It’s been many years since I launched an online course, but this year, we launched our latest course, and I wanted to share my 5 biggest lessons this time around.
Yes, some are the same lessons, that I didn’t learn years ago (I’m a fast learner lol), but some are not!
Let’s get stuck in…
1. Not Tracking Time
Whenever we work on a client’s project we track our time against that project. That includes my time, as well as my team’s time. We all have an hourly cost to the business, so it’s a matter of then understanding how many hours each person is working on the course and what it costs. Unfortunately, we didn’t do this for this course creation. Not sure why, I think because I didn’t think it would take long. Ha ha ha! How wrong was I!?! Now, I know how long the video content is, so we can go off that. But that does not include the time spent researching, planning, the content preparation, the recording, the editing, creating lesson overviews, loading resources, not to mention the setup of the actual course. With any business project, particularly something as time consuming as creating a course, it’s critical to get an idea about the resource investment. From a cost point of view, but also the human hours that have been invested into it.
Now, let me be clear, there are many reasons to create a course. And it might be completely fine that you don’t make money from it. It’s your lost leader to get people into your funnel or other programs. But for some of you, you’re betting on this to be a big earner for you. Now, I’m happy with the time I invested. I have an asset that I have created once and can sell again and again – and we had clients who needed it as well, but I just wished I knew the internal investment I’ve made to make it happen.
2. Not Building A Bigger List
Before we launched, we didn’t focus on list building ☹ This is where you put energy towards adding leads and contacts to your database. I didn’t do this for a few reasons. One, I was too focused on creating material for my course. (Can you relate?!?!). Please don’t make this mistake like me! Now, in all transparency, our course, is a backend course, so it’s not something that someone new to our world would purchase. Therefore, I needed to focus on building my list, for the step before that. The second factor why, was we were in the middle of shifting our focus and changing are target market at the time. We’ve been further refining our market, which meant, I wanted to hold off and make sure we were targeting the right audience. As I type these reasons, I know they are weak excuses to not prioritise a really critical activity of list building, but I wanted to be honest about why this made it onto the lessons list.
3. Not Pre-Launching Properly
We pre-sold our online course, which I’m happy that we did. However, as much as I sold it, before we were finished, we did not pre-launch properly. It was a scrappy job. It included one call, a recording, a couple of emails and only to a few people. We’d had interest for the course by one of our clients, before we started the pre-launch because they said they needed this now. So, based on the fact this was an offer for people after they purchased another offer from us. Therefore, we did have less people to talk and pre-launch too. We could have done more followup and reach out to potential clients to get a higher conversion.
4. Being A Perfectionist
This lesson applies to certain parts of the course creation process. Areas that I was particularly pedantic about include the structure of the course, the order in which content appeared in, course images, branding consistency and the creation of templates. Also, when recording certain videos, I did my best to make sure the screen size was the same as other videos for consistency. As part of being a perfectionist, I probably did overdeliver. I’ll wait for feedback from our first course participants to see if that’s something I am assuming or if my thoroughness was helpful. There were also areas in the course creation process that I wasn’t as much as a perfectionist about. Including editing all the subtitles, following a word-for-word script and recording direct to camera the entire thing. These were either things that I didn’t do or only did sometimes.
5. Not Effectively Tracking Lesson Creation
We had an excel spreadsheet that I used to outline all the lessons for our course, reference details, status for videos and more. This was super helpful for helping me keep focused and work out where I was up to in relation to content creation. Despite this, there were 2 regrets related to tracking of the course being created.
Firstly, I created reference codes for all the videos (see column D in the spreadsheet below). This was helpful due to the volume of videos I needed to create. When saving each file, I could add the reference to be able to easily find it later. What I didn’t anticipate, that despite planning out my course, as I got creating content, I removed videos and added other videos. This meant that the reference code was no longer accurate. Ugh! As you can see in the image below. I changed the reference code from the original one in column D, to what was included in column G. This caused a lot of confusion when trying to reconcile files already created with the old reference.
The second factor around lesson tracking that I regret was not using a Google sheet from the start. We ended up having 4 team members in total working on the course in some capacity. It was not effective for everyone to edit the one version of the spreadsheet in Dropbox (it’s an cloud based storage platform that we use). I love Dropbox as I’ve needed to go back in time and recover documents before, but it wasn’t ideal for team collaboration. A simple Google sheet was the winner in the end, and it would have saved us hours of work because we would have all been working of the one spreadsheet from the get-go.
Course Creation Lessons
Yes, there are probably more lessons, but hopefully by sharing these top 5 will give you some greater insights and stop you from making some of the same mistakes that I made!
