Examples of Successful Online Courses (and How They Were Started)

In this chapter, I’ll be sharing a few stories of entrepreneurs in a range of fields who have used an online course to grow their audience and their income, and deliver a positive transformation to their students—and themselves. I decided to highlight a pretty broad range of case studies, so that you’ll hopefully find something to identify with and be inspired by in these course creators’ stories. You’re going to see how it’s possible to succeed with an online course even if you already have a full-time job, or your niche is not that mainstream, or you’re starting from scratch (or maybe all of the above!).

Here are the case studies we'll be featuring:

1. Building Something Big in an Obscure Field: Deborah Niemann
2. Creating a Family Business Around Their Course: Sam and Joe Pitcher
3. Following the Course Validation Process to a T: Bryan Harris
4. Overcoming Impostor Syndrome (& Winning with Crowdfunding): Asad Chaudhry
5. Finding Course Success Alongside Life and a Job: Dave Stuart Jr.

Building Something Big in an Obscure Field: Deborah Niemann

I first met Deborah Niemann at the Podcast Movement conference in 2019, and to be honest I was a little shy about asking her to join me on the SPI Podcast in early 2020. Deborah has become kind of a celebrity in the online course world—and for good reason!

She’s been incredibly successful creating and selling courses in her niche: goat breeding. Over the past three years, she’s launched several successful courses and created a tiered membership program. Over 5,000 people have gone through her courses to date, and nearly 80 percent of her income comes from courses.

So how did Deborah get to be so successful in this niche?

Moving to the Country

Deborah moved to the country in 2002 to grow her own organic food. She also loved goat cheese—but not how expensive it was—so she thought, “I'm just going to get a couple of goats so I can make my own goat cheese.”

And she did. But after a couple of years, her goats started dying. They weren't getting pregnant, or staying pregnant, and she didn’t know why. She took them to four or five different vets, none of whom knew why, either. So she started doing research, and figured out that the main problem was that the goats were copper deficient.

In the meantime, Deborah “was also doing all this other homesteading stuff, like gardening, and chickens, and making soap, and making cheese. And people were asking me in the real world to teach them.”

Deborah started out teaching people one-on-one in her kitchen, but soon realized it made more sense to teach to groups. So she started teaching up to eight people at a time. Then she started getting phone calls from people who said, “Hey, so-and-so told me that you taught her how to make cheese, or how to make soap. Could you speak at this conference?”

That progressed all the way to a speaking engagement at the first Mother Earth News Fair in 2010, in Pennsylvania. There, a publisher discovered Deborah and sold her on the idea of writing books. She agreed, and wrote several books on raising goats and self-reliant living.

Even though her books ended up being successful, they weren’t making her much money. So she started teaching online for the University of Massachusetts. It paid just a little more than her book royalties. But it did give her the spark of an idea: that she could start teaching what she knew about raising goats via online classes.

From Missteps to First Online Course

Initially, Deborah thought she could just take the content of her online university course and change the format for a different audience. She had almost finished the course when she began comparing it to other courses out there—and realized it wasn’t going to work. The course she’d made based on her university teaching ”involved a lot of research, a lot of assignments. And that is not what the online public course space is like.”

So she threw out that plan and had her son follow her around with an iPad and video record everything for an “on-farm” course. But that didn’t work either, because the sound quality wasn't good enough. 

Then she found an online course about how to create your own course on Teachable, and the rest, as she puts it, “is history.”

She initially worried that setting up her first course in Teachable was going to be difficult, but quickly realized “that it really wasn't that complicated,” and that Teachable was a really intuitive platform. Although she signed up for Teachable’s paid plan, which came with two free hours of concierge onboarding, she never needed the extra help.

Her first course in Teachable was called Goats 101. She recorded the content (about seven hours of video), priced it at $129, then offered the course at half price to the 2,000 people on her email list. Fifty people bought the course, which validated the idea. She got a bunch of positive feedback, nobody asked for a refund, and Deborah was on her way.

