You want to create online training… but do you really have to?

Thousands of online courses are created every day, but only a small portion of them are truly successful. What sets these success stories apart from others? What can you do to maximize your chances of success so that your education can begin to create passive income for you and your family?

Here are some tips to get you on the right track.

WHY ONLINE TRAINING ?

Online courses allow you to get paid to teach while you do other things, like sleep or relax on the beach (yes, yes!). You could provide training after training 24/7 until the end of time.

Now, don't get me wrong, this is a lot of work to create and requires a tremendous amount of time to research, prepare, and publish. However, once created, an online course can be an incredible source of passive income for many years.

Another wonderful benefit of creating an online course is your ability to reach and teach people all over the world. Anyone can follow your training from the comfort of their home or business. Sometimes people avoid private coaching because of the high prices of one-on-one sessions. With online training, they can still benefit from your incredible guidance through self-study at a price more affordable to them.

FIND A NEED

All good online training courses have one thing in common: they solve a problem.

Taking the time to do a little market research can help you determine what problem exists in your niche and how big the demand is for digital training that effectively solves that problem.

Remember, it's not just about whether or not you would be good at teaching this topic, but whether people will actually buy the training. It's all a question of demand.

There are a number of online training teaching platforms that you can use to host your training initially. Many offer ways to determine whether your training would be a good fit for their audience and whether there is a demand for it. Udemy, for example, has a section on its website called “ Marketplace Insights .” This searchable data set lets you know whether or not Udemy customers are searching for a particular training topic and whether there are already courses covering that topic.

VALIDATE THE NEED

Let's say you've determined that there is a need for your training. Now you can start creating it, right?

Well, not exactly. It is better to validate this need for your training as best as possible before spending a lot of time creating it. There may be a real need, but people may not be willing to pay the money to get it. Ensuring that there is a need and that people are willing to pay for this information can save you a lot of headaches and wasted time.

There are a number of different ways to validate your training idea.

If you have an existing blog or website that you can leverage, this may be a good place to set up an email address capture or survey. Letting people know they could purchase your course at a pre-sale price by giving you their email address (or filling out a survey) can be a great way to find out if there is a need or want for that topic training.

If you don't have an existing audience to get feedback from, you can test your idea on social media by running pay-per-click (PPC) ads that announce the launch of your next training course or who pre-sales it. All you need to do is send the customer to a waiting page where they can leave their email address to be contacted in the future when your next training becomes available. If many people sign up for your waiting list, you'll know the idea is worth implementing.

MOVE FORWARD WITH CONFIDENCE

This process will help you understand whether people are willing to pay for your training and what they expect from you throughout the training. You could include a short survey on your landing page asking what types of content they would like to see covered.

By validating the need for your training before starting the creation process , you ensure that the important time you will have to invest will not be wasted. You'll gain confidence in your project as people let you know they're interested, and you can then move forward with confidence, knowing you're on the path to success.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOUR ONLINE COURSE IS READY TO SELL? PUT IT ON AUTOPILOT!

The beauty of passive income streams, like online courses, is that you can make money from these income streams for many, many years. That’s what got me into digital marketing and over time, I’ve refined my process for setting up a sales funnel on autopilot very simply. So, with very little maintenance, your online course can sell for many, many years.

My “Automatic Sales” Mastercourse is a self-study course, so you can go through it at your own pace. It includes 4 lessons, a workbook and checklists to help you get organized. Don't let your online training gather dust on your website; use my “Automatic Sales” Mastercourse to set up a sales plan on autopilot!

Click here to join me on the “Automatic Sales” Mastercourse.