5 Crucial Questions To Know If You're Ready To Create A Course

Before you dive into creating a course, you must ask yourself these 5 questions. These questions will help you decide if creating a course is the next best step for you.

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Transcript

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Welcome to the Little Miss Course Creator podcast. I am your host, April Bradford. There is a big problem with the course creation world. Course creators build a course, put it out there and either it doesn't sell or does. Are waiting between launches, wondering where the money is going to come from. Well, if you are ready to turn from a course creator to a course boss, we are going to flip that model on its head. In this podcast, you are going to learn how to build a course business based on strategy from solo episodes with me where I will teach you everything I know about corporation and digital marketing to fix your funnel episodes where you'll learn how to optimize your selling. This podcast will teach you the strategies to do that. Becoming a coursebox isn't always easy and it isn't always pretty. But I promise you it is worth it. So dive in and start implementing the strategies that you hear today and start building the life that you dream of, the business that you love and get those things on your vision board checked off your list. Hey there. Welcome to another episode of the Littleness Course Creator podcast. Welcome my friends. Today we are diving into a very important topic. We are going to be talking about five crucial questions you need to ask yourself to know if you're ready to create an online course. And I want to preface this by saying before I do a podcast episode, I like to research and see what other people are saying on these topics to see if I have something different to say. And so in this episode, I am going to give you a view from if you are just getting started in the online industry, these are crucial questions to ask yourself. A lot of the content that I found out there was based on people who already had an online business, a successful online business, and then transferring that into an online course. Are you ready for that? And so I want to take this from that place of you're just getting started. You have this idea and you want to know if it's right to do this. Okay. If creating a course is right for you. And if you've looked this up before, you might have found the same content that I found where all of these articles or blog posts or videos are saying do not create a course until you have an engaged audience. Tell your audience is asking you for things, but if you're just getting started, you don't have those things. So we are going to talk about these five questions to ask yourself. And I want to tell you that every client that I've worked with did not have a business they started with their course. Their course was their business. So it is possible to start a course business from scratch from your course, not from having to work one on one with clients or something like that. Okay, so let's dive into these five questions. The first question that you need to ask yourself is do you have a proven success path? So when you're thinking about your course idea, is it proven number one? And this does not mean that you have had hundreds of people go through it or even ten people go through it. Have you had success and achieved the result that your course would be promising? That's the first thing that I want you to think about with this question. Is there a proven path and do you have a path? Was there a system that you followed that you could teach? This system or this proven path is what is going to set you apart from the others out there because your path is going to be different than the others paths. Okay, and so what is that proven success path? And also is it specific? Is there specific results? That's what you need to think about as well because we're going to talk about in an upcoming episode how to choose your profitable course topic. And one of the things that we'll talk about in there is offering a specific result because that's what people are looking for. They're looking for a specific result. So do you have a proven success path that has a specific result that when you create your course that you are going to say, hey, by the end of this course, you are going to be able to blank. You're going to have blank. So for example, with my elite course experience that's coming up, you will have in the end of those 90 days, you're going to have your course completely ready to sell, your sales funnel done and you're going to have guidance every step of the way. That is my specific promise is in 90 days you're going to have your course done, your marketing done, it's all ready to go, the tech set up and side bonus, you get help all along way. Okay. And I have a path for you to follow. I have a specific 90 day path that you will follow. I've done it. I've had others go through it. Did I have others go through it when I first taught this path? No, I hadn't. I had done it myself and then I was able to teach it to others. Okay, number two questions. So that first question, do you have a proven success path? Number two question, and some of these are going to get pretty deep. Like you're going to have to really answer truthfully to yourself if you're willing to do this. Because I'm going to tell you right now the online course business is not an easy over the night success and we'll get into that. So I want you to truly answer these questions truthfully to yourself. Number two, are you willing to put in the time and effort to stick with it and build your audience and build your business here's. The difference between people who have a business, people who have an audience, and then they're adding an online course is that when they go to launch, they have already built the rapport with their audience. They have an audience that's asking for this. They know that when they launch, they have buyers. On