How to bring your online course to life (the simple way!)

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Contrary to popular belief… you do not need to spend months pre-recording your course before you can make your first sale ⚡️❌

Instead, you can launch your course for the first time as a live group program! This allows you to bring your online course to life faster and easier and get real time feedback from your students.

There are two ways that you can do this. Let me show you both!

First things first: You need to outline your online course ✍️

You have to have total clarity on what you will be teaching.

As you do this, it will start to become clear as to how long your program needs to be. Think about manageable pieces that your students could do each week. So as you do this, it will become clear whether your program needs to be six weeks, eight weeks, 12 weeks, or maybe even longer.

Next, you need to choose how you want to deliver the material. You can either:

1️⃣ Show up live on Zoom each week to teach, or,

2️⃣ You can prerecord your lessons and then email them out to your students every week.

Option 1: Zoom 🚀

Let's go through the Zoom option first…

This one is really simple. You're going to determine a program start and end date, and then what the weekly lesson schedule will be. (For example, every Monday at 2:00 PM).

Then all you need to do is set up email reminders to go out every Monday reminding your students of the lesson and providing the Zoom link.

Option #2: Pre-recorded Lessons 🎥

A lot of my students though, would rather prerecord their lessons, so if that is you and that feels easier and less stressful, here's what you're gonna do…

Again, you need to decide on your program start and end date, and then you're going to decide when each lesson gets sent out to your students. (For example, lessons get sent out every Monday at 10:00 AM).

If you are going to do it this way, I would recommend that you record weeks 1 and 2 before the program starts. That way you're not too stressed out around the time of your launch, and then you have enough time to record weeks 3 and beyond.

So as you are running your program, you are also behind the scenes recording the next week's content. This is so much easier than having to prerecord all of your lessons before your first launch, and it means that your course actually gets done.

With this type of program, you can also choose to do a live Q&A! When I was first developing one of my programs, this is exactly how I chose to bring it to life. What I did was I sent out a prerecorded lesson every Monday, and then on Wednesdays I would show up and do a live Q&A. This worked really well and all of our students loved this format, so that's something you can do as well.

From a tech standpoint, I would recommend that you record your lessons using the platform Descript. This tool is amazing. You may have heard me rave about it before, but it makes it so easy for you to edit all of your lessons, which you know for sure there's gonna be a lot of mistakes. When I'm filming, I make so many mistakes and Descript makes it really fast for me to go in and edit videos because they edit videos like a Word document. (Here is my Youtube video on how to use this fantastic tool!).

So I recommend that you use Descript to film your lessons and then Kartra to actually sell your online course and set up your members area where people will log in and watch the videos.

So you'll set up your course area, and as you complete each lesson, you will then upload it to your member's area in Kartra. Then, all you need to do is send out an email every Monday letting your students know that that lesson is now available. For me, I use the lesson visibility feature, which I'm gonna show you now…

So, for example, here is my online course in the backend of Kartra:

Let's say that I wanted to release the content week by week, and I wanted to do a six week program where each module gets released every Monday. So what I would do is I would film my lessons in Descript, and then I would simply embed them into Kartra - and that's what you're seeing here. I have filmed my lessons in Descript, and then I copy and paste it into my course area.

So now what I wanna do is once I have added in all of the videos for module one, I'm going to save that.

Then, I'm gonna go over to where it says “access levels”. (Tip: This will be a similar process for you, even if you're using another software) - so I'll go into membership access levels, and this is what determines what your students can see. I would go in here and once module 1 was ready, I would simply turn on visibility for that module.

Then, coupled with that, I need to send out an email and let my students know, “Hey, module one is ready for you. You can log in and watch it.”

Once you've made these core decisions, you can move onto planning your first launch and creating your sales page so that you can enroll your first students in your online course 🚀

Then once your program starts, you'll deliver the content on a weekly basis, and later you can transition to a more passive version of your course.

This is how I launched one of my recent programs, and it made it so much faster and easier for me to bring it to life!

So will you be doing a live program the first time? Comment on this video and let me know! 💛

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