Growing Her List and Expanding Her Platform

Deborah’s next action item was growing her email list. She thought about offering a free course to get people into her funnel, but she was stuck on what topic to use.

Luckily, she came across some advice to look at her blog stats and see which posts get a lot of traffic, shares, and engagement when shared on social media. She saw that her posts on copper deficiency in goats “would just blow up every time,” so she created a free course on copper deficiency—and immediately got hundreds of sign-ups.

“I was just blown away,” says Deborah. “I had it set so that I would get an email every time somebody signed up for a free course. I was getting dinged all day.” Within a couple of weeks, over 1,000 people had joined the course.

Since then, she’s created several more paid courses: Just Kidding and Raising Kids, which is all about birthing and raising baby goats, and a course on soap making. She also has a membership program that includes access to five courses, with a premium tier where people get her cell phone number for texting, plus two monthly Q&As on Zoom.

Marketing Her Courses Using Empathy and Authority

Marketing can be a struggle for many creators. Even if you find it easy to put a course together, it’s another thing to go out there and have the confidence to sell it. Deborah combined a smart email-based launch strategy with the power of empathy and the authority she’d built up in the goat-breeding community to propel her first paid course to a successful launch.

Deborah didn’t try to do it all on her own when she launched her Goats 101 course; instead, she borrowed the strategy from the “Seed Launch” chapter of Jeff Walker’s book Launch. She emailed her list and asked them, “I'm working on a course; what would be helpful to you?” Then she followed Jeff’s launch formula using a series of emails to promote the course.

In these emails, Deborah spoke directly to the main concerns and motivations of her target audience: people who keep a few goats as pets or because they want their own milk supply. From the early days, Deborah realized there was an opportunity to help these people, as she puts it, “raise their goats without losing their mind or going broke.”

Sounds pretty extreme, but as Deborah explains, when it comes to raising and caring for goats, “there is a ton of conflicting information online.” She gets a lot of emails and messages from people saying, “This is my problem, and I've read this online, and I don't know what to do.”

“That’s the losing your mind part,” Deborah says, because all the conflicting information out there on raising goats can be “very confusing.”

What about the “going broke” part? Deborah says there are so many people online telling others, “‘You ‘have to have’ this ginormous list of drugs, and supplements, and everything to keep your goat alive. And everything your goat does is ‘a symptom that it’s dying.’” Without the right information, goat owners can easily spend lots of money on medicines and supplements that don’t help, or make things worse.

In her Goats 101 launch emails, Deborah tackled the “losing your mind” and “going broke” issues head-on. She talked about her experiences as a new goat owner, and how frustrating it was to find conflicting information about raising goats. She also shared how she was lucky enough to find some trustworthy and experienced mentors to guide her.

Says Deborah, “I got the same conflicting information on Yahoo groups eighteen years ago that people are getting on Facebook groups today. And so, I put a lot of information in there so that they know that I'm empathizing, I know where they're coming from. And talk about some of our birth stories. Our first birth stories were hilarious, because we really had no idea what we were doing.”

In addition to empathizing with her audience, Deborah has been able to position herself as an authority in a space where so many people are confused by conflicting information. How does she cut through the noise and confusion to stand out as a trusted figure?

“I tend to quote a lot of expert sources. I have every vet textbook that's ever been published in the last fifteen or twenty years, for goats. And so, instead of just saying, ‘This is what worked for us,’ I actually quote the research. And I also, since I teach college, I have access to the library's subscriptions to scholarly journals. And so, I talk about the research.”

This is one of the things people tell Deborah they appreciate about her: She’s not just telling them, “Do this because it worked for me,” but, “because I read all of the research, and the research led me to do this.”

Deborah’s Number One Tip for Course Creators

What does Deborah recommend for somebody who wants to follow in her footsteps?

“As soon as you have a website, start collecting email addresses.” Her website was collecting roughly 30,000 visits a month for five years, but she wasn’t collecting email addresses. Thankfully, she had access to the 2,000 email addresses she used to promote her first course through a network she’d created on a site called Ning.com.

