5 Essential Ingredients For A Successful Online Course

Tara Bryan: 00:00:05

Hey everybody, it's Tara, Bryan and you are listening to the course building secrets podcast. Whether you're a coach or a CEO, the success of your team and clients is based on your ability to deliver a consistent experience and guide them on the fastest path to results. This podcast will give you practical real life tips that you can use today to build your online experiences that get results and create raving fans. Why? So you can monetize your expertise and serve more people without adding more time or team to your business. If you're looking to uncover your million dollar framework, package it and use it to scale you're in the right place. Let's dive in.

Tara Bryan: 00:00:51

Hello course loungers. Welcome to today's course building secrets episode. In the next couple of episodes, what I'm going to cover are the five essential ingredients, you need to create your online course. Now listen, these are our tips will actually help you create any program. But I'm going to center them around online courses. Okay, so there are five essential ingredients, I'm gonna tee them up today, and then I'm going to tackle them one by one in the next podcast episodes. Okay, so there are five essential ingredients that every online course or program needs to have in order for it to be successful. But what does success actually mean? So from a business perspective, right, you are in a business and from a business perspective, success means being able to promise or deliver on what you promised your customer, right. So you are out there spending time finding customers and getting them into your online course in so success is are you able to fulfill on what you've promised that you are going to fulfill on? Right, and, and so as you start, you know, selling your course, as you start working on it and fulfilling with your customers. The goal is really to be able to not only sell the course, but also get people results, and then have them come back. For more right and retain those customers. We're going to talk a lot about how to kind of think about this as a business system as we move forward. But today, I just want to get into the actual ingredients that you need when you are creating your online course. And this is for people who are creating their online course for the first time maybe creating a new online course. And looking at the course that you have. Because here's the reality is most online course creators, most people who are creating courses and selling them get to a certain point where they're selling, but some things are missing, things aren't really happening exactly how they wanted them to. Maybe customers aren't able to get results, maybe they're leaving, maybe there's some things happening, that are causing some, you know, kind of hiccups in the process. So I want to help you kind of tighten that up and tackle that today. Okay, so without further ado, the five essential ingredients that you need in your online course would be the first thing is you need a specific goal or transformation for your learner's. And again, we're gonna get into each of the detail with all of these but the very first thing that you need to have as a specific goal and transformation for your customer. The second one is you need to build in feedback. And in a sense of, you know, telling somebody how they're doing and recognizing them for the actions that they're taking. Third, you need to help them practice. You need to produce, produce, and create opportunities for them to actively participate and practice what you're teaching. Number four, you need to plan out specific milestones and targets along the path. And this is super important because so often we just teach our topics, right? And we don't actually think about the milestones that they're going to hit as they you know, keep learning what you're teaching them in order to get results. And then the fifth one is you need to know where your students are going to struggle. You need to know the challenges and obstacles that they're going to have along their path. If you think about it, if the very first thing that you're doing is identifying a problem that you're trying to solve, then, you know, why haven't they been able to solve this problem on their own? What are some of the things that are tripping them up as they're going on this journey? So that is number five, which is obstacles and challenges. Okay, so I've given them all to you now, you know, all five of the essential ingredients, but how do you incorporate them into your online course. And that is what we're going to tackle. So I'm going to talk to you today about the very first one, which is you have to have a specific goal that leads to a transformation. So this is something that a lot of times we think about. And then in practical application, it gets lost. So what we want to do is help our people go from kind of learning information, learning the knowledge or concepts to how do they apply those concepts in order to actually have something happen, because your job is, of course creators, just to give them information, they can get that and the Google right, your job is to actually help them get results. So in order to do that, you have to start with not only a problem that they want to solve, but an actual goal that will get them to be able to, to get to that, that resolution of the problem. Alright, so let me just illustrate what I mean by this. Because this is I think, where people, you know, actually should first start, and we're actually where people kind of start to go astray, is in this concept of starting with a problem not starting with the information. So when you think about what you want to teach, be it you know, something about, you know, how to lose 10 pounds through strength training, or how to make your first million dollars, or how to buy your first real estate property or whatever, right? It could be any topic, it doesn't really matter. And you think about okay, so my goal, personally, is to teach this concept because I'm an expert, then you say, Okay, so when I think about my, the learner, or the person that I want to help, what problem are they trying to solve. And if you're trying to solve, so you're trying to buy your first property, you're the problem you're trying to solve is actually actually purchase that property, right? There are all sorts of obstacles and challenges that may be in your path. But you're trying to get to the goal of that first property. Or if you're trying to lose 10 pounds through strength training, then that's your goal, right is the end of the day, you see movement of 10 pounds on the scale, trying to make your first million dollars. That is your your goal, right? Your goal is to actually get to that million dollars. So how do you do that? The problem is, you don't know how to do that, right? So you look at it and say, Okay, so here's what I'm trying to teach. Here's the problem that we're trying to solve. And then here's what the transformation looks like. So you sort of map that out. So typically, what happens is, when we start thinking about our topic, we, we like, want to give all the things about the topic, we want to give all the information we want to give everything that we know in order to help somebody because there's a sense to serve. The challenge, however, is that the your person isn't necessarily ready for all the things that you have, because you're an expert, you're like farther down the road than they are. And so what's essential is just giving them what they need to get to that goal, be at the first goal or the ultimate goal, right? So what I recommend people do is grab some post it notes or you know, some different pages or you can do it on your computer, however you want to do it. And instead of answering the question, what are other things that I know that I can teach about this topic? Turns into what is the path that I can give someone that they can go from where they are today to that transformation, that problem resolution? So if the goal is to lose 10 pounds through strength training, instead of saying, Okay, well, you need to learn about your, you know, lifting weights in your arms and lifting weights in your legs and lifting weights, and your back and doing situps in aisle and eating well, and exercise and all the things it's really more about. Okay, so if I needed to help somebody get from where they are today, to losing 10 pounds, what's the path I'm going to take them on in order for them to get there and then brainstorming the steps along that path becomes so much easier to digest for you and for your learner because you're taking them on a specific journey to get get from where they are to where they want to go, which is to get to that transmission, you're specifically planning for that, versus giving them a ton of topics. And if this is something that I'm talking about, you're like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. But I guess I never thought about it that way, is because really, when you think about when you went to school,

