by Victoria Hockaday | Featured Contributor
If creating a signature course overwhelms you, then a mini-course is a great way to start making an additional income stream.
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again – creating an online course is a huge task. First, you have to create the course, which can take up to 30-60 days to create and then you have to create the launch content.
So, if a course feels too big and intimidating, a mini-course is a great way to start creating and make an additional income. And it allows people to think “I love what she teaches and I wonder what else she has”.
In fact, there are many benefits of creating a mini-course, here’s just a few:
- It gets you into creation. Creating a mini-course gives you the momentum to get started and make things happen.
- Lower barrier to entry. A mini-course with a smaller price tag gets more customers through the door.
- Proof of concept to make something bigger. If one person buys your mini-course, then it’s proof that its something people want and need. When you’ve validated your concept with a mini-course, you’ll feel more confident about putting the time and energy into a signature course.
- Build know, like and trust with your audience. It allows you to dial up your credibility and gives you the time to build trust with your audience. If they get results from your mini-course, then they’re more likely to want to learn more from you. Pretty cool, right?
Ready to create your mini-course? Let’s dive into the steps.
Think of What You Can Teach
To help you kick start your course creation you want to think about what you’re going to teach. At this point, you might have a few ideas about what topic you want to focus on for your mini-course. Ideally, you want to create a course based on results that you’ve created for yourself or others. So, think about what transformations you have had and how you could you turn it into a mini-course?
Know Your Dream Customer Avatar
Now that you’re on board with what you’re going to teach, you want to think about your dream customer avatar. The key is knowing what their biggest pain point is and creating a course that solves that one problem. Let’s say that you’re a brand strategist for solo entrepreneurs. You know that one of their biggest pain points is creating a value ladder for their business. A possible mini-course that you could offer is one that demonstrates how to create a value ladder for their business. BOOM.
Decide How You Will Deliver Your Course
If you’re doing a mini-course there a few ways you can go about it. You could create a workshop course where you offer a 2-hour training. This would be to address an immediate challenge that your audience is facing. This might be a live recording that you do over Zoom and you can have a Q&A at the end. (Plus, it’s the easiest one to get up and running quickly!) Or, you can create a course made up of videos or workbooks. You can prepare a Powerpoint with a voice over and you can do screencast showing them how to use certain tools. Then, if you’re going to deliver your course via email marketing, you’ll need to set up an email drip campaign.
Work Out How You’ll Collect Payments
Delivery options include sending out your course via a course platform, such as Teachable, Thinkific or Member vault. Alternatively, if you want an all-in-one business platform and you want to have your landing pages, sales pages and email in one place you can use Kartra or Kajabi. Or, if you want to keep your costs low you can use a service like Gumroad and Send Owl for collecting payments and delivering content.
Victoria Hockaday is a Launch Strategist who helps online entrepreneurs and course creators launch profitable online courses, so that they can impact more people and teach what they love. She is passionate about helping creators lead with their hearts, so they can overcome fear, imposter syndrome and become Brave Creators.
