Content Queens: How to Create a Successful Online Course

Earlier this month, at BlogHer Business in Los Angeles, we had the opportunity to hear SHE Media Partners, Christelyn Karazin (@christelyn) of Beyond Black & White and Sherita Rankins (@sheritajanielle) of the lifestyle blog, Busy Wife Busy Life talk to the audience about what it takes to start an online course, how to monetize it and how to grow your customer list.

You can watch the full Lightening Session at the bottom of the page, but before you do, we’ve made a list of our favorite pieces of advice from this powerhouse duo.

9 tips on starting an online course

1. It only takes one idea to create a compelling course that can make you a lot of money. Money that looks like $500/mo, $15k/mo, $30k/mo and up. – Christelyn, her online course The Pink Pill, has been sold over 1,000 in the last year.

2. No matter what skill it is, if you have people asking your expertise on something, there’s a good chance that’s what your course should be about. Go where you knowledge base is. – Sherita

3. You can host a course for free essentially, nothing out of pocket. Once you start making money, there is a transaction fee, but you can go home tonight and start building your course. – Sherita

4. What’s so great about these platforms like Teachable, you can refresh the course, edit the course, add more content to it and your previous customers will immediately get these updates at no additional cost. – Christelyn

5. If you already have a following then you have potential customers for your course. People who already have a blog audience, those are your warm leads. If you’re just starting from scratch, what you’re going to want to do is start building your social network and talking about the course simultaneously. – Christelyn

6. Create a FB page about the course, and invite people who you think would be good customers, good students into the group. Then you can discuss things with them and refine your ideas as necessary. – Sherita

7. Your e-mail list is gold. You must build your email list because those people who opt-in are telling you that they’re interested enough to buy. Make sure that you’re continuing the relationship with the people on your e-mail list. Invite them to your private Facebook group about your course. – Christelyn

8. If your course isn’t directly tied to your blog content, offer a newsletter opt-in to receive information for that particular content segment. And if, let’s say, you do have a small number of blog posts covering your course topic, put that same opt-in on those pages. – Sherita

9. One of the things I learned about creating a course, from Christelyn and from The Gold Digger podcast, you always want to provide someone with valuable information before you sell to them. It’s like give, give, give, sell. – Sherita

Watch the Sessions in full here: