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Selling eLearning Courses: The 5 Biggest Mistakes Course Creators Make

In our experience, when it comes to creating, marketing, and selling eLearning courses, there are a few common mistakes that aspiring course creators make that often spell the difference between sales or no sales.

Below we’ve created a list of these to help you start your course creation journey on the right foot.

1. Not Defining The Target Audience:

This is likely the most significant mistake course creators can make when building a course. They dive in and start building without taking the time to define their target audience. Without a clear understanding of who your course is for, it will be challenging to create content that resonates and sells.

As part of our initial consultation, one of the first questions we ask is, “who is your audience?” you’d be surprised how often the answer is, “I don’t know.” Knowing your target customer is key for starting a successful business, and in the blog world, we often talk about defining a niche that you can fully immerse yourself into and do it well. This also holds true in eLearning course creation, which is the basis for good Instructional Design.

Once you know who you intend to communicate with, we can optimize your course and subsequently market it appropriately.

2. Not Creating Compelling Content

At Coach2Learn, we believe that everyone has a life of education, knowledge, and experience that they can pass on to others. This belief also defined our tagline, “Everyone has a course to teach.” But having the knowledge doesn’t always mean you can dive in and create an optimal learning experience.

Your content needs to be compelling, learners want to be engaged throughout your course, or they’ll simply drop off. To get people to buy your course, you need to offer something valuable and worth the investment. This means going above and beyond to ensure that your content is well-researched, engaging, and informative.

Don’t just put your ideas into a digital document with a couple pictures sprinkled in; things like course structure, including the initial landing page, the lessons, topics, interactions, quizzes, animations, and course certificates all create a delightful experience. The more engaging your course is, the greater the chance of learner success.

3. Not Promoting Your Course

If you don’t promote your course, no one will know it exists! So don’t assume that people will somehow find your course on their own. You need to be proactive in your marketing efforts, using a variety of channels to reach your target audience, and you should already have an established brand and loyal followers.

If you’re just starting out, this might not be the right time to launch your course. Instead, we suggest you focus most of your efforts on strengthening your brand. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start building your course; actually, we encourage it, so it’s available when your audience is ready. This may be an opportunity to outsource some of the work to an Instructional Designer.

A valuable tactic here would be to build your course in a “coming soon” way to entice your growing audience. You can strategically sprinkle in some enticers within your social media postings. Then, when you feel you’re ready, you can do a coming soon countdown to the launch date.

4. Not Pricing Your Course Correctly

Pricing your course too high will discourage potential students from signing up, but pricing it too low can make it seem like your course isn’t worth the investment. You need to strike a balance.

The best way to target the pricing sweet spot is to research your competition and see what they charge for similar courses.

Pricing is always tricky, and there are several ways to go about it: offering a one-time payment, a recurring monthly cost for a defined period, or a membership that can be packaged with other sweeteners like private access to your social community. The key here is to align the price with the value offered.

5. Not Getting Proper Feedback

Getting feedback from your target audience is essential to ensure that your course meets their needs and expectations. Don’t assume that you know what they want – it’s always best to ask them directly.

You can run user tests with friends to see what they think, but caution here; they’ll more often than not praise your course, even though they may not think so because they’re your friend.

One of the best ways to get feedback is to launch a beta version of your course and offer it at a discounted rate or even free to a small group in exchange for student feedback. This will help you fine-tune your course content and delivery so that when you launch the full version, it’s precisely what your students are looking for.

There are several other options and a service that we at Coach2Learn can assist with should you want a final expert opinion.

Conclusion:

As you can see, creating and launching your first course can be an inspiring thing, but there’s nothing more discouraging than putting in a lot of work, only to hear crickets once you launch.

We’ve seen this all too often, which is why we started to blog in the first place. Our hope is to help you avoid some of the fundamental common mistakes so you can be in a position of success once you decide to launch your course.

As always, we’re here to lend a helping hand.

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