How To Create an Online Course in 10 Steps

With a laptop and a talent for communication, your online course can attract students from around the world, helping them master important skills or increase their knowledge.

This article takes you through a 10-step process to create and sell an online course that satisfies learners and generates income. 

You’ll walk away with a blueprint for building a course that positions you as an expert in your industry and sets your students up for success.

How to create an online course in 10 steps

1. Choose the topic of your course
2. Conduct user research
3. Select the format of your course
4. Test if your course has market demand
5. Pre-sell your course
6. Outline your course content
7. Set course pricing and sales goals
8. Choose the right course platform
9. Launch and advertise your course
10. Collect feedback and testimonials

1. Choose the topic of your course

The rise of online education and the benefits of creating an online course signals something important: You’ll have competition when bringing your online course to the market. There is no shortage of online courses available on topics ranging from digital marketing and entrepreneurship to gardening and even cat training. 

When considering how to create an online course, choose a topic you’re uniquely suited to teach, where you have industry insight, credibility, expertise, and passion.

Once you’ve narrowed in on topics, explore which has the highest market demand.

Niche course topics like “making authentic maple syrup” or “producing ska music” might attract fewer students, but may present an opportunity to establish yourself as a leading educator in the space.

Targeting highly popular topics like “novel writing” or “golf” will ensure an unlimited supply of students, but are likely too competitive for newcomers. Beware of pitting your content against well-known courses like Yale’s Science of Wellbeing.

Your online courses don’t have to appeal to the most people or be the most popular in their category, but they should cater to topics where there is consistent interest. They should also have a unique value proposition, offering students something valuable that they can’t find in similar content.

We’ll dive further into assessing marketing demand in step four of this post.

Finding a course topic: Ikigai exercise

Here’s a simple exercise, inspired by the popular Ikigai concept, to help identify the right course topic by aligning your skills, passions, and market needs.

Ikigai is a Japanese concept that describes your personal source of inspiration, purpose, and joy. You can use an Ikigai diagram to uncover what subjects will most motivate you as a teacher.

Here’s how:

Draw four circles

On a piece of paper, draw four overlapping circles, as shown in the image below. Label them as follows:

• “What you love”
• “What you’re good at”
• “What the world needs”
• “What you can be paid for”

Fill in each circle

In the circle labeled “What you love,” list the things you enjoy doing and the subjects you’re passionate about. In “What you’re good at,” write down your skills and areas where you have expertise.

Under “What the world needs,” think about current trends, challenges, and gaps in knowledge that people are actively seeking solutions for. The user research you conduct in step two will help you fill out this circle.

Finally, note down topics or skills that people are willing to pay to learn in the circle labeled “What you can be paid for.”

Identify overlaps

Look for intersections between your circles—areas where the things you’ve written down apply to all four categories.

This overlap represents a potential course topic that aligns with your passion, expertise, market demand, and earning potential. By completing this exercise, you’ll gain clarity on a course topic that is not only fulfilling to teach but also has the potential to attract and engage learners.

2. Conduct user research

With a topic in hand, the next step of creating an online course is to identify the skills, knowledge, or experiences students are most interested in learning.

This requires conducting user research to understand your target audience. You’ll define your ideal student and use that information to design irresistible course content.

Build a detailed picture of your target audience with these techniques:

• Put yourself in a beginner’s shoes. Being an expert in a field often means losing touch with what it’s like to be a complete newbie. Speaking with prospective users will help you return to a beginner’s mindset. 
• Understand customer pain points. Your course should help a learner solve a problem they’ve been facing, support them in acquiring knowledge they’ve struggled to find elsewhere, or assist them in learning something more quickly or efficiently than available alternatives. For your course to accomplish this, you need to know precisely what pain points your prospective buyer is facing.
• Learn what a student wants to achieve. The most important part of your course for students is the transformation: the state they achieve after they’ve completed your course. Speaking to prospective customers will help you uncover what they want to achieve.

User research tools

Approach the task of defining your ideal student in the mindset of someone conducting methodological market research. Try these tools to identify user insights:

• Google Trends. Use Google Trends to search for your topic and see whether it’s increasing or decreasing in popularity over time. 
• Keyword tools. Generate keyword insights with tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and AnswerThePublic to understand what people are searching for on Google and social media.
• Browse Reddit, quora, and niche forums. Explore community questions related to your topic and browse threads containing student discussions.
• Scavenge social media. Follow prominent people in your industry across social networks like X and LinkedIn, paying attention to the conversations related to your course topic. 

Primary research

For unique insights into your users, connect with prospective customers directly and survey them about their needs and preferences. 

