Good morning and welcome to the Monday Morning Marketing Podcast. I'm Esther.
And I'm Melanie.
And today we're talking about setting up and promoting your online course. I'm very excited about this one.
Oh, I'm thrilled.
At the time of recording, I have set up and promoted an online course. Have you, Melanie?
I'm in the process of. Yes, I'm in the process. Okay. I have to count on a certain member of your team to..
my team?
Your team.
My fabulous team.
Yes.
Right. Okay. So you're starting the process.
Yes.
What made you start wanting to set up an online course?
Well, my motivation was pretty much I'm reaching a point now where I've been in business for X amount of time, and, you know, every single bit of money that I earn is through sheer hard, blinding guts and gall. And as much as I enjoy doing that, I also would like to be able to bring on team members, more staff, grow my business. And I can't do that if I'm doing all of it entirely by myself.
Yes. So do you want to earn money while you sleep?
Well, yes and no.
In a way,
Because the way my current course is set up supported digital marketing strategy training. I am working on the name. This is ridiculously long. I have to be present to do all of it to help one person at a time.
Yeah.
And it's not enough anymore. I want to be able to help more people and, you know, hand back the power back to them to manage their own social media and marketing. But I'm just doing it too slowly. And actually, I'm actually part of a mastermind at the moment with Andrew and Pete. Thanks, boys of Atomic. And they're kind of getting my Ducks in a row and motivating me to move it forward. And you Nag a lot, which is a lot to do with it as well. That's my reasoning for doing it now. It shouldn't be this hard to help people. It really shouldn't.
Yeah. So what the course I set up is for people who want to become VA's. So basically saw a niche in the market or need in the market when Covid first hit that a lot of people needed to go online quicker and people needed to find a job to work from home. So myself and Barbara Edwards set up the superstar VA. And basically we sat down and wrote different topics and themes and lots of different parts of the content between the two of us. We recorded videos and made workbooks, and you just had to find the starting point and just start. There is a process to follow. Like, where are you going to host your online course? How are you going to promote the online course? Who obviously we're back to customer avatars again. Who are you going to sell it to? Who are you going to promote it to? How much money are you going to spend promoting it? How much are you going to charge people for the course? Is it going to be a one off course? Is it going to be a follow on course? Is it going so much to think about? But just getting started is almost the hardest part, don't you think? Because you're sort of going, right, I have this course in my head because you have X number of years of experience and you have so much knowledge. But how do you get that onto a video? Onto a course? Onto paper
and evergreen.
Yeah. Especially in the digital world. Yeah.
We picked a really sucky topic to cover, didn't we?
No, but it doesn't have to be. Our topics that we would cover in our online courses would be obviously about digital marketing, email marketing, web design, et cetera. But other people can set up a course on like we had Becky a few weeks ago, talking about writing and publishing your own book. You could write a course about that. Most of that stuff probably won't change from day to day. So there are lots of courses that you could set up based on your knowledge. That won't change just because one social media company decides to completely rebrand and completely change algorithms and completely mess with everyone's head.
You were targeting somebody directly there.
But no names will be mentioned. The guilty will remain nameless. But if you're lucky enough to be in an industry that's not digital marketing, then you could totally set up and promote your online course. There are so many platforms out there that are paid, not paid, that you pay a percentage of people who buy your course rather than paying a monthly fee to host the course where it is. Talk to your web designer. They will know lots of different options. They will have different options for people paying you as well.
There's also the option of not going for one of these platforms. So you don't absolutely have to from the get go, because they can be expensive, especially when you're first starting. And I'm looking at working within my own website, which some obscure company called IPA Group created for me a while back.
They sound really nice.
Yes. And working within private Facebook groups as well. So I'll do my group training in private Facebook groups. And once I've got a few Bob behind me, I might start looking at different types of platforms to manager.
Yeah.
Some people do prerecorded videos. Some people just go live with a group of people.
Yeah. And the options are never ending as to what way you do it, because you could have a one to one Mastermind or one to many Mastermind and ask me anything session you could have, like you said, prerecorded videos or just I will be in the group at this time. Come and ask me anything. If you don't show up, I'm still going to start alive and tell you what and the replay will be made available. Exactly. There will be a replay, which you can then repurpose and make into a blog post. For those that don't want to watch the video, you can add subtitles to your video for those that don't like to watch videos, but on silent. There's so many things you can do and turn that video into course content and make questions out of the video so that people are then always continuing to learn so many things. Now there are other courses that people set up that give certificates at the end.
Yeah.
You could become CD. No,
CPD.
Cpd, that's the word. Cpd accredited. To be able to give people certificates and for them to prove to future employers or to future customers that they have these qualifications behind them because they've taken a course from a reputable company.
You can also go down the QQI route. Over here in the Republic, we've got the QQI levels, which go all the way up to level nine. I don't know what they are sorry overseas, but I'm sure there'll be something, an option that's the same for them. So it depends on how you want to get accreditation. If you want to go down that route, you don't. Absolutely.
You don't have to. No, you don't have to, because there are so many people that can set up a course, and it could be anything from a cooking course. For example, we know that there are people that listen to this, to our show, who are financial advisors. It could be how to get your money in order, how to communicate. Yeah. There are others who research your family tree. So how to research family tree, where to go for genealogical information, et cetera.
Creating a video.
Lots of different things. I mean, the options for starting an online course are endless. They can be as long or as short as you want it to be, but just make sure that it includes lots of different elements video, audio, text, images to deal with everybody's learning curves.
Yeah. And don't worry if you feel that you're going to be running a course that you feel is going to be very like somebody else's. It's not what you say sometimes. It's the way you deliver it. The platforms you deliver it on, maybe the timing that you're putting it up, that means that people will buy from you.
Yeah. And at the end of the day, they will be buying from you, from your personality. Put your personality through on the videos, the audios, et cetera, et cetera. So that people know that it's you. And the information that you give, like Melanie said, might be exactly the same, but the way you deliver it might be the key for them understanding it.
Yeah, totally.
You know, just because other people have done them doesn't mean that you can't do on yourself. So don't let it put you off. Go and do your research. Talk to your web designer and see about getting a course set up on your website and then promote it across all your social media channels, your email marketing. You know, we've been talking about all your channels and all your platforms before, so you know what we're going to say? We don't even have to tell you. But let us know if you do decide to set up a course and we look forward to seeing when Melanie's course is set up and we can promote it across as well. No pressure. No pressure, IPA group. That's it for today, guys. Thanks again for joining us and we'll be back next week with more Monday morning marketing. Bye bye.
Ciao. Ba banner, Arrivederci.
Now you're speaking Italian.
Yeah, I'm multilingual. I'm not actually.
But you can dream.