4 common mistakes made by aspiring course creators and how you can easily avoid them

Sadly, when it comes to transforming your expertise into a wildly profitable course too many coaches, consultants, and aspiring course creators make simple mistakes that cost them dearly. If you’re not careful, you could follow in their footsteps and end up falling well short of your goal.

But don’t worry – we’re here to help.

We’ve put together a list of the 4 most common mistakes made by coaches, consultants, and aspiring course creators – as well as easy-to-follow tips on how to avoid them.

Mistake #1 - Build it and they will come

Far and away the most common mistake coaches, consultants and aspiring course creators make is ”build it and they will come”.We have seen it all too often - we’ve honestly lost count of how many people we’ve come across who have made this error.

Just because you’ve built a course, it doesn’t mean that people are going to find it and enroll in it. Building it first, without generating any desire could cost you thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours in development, if after building you find that it is not what the target market wants.

To avoid this you need to develop your marketing campaign, develop assets and make sure that you have generated desire in your course. This could be by getting people to signal their intention to purchase the program, preselling your course, or running a pilot. A pilot can be a great way to market and road test your course. This doesn’t have to be the full course, rather a minimal viable product to give people a taste of things to come.

Mistake #2 - Audience Ignorance

Audience ignorance is another common mistake and is right up there with build it and they will come in terms of the amount of time and money it costs coaches, consultants, and aspiring course creators. It’s such an easy mistake to avoid, but it happens WAY more often than it should.

Without a clear idea of who is going to be accessing the content, how can you deliver an effective learning experience? You will not be able to develop a course that addresses the audience’s key pain points, that will tap into their deep why and their motivation to learn. As a result, your learning solution will miss the mark and you will struggle to sell it.

It is critical that you have a clear understanding of the user persona – who they are, their needs, goals, motivations, and frustrations - and design content that is going to be of benefit to those users. Something that solves their problems.

An understanding of how they learn and access information is going to give you a much better picture of who these people are. And it’s going to help you to design a better more user-centered learning experience.

Mistake #3 - Kitchen Sink Syndrome

This mistake might not be as common as the first two we’ve outlined – but that doesn’t make it any less harmful. In fact, it could be the most costly out of the three – an error that could see you throw away tens of thousands of dollars and leave you further away from achieving your goal than when you first started.

We commonly find experts who are sitting on a mountain of intellectual property but struggle to unpack it. The mistake is thinking that they must provide the learners with a heap of content. The result is this huge course full of information and the learners become overwhelmed. The prospect of climbing a mountain would be daunting for anyone except a seasoned climber. Putting a mountain of information in front of any learner will be equally daunting and the easy route that will be taken is most likely to avoid the content or skim very quickly, resulting in poor knowledge transfer.

When too much information is provided learners start suffering from cognitive overload. They end up not remembering the key points that we need them to remember. We also find that they start to disengage. Brain-based studies have shown that physiologically, your neurons are keen and alert for no more than 20 consecutive minutes. At the end of those 20 minutes, your neurons have gone from full-fledged alert to total collapse. When less content is delivered, the issue of cognitive overload is eliminated.

Mistake #4 - Technology First

While not as costly as Kitchen Sink Syndrome, this one can still have serious consequences. One of the big mistakes we see when people are putting their content online is that they start with the technology. They select a learning platform and then create the learning experiences and learning assets to fit with the platform. Having this learning first approach limits the learning experience that you could create. You are restricted to the tools and functionality afforded to you by the learning platform. If the learning platform is limited in the asset types it can host, then you are limited in the choices of assets you can design and develop to engage your learners. For example, if the platform does not allow for the uploading of SCORM or xAPI content (created in an external authoring tool) then the interactivity and functionality will be limited. If the platform does not provide badges, points, or other gamification elements, again your learning experience will be limited.