Over the past two years my wife and I have created high quality videos for best selling authors, online entrepreneurs, and large conferences like TedX and World Domination Summit.
Creating, Filming, and Launching Online Courses
The online course industry has been growing steady over the past several years. Content creators are launching free and paid online courses to provide value and education for almost every subject imaginable.
Alyssa and I have worked with online entrepreneurs, bloggers, and authors to help them create engaging courses for their audiences. With our film expertise and experience in writing copy, we’ve been able to help walk clients through the process of building, filming and launching their own online course.
Why work with us?
Creating an online course isn’t easy work. Think of it like writing a book, but on steroids. You not only have to plan out a schedule for writing the content for your course, but then you have to film it, build the actual course site inside a WordPress platform or third party site (like Teachable) and then launch it (not to mention if you decide to launch with affiliates). It’s a lengthy process and shouldn’t be walked alone.
Alyssa and I come on board as an extension of your team. Our typical timeline that we work with clients is 2-4 months. Below is our typical approach to helping our clients build, film, and launch their online course.
Month #1: Developing the Course Content
Most of the course creators we work with are “thought leaders” in their own respected fields. Last year we worked with Jia Jiang, Random House author of Rejection Proof, who is widely renown for his unconventional methods for overcoming rejection. Jia’s TedX talk is one of the most viewed of all time.
During our first month of work with Jia, we sat down to break out the outline of the course and the overall goals of what he hoped to achieve. Since he is the expert, our job was to simply help extract the information from him and insert it into a course format and timeline.
Key deliverables we tackle during our first month:
1. Create a customized course launch timeline to help guide you through process.
2. Help you grow a targeted email list around the specific subject of your course.
If you’re building an online course, you more than likely already have a decent sized email list. However, we’ll work with you on creating an “interested” email list that is specifically geared toward the content inside of your course. This way, when you “press launch” on your new online course, we’ve got a big list of people who are ready to buy.
3. Work with you to create an engaging sales page for your course.
Sometimes people have trouble writing sales copy. We have digested some of the best written copy for online sales pages and worked with our clients to create pages that convert customers. Below are a couple examples of sales pages we’ve helped our clients craft for their online courses.
Weekend Resume Makeover Course by “Job” Jenny Foss
Find Your Signature Sauce Course by Paul Angone
Hack the Hidden Job Market by Mac’s List
4. Craft content for free video series and actual course.
Almost every successful online course has some type of “free offer” that preludes the actual course. We’ll work with you on creating a valuable offer that help bring potential customers into the funnel. Also, we’ll help give feedback and guidance while you are crafting the content for the lessons inside the course.
5. Create survey to get feedback from readers.
One of the biggest mistakes we’ve seen people make with building online courses is doing it in the dark. In other words, they didn’t validate the need with their audience. Instead, they spent months working on building something that didn’t work. We won’t let you make this mistake, instead we’ll work with you to create a survey that you can send out to your readers so you know exactly what they want to learn from you (and what they will pay).
We will typically use this survey to also help us craft the content inside of the course. This survey also helps generate reader excitement because they are pumped to enroll in your new course.
Month #2: Filming & Editing the Course
This is the most straightforward part of the course creation process.
Why video?
Video is the go-to for creating high quality online content. I don’t feel a huge need to make a case for this, but I will anyway. Creating an online course with professional quality video says that you’re making a serious commitment to providing value for your students. This is where we come in. We’ll bring the cameras, audio, lighting equipment, and experience to you so that you can sit back and be the absolute rock star that you already are.
Where do we film?
We have filmed in offices, living rooms, and film studios. Where we film is less important. Since we live and travel in an RV, we are more than open to coming to you. However, this tends to be a case by case solution. We are more open to travel to you if you’re in a beautiful place like California or Maui. If you’re in Nebraska… we might have t0 talk about flying you to us :).
What if I’ve never been on camera?
We do our best to coach you through the filming process and help you feel as comfortable as possible (it helps that we are pretty fun people ourselves). One option while filming is to speak into a teleprompter and another is through an outline (presentation style). While speaking from an outline can be more engaging to an audience, it really will depend on each person.
What about slides and graphics inserted into my presentation?
For the most part, Alyssa and I will create all of the graphics or slides inside of your video. This way, your students aren’t just seeing you talk for hours on end inside your course. We’ll work with you to create branded slides that fit your overall theme. If anything requires advanced skill in photoshop or design, we can discuss it on an individual basis (but haven’t had this issue come up yet).
Month 3: Building Out the Course & Gearing up for Launch
In some cases, we’ve been able to launch the course in this third month. This all dependent on how quickly the content was written for the course.
During this part of the course building process we’ll be working with you to:
1. Build out the course website (our preference is building the course inside of the Teachable platform).
This would include writing down the text takeaways from every lesson (a very tedious process) for each one of the lessons, as well as embedding the videos inside the course, and making sure the basic functionalities of the course are working.
2. Create a launch plan and handle communication with your affiliates.
If this is your first launch, you may or may not want to launch it with affiliates. If you would like to bring on affiliate partners, we’ll work with you to help you create the swipe copy, social media posts, and communication that your affiliates will need to help promote your course. There is a lot of communication that has to happen before a launch, our goal is for you to be able to spend that time communicating with your subscribers, fans, followers, and community.
3. Work with you throughout the entirety of the launch week to help assist with customer support emails, site functionality (making sure everything is working), and your sanity.
Launch week is always crazy, so we try to take as much of the load off as possible.
Interested in Working With Us?
Look how happy you made us?! Can’t wait to hear from you. Drop us a message and let’s talk more!
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