Once she set up her email list via ConvertKit and started collecting addresses on her site, she “could believe how fast people signed up.” Roughly 500 people signed up within a few weeks.

She also wishes she’d started a podcast sooner. Of the roughly 450 articles on her website, 125 are about goats. Deborah feels like she’s “pretty much written almost everything there is to write about goats.” As a result, she has trouble coming up with new goat-related article ideas. But she found that having a podcast “opened up a whole new world to me, and a whole bunch of new people. There are people out there in the podcast world who were just waiting for a goat podcast.”

Creating a Family Business Around Their Course: Sam and Joe Pitcher

Sam and Joe Pitcher created a course to help their mom, Sue, (actually “mum” because they’re British :D) share her approach to textile artistry with others. I asked them to answer a few questions about how their course came to be and how it’s changed their lives and their business, and they were game to help out! They shared a ton of detail with me on how creating their online course helped them figure out who their audience actually was, so they could bring Sue’s passion and skill to the people who could benefit from it. Check it out!

1. What is your course, who is it for, and what transformation does it help people achieve?

Our signature course is called Exploring Texture & Pattern. My brother Sam and I developed this course with our mum, Sue Stone, who is a respected textile artist and tutor. She’s been Chair of the most prolific textile art organization in the UK and had her work featured in top embroidery magazines such as Selvedge and Fiber Art Now. She also travels the world teaching in-person stitch workshops to textile enthusiasts. This course was a way to take her teaching online and be able to go more in-depth than she was able to in an in-person scenario.

The world of fiber art is filled with passionate, creative people who are compelled to make stitched works of art, but a common issue is what we call “dabbling.” There is a temptation to try out as many shiny new techniques as possible, and often stitchers find themselves flitting from one thing to the next. One week they are in love with appliqué; the next they’ve moved onto screen printing. This can be great fun, but what we’ve found over the years from community members is that it ultimately leads to frustration, feeling overwhelmed by the possibilities and dissatisfaction with their process and the work they create. 

Our course offers an alternative because we take the focus away from complex embroidery techniques and instead home in on creative thinking. Mum challenges students to “opt for a set menu of techniques rather than the ‘all-you-can-eat’ buffet.” But by choosing just a handful of simple, traditional stitches, she encourages students to push their boundaries by asking What if? and honing the potential of these techniques. It’s a “go deep rather than broad” approach to making textile art.

The beauty of this approach is that a beginner can get a lot from the course because it doesn’t require advanced technical skills, but it also gives more experienced stitchers a new way of looking at the creative process. It also encourages the students to work to their own tastes and explore how they can use the techniques to develop their own personal visual vocabulary—it is not a follow-along, connect-the-dots course. Each student produces work that is individual to them. That is one of the aspects that differentiates our course from some of the other online embroidery classes, which tend to be more prescriptive.

Our community is mainly made up of women over the age of fifty, most of whom are used to attending in-person textile art workshops. Many of them haven’t been creative in a long time and are returning to embroidery after a long break having raised a family or worked full time. We made this course for them, to offer them a creative outlet, as well as a way of building a more systematic approach to their stitch process and create work that they’re proud of in their own voice.

2. Why did you create your course?

We created the course because we knew Mum’s passion for her craft could reach more people than if she stuck purely to in-person workshops. She’s also not far off seventy years old and doesn’t want to travel quite as much going forward.

We were also very keen to make something as a family. Of course there are times when working with siblings and parents can be challenging, but in general it’s fantastic to be building something together.

But primarily we made the course to serve the needs of our community. We spent a long time building the blog, newsletter, and social media presence before we ever tried to sell anything of significance (too long, in fact!). We knew if we wanted to build something sustainable for us and for the community we’d need to create something to really address the feedback we were getting when we chatted to people in the community.

They wanted the ability to build a more disciplined creative process and use the materials and stitch techniques they loved and grew up with (many of them learned to sew sitting on their mother's laps) to create art. They were feeling frustrated that the only way they really felt empowered to make anything was by imitation because they lacked the tools to be able to bring their own vision for a piece of textile art to reality. They had no go-to system for developing textile art that felt personal to them. 

