27: Essentials to build and sell your online course
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Welcome to episode 27 of Permission to be Messy I'm your host, JoAnn Krall and today I'm talking about the essentials that you need to build and sell your online course.
This episode is for you if you've never even thought about creating an online course, or you have thought about creating an online course, or you've created online course, but you just scrapped it because it seemed way too overwhelming.
I have been in the online business space for about seven years. Really before that I was learning about it, but I actually started my online piece of my business roughly about seven years ago,
And when I transitioned my business to all online, I started with Kajabi. I do have an episode where I talk about that in episode 19. And I transitioned my professional organizing business into a virtual business, but I also wanted to start doing online courses because when you teach something and you teach it over and over again, it's really helpful to have an online course that you can offer to people because it helps you stop trading that time for money and anything that's repeatable and you have a process for it's a great option for that.
You may currently have an in-person business where you provide a service and maybe there's something inside of that, that people ask you about all the time. So for me, obviously, people ask me about organizing questions, but I also get a lot of questions about building an online business because I've spent extensive time learning about online marketing and social media and actually creating the business and how to sell it and how to build an email list and all of the things that the big gurus are teaching.
Over this summer, I have been working on building a new piece to my business. So I'm still going to have my organizing courses and help people, through coaching and strategy with that. But I'm also going to be helping people build their own online businesses.
There's so many people teaching about online courses out there. But what I've seen and especially since the pandemic, because this industry has exploded is that there are so many people who know one way and they teach it. So for example, if I was to say to you. You're going to build an online course. You need Kajabi. That's the only thing you need. You need nothing else but Kajabi. That would be wrong.
I was going to talk about this today anyways, but it was very interesting that I was in the Kajabi Facebook group and there was a new user and she said that she was taking a course on how to build her online business in Kajabi and the person said, you need to have Thrivecart and you need to have Active Campaign. If you're not familiar with those Thrivecart is a shopping cart, and Active Campaign is where you would do your email marketing. Now you can do both of those things within Kajabi. So for me. She already purchased Kajabi. This person should not be selling her on other things until she's proficient in using Kajabi .
But what I'm talking about today is really giving you some ideas that it doesn't have to be difficult.
So what are the essentials that you need to actually create an online course? If we were to keep it really simple, you need a place to host your courses. It doesn't have to be as structured as a Teachable or Kajabi. You could actually put the content into Google drive and share it that way.
And you could use YouTube and have unlisted videos. That can be built out that way without even having to make an investment. And this can be really helpful for somebody who's just testing out and wanting to see if their idea works.
You also need to have, a place where you can hold your email list. So you want to be able to collect emails from people. whether you bringing them in as leads or whether you bringing them in as customers, you want to have a place where it holds your email list and then you use that service, whatever it may be. Using that email service to be able to send emails, to deliver the content saying, okay, you've purchased, here's the links. Here's your access to this Google drive that has all the information that you need. And of course, it's a little bit harder to organize something for somebody in Google drive.
But I've seen it done and I've seen it done by seasoned business owners as well. They're using that for the simplicity and then as far as selling the online course, you need to be able to have a landing page. You don't necessarily have to have a full-on built out website, but you need to have at least one landing page, or two, we'll talk about this in a second, but you have to have a landing page where you would use that as a sales page. That's going to list out all the features, the benefits and everything that you need to tell people in order to buy. And on that page, you would have a link to buy, which brings me to, you need to have a payment processor.
You would have a payment button on there for people to be able to pay. it could go straight to PayPal. and then there are other payment services out there. And when I talk about another landing page, I think it's always essential to have some sort of a lead magnet.
cause you want to bring people onto your list so that you can nurture them and, then let them know about when things are being released. You'll see examples of this in my show notes, I'll have my, my seven steps. opt-in you can see what the landing page looks like. You can opt into that and you can see the flow.
And as of this recording, I know that. MailChimp still has a free option, and I believe you can have access to some landing pages in there so you'd be able to do a lot of this stuff in there. There are ways to start your online business at no cost or very low cost. and this can be an option for people. I think sometimes what happens is, people say, oh, I want to start an online business and then it, everybody in their brother comes out of the woodwork and says, you've got to use this product and this product. And it can be completely overwhelming.
Myself, actually, I almost got sucked into, grabbing Thrivecart's one time. One time offer. So currently you can get Thrivecart, which is the shopping cart for, Was it four, I think it's $495 one time never pay again, which is a great deal. and then you can upgrade to the pro, which is 195 a month so it would be a month, a hundred ninety five, one time cost. And so the totals. roughly $700 one time never having to pay again, which is a great deal. So that isn't is another option. If you have something in mind. that could be a great option to start with, but I almost got sucked into it because I was like, oh, am I going to regret it? Because they've now added courses. You can do courses on Thrivecart. and it's, it's still relatively new and I think it will come along.
And what I like about it is it's more competition for Kajabi. So that's going to make Kajabi step up their game. I didn't do it. My daughter actually talked me out of it. She was very wise and, had some great advice for me, but that's because I already have Kajabi and it would be silly for me to add this on, knowing that I'm doing just fine without it.
Let me speak to the whole, why would anybody do an online course?
It can be a great source of extra income. If you already have an in-person business or you have a job in. the corporate world and there's something that people come to you and ask you about. Even if it's, helping somebody get into your field or somebody in your field, how to navigate the field or you have a business say you're a spa owner and you're really successful maybe you can create something that helps other people start their own spas. Or maybe you provide a service in that spa where you're constantly helping your clients work through certain issues and that's something that you could teach online so that you can help people beyond. So taking your expertise and helping people all over the world.
Maybe you have some expertise in, home design or, in, fashion or something, anything that can help people that you, you know, you find yourself helping people with that a lot and something that you could translate into a course. I love talking with people through this. So I'm going to put a link in the show notes for you to be able to set up a free call with me. No obligation whatsoever. I'm in the testing phase. So this is something that you would want to do as well.
I'm in the testing phase to see if people are actually interested and I have had people interested so that's very exciting. but if you think. I wonder if I have enough to create an online course and actually sell that. I would love to chat about that. If you I have already tried the online course route and not been successful. Definitely book that call as well with me. . I would love to talk with you. to see potentially why it wasn't successful or, maybe the tools were too expensive for what you were doing. I love, love, love, brainstorming around that.
And of course, if you're somebody who's been thinking about building an online course, But you're overwhelmed by all the choices out there. And you're overwhelmed by the prices of the people who teach this definitely reach out to me because when I, I'm going to be doing an informational webinar at some point, probably towards the end of the summer.
And in keeping with the podcast title permission to be messy. I want you to keep in mind that if you're going to build an online business you do not have to have everything perfect If you think about what i'm saying of doing things in say Google docs or on YouTube that's almost like a rough draft and it could stay that way if it works but it's a starting point and you're giving yourself that permission to be messy and you're trying not to spend a ton of money up front to make sure that everything is perfect designing that perfect logo and that perfect website and picking all your colors and creating everything. You really want to keep it simple in the beginning especially if you haven't proven the idea it's like i said i'm grabbing in people to see if people are interested But i'm still not investing a lot in creating I'm not creating the course in fact When I do create a, course based on this I'll be doing it with the help of beta students be walking through it getting their questions Creating the answers and then formulating around that because I can think of how I want it to go but I and you need feedback from the people that are going to be learning from us to build a truly effective courseAgain reach out to me And as always i'm wishing you much purpose peace and progress and of course the permission to be messy thanks for listening.
