it can be a lot of work too. Which is fine – because many things worth doing require hard work.
However, what really sucks is investing a lot of time and effort in something and then finding that things don’t pan out the way you hoped.
The thing is, everyone wants their course to be a success, but here’s the big mistake many first-time course creators make…
They start building one without having a clear idea of what that success looks like.
So maybe they heard about some of those high-level benefits: making more money, winning back time, having a greater impact in the world.
And they thought to themselves: “Well that all sounds pretty awesome. I’ll have me some of that sweet online course action.”
But things are more complicated than that. You can’t just forge ahead and build an online course and expect to get all of those benefits in equal measure.
In reality, you’ll get a different blend of benefits depending on the type of course you build. And if you don’t have a clear idea of what you want from your course, you may not get any of the benefits you expect.
So here’s a quick analogy.
Building a course is a bit like buying a house.
A house can be a wonderful place for you and your family to live. It can also be a great source of rental income. And it can be a fantastic holiday or vacation home.
But one house can’t be all of those things at the same time.
So you need to clarify what you want from the house before you start looking. Because depending on what you want, your approach to your property search will be very different.
If you want a house to be your forever home it’ll be a very different house to one that’s intended as a rental property or a holiday home.
The style of house and the internal layout may be different. You might choose a different part of town or even a different part of the world to find your house.
And it’s exactly the same with an online course. Knowing exactly what you want from your course will help you make smart decisions about the type of course that you should build.
Remember how we talked in the first module about the three defining dimensions of an online course — Size, Spend and Support — and how they lead to the four most common types of courses?
Well, what you want from your course will affect which of those different course types you should choose to build.
If you want to generate passive income, then you won’t want to build a hybrid course that requires a lot of interaction. Not exactly passive, right?
Secondly, what you want also affects what else needs to be in place for your course to be a success. After all, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
Remember the “ecosystem” for a successful course?
How it’s not enough to just have a course/programme, you also need some kind of pipeline that turns leads into customers, and a promotion mechanism to get people’s attention?
Well, what you want from your course affects those things too.
Hell, it even affects the type of promise you make.
The promise behind a tactical mini-course designed to generate a few leads will be different to the one behind a flagship course designed to support a whole business.
So that’s why you need to get clear on what you want from your course. Because it affects all those other supporting elements.
There’s one more reason too.
Being clear about what you want from your course helps to keep you focused as you build it.
You don’t want to run out of steam part way through because you’ve forgotten what all the hard work is for. Or realise you don’t even know if you’re succeeding or not because you don’t know how to measure your progress.
Knowing what you want helps you keep your eye on the prize.
Okay. In the next lesson, I’ll introduce you to some common “wants” that a course can help you achieve.
But first, ask yourself what you’ve come into this programme hoping a course will do for you and make a note of the answer.
Once you’ve done that, jump into the next lesson.