Try to talk to at least 10 people. Keep interactions short and focus on foundational insights like course format and pricing. Consider incentivizing interviewees by offering them your course for free once it’s complete. 

Create survey questions that address the following areas: 

• The problems your course can help solve
• Reasons for taking your course
• Expected outcomes after completing your course

Use the following script to ask prospective customers if they would be willing to sit down with you for a user research interview: 

Taking time to conduct user research will make all the difference in crafting a high-quality course that can be promoted to an ideal buyer and provides value to students.

Learning outcomes

After completing your user research, you’ll be ready to define the learning outcomes of your online course. These are the valuable skills, experiences, or knowledge that learners will gain, which are essential for marketing your course.

Well-defined learning outcomes serve as a roadmap for your customers, helping them see the benefits of enrolling in your course.

When crafting outcomes, consider what learners will be able to do, know, and feel by the end of their journey.

There are many ways to write a learning outcome. A popular method is the ABCD approach:

• Audience: Who will be taking the course
• Behavior: The skills or knowledge they will acquire
• Condition: The course requirements
• Degree: The level of expertise they will achieve

Using this method, you can outline what your users (A) will learn (B) upon completing the entire course (C), along with the level of ability or accreditation they’ll gain (D).

Arrange the four elements in a way that reflects the priorities of your ideal learners. For example, if your course leads to a professional accreditation, you might start with the degree. If your audience consists of enthusiastic hobbyists, you may want to emphasize the specific behaviors they’ll master.

When writing your outcomes, consider the level of detail that will resonate with users. A one-line learning outcome may suit some audiences, while others will require a full document.

3. Select the format of your course

Online courses come in a range of formats and mediums, including live classes and asynchronous content (where instructor and students engage with the course content at different times.) How you structure and deliver your course will determine how you market to learners, as well as how much money you can reasonably sell your course for.

When selecting a course format, consider the delivery method. For example, will students access course materials through an elearning platform and complete assignments on their own schedule, without real-time interaction? Or will they learn together via live webinars or scheduled classes?

Self-paced courses give students the flexibility to progress through the material at their own speed. While cohort-based courses bring groups of students through the material together, often with set start and end dates.

Consider your delivery methods when deciding on the overall format of your course. There are three main types of course:

• Mini-course
• Multiday course
• Master class

Mini-course

A mini-course generally requires an hour or two to complete. It can take on different mediums—for instance, a series of emails or a playlist of 10 short videos. 

Mini-courses are generally offered at a low price point (e.g., less than $100), or may even be free, to serve as a marketing tool or lead magnet for a more in-depth and pricer course offering. A mini-course is a great way to get started as a course creator to test the market and learn how to create a larger course.

Multiday course

Multiday courses are intermediate digital educational products that generally take students several days to complete.

They might include prerecorded videos breaking down the course into different levels or modules and include supplementary materials like worksheets and checklists. They may also have live check-ins and social meet-ups to resolve challenges and enrich the learning experience.

These courses often fall into the price range of $250 to $2,000. A multiday course is ideal if you’ve already validated your idea through a mini-course.

Master class

Master classes can be anywhere from weeks to months long and aim to provide students with a complete system for success. These types of courses are generally sold to professionals and have a price point ranging from $300 to $5,000. If it’s your first time creating a course, you generally shouldn’t start with a master class. Instead, build up your experience creating mini-courses and multiday courses first. 

For example, Jean-Martin Fortier and Suleyka Montpetit, the founders behind The Market Gardener Institute, offer a range of courses, including a master class.

The master class takes 40 to 60 hours to complete and includes more than 40 modules, over 50 videos, and more than 45 technical sheets. A community component is part of the offering. The course includes a downloadable syllabus you can review before buying, which provides information on learning outcomes.

4. Test if your course has market demand

Before spending money and time building a digital product, test whether enough people are willing to purchase your course to keep your operation profitable. 

One way to do this is by building a minimum viable product (MVP), a concept coined in Eric Reis’s The Lean Startup. An MVP is a product you release to the public with just enough features to validate your assumptions.

For an online course, an MVP could be a mini-course or a free webinar. 

Mini-courses

Mini-courses narrow in on a specific topic rather than attempting to cover a broad range of ideas. Here are examples of taking a broad course topic and narrowing it into a mini-course MVP:

A mini-course allows you to choose a topic you know well and package your expertise or repackage your existing material (e.g., blog posts, threads on X, email newsletter) into a format like an email course. An email course also lets you capture the emails of people who you’ll eventually market your bigger course to.

