If you’re trying to figure out how to structure an online course and you’re finding it difficult, you’re not alone!
It’s also a question that’s pretty difficult to answer, it isn’t a one-step or one-course structure that suits all.
There are so many different variables that go into what it is you’re trying to achieve and who your target audience is.
However, within this article, I’ll outline exactly how you can work out the perfect online course structure so you can get building right away.
Along with some tips and tricks that I’ve learned from years of experience in the world of course creation and making sales.
Here’s what we are going to be covering.
How To Structure An Online Course In 7 Simple Steps
- Choose the right course topic and niche
- Understanding your target audience
- Gather all the course information you’ll need.
- Write down every part of the course
- Choosing a pricing structure
- Creating your online course
- Allow access to beta testers
1) Choosing Your Niche And Online Course Topic
When it comes to choosing the right topic and niche for your online course, it’s important to do your research.
There are a few things you’ll want to consider when selecting a topic:
- What are you passionate about?
- What are you skilled in?
- What is the demand for this type of course?
- What is your competition like?
Let’s dive into each of these in a bit more detail.
What are you passionate about?
Having a passion for your course and teaching your knowledge to others is super important.
Because I can assure you now, you’ll have times that get tough, and if you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, you’ll just quit.
If however you love what you teach and enjoy seeing your students get results, you’re already onto a winner.
Only you know what you’re passionate about, so put a bit of thought into this before moving forward.
What are you skilled in?
This is a part that a lot of people get wrong and can even put course creators off the whole idea of creating a course.
You don’t need to be an expert in whatever it is you’re going to teach.
You simply need to be 1 step ahead of your target audience.
Think about this for a second, when you first learn to drive a car you don’t hire a professional race car driver?
You just look up driving instructors in the area that have some good reviews.
These instructors can drive sure, but they aren’t experts or professionals, they are probably no different than your parents at the time.
It’s the same principle with teaching online courses, you just need to have more knowledge than your audience.
What is the demand for this type of course?
Before putting any time and effort into creating your online course, it’s important to make sure there’s demand for it.
There’s no point in building a course if people aren’t interested in learning whatever you want to teach throughout the course.
How much competition do you have?
Finally, it’s important to check out your competition.
- How well are they doing?
- Do they have lots of students?
- What’s their course structure like?
Once you’ve chosen your niche and worked out what you’re passionate about, write a list of your top 10 competitors and work out how you can make your course content better than theirs.
2) Understanding Your Target Audience
Now you’re chosen your niche, it’s time to dive deep into your target audience.
Here are a few things you now need to consider.
- Are you helping beginners?
- Are you helping more advanced students?
- Where do they hang out on the internet?
- What’s the best way to teach your audience?
Deciding on the type of students you’re going to teach is extremely important.
If you’re teaching beginners, you’ll need to have patience and understand that people pick things up at a different speed.
Equally, if you’re trying to teach a more advanced audience it’s important to understand their needs.
Will an online course with video help them, or will they need coaching?
Where does your audience hang out on the internet?
As an example, let’s imagine that your audience hangs out on Youtube and they’re watching lots of videos with your competition.
The first thing I’d do is read the comments underneath each video and work out what questions are being asked?
These are things that your potential students will need help with, so it gives you some great ideas to add to your course.
3) Gather All The Course Information
Now that you know what you’ll be teaching and who your target audience is, it’s time to start gathering all the information you need for your course.
This can be done by conducting research, interviewing experts in your field and creating any resources or materials you think will benefit your students.
Essentially what you want to do now is create a course outline.
Again, don’t worry about making everything perfect, you can always go back and add to your course or update information as things change.
The important thing is to make a start.
As an example, I’m going to pretend I’m helping students learn how to become affiliate marketers.
You’ll want to structure it something like this:
Module 1) Intro To Affiliate Marketing And What it Is
Module 2) Mindset And Patience
Module 3) Choosing Your Niche
Module 4) Creating A Website
Module 5) Finding Affiliate Programs
Module 6) Creating Content To Attract Customers
Module 7) Scaling Your Business
Once you’re created a course outline you can start to document the content you want to have in each of the modules.
For example, let’s dive into Module 4 Creating A Website:
- Choosing a domain name
- Choosing website hosting
- Installing WordPress
- Deciding on fonts and colors
- Designing a logo
- Creating your first page
- Building out menus
- Publishing your first blog
So on and so forth.
4) Write Down An Outline For Your Online Course
The next step is to start writing out what you want in each lesson and be as specific as possible.
There are a number of different ways to help students learn, such as:
- Video
- Written articles
- Assignments that need to be completed
- Questionnaires
- Recorded Webinars
- Interviews
Or perhaps you want to make the education and online learning more engaging through live webinars.
The importance of documenting each lesson now means you won’t repeat yourself over and over again.
I personally like to create my courses in reverse, as this enables me to explain what’s coming throughout the program.
Which is especially helpful with video content!
It also helps to keep students excited about progressing on knowing what they are about to learn next, which is key.
5) How To Price Your Online Course
You may be thinking ‘Ahh I’ll price the course up after I’ve finished it’ but that’s a big mistake to make.
Sure you can always change the price further down the line, but it’s important to have a rough idea of how you’re going to price the program.
There are multiple different ways and they all have their own pros and cons.
One Time Payment
This is going to vary massively on how good your content is, how much work and effort you put into this and more importantly how much it’s worth to your students.
Whatever price tag I put on my courses I’ll always make sure that I make the course 10x in value than the price.
So if I’m going to sell my program for $997, then I make sure that its true value and worth to my students is $10,000!
Example same as before: I’m teaching students how to build an affiliate marketing business.