the other hand, if this is your very first product, this is the very first thing that you're creating in your business, you do not have that advantage. And that's okay. I want you to know that's, okay? But you need to ask yourself, are you willing to put in that time and effort to stick with it? Because you are going to start small. You can't expect to have 5000 email subscribers overnight ready to buy from you. Even if you have 50 subscribers overnight, randomly, they're not going to be ready to buy from you right away because it takes time to build a relationship. And so are you willing to put in that time and effort to build that audience? To build that relationship? And I'm not saying that you need a giant audience before you launch your course. In fact, and I've talked about this on the podcast before, I did not have a huge audience whatsoever. When I launched my first course, I had less than 100 people on my email list. Less than 100 people. And I still launched and I made money. So if I can do it, you can do it. Okay? If I can do it, you can do it. But you need to know that there is going to take effort and time to build that audience. And I knew with my audience that size, when I launched my course to an audience of less than 100, I was just excited if anyone bought. And so when I can't remember the exact number, it was like eight or nine people bought. It was so exciting. Like, I was like, oh my gosh, this online thing works. Like, I just put something out there and someone bought it. This is amazing. And I knew that I wasn't going to make $100,000 from that lunch. I didn't have the audience to do that. The price that I was selling my course for, it didn't make sense. That wouldn't work. So I had that realistic mindset. So when you think about taking the time to build your audience, being consistent in emailing them every single week, being consistent in creating content, one of the things that I see is I will be working with people and they're like, oh yeah, I'm being consistent. I'm emailing my list, but I'm like, I'm on their list and I'm not getting the emails. Like maybe once a month, you need to be building that relationship. Think about if you were pen pals, right? If you only heard from your pen pal. I don't know about you, but when I was little, like, I wanted a penpal so bad, I thought it was the coolest thing. And here's the problem, though, is when I got a penpal, it fizzled off very quickly because I would forget to write back or they wouldn't write back, and then it would be forever until one of us responded. And then that relationship just is never built. So if they're never hearing from you, how are you building your relationship with them? Okay? So you need to be doing two things very consistently. And even if you're not seeing results, as in like, oh, only five people watched my YouTube video, or only five people listened to my podcast. That's five people, you guys. Imagine if those five people were standing in front of you waiting to hear from you, waiting to listen to you. Would you be like, oh, they're only five people, and just walk out? You wouldn't. And so treat your small audience the same way, because I'm going to tell you, a small audience can be very mighty, more so than I would say a lot of times, a big audience, the bigger the audience gets, a lot of times you have a lot of those people who aren't engaged. That small audience can be amazing. So remember that. Treat them like gold, and they will treat you like gold back. Okay? So are you willing to put in the time and effort to stick with it and build your audience? Because it does take time and it does take effort. It does take weekly planning to plan your content. It does take planning and time to write your emails. All that stuff takes time. But it's so worth it when you do it and you do it consistently. Number three, are you looking for a get rich quick solution? If you are, turn off this podcast right now and go find something else. Online courses are not a get rich quick solution, and they also are not easy money, okay? And when I say easy money, you hear all the time, oh, passive income, make money in your sleep, get rich quick, those kinds of things. That's not what online courses are. People are going to try to sell that to you because it sounds good. But I'm here to give you the real stuff, give you the real behind the scenes. Online courses are not a get rich quick scheme. Going back to the last question, are you willing to put in that time and effort to build your audience? It takes years to build a very large audience so that those launches that you hear about, like, oh, I launched, made $100,000. I launched and made a million dollars, whatever that is. That took years to get to that point. It was not an overnight success. And we think that people have overnight success because you did not hear about them all of those years that they were small and little and doing all the things that built up to this point of this huge success. That's why we think that there's overnight success. It's not an overnight success. It's also not passive income. You are constantly once the course is created, yes, it's created. You don't have to create it again, right? It's there, it's up, it's ready to sell at any time. It is passive in that way. However, you are always marketing your course. You are always creating content. There is stuff that you are always doing. So it's not this passive income like set it and forget it. That's not what your online course is. It is going to be a constant every week, every day, doing something to get your name out there, build your authority and build your audience. So I want to be very real with you that it's not a getrichquick scheme. And if that's what you're looking for, go find something else because this is not it. Online course creation is not it. Okay, number four, do you have a growth mindset? This is huge. I talk a lot about mindset, and it's funny because when I send emails about mindset and stuff, those are some of the emails that get some of my