My Course Creation Process
Creating an e-course can feel like an overwhelming piece of work – developing the idea into an outline, spending weeks or months writing the course content, deciding whether to use video or images or slides or whatever else, figuring out the tech to deliver the course, and then all of the selling or marketing. If you’re sat there with the germ of an idea you can very quickly skip to worrying about whose Instagram accounts you can use to promote this course that doesn’t even exist yet, and it feels like too high a mountain to climb.
Let’s look at the positives for a moment. Creating courses is one of the most rewarding parts of my business – getting excited about the idea, the project of writing and creating it, and then the moment when someone tells you how helpful it was for them. I love the process of getting stuck into a subject and exploring different ways to help people make progress on their own terms. This is not to say, of course, that there aren’t moments where the very last thing you want to do is write that section, or where you think to yourself ‘oh wow, this really is total crap!’. But to see the light we need the dark, and on the whole making and selling courses is one of my favourite things to do.
But back to that overwhelm. You have an idea for a course that you’re quietly excited about, but there seem to be a lot of different moving parts and you’re not sure where to start with actually making this thing a reality. I know it feels like this behemoth of a project beforehand, but once you break it down and set some realistic deadlines, it will feel much more possible. Here I’m sharing the process I go through when creating a course, not so you can follow it blindly, but in the hopes, it gives you an ‘in’ and some context for creating a process of your own.
Side note: if you are a coach or a mentor and you want to start creating courses as part of your facilitation business model, there is a whole module on this in my course, The Playbook. In it, I will be sharing lessons that are specifically tailored to your kind of business, and have a course creation workbook that you can work through to create your next course. Click here for more info.
Part 1 – Mulling Over
Before I commit to a new course, I have a period of mulling over. This is when you’ve had the idea, and you’re trying to decide if it’s a good one or not. The first thing I do is ‘scratch the itch’ – very often a new idea grabs a hold of us, we can become a bit obsessed with it and the thinking about it starts to distract us from our current projects and workload. At this point, I scribble down (in the Notes app on my phone) what’s in my head around the idea, just a few sentences and bullet points. Getting it out of your head scratches the itch of the idea, and if you can come back to those notes and still feel excited by it, then you know the ideas a good one.
Once I’ve decided that this is something I want to pursue, I will let it whirr around in my head for a little while. I don’t want to formalise the ideas too much, as it this point you need the creativity to flow and sitting down at a screen ready to PLAN can often kill it off at this point. So on dog walks, in the bath, or while waiting for the kettle to boil I’ll think of things that could be included or ways to narrow it down. Any thoughts where I think ‘ooh that’s good, that’s a breakthrough’ I add to that original Note.
Part 2 – Outlining
Once the idea is feeling more fully-formed in my head, and I feel itchy to reorganise and systematise the Note I’ve been jotting ideas down in, I know it’s time to formalise the idea. I usually Google Docs for my course creation projects, both because I like having the Outline feature, and the reassurance that all this work is saved in a cloud and not just on my laptop.
I take all the disparate thoughts I’ve had and make them into a shape that makes sense. Grouping everything together under headings, making sure that if you need to x to understand y that they are in the right order, looking at any gaps that disrupt the flow. Those headings will become the modules, so I see how many there are and whether some need to be cut or amalgamated to make this a manageable course for people to work with. So by the end of this process, I have the module headings, and around five different key sections within each one.
After this, I write the sales page. This might seem a bit premature, but writing the sales page at this point forces you to focus in on the person you’re creating this course for, and ensures that you really understand the proposition and the content (in order to explain and ‘sell’ it someone else you have to really get it!). The sales page isn’t necessarily published at this point, and it will likely be edited before it is, but it really helps me to focus in on the customer and what problem they want to solve by taking this course. When I then move on to creating the content, that’s what’s front of my mind.
Part 3 – Project Plan
When you’ve got your outline and your focused proposition, all that’s really left to do is create it – but that feels like a sheer cliff face that soars up into the clouds in front of you. Before I start creating, I break it down into a project plan so that I can be realistic about what it’s going to take.
For The Playbook, because it’s such an in-depth course, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to speed through it, so I planned to write half a module per week. When I’m writing a big project I prefer to do lots in one go and then not touch it for a few days, so if you’re more of a ‘little and often’ worker take this into account too. The way I find it easiest to create as well is to write and write everything out of my head, and then come back in later to add examples and clarify some points. So planning all of this out, with The Playbook I discovered it would take me around 3 weeks per module – 2 weeks to do the bulk of the content, then one week to add in examples, exercises and create the workbook.
This, therefore, defined the deadline, as rather than it be ready in a month I knew I would have to push the start date backwards. I know some people like to create the next module as people are working through so they can react to people’s experience of the course – I’ve tried that and personally found it really stressful to be up against the clock like that, although it may work for you.
In my Project Plan, alongside the course content, I would be creating each week, I also included what I would do to market the course each week. With The Playbook I launched it with a pre-order, so people could buy it before the start date, so my marketing period was more protracted. You may wish to start your marketing later on, but I would advise starting it before you feel really ready – just some sneak peeks and teasers is great to start setting the scene for people and starting their journey of considering the purchase.
Phase 4 – Creating and Selling
The beauty of the project plan is that it takes away the guesswork of what to do next – I find when I systematise a process it takes away so much decision-making and I can just get on with the work. So at the start of each week, I check the project plan and then plan into my week when I’m going to do each element. I’ll spread the writing across Tuesday and Friday, and then add in the marketing – maybe it’s scheduling an Instagram Live, sending out an email, recording a trailer for the podcast or simply mentioning it on my Instagram grid. As long as I follow the plan, I know that everything will be done on schedule.
So there you have it! There’s nothing really ground-breaking here, but really there never is – we all want to know the ‘secret’ to doing these things but it is a case of just doing it. The only ‘trick’, if you want to call it that, is working out the way that is going to make it easy for you to do it. It’s taken trial and error to land on this process for me; it’s what’s working at the moment, but may well change in the future. I hope that this can spark something in you that will inspire your own way to get your course done.