If my goal is to help my students earn $1,000 a month extra online, then over the course of a year that’ll be $12,000
Meaning if they purchase the program for $997, they will have 12xed their investment.
This is how you should be looking to build your program out because when you start to get reviews and testimonials that state the above, you’ll be flying!
Pro Tip: Price your courses with the number 7 at the end, and avoid using round numbers such as $100 or $1000. Instead go with $47, $97 or $997. Physiologically this helps make the price look less than it is.
Recurring Monthly Payment
Charging a monthly cost for your online course or program can be incredibly powerful.
Let’s say for example you charge $99 a month and have 100 customers.
That’s virtually a guaranteed $10,000 coming in every single month.
But there are a few important things to note when creating a monthly payment for your course.
1) You need to make sure that you’re consistently providing value every single month.
If people have finished your course, why would they continue to pay the membership?
Make sure you can answer that question before going down the route of a recurring payment plan.
2) You will get customers that purchase the program and then leave after a month.
Meaning they had all your value and expertise for super cheap, as opposed to purchasing the course out right at a higher price point.
3) You’ll need to focus on building up a community to keep students engaged
Which Pricing Method Is Best?
There is no right or wrong when it comes to how you price your program.
But just keep in mind that with a one-off payment, you’ll be able to step away from the business more.
However, you’ll have to focus on always bringing in new sales every month
With a recurring payment plan, however, you know you’ll have a guaranteed income coming in.
But you’ll have to be very engaged so your students and members stay.
If you can work out a mix of both, you’re onto a winner!
6) Building Your Online Course
At this point you’ve created the online course structure, and priced out your online course, it’s time to start putting everything together.
I’d suggest signing up for an online course platform, which will make your life one hundred times easier!
These platforms will allow you to build out websites, different online courses, modules, landing pages, email marketing funnels, and so on.
Basically everything you need to make your business come to life.
Online course platforms like Kajabi also allow you to host your videos directly with them.
Here’s what to do:
- Sign up for an online course platform
- Play around with the platform and go through any tutorials they have
- Build out your online course outline on the platform
- Record your videos (They don’t have to be super high quality)
- Edit the videos straight away (This saves tons of time later on)
- Upload them directly into the online course platform
- Add in the instructor description and links for each lesson
- Check the whole course over
This process is going to take a while, sure it’s simple to just bullet point exactly what I do.
But depending on the length of your course this could take days, weeks or even months to put everything together.
However, once it’s finalized it’s time to publish it!
7) Allow Access To Beta Testers
Ok, so we’ve now chosen a niche, created a course outline, priced the program up and built the course content.
It’s now time to allow access to beta testers who can check everything out and provide you with the good, the bad and the ugly.
The beta testers’ job is to help you, and in return, they’ll get access to your awesome content for free, or at a very cheap price.
It’s important that you ask them to provide you with brutal feedback because this is how you can grow and make important changes to the course before marketing it to the world.
Get Reviews And Testimonials
I can not stress enough how important it is to get testimonials from all of your beta testers.
In the world of online learning and online selling, testimonials are like solid slabs of gold.
If you think about the last purchase you made of over $50, chances are you will have checked out a review first.
So the more glowing testimonials you have, that explain in detail how awesome your online courses and programs are, the more sales you’ll make.
If these testimonials also share results then that’s even better!
Pro tip: You can use software such as Testimonial.io to directly upload your testimonials to your sales and landing pages with just one click.
Content Ideas To Include In Your Online Courses
A lot of online courses will require students to complete exams or questionnaires before moving on to the next module.
It’s a great way of making sure your students aren’t just flying through the course and not implementing what you’re teaching.
Unfortunately, lots of people do this.
They see ticking off the modules as an accomplishment, rather than actually putting in the work.
So by adding exams or tests will keep your students engaged and on their feet.
It also helps students achieve results and feel like they are getting somewhere by doing project-based learning.
You can create the exams through various learning management platforms such as Thinkific or Kajabi.
Here are a few other ideas to generate engagement and activity from your students:
- Giving access to quizzes along the way
- Having leaderboards for the top students
- Offering badges
- Running competitions along the way
- Offering an affiliate program
- Incentives for the most interactive students
- Creating an engaged community
- Public recognition in a Facebook Group
- Public recognition on a webinar
- Giving users assignments and exams to complete which have to be done before continuing on to the next module
- Question and Answer sessions are done weekly
Creating a community Facebook Group is another way of giving your students a place to share their wins.
Which again can be used as testimonials for your business.
How To Film Your Online Courses?
Unless you’re teaching people how to create high-quality cinematic content within your lessons, using a standard iPhone camera is more than good enough.
In fact, I’ve recorded many of my online courses in the past with my iPhone 12. The front camera is excellent, but I will use a wireless mic to make sure the sound quality is good.
What Tools Do You Need To Create An Online Course?
Again this comes down to what you’re teaching, but there’s actually very little you’ll need to create your online course.
Don’t forget, you can always update the program over time and make it better, for now, you just need to get the content out there.
Physical Tools
- iPhone for recording
- Basic tripod to keep the camera steady and at the correct angle
- Use a microphone to increase sound quality
Software
- Video Editing software
- Online Course Platform
- Email marketing software (Is included within most online course platforms)
- Funnel Builder Sofware
That’s pretty much it for the basics, and defiantly all you need to get off the ground.
Overview Of Your Online Course Structure
I hope you’ve found this article helpful in giving you a structure and outline to create your online course.
Ultimately a lot of what you create will come down to trial and error, but you can avoid some fatal decisions by:
- Choosing a topic or niche you’re passionate about
- Finding a substantial audience for your course
- Researching Competitors
- Planning and writing out your course structure in advance
- Getting beta testers to provide honest feedback.
I wish you the best of luck with your online courses.