Tara Bryan: 00:10:23

and either high school or college or whatever, and you were taking a class, most often, you would get a syllabus, or you get a list of topics. And the way that they would assess whether or not you had an understanding of the topics was to give you a test, or a quiz or a final or a midterm or whatever, right. And so that's how they would assess where you were. The problem is that with that is that they didn't ever give you a specific sort of goal of a problem that you're trying to solve, right. So you're taking a psychology course, the way that it was laid out would be, you know, various topics in psychology that they wanted you to learn. And at the end of each of those topics, they would give you an exam or a quiz or something where they would test your knowledge.

Tara Bryan: 00:11:13

And when you think about it, I mean, it was it was interesting, and you learned different case studies, and you learn various various things, but there wasn't actually a goal at the end of the learning. So when you are put are put into a situation where now you are actually giving somebody a transformation, people are paying you because you're leading them down the fastest path to mastery. That's really what what an online course is, a course that you're selling, as your business is that you actually can give them a result. And then again, that's how you get raving fans, that's how they stay with you. That's how you know that that you are really serving your customers is because you're giving them a result. But we have to resolve this challenge that we have, which is, you know, when we think about education, when we think about teaching people things, we go back automatically to the school model, which is very topic and knowledge based, when in fact, in order to solve a problem or have a transformation, you have to actually be immersed in the situation, you have to experience various things, I can't get to a million dollar run rate. By learning about the information about it right, I have to actually do it in order to get to it, I can learn how to do it. But in action to actually get there, I have to do it have to take the steps, I have to take action, which we'll talk about in another essential ingredient. But when you're thinking about putting together and finding that goal and transformation for your online course, this is where you start is what is that goal. And for those of you who feel like well, my courses, more information on my courses more knowledge based my course is more, you know, something that doesn't have an ultimate goal. And I challenge you to really look for the goal or transformation in what you're creating. And if it doesn't have one, it's probably not going to be something that that you can sell. And it's probably not something that you're going to create, you know, a large business or following around because people aren't going to stay, they're not going to keep, you know, kind of working through your ascension path. And stay in your world if they're not able to get results if they're not seeing some sort of transformation. So I challenge you to really think about this, in this phase. And if you are, if your course is sort of like a leaky bucket where people are coming, they're really excited. And then they leave and you're not able to keep them as customers, or they're not referring other people to you, you may have this challenge that you need to solve immediately, which is how are you creating that goal that leads directly to that transformation. And if that's, you know, this is a symptom. If this isn't dialed in, you have some sort of maybe challenge with being clear about how you're leading them to that path. Incidentally, and we'll talk about this again, as well as you may have a transformation and a problem that you're solving that's very specific, but you may have too much, you may have too many steps you have you may have too much content, too much information that is is causing that path to get muddled and be unclear. And as you keep growing as you keep adding content. This sometimes tends to be the case is maybe you had a really strong path at the beginning and then As you continue to add things, it just got too confusing for your students to actually get results. So if you already have a course and you're seeing some trouble, this may be one area to look at, and just dial back in, how do you give them the fastest path? That just the essential steps to get to that goal and transformation, so they have a clear, easy path to get there. Alright, there you go. That is the first essential ingredient is to start with a goal around a particular problem that leads them directly to a transformation. Alright, in the next episode, we are going to cover the second essential ingredient to online courses.