There was also demand for the community to learn from our mum specifically. I think the story of Mum’s return to textiles (she didn’t make anything for almost thirty years) resonated with people, and they liked the fact that someone starting later in life could not only achieve as much as she has achieved but also create work that feels very authentic to who they are.

3. What were the biggest challenges you encountered in creating and marketing your course?

Sam and I perpetually underestimated the amount of time various stages of developing the classes and the promotion around the course would take, so when we built the first version we missed every single deadline.

We were originally doing all the work ourselves. I was writing every bit of content, Sam was making every single graphic, we were inputting newsletters and blogs, doing all the social media, building out sales pages, filming and photographing the course ourselves . . . It was a fairly stressful process trying to spin all of those plates. Some of that was to do with the fact we hadn’t made any real money from the business at that point so couldn’t afford to get other people involved. But I think a bigger problem came from us not wanting to relinquish any control. That’s been a difficult learning curve, and one we still struggle with from time to time.

I think the learning curve in promoting the course was also steep. It was a new way of thinking for us. We originally did a Jeff Walker-style video launch, and with each launch we’ve refined the language we use. I think, although it gave us fantastic results, the first time we released the video series we were uncomfortable with the sales pitch side of things. It felt inauthentic to be so direct; it’s taken us some time to find the way we talk about the course to potential students in a way that is confident and demonstrates we have absolute faith in the product but also feels authentic to us and our audience. After all, we’re polite, nicely brought-up English men, neither of whom have any real background in sales. Sometimes the traditional strategies of online selling can feel a little brash to us, so it’s been about adapting those strategies to suit our personalities and the taste of our community members.

Another challenge was the resistance from our community to online learning. Because they are so used to the in-person interaction of workshops and instant feedback, there was a big leap for them to see that online learning could be just as satisfying (in a different way), and in some ways better in terms of detailed teaching.

4. How has the course changed your business and/or life?

Honestly, it has made it into a business. Prior to the release of the first course, we’d tried various things as we figured out who our audience were. And none of them were very successful.

We started out thinking our audience would be professional textile artists like Mum or people aspiring to exhibit and make a living from their art. A lot of our early attempts to make the site into a business were focused around that: teaching people how to promote their work, even offering a service where we built websites for artists. 

When we started to learn that our audience didn’t necessarily have those aspirations and were actually people who just loved to stitch and create textile art to satisfy their own creative need, we did a couple of affiliate launches for other online textile art courses. I think the issue there was that those weren’t really viable long-term prospects. Although we had a decent-sized mailing list (probably around 30,000 at the time), it was a struggle trying to convince the artists who ran those courses of the value we could add to their launches, and so we settled on a commission rate that didn’t make the return worth the investment. But I’m glad we did them because they taught us a lot in preparation for launching our own course.

5. What tips would you share with other first-time course creators?

The number one tip is listen to the audience. Get on the phone with some of your most enthusiastic community members and talk to them. That was uncomfortable for us to begin with because we’re both naturally quite introverted and shy, but it was a revelation. It gave us so much invaluable information about who our students were, what they wanted (or thought they wanted) versus what they needed, the obstacles they faced, potential objections they might have, and the language they were using.

Beyond that, don’t get bound by perfectionism. The first version of your course is just that: the first version. Each time you can listen to the feedback and tweak what you have to serve your students, the better. 

Don’t be afraid to charge what the product is worth. We struggled initially with the fact that in order to make the business sustainable (and in turn be able to continue serving our community) we needed to make a course that was significantly more expensive than the other online textile art courses available. We knew in order to justify that price tag we had to go above and beyond in the value we offered. And that’s what we did. After several launches, I still get nervous asking people to part with a significant amount of money, but we have very little pushback and a very low refund rate, which I guess shows we’re doing something right!

