TEACH WHAT YOU KNOW
Serve Your Audience, Create Passive Income
Online courses have quickly become one of the best methods for serving a niche audience. They give you an opportunity to teach what you know, going as deep into the content as your students need.
Creating a great course worthy of a premium price requires that you make a solid investment in time and effort up front, but when done properly, it allows you to build a solid passive income stream for your business. Online courses were instrumental in growing the Smart Passive Income business, and we want to teach you how to do the same for your business.
When you create an online course, you can:
- Focus on a specific topic and explore it deeply, much more so than a single blog post or podcast can cover.
- Foster a deeply engaged community around your course's subject. Facebook Groups or Slack communities are good tools for this.
- Employ a variety of teaching methods, including video, audio, text, and exercises like worksheets.
- Set up a passive income stream that allows you to determine your level of engagement.
- Ask your students to complete homework that reinforces your teaching.
- Charge a premium price for a quality learning experience.
Free step-by-step advice
The SPI Essential Guide to Online Courses
Courses and Workshops
Courses to grow your skills

Making of a Membership Community Workshop
Free

Click and Convert Workshop
Learn to capture attention, increase engagement, and grow your business with this workshop from Pat Flynn and guest expert Darrell Vesterfelt.

Pricing for Profit Workshop
A pro workshop to help you learn and apply smart pricing methods to optimize your profit and grow a healthy and sustainable business.

Email Marketing Magic
Grow your list, make more money, and automate like magic with this course on establishing an email marketing program. Ideal for anyone new to or frustrated with email marketing.
Articles
Tutorials and Case Studies

And Now for Something Completely Different: SPI’s Next Big Thing
When it comes to community or courses, there is one universal truth: All roads lead to the customer outcome.
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How to Use Segmentation to Improve Your Teachable Course Sales
How would you like to make more course sales? Thankfully, online course platform Teachable has a built-in tool that makes the process easy—using the power of segmentation.
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How to Create and Sell an Online Course: The Ultimate Guide
My ultimate guide to creating online courses! Here are the three principles and ten practical steps you need for creating amazing, profitable, and life-changing online courses.
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The Year of Online Courses (The Results. The Good. The Not so Good.)
One of my 2017 goals was to create and launch powerful online courses. Learn what went well, what could be improved, and what my plans are for 2018.
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31 Tips from 31 Course Creators on How to Build and Launch a Successful Online Course
Entrepreneurs from various niches share their number one lesson learned from creating an online course.
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How to Get the Most Out of an Online Course
If you're going to take an online course, you need to know how to get the most out of it. Here are ten things you need to know about online courses.
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Brainstorm Your Next Online Course
Plan the Outline for Your Next Course
Download the template to work through the brainstorming process for your next online course.
Sometimes getting started is the hardest part.
Even if you've created courses before, the outlining process can feel overwhelming. The Online Course Creation Template walks you through the outlining process step by step.
RECOMMENDED TOOL
Teachable
Offering online courses to our audience revolutionized our business a few years ago, and Teachable made that possible. Teachable is a market leader in the booming online courses industry. All of our online courses are housed on Teachable because they make it so darn simple to configure content, manage settings, and sell to students.
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Podcasts
Online course podcast episodes
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Smart Passive Income Podcast with Pat Flynn
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AskPat 2.0
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Smart Passive Income Podcast with Pat Flynn
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AskPat 2.0

Smart Passive Income Podcast with Pat Flynn
Weekly interviews, strategy, and advice for building your online business the smart way.
Featured Episodes:
February 22, 2017SPI 254: Lessons Learned While Testing and Launching My First Online Course
February 1, 2017SPI 251: (In the Middle) Launching a New Course with New Entrepreneur, Sarah Argenal
June 22, 2016SPI 219: How Meghan Telpner's Culinary Nutrition Academy Makes You Rethink Traditional Online Courses
June 15, 2016SPI 218: Starting an Online Course? Best Practices and Getting People to Follow Through with Ankur from Teachable.com
April 13, 2016SPI 209: The Power of Community—How Noah Bradley Made Art Camp

AskPat 2.0
A weekly coaching call on online business, blogging, marketing, and lifestyle design.