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If your online course offers high value to your target audience, you're assured that the course will be a success. One way to add more to your course is to add supplemental bonus material. Add More without Going Too Long The ideal length for an online course is five to seven modules. If you make it much bigger than that, you're going to overwhelm your participants and your course may lose focus. It needs to be just long enough to tackle one learning task completely. Adding bonus material allows you to add to the course without extending it. The bonus material is a supplement. For example, you might find that you have too many modules. You can then look at your modules and pick one that's a bit of an odd man out. Remove this module and offer it as a "bonus report." A Little Off-Topic Bonus material allows you to add more something to the course that's not strictly on-topic. Good courses proceed in a logical order and help a student learn how to do one specific task. Your bonus material can offer something extra that's related, but not related enough to be part of the course. For example, you might offer a course on setting up and managing a successful blog. The modules start with the technical aspects of setting up the blog, and then cover how to come up with ideas for content and write, and finally some tips on driving traffic to your blog. If adding an audio version of your blog posts is a technique you've used to great success in the past, you might offer an additional report on creating audio posts. An Extra Bonus! Bonus content adds value to your course. It has a powerful psychological effect. If you have a course with seven modules versus a course with six modules and a bonus report, the latter will be perceived as having more value. The idea that it's an extra bonus makes the buyer feel like they're getting something extra, even if the volume of information is actually the same. Differentiate Yourself Finally, adding extra bonus material is a good way to set your course apart from other similar courses. It gives you just a bit extra over the competition and can be a unique selling point for your course. If you want to add bonus material, anything that provides valuable information or helps the buyer will work. The material can be:
It takes some work to create additional content, but it can be a great bonus for your course participants. It doesn't have to be anything involved, but just something valuable. About The Author Pat Simes is a Business Strategist, blogger and Founder of Innovative Business Solutions and Innovate Academy. She currently resides in the Midwest and is committed to inspiring and empowering entrepreneurs to transform their vision to reality. Schedule a FREE 20 Minute “Chat with Pat” HERE Running a business can be tough, but it doesn't need to be lonely! If you're craving a conversation with someone who truly understands what it's like to have business challenges…… Let's chat. 
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 Online courses are extremely popular today. Any business can create and run an online course to extend their reach, build their audience, share their expertise with the world, and turn a nice profit. Here are three mistakes that businesses often make when they create their first course. Creating the Course YOU Want (Not the Course Your Audience Needs) You may have a great deal of knowledge in a particular area that you can teach others. You might think you know exactly what kind of course your audience would like. But it's a fatal mistake to create the course you want rather than the course your audience needs. You may be able to create an excellent course based on what you think you should teach, but it's not likely to reach a great number of people or earn you a profit. And then, what's the point? You'll have a highly informative course that no one signs up for. Instead, you should start by considering your target audience. What problems are they struggling with? What do they need to know? What are their interests? Once you have some ideas, consider how you can help them. Try to match your audience's needs to your skills and expertise. For example, you may find out through surveys that your email subscribers want to know more about using LinkedIn. You can take your knowledge and experience with LinkedIn and create a course that teaches them how to set up a profile and use it. Making Your Course Too Long Naturally, you have a great deal of knowledge you want to drop on your course participants. It also makes perfect sense that a longer course is more bang for the buck. A long and thorough course offers more value to its participants. The problem is that if your course is too long, it might overwhelm your students. You might lose some of them along the way. The best courses are tightly focused. They teach what they need to teach in order for students to overcome the problems they're struggling with. Your course should be just long enough to do that. The ideal length for an online course is five to seven modules. Each module should have three to five steps or small sections. Each course has its own needs structurally, though, so this is just a guideline. If you find that your course is longer than three to five modules, try breaking it down into two courses. If there is a sequential relationship, you can make parts one and two. If the course is slightly too long and you feel the information is very valuable, you can remove one module and offer it as supplemental material, a bonus add-on, or an additional resource for participants. Putting All of Your Effort on the Course but Skimping on the Marketing It takes a great deal of work to put