6. Anything else you think would be useful/interesting to know?

I just want to emphasize the value of really good testimonials. Anything positive that people say about the services you offer, keep it somewhere safe. When it comes time to launch, get on the phone with some of those people and craft testimonials around the claims you’re making about the course. It’s so much more powerful when it comes from people who have experienced the course and don’t stand to gain anything.

Following the Course Validation Process to a T: Bryan Harris

I had the pleasure of interviewing Bryan Harris of Growth Tools (formerly Video Fruit) in Session #190 of the SPI Podcast. He always shares amazingly helpful content, and the awesome thing about Bryan is that he’s used a version of the validation method I talk about in chapter 2 to pre-sell several different kinds of products over the years to make sure people want those products first before he builds them. In this chapter, I want to highlight the launch of his very first product, a course called the Bootstrapper’s Guide to Explainer Videos.

Bryan started his entire business with the Bootstrapper’s Guide from scratch inside a small Facebook group in 2013. Five months later, he quit his job. Here’s how he did it . . .  

[Note: This case study is lightly adapted from my book Will It Fly?.]

Step 1: Get in front of an audience. 

Bryan has some serious video-making skills—that’s one of his superpowers. After getting great feedback on his work, he decided to see if he could create a business out of it. He started to build a rapport with the members of a small Facebook group that he knew would be potentially interested in making videos. He began sharing a ton of advice and opening up a lot of his video-making process for free, and in doing so he was allowing people to get to know him and his expertise first, which I love. If there’s one thing that will always work for building a strong relationship with an audience quickly, it’s providing value first. 

Step 2: Hyper-target. 

After a week and several helpful posts later, Bryan shared the following message publicly in the Facebook group: 

Last draft of first video using a new method (see post from yday). Final copy out tomorrow. Total hard cost of this video is under $30 with around 2.5 hours of my own time invested. 

If you are interested in learning how to make these DM me your email address.

The post also included a short video that people could play to watch to see his work in action. What’s cool about this post is that he’s not just sharing his progress, but he’s also hyper-

targeting those in the group who are interested in learning more about his video making methods. Twenty-five people ended up “raising their hands” and sending him a direct message with their email address, and this is when his idea for the Bootstrapper’s Guide to Explainer Videos course was born. 

Step 3: Share your solution.

Next, Bryan sent the following email to everyone who had sent him a message: 

Hey guys, 

If you are getting this email you asked me to contact you with some details on how to make the cool promo videos that I posted . . .  

So here’s the deal: 

Last week I found this really cool way to make awesome videos. I’ve used it myself over the last week to make several product videos and have even made sales to clients for those videos, all at a very high markup. 

I want to make a course showing every detail of how I do it, but I want to pre-sell the course to verify demand . . . 

I love that Bryan is being super clear and honest about what he wants to do, including the fact that he’s going to pre-sell his product to make sure there’s a demand. 

Step 4: Ask for the transaction.

Bryan includes a call-to-action in the remaining part of that same email:

I have stood up a simple web page here where you can pre-order. The regular cost is $55 but the pre-order price is just $35 . . . 

I am offering everyone that gets this email a 25% discount off the already reduced pre-sale price. Just use the offer code “earlybird” at checkout. That will make your total $25.75. 

He set up a quick pre-order page, and his goal was to get three people out of the twenty-five (12 percent) to pre-order the course to show him that there was legitimate interest and people weren’t just being nice. Within forty-eight hours, nineteen of the twenty-five prospects had purchased, validating his idea for the course. Yes, this was a massive discount relative to what he was actually offering, but his goal here wasn’t to make money; it was to simply validate the idea by having people pay something. 

What happened next? 

In good form, Bryan kept in constant contact with his customers while building his course between May 2013 and October 2013. He also continued to post regular updates about the course in the same Facebook group, and he started to build an email list. By October, his list grew to 575 people and he was ready to re-launch his course. He re-evaluated the value and pricing structure of his program based on the feedback from his current customers, and when he re-launched his course with a price point of $397, twenty-one people purchased generating a total of $8,337 in revenue. And by then, his course was already complete. 