Someone signing up and taking your mini-course is validation of market demand for a larger course on a broader topic.

Create a free webinar

Another MVP strategy for validating the market demand of your course is creating a webinar with an upsell. Webinars generate signup rates of more than 20%. Seeing a high signup rate validates the market demand for your course.

Spend the majority of the webinar providing valuable information on your course topic, but make sure to gather feedback from participants on what they found most valuable and what else they want to learn. 

These methods of validating your online course idea will save you the experience of creating a course that nobody actually buys.

5. Pre-sell your course

Pre-selling a course means selling your course before you’ve actually created it. This is another mitigation strategy to avoid creating a course nobody wants. 

Other advantages include stress-testing your concept, tailoring your content to early feedback from buyers, and raising money through pre-sales to fund course creation. Plus, having a few early student sign-ups will likely serve as a motivator for finishing and launching your course to the world. 

Getting your first cohort of customers to sign up for a pre-order can be done by creating a pre-sale landing page on your website and incentivizing buyers with a discount.

To pre-sell your course:

• Share the course title, topic, and outline to give early buyers an idea of the curriculum they’ll learn down the line
• Have a goal in mind of what a successful pre-sale might look like 

For instance, your aim might be to make 25 pre-sales. If you make less than this in a given time frame, it’s worth considering whether you want to continue creating the course. Instead, you could opt to refund customers what they’ve paid and go back to the drawing board.

You can use Shopify to create a pre-sale page and collect payments for your course. To add pre-order functionality to your store, download an app.

Shopify also integrates popular course platforms like Thinkific.

6. Outline your course content

Coming up with the contents of your course and logically dividing it into lessons requires a lot of careful work. You’ll need to put yourself in the shoes of a student and start from the desired end state, working backward in manageable chunks. 

Break content into modules and lessons

The amount of content in your course and how many lessons you include will be determined by the type of course you create (e.g., mini-course, multiday course, master class) as well as the associated completion time and cost. 

For instance, if you created a multiday course on content marketing, here’s what breaking that course into five modules might look like:

From there, you can break modules into a series of specific lessons that go into detail about a given subject matter. Here’s how you might break down the above modules:

Once you have an outline that details topics for each module and lesson, you should have a structure from which to start building your course content, one lesson at a time. Each lesson should have detailed steps, information, and exercises for students to work through. Within each lesson, set learning objectives students who buy the course will accomplish. 

Determine lesson formats

Depending on the type of course you decide to create, the medium of your course could take many different forms. For a mini-course that’s free or low-priced, you might opt for an email format where you limit the formats you use to text and some illustrative images or screenshots. 

However, for more intensive and higher-priced courses, it’s best to use multiple formats to keep your students engaged throughout the course. For example, rather than using only text or exclusively video, use a mix of formats to keep your students engaged. Here are a few popular course formats and their benefits:

• Video content: Great for portraying ideas simply and time effectively.
• Screencasts and walkthroughs: Ideal for processes where students need to see the exact steps.
• Text content: Best for explaining concepts in more detail, giving step-by-step information, and linking to other resources around the web.
• Downloadable content: Excellent for cheat sheets, glossaries templates, and other tools that set learners up for success.
• Workbooks: Valuable for helping learners internalize concepts.

As a best practice, keep videos less than 10 minutes long and aim to create focused and actionable content. During your research phase, look at what formats your competitors are using and consider asking prospective students about what course medium they find most engaging.

Recording video classes

Creating high-quality video will keep your courses engaging. Bear these tips in mind for setup, shooting, and editing:

Setup

• Space: Choose a location with minimal noise and a clean, uncluttered background.
• Lighting: Use natural light, or invest in softbox lights. Position lights at 45-degree angles to your face to avoid shadows.
• Equipment: Use a tripod-mounted smartphone or DSLR camera. Invest in a good external microphone for clear audio.

Shooting

• Framing: Position the camera at eye level. Use the rule of thirds to keep your face in the top third of the frame.
• Delivery: Speak clearly, at a steady pace, and make regular references to your visual aids.
• Take regular breaks: Record in short segments to maintain an energetic tone and make editing easier.

Editing

• Software: Use free editing tools for transitions, cuts, and picture-in-picture.
• Trimming: Cut pauses and mistakes to keep videos concise.
• Enhancements: Add text overlays, transitions, and background music to enhance engagement.
• Captions: Include captions for accessibility and to aid comprehension.