together and run an online course, but you can't forget to market it. Before you even get started, make sure that you have a solid marketing plan. How will you get your course in front of your target audience? How will you advertise it and put the word out? Which marketing channels will you use and how will you use them? If you have a topic that aligns with your target audience's interests, a tightly focused course, and a marketing plan in place, you're virtually guaranteed a successful course. About The Author Pat Simes is a Business Strategist, blogger and Founder of Innovative Business Solutions and Innovate Academy. She currently resides in the Midwest and is committed to inspiring and empowering entrepreneurs to transform their vision to reality. Schedule a FREE 20 Minute “Chat with Pat” HERE Running a business can be tough, but it doesn't need to be lonely! If you're craving a conversation with someone who truly understands what it's like to have business challenges…… Let's chat.   Are you thinking about creating an online course to offer to your audience? The first and most crucial step is to decide on a topic. The topic choice determines all of the other decisions you'll make as you plan your course, and it’s the single biggest factor determining whether you'll see high enrollment or not. The internet offers a wide variety of places to get ideas for your topic. Simple Google search and social media can help you find an excellent topic idea. But here are three great places for ideas you might not have considered. Feedly Feedly is a news aggregator application that brings you blogs and articles. It takes the work out of searching for you by bringing stories you're interested in straight to your feed. What sets Feedly apart is its ease of use; it brings you headlines that you can scan quickly to see what's new. You choose sources by simply clicking on an "add" icon and then mark the sources by priority. You can create categories and organize your feed to make it as efficient as possible. Checking your feed, you'll see blog posts and news in your niche. Feedly is available for various web browsers and mobile devices using iOS and Android. Quora Q&A Platform A great way to get topic ideas is to consider questions your target audience asks. What are the things they always want to know from you? Social media is useful for seeing conversations and seeing what people are asking. But Q&A sites like Quora are even better. You can search for questions that users are asking directly. Find a good question and base a course on answering it. You can also get an idea of how popular topics are. You can see which questions are asked most often on Quora. These high demand questions are good issues to tackle in your course. You can then read answers to get ideas on the kind of advice that's given. Reddit is a very active online community and message board with conversations on any and every niche under the sun. Users create "subreddits" for specific topics and questions. Like Quora, it provides a place where people can ask questions and other users can answer. You can search Reddit to find questions for topic ideas. When you're looking at these sources for ideas, here are a few things to consider: Look for pressing problems that your target market is facing. Your course should aim to offer one unique way to solve the problem. Try to consider length. Your online course should be about five to seven modules. Is this a question you can answer in that length? Choose a topic that's timely but also evergreen. If you teach something evergreen, you can run the course multiple times. Try to choose a topic you know about through experience if possible (but remember that you can fill in gaps by researching or hiring a writer). Make a big list of ideas and save the ones you don't use this time for future courses. About The Author Pat Simes is a Business Strategist, blogger and Founder of Innovative Business Solutions and Innovate Academy. She currently resides in the Midwest and is committed to inspiring and empowering entrepreneurs to transform their vision to reality. Schedule a FREE 20 Minute “Chat with Pat” HERE Running a business can be tough, but it doesn't need to be lonely! If you're craving a conversation with someone who truly understands what it's like to have business challenges…… Let's chat.   Everywhere you look online now, you see online courses that offer anyone who has a little time and money the chance to gain new skills. With no commute to a physical classroom, these educational opportunities allow anyone no matter how busy they are, or where they're located to learn. Here are five reasons why you should be creating online courses. People Need Help and You Can Provide It People get on the internet to find information they need. If you can address a need of your target market and teach them how to fulfill or solve it, you can help people. This benefits them but it also benefits you by building relationships. After people take your course, they'll continue to follow you and they may take future courses. You Can Become an Expert Creating online courses helps you to become an established expert in your field. Right now, you may not feel like much of an expert. What on earth can you possibly teach people? But if you think about it, there is a great deal of knowledge you've gained through running your business. This is knowledge you can easily teach others (and you can research to fill in any gaps). You'll become the go-to for information for your audience, and their go-to when they need your products or services. Catch up (or Surpass) Industry Standards There is a good chance that many others in your industry are not running online courses for their