He also discovered that a lot of people wanted to just pay him to create videos for them, so he took on a number of clients at the same time, many coming from the same Facebook group. It was at that point he was confident enough to make the decision to quit his job and go full-time with his website and services at VideoFruit.com. 

And to think, this all started from just providing value in a small Facebook group. Awesome. Check out my interview with Bryan on the SPI Podcast:

Overcoming Impostor Syndrome (& Winning with Crowdfunding): Asad Chaudhry

Asad Chaudhry is a magician, entrepreneur, teacher, YouTuber, and vlogger who has turned his passion for close-up magic into a successful course-driven business. He's become one of the leading magic educators in the world, but getting there has meant leaving behind a stable engineering career and overcoming self-doubt.

1. What is your course about, who is it for, and what transformation does it help people achieve?

My flagship course is entitled The Foundations of Card Magic, and it aims to help students of magic gain a firm grasp on the fundamentals of the craft. Learning magic tricks can be an incredibly enjoyable and useful hobby for those seeking to develop a skill that helps better connect with others and entertain. Learning a tangible new skill can also be a powerful confidence-building and therapeutic process for the individual.

2. Why did you create your course?

I had been creating free magic tutorials on YouTube for quite a while and built a strong subscriber base. It became apparent that my audience would benefit from a more comprehensive and structured learning resource that would help students learn the material step-by-step in the ideal order. I was also interested in monetizing my audience so that I could create a business and pursue my interest in magic full-time.

3. What were the biggest challenges you encountered in creating and marketing your course?

This course was my first product, so there was a great deal of uncertainty when it came to releasing it. I had published so much free content at this point that I was unsure of how selling a course would be received and how it would affect the perception of my brand. Instead of investing countless hours ahead of time to create the course, I felt it would be safer to validate the idea first by launching a crowdfunding campaign through Kickstarter to see how much demand there would be.

4. How has the course changed your business and/or your life?

The Foundations of Card Magic Kickstarter campaign greatly surpassed my hopes when almost 2,000 backers helped raised over $65,000 to support the creation of the course. This revenue helped me leave my full-time job as an electrical engineer and pursue my goal of working for myself and creating a magic company with confidence. The course became the first in a line of successful entrepreneurial ventures I have launched since then, and I have been able to develop a lifestyle with much more freedom and independence than what I once had.

5. What tips would you share with other first-time course creators?

It seems like first-time course creators often experience a degree of impostor syndrome. They question whether they are in a credible position to create a course and ask themselves, “Who am I to teach others?” It's important to recognize that these are completely normal thoughts and that all experts on a subject have the same doubts from time to time. Remind yourself that as long as you know more than your students, you are in a good position to provide them the value they are seeking. 

6. Anything else you think would be useful/interesting to know?

A unique and beautiful aspect of an online course is that it's a product that you can gradually improve over time. My recommendation to first-time course creators is to create a minimally viable version of their course in the beginning, and then continue to add to it after receiving feedback from the first batch of students. This will help you to validate your course idea before investing too much time into it, and it will cater the content to your target audience more precisely.

Finding Course Success Alongside Life and a Job: Dave Stuart Jr.

Dave Stuart Jr. is a teacher with a full-time job and a family—and he still found time to create his own products and spend more time with his family. He created his first course in 2016, and since then he’s created three additional courses and even speaks and leads workshops for teachers around the world. He’s a real inspiration in terms of what’s possible for busy course creators everywhere. Here’s a little Q&A I did with Dave on how he succeeded with his first course and how it’s changed his life and his business.

1. What is your course, who is it for, and what transformation does it help people achieve?

The Student Motivation Course is for K–16 teachers seeking to win the hearts of their students. It helps teachers understand and implement the five key beliefs beneath motivated human action: credibility, value, belonging, effort, and efficacy.

2. Why did you create your course?

I was noticing in my high school classroom that a growing percentage of my students came to me disinterested in school. And as a teacher who also writes and leads trainings for teachers around the world, I was aggressively poring through the research on human motivation. I started seeing these same five themes again and again—the five key beliefs. And so I began incorporating these into my classroom and my trainings, and I found that they really helped clarify student motivation—both how to analyze when students are under-motivated and how to act in a positive way to remedy that lack of motivation. 

