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I'm taking you behind-the-scenes and showing you how I outline online courses. I hope this helps you outline your course too!

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video transcript:

How To Create Your Online Course Outline

Welcome to my new video series all about creating an online course. What I’m going to be doing is creating and launching a new online course, and I’m going to bring you along with me for the ride and show you behind the scenes of how I bring a new course to life. This first video covers how to create your online course outline.

The course I’m creating is called Scale with Kartra. This is going to be a course to help business owners simplify and scale their online business, using the all-in-one marketing platform Kartra. This is what’s going to allow people to create their own online course or membership site, create sales funnels, and a whole lot more advanced things to help them grow their business.

In today’s video, I’m going to walk you through the three phases to create your online course outline.

Step 1 – Create a Rough Online Course Outline

The first thing I need to do is create a rough outline of my course. I use the tool Asana for this - it is one of my favorites. It allows me to plan out all of my projects, and store all of my ideas in one place. Let’s dive in, and I’ll show you how I do this.

The first thing I do is create a rough outline in Asana. Usually, I’m actually using the List view for most projects in Asana, but when it comes to outlining my course, I like to use the Board view. At the top of my columns I have the module name, and then I have each of the lessons written below it. What’s great is that I can outline my course and then I follow it as I create it, and I can click right here and mark them complete. As you can see, this course has a lot of different modules. It was really important to map this out and figure out the order that I wanted to teach everything in. Luckily, all of the videos, whenever I create courses, are short and actionable lessons, so it’s not actually going to be overwhelming. Kartra is just so powerful that I do need to cover everything – how to set up your own helpdesk, your calendars, integrating this with Squarespace - and of course I always like to put bonuses in.

As I’m creating this, I will also make some notes for myself. If we go back to the first column, you can see I’ve put a note to myself “Important things to cover” – and I’ll put some notes in this section here of things that I need to ensure make it into the course. At the end here, you’ll see that I have a column for Big Selling Points. As I’m creating the course, I can start to really see why this would be so valuable for someone to invest in, so I’m writing notes for myself. For example, you can include entire funnels, I can do non-ugly page templates, I can talk about the money saved with the software, the time saved – these are just ideas that will come up as you are creating your online course outline. So, this is how I outline my course, and what I love about this is that everything is drag and drop. For example, if I decided I wanted to cover this first, I could simply move it into this module instead. This basically gives me a lot of flexibility when I’m coming up with the course. I can do it with individual cards, I can also do it with entire columns. Having a system that is so flexible like this, to outline everything, is very helpful. So, Step 1 is to create a rough outline like this in Asana. If you are not using Asana in your business yet, I would highly recommend it. I’ll leave a link in the description below for my free roadmap that will get you started with this fantastic software.

Step 2 – Research Your Topic

After I’ve completed my rough online course outline, then I go through and do a ton of research and make sure that I haven’t missed anything. I’ll go through all of the training provided by the company themselves – for example Kartra offers some training, so I went through all of those. Then I also went through their Facebook group - a lot of softwares and companies will have Facebook groups related to their program. I went in there and I scrolled through everything. I looked at where people are getting stuck, what are the most commonly asked questions, so that I can build this into my course, so that people wouldn’t get stuck. I also decided to hire consultants – so anything I wasn’t sure of I was hiring consultants, booking hourly sessions with them to make sure that this course is as strong as it can be. On top of this, I have been using this software personally myself for over a year now, so I, as well, have been through a lot of problems simply through trial and error, so I know exactly what I need to include in this course. So, I’ve created my rough outline and now I’ve done any research or training that I need to, now I’m going to go in and finalize my outline.

Step 3 – Finalize Your Online Course Outline

The last step is to finalize your online course outline. I would come in here, make sure that I’ve covered everything that I want to, and then, of course, I can rearrange my lessons by dragging and dropping. After I have done that, then I will go in and take notes on all of the lessons. For example, if I click on this one here, you can see some notes that I’ve taken for myself, and this is what’s going to guide me once I am ready to actually film these lessons. This ends up giving you a full blueprint for your course, and a guide for when you are filming. This takes away a lot of the overwhelm of bringing your course to life. On top of this, it feels so good to go in and see everything that you have completed so far. It’s funny, often I will, as well - if you click on this one here - you will see that I’ve marked this as easy. Sometimes it will get really overwhelming when you’re creating your course, and I will procrastinate so much on sitting down and actually getting the lessons done, so I’ll add a tag like OK Louise, this is easy, don’t worry, you can do it. Just sit down and actually do the filming. So, I’ll go through and mark ones that are easy and then I know I can fly through these and actually get these done. This is one of those little mental tricks that I do. After you’ve completed all of these steps you are done, and your outline is ready to go. The next step is prepping your course for sale.

That’s it for this video. That is the process I go through to create my online course outline. I’m really excited for the next video in this series. I’m going to show you what I do to prep this online course for sale. I hope you enjoyed the first video in this series. If you did, let me know by giving this video a thumbs up, leave me a comment below, and if you haven’t yet, don’t forget to hit Subscribe. Thank you so much for watching, and I’ll see you soon with another video.