What are the assets you need for Successful Online Course?
You might think that what you need for a successful online course is good content.
And even though that is important, just like anything else the people buy or consume, it’s almost never just about the quality.
As a matter of fact, great quality with bad marketing and bad packaging almost never wins.
So, I’m not saying crap quality can be fixed by marketing and packaging, although I’m sure you’ll agree there’s lot of that out there, but just that quality isn’t enough.
What do I mean by Assets?
First, let’s make sure we are on same page when I talk about assets.
When I say assets you need, I’m talking about what you’ll need to create, buy or setup in the process of publishing and creating a course.
For example, the course videos are one asset as are ads to promote the course.
Another example that most will agree with is course curriculum or a workbook.
What you might not think of as a course asset though is email sequences or an opt in page.
What are the assets you need for Successful Course?
Let’s list out the assets I consider important to a successful online course.
Obviously, others may have differing views and I totally realize my thoughts on this are not the only views.
Here are the assets:
- Course title
- Course summary
- Course description
- Course outline/curriculum
- Course content
- Course thumbnail
- Course landing page
- Course follow up emails
- Course student success emails
- Course no start emails
Obviously, they are all related to the course in question, but let’s get into each a little more.
What about sales?
You might have noticed I didn’t talk about sales or what success might mean but I imagine pretty much everyone considers success for a course as to number of students and that is usually sales.
So, how do you get sales? Or even free students for that matter!
Well, I imagine you’ve heard about attraction marketing and personal branding but what does that have to do with a successful course you might think.
Well, one of the biggest hurdles to successful courses is that people just don’t buy from those they don’t trust. They don’t even join a free course either!
Your course must be good but it also must be sold by someone people know, like and trust.
With that in mind, you’ll have a better understanding of the rest.
Assets 1 to 3: Course title, summary and description
Since part of the success in a course is to attract an audience who knows, likes and trusts you, it might not be a surprise that the title, summary and description must be tailored to your ideal avatar.
In marketing, an avatar is defined as a specific person that you imagine being the one you are presenting to.
This means, if your avatar is a man, you’ll use different words in your course title, summary and description than if you avatar was a woman.
Even if you limit who is interested in your course by the use of an avatar, remember that focusing will dramatically increase your sales.
Lastly, on the title, you’ll want to ensure it’s SEO friendly as well since most platforms will you the title in the url of your landing page.
Asset 4: Course outline or curriculum
As far as the course curriculum, I try to keep that pretty simple with a few videos (5-10) for the lessons and always add an introduction and a conclusion to the course lessons.
Of course, that’s totally up to you in terms of how complex you need it to be and depends on your student (avatar) that you are trying to attract.
Depending on the platform you use, you might be able to have a simple course with just videos or a more complicated course with chapters and content in each chapter.
On Click eCourse (the platform I created and use at https://clickecourse.com), you can do either type of curriculum, not to mention drop courses and quizzes.
Asset 5: Course content
Once again, the content will vary depending on the type of course you are creating.
You should be able to choose between videos, audios, text files, eBooks and presentations.
Some platforms also allow you to enable video downloads or audio downloads from videos (such as Click eCourse)
Keep in mind that the more variations in content you want to include in your course, the more complexity it might have and some students will not like that, so keep your avatar in mind.
Asset 6: Course thumbnail
Don’t forget the thumbnail for the course.
Sure, it’s just the image shown on the course preview, or is it?
Personally, I like to work smart and that means creating assets once and re-use them where it makes sense.
For example, you’ll need images for Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and other social platforms and not to mention browser icon, social sharing image or blog page featured image.
You could create an image for each of these destinations, but I like to create one image that can be used for all although that’s up to you, but you at least need one.
Asset 7: Course landing page
If there’s one thing that we can probably 100% agree on is this asset.
No matter what your course is, there will always be a page that people access to learn about your course, and that’s the landing page.
You could create a funnel with an opt-in and a freebie that is related to your course.
Or maybe your course is free and they just need to give you their email?
What if you didn’t have to do that?
On Click eCourse, you get a free landing page editor that lets you create it no matter what your desires are.
Conclusion
There’s also email sequences to send to your prospects and your students.
Most course hosting platforms don’t let you do that – they own the student contact information.
On Click eCourse, you can setup email sequences to prospects interested in your course (because they accessed the page), those who opted in to your freebie, those who joined your course but haven’t started it and those who have completed your course.
You can even send the student emails to your aWeber email list and manage it there.
Check out the video to learn more about all this.
Don’t forget to share with your friends using the social icons.