3. What were the biggest challenges you encountered in creating and marketing your course?

I decided to opt for brief mini-lessons—anywhere from two to ten minutes in length—with attached “Dig Deeper” links (studies, articles, books) and a “Reflection Application” exercise. The difficulty was in scheduling the time for myself in my classroom to film the lessons because it was obviously easier to film them in batches. But my classroom is active with students for five hours per day, and during other hours it’s prone to unscheduled visitors (students, colleagues). I did eventually find a rhythm that worked, and filming the course took about a month total.

Marketing the course was really straightforward: When I'd have an insight into student motivation while I was filming the course, I’d write a blog article on that insight and mention the course waitlist at the end. By the time I was ready to launch the course, there were 800 people on the waitlist (down from a 17,000-person newsletter list).

4. How has the course changed your business and/or your life?

My revenue used to predominantly come from in-person speaking and workshops, but now the largest slice of the pie is from digital courses—and this course is by far the breadwinner. It has also been a surprising source of marketing power, as I’ve had numerous participants end up asking me to come to their school to lead a workshop. These after-course workshops tend to be the best reviewed of all my offerings, too—because by the time they’ve completed my course they are very familiar with my down-to-earth style as a speaker.

Most importantly, I've heard from many teachers who share that this course has genuinely helped them reach more students. My blog has always existed to encourage and equip educators on the journey to long-term flourishing and professional excellence—and it's rewarding to know that, even as I write this, a course I created may be helping a colleague across the world to make progress on that exact journey.

5. What tips would you share with other first-time course creators?

Do the research. I think the reason my course appeals to teachers is because I am able to cite where my insights originate and explain how I'm moving from research to theory to practice and back again. As I model this through the brief lessons, my participants grow in their thinking and skill, and they end up feeling a greater sense of agency when confronted with previously unsolvable problems. There's really not a shortcut (in my opinion) to developing the kind of expertise that can really help someone. So keep doing the research and the thinking and the clarifying and the writing that factor into giving you unique insights.

Don’t get lost in minutiae. My course videos are all made in iMovie, and they are not edited into neat clips or anything like that. I put in a simple iMovie intro, I optimize the audio (with what little functionality for this that iMovie offers), and I put in an outro. Very simple. In some industries I think this makes sense to up the production value—e.g., courses for online marketers where the design and quality bar are higher—but even then, when I look at the video-based courses that Seth Godin creates, the production value isn't high. Rather, it’s the words that Seth produces, the ideas he’s worked so hard to develop. So I guess I’m just looping back to that first tip: Don't try to skip the hard work of developing the great ideas and solid insights that come from a deep familiarity with the playing field of your industry.

Create Your Own Online Course Success Case Study

I hope these case studies have shown you that there are many ways to be a course creator and further inspired you about what might be possible!

Online courses, as you know, have been a big part of my life over the past three years, and an increasingly bigger and important part of the SPI Media brand. In fact, courses have become the number one way we’ve been able to help entrepreneurs find and build their audiences and grow their income.

I remember when I first started even hearing about online courses. I was focused mainly on affiliate marketing at the time (don’t get me wrong—affiliate marketing is great!), and even though lots of people were nudging me to build a course, I was always pushing back.

Why? I didn't think I was good enough to create my own online course.

I’m so glad I pushed through that sabotaging belief.

The truth is, to succeed with an online course, you don't have to be the expert, and you don’t have to be the first to market. You just have to create something that resonates with your audience and will help them solve a problem or achieve a desired transformation. You don’t have to be the world’s foremost authority—even if you're just a few steps ahead of your target audience, you have an ability to help them—and get paid for it!

Yes, it is a lot of work to create and validate an online course. But the work you do up front can pay you back in spades over time.

Up next is the final chapter of this guide, where I’ll share my favorite platform for building your online course.