Lesson 4 To Do

Use your copy of the Profitable Course Idea worksheet to start filling in your three to eight solutions to the painful problems you've found.

These three to eight solutions you provide will make up your offer and the actual outline of your course. This helps you stay focused about what to include and what NOT to include in your course.

In the discussion area below, write out the offer you're planning to stack. For extra credit, how much do you think it's worth? Write that in as well.

Lesson 3 Background

In this lesson, we're going to now take advantage of all the research you've done by creating an outline and drafting out an amazing offer for your audience.

Actually, that's all a course is, an amazing offer that creates value.

What you'll notice after doing your earlier research is there will be common pain points that your audience will talk about in many different ways. It helps to group all those similar statements in your copied worksheet next to the pain points like so:

To the right, you can then fill in the solution you can create to solve the problem you've found.

For this one pain in our photography example, I came up with a live group webinar on how to set up their portfolio site using a website called SmugMug.

SmugMug is a really easy site I found to create a professional photography site, and will save students a significant amount of cost and time in getting it set up.

From the research I've done, I've found beginning photographers spend weeks searching for the right website software and often have to switch from multiple providers. I've also found others who've spent thousands on getting a web designer to build it for themselves.

In the lesson we create, we can help our wannabe photographer students avoid all of that.

You might also notice I included a $100 discount in the sheet. By reaching out to the technology creator of SmugMug, I might be able to get an exclusive discount off the cost of the software, which makes my course even MORE stacked.

We can keep adding in benefits like this to help us “stack" the offer.

There are a TON of ways to do this, and you can be creative. Here's a list you can use for almost any audience that I've seen a lot of great course creators use:

• Offering a weekly webinar with a Q&A
• Recorded screencasts or video someone can take at anytime walking them through their challenge
• Including a Facebook community, discuss comments in your course website, and offer email support if anyone has a challenge
• Include a software deal if it's related to your course
• Creating PDF worksheets, Google Spreadsheets, Google doc templates or other assets to help someone more quickly accomplish a task
• Improving the production value of your course with better video, screencasts or multimedia.
• 1 hour of 1-on-1 Skype coaching
• 1 hour of consulting services to help with X
• 1 hour of weekly office hours for X weeks
• Offer to review your student's completed projects and give feedback
• Offer an in person networking event at the end of your program
• Limiting the size or curating your online class to provide a small group focus
• Including expert interviews on your subject (with mp3 downloadable)
• Include transcripts of the video lectures

Now we have an offer, right next to it, you can start to create an outline like so:

See how simple that is?

What can work in the "Outline" column is to create at least 3, but no more than 8 titles that make up the “modules" of the course.

You can go more than that, but at that point, you might be creating too big of a project for yourself. After all, the more content you add, the more you have to figure out how to communicate that value.

3 - 8 Modules makes it easy for you to tackle. They're also easier to communicate to your audience.

We'll cover communicating with your audience in Lesson 6, and for now get started by creating a mini course and the steps to grow your own audience (who's likely to pay you) whether you have a following now or not.