Taking Advantage of the Online Learning Boom

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Danny Iny is one of my long-time friends and I consider him a mentor. He helped me put together my first course and has helped me many times since. 

Today he’s releasing his latest book, called, Teach Your Gift. I’ve taken a look at it and I consider it THE manual for any business looking to add a course offering to their business.

I interviewed Danny about his book and was especially interested in his thoughts on who should create a course. 

(Hint: YOU should.)

Thinking about creating an online course? Download your copy of Danny Iny’s new book, “Teach Your Gift”, for free until May 11, 2020

My interview with Danny Iny:

Josh: First things first, can you tell us a little bit about your “Teach Your Gift” book? Would love to know why you wrote it and what readers should expect?

Danny: I owe my business to online courses. My first successful online course gave me a platform and an income stream that I was able to leverage more employees, more product development, more marketing, and more courses -- and I’ve built a multi-million dollar business using the engine that that first little course set in motion.

I’ve been teaching students how to build and launch courses since 2014 -- and I’ve seen first-hand that my experience isn’t unique. My students often find that their courses help generate the resources and reach they need to take their business to the next level.

Six or seven years ago, there were so few online courses out there that people could put one up, automate the whole thing, and pretty easily attract students and revenue. But now the industry has matured, and the long-term successes are the people who have built real businesses, with good foundations. 

There’s still a tremendous opportunity out there. Online courses are just coming into the mainstream -- and that process has been hugely accelerated by the fact that a lot of people have suddenly been pushed into online learning by the situation with coronavirus.

But the online course industry (and online marketing) has changed so radically in the last few years that it’s really important to be thinking strategically about how you’ll leverage a course.  

Online courses can be an incredible way to package your expertise, bring in more revenue, serve more people, and make a bigger impact. But it’s no longer enough to just build and market a course -- it has to be part of an overall business strategy that makes sense.

I’ve met so many people over the last year who are interested in developing their own course. But they might not know how to do it or, worse, they’re operating by an old playbook, which means that even if they manage to launch, they may not see the results they want.

I wrote this book for them. Because online courses still have tremendous business potential -- but only if you understand the landscape we’re operating in.

Josh: How much of an expert does someone need to be to build their own course? In other words, who’s qualified to create one?

Danny: If you can get results for your students, then you’re expert enough to create your own course.

In the early years of online course building, you often heard that you didn’t need to be an expert to have a successful course. The analogy was that if you were at a fourth-grade level, you were well-qualified to teach someone at the second-grade level.

But now the marketplace has evolved to the point where you do need some degree of expertise and a track record in your field. And I would say that that evolution is all for the better.

That’s not to say that you need to be the world’s foremost expert in a subject in order to be qualified to teach it. I wouldn’t recommend that you teach something that’s new to you or that you haven’t invested a significant amount of time in practicing -- but results matter. If you can get results for your students, then you’re qualified to teach them.

Josh: For those of us who might not know, tell us the difference between creating an online course and creating an online course BUSINESS.

Danny: A course is a product. And your product is not your business.

These lines got blurred a lot in the early days of internet marketing because for a while it was like the Wild West. You could make a lot of money with a single product, just by virtue of being in the right place at the right time.

That’s no longer the case. 

Nowadays, for a course to be profitable, you need reliable, repeatable, affordable mechanisms for attracting leads and making sales. And the economics of your course need to be such that you can pay for leads, pay for sales, and pay for fulfillment and still have reasonable profit left over.

A course business could be one whose primary business is selling premium courses that deliver a substantial, desirable transformation for its students.  

But online courses can provide other forms of leverage for a business, and they can support or augment the main business in really powerful ways.  

You might offer a course that supports the marketing journey by attracting leads, demonstrating expertise, and delivering customer education that teaches the kinds of things that make customers ready to buy. Or, after the sale, your course might support the customer experience by providing the training or support they’ll need to get the most out of your main product.

Or, if you’re a coach, consultant, author, speaker, or expert, you might supplement your work with a course that supports the behavior change your clients desire. So for example, a speaker might sell a course add-on to a talk they deliver to an organization. Or a coach who works with senior leaders might produce a course that leaders can use with the people below them in the organization.

It’s important to think broadly and strategically about how you might use a course in your business. Because there are lots of options. Courses can be the main drivers of your business income if that’s your goal. But they can also serve a dozen other purposes in your business, all of which add to your reputation, reach, and revenue.

Josh: How would you recommend that someone get started with online course building? What steps can they take to ensure success?

Danny: At the outset, people are often worried about the wrong things. They’re focused too much on what they want to teach or could teach, and not enough on what people want to learn.  

The most important thing you can do is figure out the transformation that your audience really, really wants -- and then how you can give it to them. 

At Mirasee, we use and teach a piloting process that lets us test our assumptions before we invest time and money into building a new course. It’s entirely possible to sell seats in your course before you start building it -- and if you’re able to do that, that’s a great indicator that you’ve landed on an offer that your audience truly wants.

I cover that whole process -- plus a lot of the nuances that can make it successful or not -- in Teach Your Gift.

Thanks, Danny! Definitely grab your copy of Teach Your Gift here (free till May 11th). 

Your Turn 

Want to learn more?

Danny’s book is a solid resource and even if you haven’t considered adding a course to your business, you should take a look. 

1. You’ll learn how to incorporate it into your business model, 
2. How to use it to help you fill your pipeline and get more leads and clients, 
3. How to sell your course before it’s even complete,

And much more.

I took a chance on this years ago and it’s paid off BIG time and totally changed my business. I highly recommend you check out Teach Your Gift here.

Want to contribute? 

If you were going to create an online course, what would you create and who would be the ideal member? 

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