The online course business is booming, hitting over $250 billion last year. And if you're like a lot of people, you probably dream about sharing some of that market.

It is a great time to create an online course. But you should know that the world of online courses is changing. There is more competition, which you probably figured out already. There are a lot of creators out there. And there are a lot of stories about people who created a course and earned $45,000 in their opening weekend. All this might leave you intimidated, cynical, or heck, even inspired! And we hope that it's the latter!

Here, we want to talk a bit about how to create and sell online courses with Mighty Networks. If you want more in-depth guides to creating online courses, do check out these related posts, The Ultimate Guide to Creating an Online Course and How to Sell Courses Online

If you want more support in building your online course community, come join OUR Mighty Community for free and meet other new and established community owners! We’d love to meet you. Join for free!

In this article…

1. Community Design™

We recommend starting with this process, even if you are creating a course. In part, this is because the thing that makes Mighty Networks so successful is their communities – more on this in a minute.

Our trademarked process of Community Design™ walks you through developing a clear understanding of who your ideal member is, what their problems are, and how you will serve them. It's the place to start in creating an online course.

2. Decide on delivery

Think about how you want to deliver your online course. With Mighty Networks you have the choice to do the course as pre-recorded, to drip out the content, or even to teach it live!

In fact, we've had some great success stories of people who have chosen to deliver the course live!

There's not really a wrong answer. You can choose what feels right for you. And even if you do a live course, the recording will live forever as an asynchronous course.

3. Choose your pricing structure

One of the hardest parts about creating an online course is figuring out how much to sell it for. It's easy to think that keeping the price tag low will get you more sign ups. But from our experience, this is not always the case. And people often value what they pay for.

The nice thing about teaching a course through your Mighty Network is that you can sell it in different ways. You might choose to keep membership in your community cheap or even free, and upsell into the course itself. This might let you deliver value to people before asking them to pay for the course. Once they are already in your community, it's an easier jump to upsell.

Or, you might choose to sell the course itself as a one time fee, and give members access to the community for a set amount of time.

Or, you might choose to charge one membership fee and include a course as part of your community.

However you want to handle this part of your business, Mighty Networks lets you build just about any type of bundle you can imagine. And if you are not in the US, you can charge in your home currency.

4. Find your members

When you have done the background work, and you have your community set up, the next step is to find your members. Whether you are trying to get members into a free community, or whether you are pre-selling a course, membership acquisition is an essential part of any course-based business.

You can start with the people you interviewed as the ideal members. It might not come as a shock that the people who have shared their frustrations with you might be willing to pay for your solution.

You can reach out to them with a message or email like this:

Hey James,
Thanks again for your feedback on the challenges of starting a freelance writing business. As a result of my interviews, I decided to start a freelance writing community. It's totally free to join, and will be a place to support freelance writers and share the knowledge that I've gained from building my own six-figure writing business. I'm also planning to teach a live course in the fall on creating your own six-figure writing business.

I'd love to see you there, but absolutely no pressure if this isn't for you right now! Thanks again for your valuable insights, and have a great week.

Otherwise, you'll need to figure out a membership acquisition channel for your course business that works for you. It could include things like:

• Email


• Social media


• Free trials


• Ads


• Webinars


• Guest speaking

Don't forget, you can easily invite people to join your Mighty Network by either sharing a landing page or an invite link.

5. Deliver value

Once you have the members of your course in place, you can start to deliver value. Obviously, one of your main channels for delivering value will be through the course itself. Choose your delivery method – which we talked about above. And with a Mighty Network, you can always add more material to expand your course as you go. Don't forget that every course module has a discussion section at the bottom, meaning that you can keep your members engaged in a conversation about the course too.

You are not limited to the course function itself when it comes to delivering value. You can easily surprise and delight your members with things like live streaming, live events, regular posts or articles, polls, and more.

While your course material is important, the connections that your members make with other members will also be a vital part of their transformation, as they realize they're not alone and find people to walk through this journey with them.

6. Adapt and grow

Finally, don't just stop with creating your course. Make sure you keep learning and adapting as you figure out what's working. You can add more content as you dive deeper into questions that your course members will ask. You can check your analytics to find out where people are spending the most time, and use these insights to adapt your content.

Conclusion

We hope this quick guide has given you some idea for how to create and sell online courses with Mighty Networks.

But when it comes to creating and selling an online course, above all, have fun! Building a course and community doesn't have to be stressful. In fact, when you choose the right platform, it will do a lot of the work for you. You just need to bring your best stuff to teach and we’ll help you bring your ideas to life!