First of all, my course is published and ready for anyone to join! It’s called Email Marketing with ConvertKit and WordPress: Integrate ConvertKit into your WordPress website.
I’ve always loved teaching and my first student was myself. I remember making this huge test for my Tae Kwon Do level 1 test. I aced that test and my confidence in teaching myself grew.
Later on I was lucky enough to be referred by a colleague to teach at a local university. That brought on quite a few challenges that you might recognize if you have ever taught the pre-twenty crowd. Let’s just say that messenger was my worst enemy and I had to fight for student’s attention with it.
With the ups and downs of life I have turned to WordPress once and again and always found it had somehow transformed into something else completely and I had to learn things all over again. Add to it the wonderful but varied page builder options that are now available (Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, Oxygen, Brizy to name a few) and you have quite a bit of studying to do!
But in its essence WordPress is very user friendly and I love building sites with it. So it comes natural for me to merge the two, teaching and WordPress. Of course there were a lot of things to figure out such as who would be my target student and other marketing things (all valid but I find them a bit scary) and what platform to use ( I wasted an entire week on that only to find out my options were limited because I’m from Panama).
If you do your research, all these things that you need to figure out are just excuses for not getting on with creating your course. But I wanted to do things right, who doesn’t? So I googled and went into groups trying to find answers. I took classes from all the platforms Teacheable, Thinkific and from the course creators greats (the ones I could find) like Sunny Lennarduzy, Miguel Hernandez (Grumo Media) and Danny Iny. I really liked what Danny Iny had to say because he talked about pilots and pre-selling your courses.
I even took the Teach Your Gift live seminar that Danny had planned for November. I was a bit disappointed by it because it was more about motivation than actual strategies for creating your courses but I met a lot of nice people and was pushed forward into my journey. I considered taking Courtney Foster Donahue’s Course Course at a whopping $1,450 but that is way out of my budget at this moment. It’s still in my todo list.
Then in one of my rabbit hole excursions in YouTube I found this great talk offered by Thinkific “How To Increase Your Online Course Sales in 2020” featuring one Sarah Cordiner. The video was amazing and had several great ideas some of which I had already been implementing in my own site and YouTube channel. Of course, I became obsessed with all her materials and searched for her and her articles and videos.
I finally stumbled upon her one of her most popular trainings “How To Create Profitable Online Courses”* at an affordable price of $97 dollars. I had listened to enough of her videos that I was seriously interested in joining this course and I purchased it immediately. Sarah has other courses that help with the marketing and such but I’ll talk about that in a minute.
I focused all of my attention on the course and finished in two weeks. The course is very thorough and complete though it uses Thinkific as a platform and I can’t use it unless I want to pay $80 a month (I can’t use Paypal or Stripe as payment gateways so I have to use a custom payment gateway). However at the end of the course I had my outline all prepared for my course. A couple of weeks later when I was scheduled to start working on the course I had all the preliminary work done thanks to Sarah’s course. I had my target student, my outline (with detailed chapters and modules) and the resources I would need. Filming was easy and I published my course in a week.
I used Udemy as a platform and they have a verification process and a quality control system that helps keep instructors in line. They have great documentation though I don’t know why they don’t have an video lessons if they are a video learning platform! I could go on about the reasons why a creator shouldn’t use the Udemy platform but for someone like me that has just started building an audience it’s the best bet.
Of course the hard part starts now. I didn’t pre-sell my course like so many experts suggest and I still don’t have an audience to sell to. Honestly, I just wanted to create and publish my first online course, even a short one like the one I published. The course is about how to integrate your ConvertKit landing pages and forms into your WordPress website. Here is the link if you are interested in checking it out. There are free previews you can see.
I think, all in all, the toughest part for me was making the videos as I wanted everything to be clear and explained properly. I recorded the videos with me on camera but later on I removed that video because my background wasn’t the best and I wanted to make a good impression.
What I need now are students and some reviews for social proof.
I’m scheduled to make my second course on March and it will also be WordPress related though not the one I expected to make which was WordPress Basics. There are just too many people with WordPress for beginners courses and I don’t think I’ll stand out.
For now I highly recommend Sarah’s course “How To Create Profitable Online Courses”* which is affordable or you can enroll in her Edupreneur Academy Membership* which has all her courses available for a monthly fee.
*Disclaimers: The opinions stated in this blog are all mine. Some of the links in the article are affiliate links, this means when you click on them and buy a product I’ll receive a commission at no cost to you.