5 Ways Speakers Can Jumpstart Your Revenue Using Online Courses

“Leaders have to be intensely aware and be bold and flexible enough to adjust course in the face of impending changes.” - Dinesh Paliwal

As revenue sources and ebb and flow over time for public speakers, it is always a good idea to look to additional income streams as a business. I partnered with Thinkific, one of the leading software platforms enabling entrepreneurs to create and sell their own online courses, to show how you can grow additional income streams in the age of COVID-19 using courses.

Here are five simple ways to leverage online courses to deliver the most value.

1) Know Your Value

Be very clear about the value and transformation that you’ll offer your students for your courses. Will they learn a skill set and/or a new way of thinking? Clarify before creating. Remember that when creating your course, people don’t buy information – they buy the transformation that you offer. You want to provide them with a shortcut to fast-track the journey to their desired outcome.

2) Map It Out

Organize and structure your content based on the learning outcomes for students. What flow makes the most sense for learning? I like to lay out my course chapters as sticky notes and then move them around until I find the right flow of ideas. Try it out!

Another idea: When writing out your course outline, take a piece of paper and write at the top who your student is when they start – point A. Then at the bottom, write out the end state for your student after taking your course – point B. From the end point, work backwards to outline milestones they’d need to achieve, plotting all the way back to point A. Your outline should be able to fit on one sheet of paper!

3) Pre-sell Your Course

Once your course is well underway or complete, begin to do a pre-sell (like amazing author and course creator, Dorie Clark). This can be accomplished traditionally through email lists or via newer methods like messaging apps, your community forums or social platforms. For example, before Dorie had created any of her course content, she wrote out an outline for her course, and published it on a Thinkific course sales page. She asked her audience if they were interested in pre-purchasing the course, and pre-sold her course for over $20,000! This strategy is used by many top course creators to validate their topic has market demand, before creating a single lesson. 

4) Choose Your Course Platform

If you already have an audience, Thinkific is for you! They offer white label courses that you simply pay a simple monthly or yearly fee for - no income split and therefore a much better profit margin. Thinkific makes it really easy to create courses under your own brand. You can customize it with themes to look and feel the way you want with no advanced coding knowledge required! The experience for your students is designed to be engaging, user-friendly and offers lots of options to build your community online. 

5) Create Your Course!

Creation is my favorite part of building a course. Now that you’ve organized your course, your goals and your pre-sale, you can focus on refining your course around any immediate feedback and requests. A course is a visual book that your audience can “read” or watch over and over again, so make it as evergreen as possible. You’re now on your way to creating revenue with online courses!

Have more questions? Check out this amazing super in-depth webinar I co-hosted with Thinkific on how to create your successful course today (and if you watch to the end, there’s an amazing deal): https://thnk.cc/2YYoJuA