Top 5 Mistakes When I Created My First Online Course

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I made a lot of mistakes the first time I created an online course... watch this video so you can skip those mistakes and see success much faster! ⚡️

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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Let's take a trip down memory lane…

I'm going to share with you the biggest mistakes I made with my first online course, so that you can avoid them and see success much faster 🚀

This was about five years ago when I launched my first online course Website That Wows, which is a step-by-step course to help entrepreneurs create a client winning Squarespace website.

If you're new here. Hi, I'm Louise here on this channel. I help you create a successful online business. So if that sounds good to you definitely hit subscribe.

I absolutely love online courses and this business model. I think it is so smart and such a leveraged, more passive way of building an online business. So expect tons of tips on this topic on this channel.

Mistake #1: Not making the connection 🧩

My first mistake is that I didn't make the connection to the bigger picture of why my ideal client would care about a website.

So what you want to do when you're thinking about exactly what you teach, you want to ask yourself the question: why does this matter?

And just ask yourself a few times.

With the example of a website: Yes, my ideal client knows that a website for their business is important… But why do they care? Because they want a space online where they can be found and it represents them. But again, why does this matter? So that when their ideal client comes to their website, they immediately connect with them and book in their product or service.

At the beginning, this was really hard for me. And I was just like, you just want a good looking website? And it's like, well, no… Ultimately a website is a tool to help them get more clients in their business.

So this is going to apply no matter what you teach. In your marketing, just remember to make the connection to what is the underlying reason to why someone would want to invest in your course.

So bigger picture; How is this going to change their life?

Mistake #2: Adding more to the course 📚

Mistake number two was feeling like I had to add more to the course to make it valuable.

Here's the thing: the result of your online course, that is what's valuable and that's what people are paying for.

So actually people are really busy. They have tons of other things that they're juggling. And so you want to think of your online course as the fast track to getting that result. So you just adding in more bonuses, just because you're trying to pat out the value, isn't great. Same with adding extra lessons and things that they don't really need to know.

So always work backwards from the result that you want to help people achieve - work backwards from that. And that is ultimately how you create your curriculum.

And then just own that! That is incredibly valuable that you can show people step-by-step exactly what to do in order to achieve that result and all they have to do is follow your plan.

So when I was first creating my course, I was like, “oh, I just got to like, make these lessons longer” and add in these advanced concepts that like weren't even a good fit for my ideal clients.

So don't do that and maintain your focus on that result.

Mistake #3: Not sending enough emails 💌

Mistake number three comes the first time that I launched my online course and that's that I didn't send enough emails.

I think I sent like two or three, which is really not enough.

Again, going back to the fact that people are busy and we need to make sure that they actually see your offer. The rule in marketing is that people have to see things at least seven times. I think it's even more now, today.

I really didn't send out enough and then I got zero sales and I was quite, quite sad about that.

So, remember you are a business and you have to sell, and there's nothing wrong with that!

When it comes to emails, specifically, what you can do is you can just set up an unsubscribe link that you can add to the bottom of your emails. So whenever you go into a launch or promotion, you can have a little link at the bottom that says: “Not ready for this right now? No worries. Click here and you won't receive any other emails about it”.

This is the best way to do it. It's made me feel so much better about sending emails now. It's like, okay, here, I really want you to know this but if this isn't a good time for you right now then no worries, just click this link.

So that little thing is called a link trigger in many softwares, maybe a tracking link, but it's really great because it just gives people the opportunity to opt out while you can still get your message across.

This applies for launches, promotions, and you can also do this for all of your sales funnels as well, so that you can remove the guilt from sending any emails.

Now to add to this lesson... I practically had zero prelaunch period, which meant that my online course came out of nowhere. So that is not what we want.

We want to actually prepare our audience for what's to come, and get them excited for what we'll be launching.

What I recommend now that you do is actually you have four weeks before you are going to do your promo or your launch, where you are planting the seed and you are getting people excited for what is to come.

This is really going to help your conversion rate; that your offer isn't just coming out of nowhere.

Trust me, these are all from personal experience! 💛

Mistake #4: Not understanding sales systems 🔁

Number four is that I didn't understand the sales systems that are required to sell online courses.

For the most part, you're not going to get as many sales as you could if you just put your course on your website and you're like, “Hey, come and buy it!” Okay?

You will get some sales that way, but the majority of your sales will actually happen through your sales funnels or through launches, flash sales, promotions, things like that.

This is why I'm always recommending that you build your email list, that you set up automated sales funnels, and that you also launch your course as well.

It's not enough to just create your online course, put it on your website and hope for the best.

Mistake #5: Time consuming… ⏳

Finally, the last mistake is a more of an issue of when I was making my course years ago. The problem was, is it was so time consuming and it took me so long to film the videos, then edit them, export handbrake to upload, and finally get them into my course area.

It took some time!

Now we are so lucky because the tech tools just get better every single year. So now I have to tell you to completely skip over this and make creating your course so much faster. I highly recommend that you use the tool Descript. This has been a game changer for me and my students. We all absolutely love it because it eliminates so many of those steps.

It actually allows you to quickly and easily edit your course videos like it's a Google Doc, and then it allows you to quickly press publish and just take that and embed it into your course area.

So compared to what I was doing with all my steps, it is much easier and much faster.

I actually have another video showing you how to use the software (here). Make sure to check that out next.

All right guys. So there are so many more mistakes, but those are the top five that came to mind. I hope that you enjoyed this video and that you go on to create a super successful online course biz.

Thank you so much for watching, and if you enjoyed it, let me know by leaving me a comment and hitting the thumbs up button, don't forget to hit subscribe and I'll see you real soon with another video.

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