7. Set course pricing and sales goals

The price of your course is limited by its type and format. Typically, a mini-course is free or low-cost, while a master class is more expensive. However, the pricing of your course should also depend on factors including:

• Niche and topic: Consider the industry your course falls in and how price-sensitive your customers might be. Customers buying a course on investing likely have a higher willingness to pay than customers purchasing a knitting tutorial. 
• Marketing: How much do you plan to spend on marketing campaigns? Ensure that the cost of spreading the word about your course is reflected in your pricing. 
• Authority of the course creator: Buyers will pay more for a course created by someone who is considered a proven industry leader. Take your perceived authority into account while pricing your course. 

To get a better idea of how you should price your course, conduct competitor pricing research to see how other digital course creators in your niche are pricing their own digital offerings. Ensure you’re not selling yourself short by pricing too low. 

On the other hand, remain realistic and avoid pricing too high. Don’t be afraid to study what competitors are offering, add more value to your own course offering, and price your course accordingly. 

Alongside dedicated pricing research, set a sales goal that will also inform how you price and market your course. For example, if your sales goal is $50,000, there are several ways to price your course:

Scenario 1:

• Goal: $50,000 in course sales
• Course price: $20
• Buyers needed: 2,500

Scenario 2:

• Goal: $50,000 in course sales
• Course price: $250
• Buyers needed: 200

In the first scenario, you price your course lower and need a higher volume of customers. In the second, you price your course higher and need a lower volume of customers. So, which scenario is better? 

Generally, pricing your course too low is not a good strategy. For one, you’ll need to spend time and money marketing your course to drive traffic to your course page. 

Assuming 1% of the customers who land on your page buy the course, you’ll need to drive 250,000 visitors to your page in the first scenario and 20,000 visitors to your page in second. Plus, it’s often favorable to have customers who are less price sensitive. 

Consider these factors when pricing your course, and avoid pricing that’s too low and forces you to market more aggressively. Put the time and energy into creating a course you’re proud of, and can price at what it’s worth. 

8. Choose the right online course platform

Next, decide where you want to host your course content. There are a range of different course platforms with unique features, but there are three basic types of online course platforms: standalone, all-in-one, and online course marketplaces. 

Standalone course platforms

Standalone platforms give you a lot of control over your content and data. Examples of standalone platforms include Thinkific and Teachable.

All in one course platforms

All-in-one solutions put your marketing tools, website builder, and content delivery platform in one single place.

Generally, all-in-one course platforms are the most expensive, but can be worthwhile because they let you sidestep using multiple tools to accomplish the same thing. 

All-in-one course platforms include:

• Kajabi
• Kartra

For a cost-efficient all-in-one option, many course platforms integrate with Shopify. These apps simplify website and course management:

• Tevello Courses & Communities
• LDT Online Courses
• Courses Plus
• Inflowkit Membership & Courses

Online course marketplaces

Online course marketplaces come with a built-in audience that can help surface your course more easily than you could on your own. However, you generally have less control over your pricing and data. 

Here are a couple of online course marketplaces:

• Skillshare
• Udemy

To choose the best platform for your online course, evaluate each type on the following criteria:

• How intuitive is the platform for both you as a course creator and for your students?
• Does it support the types of content you want to create (video, audio, text, quizzes, etc.)?
• Are there features for student engagement like discussion forums or live sessions?
• Can you customize the look and feel to match your brand?
• What are the costs involved (setup fees, monthly fees, transaction fees)?
• Does it offer built-in marketing tools like email marketing or affiliate programs?
• Can the platform handle your growth as you add more courses and students?
• Is there a mobile app for students to access courses on the go?
• What level of support does the platform offer to you as a course creator?

Remember, the content of your course is more important than where it’s hosted online. If the course platform you select lacks the features you need, you can always switch later on. 

9. Launch and advertise your course

Creating your course is one part of the equation; launching it to the world and marketing it to buyers is the other. 

After putting in the work to make your course as good as possible, make sure it’s visible to potential customers by implementing some of these marketing strategies:

Run a weekly webinar

Webinars are generally low cost and a good way to generate leads for your course. If someone sits through a 30- to 60-minute webinar, there’s a greater likelihood they’ll purchase your course, too.

Prioritize email marketing

Building an email list of prospective buyers is a powerful way to share updates, information, and discounts related to your course. While someone might not buy your course when they first arrive on your landing page, asking for their email and setting up an email marketing funnel may convince them to buy down the line. 

Appear on a podcast

Appearances on podcasts are a great way to increase your authority and naturally demonstrate your expertise through conversation. Pitch yourself to podcasters in your niche, explaining how your expertise fits with their show and could be valuable for their listeners.

Use social media marketing

Identify the best channels to speak to your prospective followers, home in on them, and build a social media strategy that prioritizes adding value consistently.

