3 Reasons Why Your Online Course Isn't Successful and How to Fix It

I get the opportunity to talk to a lot of people about their courses. From my podcast guests, to coaching clients, to online educators, many of them tell the same story of success and failures. And many times the failures could have been minimized or avoided altogether. Here are 3 reasons why your online course isn’t successful and how to fix it.

I am working on creating some free mini-courses but want YOUR input. I have several good ideas but want to know if you need this content too. I’ll be taking the top vote and creating that course first and giving it away to you. Go HERE to fill out the short (2 minute) survey. As a thank you, I’m giving away my free guide called, “The DIY Video Studio Guide”. It gives you my recommended gear of how to set up a mini-studio for your course videos and where to buy it.

Knowing The WHY of Your Online Course

I was at my mastermind group in Nashville last with with friends like, Dan Miller, Aaron Walker, Jevonnah Ellison, Jim Cockrum and others are in the group. We talked about our “Why”. My passion is leveraging technology to teach online and my superpower is helping create effective online course videos. My why is not about teaching you how to become a better internet marketer, but how to get to know your students better, be a better teacher, teach effectively online and promote your course without feeling icky. That’s why my tagline at the end of the podcast is, “helping you, to teach many, to impact millions. I want to start a movement with online education that blends entrepreneurship, education and technology.

Here are the 2 videos from Simon Sinek and his Ted Talk about starting with Why.

3 Reasons Why Your Online Course Isn’t Successful and How to Fix It

These are all things that I’ve seen with my coaching clients and have experienced them myself. We get excited when people talk about their success with their course but if you haven’t done the work up front, you won’t have the success later.

1. You don’t have a large audience, email list or influence

If you don’t know your why, I believe you won’t reach the level of success that you want. Your course isn’t (or shouldn’t) just be about making more money. It’s (should be) about the impact you have with your students, the influence you are creating and the life change that should happen in their lives. But if you don’t have an audience, email list or influence it’s going to be VERY HARD to sell your online course. Just because you have a great idea for a course or have the experience to create one doesn’t guarantee success, in fact, I can almost guarantee limited success without a good following.

If you don’t have a large audience, email list or influence, start today to grow your email list. I have a podcast coming up that talks about specific ways a course creator can grow their list. Subscribe to the podcast to download it when it comes out.

2. You haven’t surveyed your audience and don’t know what they truly want

I have found that many people jump right into course creation without ever asking their target audience key questions beforehand. This will drastically limit your success. While you may THINK you know what your students want, you will never truly know until you ask them. Find 10-20 ideal students and pitch your idea and get your feedback. Ideally you want them to pay you for the opportunity to go through the initial planning stages as you create a custom course with you. They get a course customized to their needs and you get instant validation and feedback on your ideas. It’s a win/win!

Want to learn more about this process? I recorded a video about “How To Properly Plan and Fail Fast In Your Course”. You can watch the video here (I’d be honored if you left a comment or favorite takeaway).

3. You haven’t put any marketing or promotions into it

How do you expect to sell your online course if you don’t have a effective marketing strategy in place? The world is flooded with incredible courses that no one knows about. Don’t be one of those.

You can build your influence and prime the pump with mini-courses, blog posts, podcasts, videos and other content strategies. This will get people to know, like, and trust you. It will also improve your SEO, so more people will learn about you.
Look for ways to do joint ventures with other people that have the same audience. There are many ways to structure this but look for a “win/win/win” between you, the person you joint venture with and the students.
Use Facebook Ads to promote your online course. Sign up to get alerted when my upcoming class comes out that teaches you how to use Facebook Ads to promote your course (and build your email list)