Online learning is one of the most popular areas of online business. Today, it is represented not only by schools but also by private experts. Have you accumulated enough knowledge in your field and are ready to create a training course?
It is important to understand where to start and how to transfer all your experience. The steps when launching a course on Instagram have a lot in common with launching any other information product on the market.
In this article, we have rounded up a guide on creating and launching your course, as well as described the pitfalls of this process. Of course, you will need a lot of free time and energy for such a business.
And the best way to offload your busy schedule is to outsource school homework. Did you know that WritePaper offer students professional paper help that are always top-notch? Entrust your task to a professional author and forget about stress and tension before deadlines. In the meantime, you can focus on course preparation. So, let’s begin!
Step 1. Concept of the Course
To decide which course you want to create, consider:
- Your expertise. This means the knowledge and experience that you have and want to share. This is exactly what cannot be found on the internet or copied from colleagues;
- Your interests. You may not be an expert in a particular field, but if you gather talented professionals around you (i.e., mentors and course supervisors), you can succeed;
- Market niche. It will be great if the topic is relevant to many. Here are examples of the trendiest ones:
- Information technology;
- Digital marketing and branding as well as HTML coding or web design;
- Content creation;
- Diet and nutrition, vegetarian cuisine;
- Time management, leadership, negotiation, and public speaking.
But keep in mind that the competition in these spheres will also be high.
Step 2: Target Audience Analysis
At this point, describe your client in detail and think about the potential benefits that the audience wants to receive. What are they looking for? What are their problems? What can you offer to solve them? There are other market research–related questions you should study as well. And the right answers to them are needed to build a strong positioning, create a working strategy, and effective communication.
Step 3: Competitor Analysis
Looking at what your competitors do, you get useful ideas and effective techniques. At the same time, you understand what not to do and what are common mistakes. When analyzing competitors, consider:
- Key features of their products;
- Positioning;
- Price policy;
- Sales channels;
- Promotion tools.
Why is all this crucial for your course? You enhance your product by turning competitors’ weaknesses into your strengths. And this uniqueness will help the client make a choice in your favor.
Step 4: Pricing Policies
Traditionally, most online schools offer users different rates. This allows attracting the widest audience. So, why not do the same thing?
- The economy tariff is for self-study;
- The standard one is an extended version with additional materials and contact with experts;
- Premium one usually means a personal approach with individual consultations and homework analysis.
Various payment options can also be an advantage since not all clients are ready to pay the entire amount at once and will gladly prefer to pay bit by bit.
Step 5: Building a Team and Finding Experts
Depending on the scale of the launch and courses’ peculiarities, you must decide whether you need assistants and a bigger team.
Thus, if you are the only author of the course and you don’t want to invest lots of money in promotion, chances are you can solve all organizational, technical, and marketing tasks on your own.
Is your project more large-scale? Then think about reaching out to designers, copywriters, managers, moderators, etc.
Step 6: Business Plan
Describe your goal – what should be the total amount of sales for the first month? For this, calculate how many packages you need to sell.
For example, you plan to earn “X” in four weeks. To do this, you have to sell:
- “A” courses of the economy package;
- “B” courses of the standard package;
- “C” courses of the premium package.
In total, you must have “D” applications.
Step 7: The Course Structure
One of the most common mistakes is to create a course structure based on the materials that already exist. Instead, the structure should be based on the learning objectives. It is necessary to create some kind of route that will lead the student from the starting point to the learning goal step by step.
- Design key curriculum modules based on objectives. Ask yourself: what kind of transformation should happen to the student after passing it?
- Break each module into a specific number of lessons;
- Decide how you will check whether the learning goal is achieved;
- Plan the final evaluation.
Step 8: Choosing an Educational Platform
The number of educational platforms is simply overwhelming these days. That is why we recommend studying what each one offers in terms of training, promotion, and sales as well as accepted payment methods.
For example, iSpring Learn is perfect for creating online courses from PowerPoint presentations, recording screencasts, and editing video tutorials.
There are also a lot of PowerPoint templates and pictures available. The test period lasts 14 days, so why not give it a try?
Step 9: The Information Product
To make a product attractive to the customer, you need to work hard on how it will be presented. This includes:
- Course name. It should be original and easy to remember. For example, not “Copywriting Course,” but “Becoming A Commercial Author”;
- Logo. It will be used on social media, mailings, educational platforms, and landing pages;
- Landing. What information is important to provide? Description of the course and program, call to action, information about the author of the course as well as rates and benefits;
- Emails. Letter templates and content for newsletters must be prepared in advance.
Keep in mind that you have very little time to make the user interested. So, the offer itself should be as clear as possible. Not “In this course, we will tell you how to work with the features of targeted advertising,” but “We will teach you how to launch targeted advertising with any budget.”
Step 10: Test Drive and Promotion
When the training course is ready, launch the first trial run for a small audience to find the weaknesses and eliminate them. During the test drive, you collect feedback from the participants and improve the course based on it.
When the test drive is over, start promoting the course. You need to develop a sales funnel, create touchpoints and set up a customer flow.
And last but not least, when the course is launched, be sure to keep in touch with students. This can be a chat in the messenger, email newsletters, reminders of lessons and webinars, and polls to collect feedback.
To Wrap It Up
And finally, let’s look at three more factors that have a paramount role.
The first one is your teaching skills. To test your teaching talent, explain one of your expert topics to someone who doesn’t understand it. This will show you whether you can share information successfully.
The second is practical exercises and feedback. If you want to make sure that the student has learned the information and started applying the acquired skills, then tests are indispensable.
And third is convenient online tools both for students and you. Some amazing platforms provide an automatic assessment of assignments and full reporting of the results.
We truly hope that your Instagram course will find its target audience and will give students exactly the knowledge they look for!
