When you’re considering how to create an online course, one of the first things you’ll want to know is how long it takes. The answer, of course, depends on a variety of factors: the scope and complexity of your content, how much help you need from outside sources, how long it takes to produce video or audio recordings, and so forth. In this article, we’ll give you a detailed look at how long it typically takes to create an online course.
There are several steps involved in creating an online course. Here’s the way I approach it:
Those are just approximations. It could be longer or shorter depending on how detailed your course is going to be.
Validation is the most important step in the process. If you’re not confident that people will actually want to buy your course, then it’s time to do some research.
Here’s how I do it:
It’s important to check if your course topic is trending in Google Trends. It doesn’t have to a linear ramp but it should at least be flat or slightly increasing. This lets you know that people are searching for it.
Using search volume is a great hack to get a gage of interest. If 300 people per month are searching for a crypto course in Google, that’s a pretty good sign.
Spying on competitors is a must. See what courses they are selling or pushing. Study their landing pages and sales process. This lets you know what’s working.
Lastly, ask you audience what they want. If you don’t have an audience, make sure you build one first or you aren’t going to be able to sell your course that well.
Doing all this work can be done in less than 1 day or 8 hours max.
You can knock out your landing page in about 2 or 3 days. You want to do a good job but you also don’t want to waste a ton of time making it perfect.
Once, you know you can make some sales, then you can go back and tweak it to make it perfect.
The important thing is to have a killer headline and make sure you address all your audiences problems as solutions in the copy.
If they think eating clean food taste bland. Tell them on the landing page the course will include recipes clean eating recipes that packed with flavor.
Once your sales copy is written, you can use a landing page builder to get it up and running fast. Doesn’t need to look super pretty.
This takes much longer. What you need to do is create a free mini course that people can opt into. The free mini course can have 2 to 3 hours worth of content.
It has to be valuable but not too valuable. You want to save the good stuff for your paying customers.
Shooting 2 to 3 hours worth of content can take 1 to 5 days in order to do a great job. Make sure you nail this because it’s the tripwire to your larger, higher ticket offer.
You can even get people to pre-purchase the course for a massive discount to gage interest. I’d argue that you should definitely try this.
Now that your idea has been validated it’s time to create the course. You want to do a killer job and make sure that you are thorough and offer tons of value.
So creating the course could take you a whole month to complete, maybe more.
This involves:
This is an ongoing process where you want to tweak certain things and see how your sales improve. You can’t really put a hard number of hours on this, it depends on how much you want to do it.
You can tweak everything from headlines to copy to media to landing pages to email sequences. The list can go on for days.
You’re probably looking at about 1-3 months to complete everything for your course. This is a rough estimate but it’s always best to give yourself more time than less. It’s better to create an amazing product that everyone will tell their friends about than a crap one that makes people feel like they were ripped off.