biggest unsubscribes. But I will never stop sending those emails. People can unsubscribe, that's fine, but I will never stop sending those emails because I know how important this aspect is. Having the right mindset to build a business, it is crucial, absolutely crucial to your success. And having that growth mindset, that not yet. That not yet growth mindset. So when we think about the million dollar launch, oh, I launched my course, I haven't made a million dollars yet that yet leaves so much space and lets you create space to keep going, to keep building instead of that shut mindset of I launched my course and I didn't make a million dollars, or I launched my course and I didn't hit my goals, I'm done. That will not lead you to success. And if that's the kind of attitude that you tend to lean towards, you probably want to find something else. But if you are willing to stay in the game, to stick with it, to look at the data, to look at your offers, to listen to your audience and be like, okay, you know what, I think this needs to be changed. I think this needs to be tweaked. Or you know what, things went well. I just didn't have the audience size to hit the goals that I'm dreaming of yet. But I'm going to keep going. I'm going to launch this again. I'm going to do it again, right? And next time my audience is going to be bigger. I'm going to tweak some things that I knew I could improve on and I'm going to try it again and I'm going to go again. Or you know what? That totally flopped. No one responded to that. My audience didn't like that. What do we need to do? Okay, that didn't work. We're going to try something new. And that leads me to question number five, and that is, are you ready to step into the CEO position? Because as soon as you create a course and you start selling it, you're a CEO and you're also probably going to be a solopreneur at the very beginning or have like a VA, but you don't have a whole team behind you. So you are wearing a lot of hats and making a lot of decisions and doing a lot of things. So when it comes to being the CEO, are you willing to look at the data and say, okay, we need to change here, we need to make a pivot here's? One thing that I see can happen is people get this idea of like, this is the course that I'm going to create. This is what people need and this is it. And then they launch it and it doesn't go as planned. And they're so married to this idea because they think it's a good idea that they're not willing to change. And so they're not willing to listen and look and learn and make hard decisions because sometimes you might create something and it might be a flop, and you might need to totally go back to the drawing board and start over again. And sometimes you might think it was a flop, and I put that in air quotes, think it was a flop, but really it was. You've got to look at the data. This is why the data is so important. My audience just wasn't big enough. They were responding, but they just weren't ready yet. Or I hadn't built that rapport with them yet. And so I'm going to stick with this. So knowing that you are going to make those big decisions of whether is this something that we're sticking to and keep going, or is this something that you know what, we need to totally tweak this offer because I was totally off base with this. And also when it comes to the CEO, are you ready to manage people? Are you ready to be the human resources? If someone emails you and it's like, hey, I didn't like your course, I want a refund, are you ready to deal with those types of situations? Because all of these things come up when you launch a course, when you start a business, like you truly are a business person. Now you're the owner of a company, and so you've got to take on that mindset of being an owner of a company. I highly recommend you go back and listen to if you haven't listened to it, listen to it. If you've already listened to it, listen to it again. The episode What You Must Know to Be Successful, because that podcast episode is pretty much stories about people who ended up being successful. But no one is successful right out of the gate. There takes time, effort, energy, that growth, mindset to get there so I again want to go over those five questions. And truly, I want you to really dig deep and answer these questions honestly to know, number one, know if you're prepared, know if you're ready to go on this journey, and know if you really want to. So let's go over those five questions again. Do you have a proven success path? Number two, are you willing to put in the time and effort to stick with it and build your audience? Number three, are you looking for a get rich quick solution? Number four, do you have a growth mindset? And number five, are you ready to step into the CEO position if you said yes? Two numbers one, two, four, and five. And no two, are you looking for getrichquick solution? Then you, my friend, are ready to build an online course business, and I cannot wait to see what you create. I would love, love, love to be your guide as you go through this journey and be there with you and supporting you and cheering you on and picking you up on those days that it's hard. I would love to be that person for you. So if you want that type of support, go get on the Waitlist for the Elite course experience. This is an open, closed course. It's not going to be open always. And when it launches, it's launching to the waitlist first. And it's a very small group because I want to make sure that I can give my attention to you so you can get on the Waitlist@littlemascoursecreator.com Elite. And I cannot wait to help you get your course created. All right, I will see you next week when we are going to be talking about what type of course. We talked about this in the last episode, making sure that your course is developmentally appropriate for your business. We're going to be talking about that. What type of course should you be creating right now in your business and how to know how to decide that. So I'll see you here next week.