customers. If they aren't, this puts you in a unique position. Within your industry, you're more than just another business but also a valuable learning resource. This gives you a tremendous advantage. If others in your industry are already offering online courses, it's a good idea to begin offering them as well. Find a unique angle or a unique approach to what you're teaching. Profits Now and in the Future You can sell your online courses and profit from them. There are free courses available online, as well as a great deal of free information, but if you can provide real value, offer something unique, and market your courses well, you can charge a good price for them and you'll see enrollment. Even better, you can use your online courses as a way to build future profits as your courses build a relationship with your audience. Even if you offer a free course, you'll establish yourself as an expert and trusted source of information. There are many ways to profit from online courses, including running a short free course that leads to a longer premium course. You can also build a passive income by creating courses that students can take at any time and that are run mostly through automation It's Easy It's much easier than you probably imagine to create and run online courses. It just takes a bit of organizing and preparing. You can research to gather whatever information you need to fill in knowledge gaps. Your online course will exist and be managed on a platform specially designed for courses. And once you run one course, it gets much easier to do the next. Online courses offer a great way to reach your audience and if you're not doing it now, you're probably missing out on a great opportunity. About The Author Pat Simes is a Business Strategist, blogger and Founder of Innovative Business Solutions and Innovate Academy. She currently resides in the Midwest and is committed to inspiring and empowering entrepreneurs to transform their vision to reality. Schedule a FREE 20 Minute “Chat with Pat” HERE Running a business can be tough, but it doesn't need to be lonely! If you're craving a conversation with someone who truly understands what it's like to have business challenges…… Let's chat.   Online learning is blowing up. People are increasingly paying good money to attend courses through the internet and here are the reasons why. New Skills Online courses teach a variety of skills and areas of knowledge. It's a great option for people who want to improve their technical or job skills. There are many courses that teach you to do tech tasks like set up websites, conduct online marketing, use social media, and so on. No Commute The only commute to your virtual classroom is the steps you have to take from the couch to your PC. Online learning enables more people to gain skills and knowledge because they don't have to physically attend. This is great for all learners, but especially for those who live in isolated areas, can't get around easily, or have family or economic issues that make attending school difficult. Online Learning Is Cheap There are free courses, but even premium courses are much cheaper than an offline classroom. The cost of higher education has skyrocketed in recent years. Online learning allows those who don't have a great deal of budget to spend on their education to learn valuable skills. Every Topic Is Available There's an astounding array of topics you can learn about through online learning. You can find virtually anything you want to know, from simple everyday skills to highly technical and specialized knowledge. Perform a search on any topic you're interested in along with "online course", and you're likely to find some options. Learn in Your Pajamas It's probably not a good idea to attend an offline educational institute in your pajamas. But with online learning, you can be on the couch with a cup of coffee to sip, lounging around as you learn. There is no more comfortable learning environment than your own home. Maximum Flexibility Online learning gives you a chance to make your own schedule. Flexibility is one of the key benefits. Parents, full-time workers, and other busy people can take courses at their leisure. You may have deadlines to meet and group sessions to attend, but the schedule is usually mostly up to you. Opportunities for Interaction Many people mistakenly assume that online learning is lonely. You don't get the same face-to-face interaction with your classmates and teachers as you do offline. But with the progress of technology, this is no longer the case. Modern courses offer a great deal of interaction, including group sessions, webinars, and one-on-one coaching. In fact, taking an online course is a great way to network. Earn a Certificate Some online courses offer certificates of completion or college credits that are transferable. This can help with your education or career enrichment. As a business owner, you can create online courses and offer them to the public. This is a great way to build your audience of followers, establish yourself as an expert, help people who could use your help, and earn a profit. It's something that any business can benefit from. About The Author Pat Simes is a Business Strategist, blogger and Founder of Innovative Business Solutions and Innovate Academy. She currently resides in the Midwest and is committed to inspiring and empowering entrepreneurs to transform their vision to reality. Schedule a FREE 20 Minute “Chat with Pat” HERE Running a business can be tough, but it doesn't need to be lonely! If you're craving a conversation with someone who truly understands what it's like to have business challenges…… Let's chat  |
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