Run paid ads

Running paid ads, like Google Ads or Facebook ads, to your sales page can be a powerful strategy to target your ideal buyer and turn them into a customer after seeing your ad. With a paid channel like online advertising, make sure you’re making a return on investment—your cost of acquiring a customer should be less than the price of the course.

Adopt SEO tactics

Optimizing your website so it’s surfaced in search engine results is valuable for having customers discover your course. Learn how to rank your site with this SEO checklist. 

Build a content marketing strategy

Creating free educational content about your course niche can build your authority and help your course rank in search results. This form of content marketing generates traffic that may convert into paid customers.

Successfully selling your course through marketing takes some experimentation. Start with a few marketing channels to see what works. Double down on strategies that are effective at bringing in customers and ditch the tactics that are more time, effort, or money than they’re worth.

10. Collect feedback and testimonials 

While many customers may be convinced by your marketing materials, having real students sing the praises of your course is the ultimate stamp of approval.

Collect feedback and testimonials from happy customers who have seen results from your course. Having positive anecdotes about transformations on your landing page and throughout your marketing is a powerful way to convince prospective customers of the value of your course and the results it can help them achieve. 

To collect customer reviews and testimonials, ask for feedback from buyers who have taken your course. Ask customers who provide glowing feedback whether they would be willing to provide a testimonial to feature in your marketing material. 

Be specific in providing direction to customers about what you want in their testimonial. Rather than simply asking for a blurb about their positive experience with the course, ask more targeted questions like:

• How much new revenue have you seen through taking my course?
• How prepared did you feel for taking the real estate licensing course before my course versus afterward?

Specific details on how your course was helpful are more powerful than vague generalizations. If possible, ask for a video testimonial rather than a text one. 

Of course, asking for feedback should not be about only testimonials. Use positive feedback to inform what parts of the course are resonating with students and use critical feedback to revise course material that is under-performing. Taking feedback to heart with each cohort of students that buys your course will allow you to gradually improve it over time and give your students the best learning experience possible. 

The benefits of creating an online course

With no inventory issues or supply chain problems to solve, selling online courses is an online business idea with benefits worth considering:

• Online courses are scalable: It takes a lot of time and effort to create an online course. However, with digital products, you can create a single resource and sell it to hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people around the world. This process can be entirely automated so anyone can buy your course with a few clicks. 
• Online courses are low cost: Depending on the type of course you create, you may just need a few software subscriptions for hosting your course to send emails to prospective buyers and build a community of learners.
• Online courses have high margins: After the costs that go into production and marketing, the remaining revenue from a course can be profit. While many traditional entrepreneurs selling physical products have slim margins, digital products like courses can have margins as high as 85%—for instance, selling a course for $100 and keeping $85. 
• Online courses generate passive income: While passive income is never truly passive—there’s upfront time, money, and effort—successful online courses are close. Once you’ve created an online learning course, you can generate income from it continuously. This is especially the case if your course is download-only and isn’t a cohort-based course with a live or community component. 

Common online course creation mistakes

Avoiding common pitfalls can enhance the quality and success of your online course. Here are some mistakes to watch out for:

• Lack of clear objectives: Make sure you know what you want your students to learn. Clear goals will help keep your course focused and organized.
• Overloading content: Try not to include too much information at once. Focus on the most important points and break them into smaller, manageable lessons.
• Ignoring engagement features: Keep your students interested by adding interactive elements like quizzes and discussions. These can make learning more enjoyable and effective.
• Poor audio and video quality: Good sound and clear visuals are important. Invest in basic equipment to ensure your videos are easy to watch and listen to.
• Neglecting feedback: Regularly ask your students for feedback. This will help you understand what’s working and what might need improvement.
• Inadequate marketing: Even great courses need to be promoted. Develop a marketing plan to reach people who would benefit from your course.
• Underestimating time commitments: Creating a course takes time. Plan your schedule realistically so you can produce quality content without feeling rushed.

Start selling online courses today

Reflect on the unique insights, valuable knowledge, and marketable skills that you can share with the world through your first online course. 

• If you’ve taught yourself how to create inspiring illustrations on an iPad, there’s a chance you can teach others to do it too. 
• If you’ve helped companies grow an engaged social media following across brands, there are likely buyers interested in learning how you did it. 
• If you’re a product management leader and mentor who has helped others enter the field, you should consider doing the same on a wider scale through a course. 

Creating an engaging and successful online course means packaging your passion into a digital product. Starting on your journey as an online course creator will set you up to earn money through your enthusiasm and expertise, while helping others learn what you know in the process.