In this episode of The Dietitian Success Podcast, I talk about 5 types of online courses that can be applied to any niche. I review what it looks like to create a mini course, a large course, an introduction course, a membership and a how-to course.
Links:
Check out the FREE Training – Choose Your Profitable Online Course Topic: https://www.onlinecourseblueprint.info/profitableonlinecoursetopic
Episode Transcript:
Hey there. Hope you are having an amazing week so far. I am having a great week actually. Having a great week. I feel like, so for those of you that have listened for a while, you know that I’m pregnant with my first baby. And almost at the five month mark. And I feel like for those of you who that have gone through pregnancy before, that first trimester is.
Just a bit of a. Surviving, not thriving. Season of life for a lot of people, not for everyone. But I felt like during that time, I just. Because there were so many days where I couldn’t, I just was not able because I was feeling sick or tired or whatever was not able to keep up with normal capacity.
It felt like I was just falling behind a lot on things that I wanted to do or CA or typically do in my business. And now I think I’ve really am feeling like over the past couple of weeks, I’ve just caught up and I’m feeling really reinspired. To work on some new, exciting, bigger projects. We’re going to talk about this more in.
Upcoming episodes, but one of the things we are working on right now is, and I’m going to take you along on the journey with this program, this course that we’re building because. I did that when I was creating dietician success center. And I got a lot of good feedback that some of you. That a lot of you really enjoyed, just the insider’s perspective on what it looks like to actually create a new program, create a new course from scratch and how we do it. What systems we use, what process we use.
And so I’m going to document that in more detail, but we’re creating a new program that’s specifically dedicated to. Counseling and coaching skills. And this is something that we’ve had a lot of requests for. From the internal DSC audience. We know that you want more practice. You want more practical application with regards to just implementing different counseling and coaching skills and also just feeling more empowered and more confident.
In your coaching. And so we’ve really been working together as a team to figure out, okay, how do we make this come to life? And how do we create something that you are like, this solves all my problems. So that’s something we’re working on right now. I just wanted to share that. So that’s been the exciting thing that I’ve had going on in the background.
That’s really just reignited my, okay. I’m back in the creative space, back in the creative zone in my business. And I’m ready to just do stuff again, which feels really good. And it’s just a reminder that, business comes at business motivation. And creative motivation, ebbs and flows, it comes in waves and I just have I’m coming off of a feeling like I was in a really, non-creative just blah season. And now I’m like feeling re-energized about.
Business, which is great. So totally normal. These things happen. Throughout the course of every business stage. And it’s just part of the process. So anyways, that’s something for me. I’m also thinking about recording a podcast episode just about. My experience as a going through pregnancy and.
And being an entrepreneur. So brainstorming that. And what I want to talk about what I want to cover. So if that’s a topic that you’re interested in and you have any specific questions, just shoot me a DM on Instagram. At dietician success center, more than happy to. Address? Any questions, any comments? I’ll keep them anonymous.
You don’t have to worry about. Me sharing any of your personal business. With the rest of the listeners, but yeah, let me know. Okay. So in today’s as you can tell by the theme of the last episode, in this episode, I’m really focusing on talking about online courses right now. And that’s because.
If you again, have been a listener for a little while, you know that I have a program called online course blueprint. And this is a standalone 12 week step-by-step program that teaches you everything you need to know to create. CEL market an online course. And so I am. Talking about that right now, because we’re offering.
A special promo. For that course until the end of may. So if you’ve been thinking about joining online course blueprint, Pop on over to the website, online course blueprint.info. And we have all of the information, all of the information about the course what’s involved, pricing, all of that good stuff.
Available on the sales page. And so we’re offering a $500 off promotion until the end of may, which is sweet. It was a really good deal. 500 bucks, you could save yourself. So anyways, definitely check that out. And I also want to direct you to, if you go to online course blueprint.info and click free training.
On the top search bar, there is a, an awesome training on choosing your profitable online course topic. So this training actually walks you through my step-by-step approach for coming up with your specific. Topic for your specific niche. So today we’re going to talk about some broader buckets or broader formats that you can use to create an online course that can be applied to.
Any niche. And then in that training, We, I actually direct you to go through the process for your own niche to come up with your profitable online course topics. So definitely check that out again. Online course, blueprint.info, click free training on the top search bar or the link for that is in the description of this episode.
Okay. So I am going to be sharing. Five different online course. Ideas so ways that you can format or position and online course that will work that work for any niche. So these are. These are broader buckets that you can then use to applied back to whatever niche that you’re in. But first I want to talk about what D what makes something a profitable online course, because that’s the title of this episode is profitable, online course ideas. What does that even mean?
What’s the difference between just an online course and a profitable online course. A profitable online course is a course that makes you money. Which is obviously the ultimate goal, right? We want to leverage courses to be able to create passive income in our businesses. And what makes for a profitable online course?
Number one is it needs to be something that people actually want and need. And I know I speak about this quite a bit in different contexts, but we are. We really need to, as we’re thinking about a topic for an online course, we really need to put ourselves into the shoes of someone.
Who is going to want to purchase and pay for this course. And so we need to ask ourselves what are some of the nutrition problems that people actively come to you looking for help with? And that is how we come up with an online course topic. Not choosing, just choosing something that we as practitioners want to educate people on. So it’s a bit of a reframe.
And we’re used to doing this. It’s the same idea as being client centered or client focused. It’s okay, let’s put ourselves. Into our client’s shoes. And let’s think about what are some of those things that they are already coming to me for that they already need help with, that they already need to address.
And that’s what I’m going to create an online course about. So it needs to solve a problem for someone, and then someone needs to be willing to pay for a solution. And honestly, there’s not many things that people aren’t willing to pay to fix. If we have an active problem, an active issue in our lives, and we’ve identified that there is an active problem, an active issue. We are going to look for solutions.
We’re going to seek out practitioners. We’re going to look for resources that are going to help us solve that problem. And so that’s really where your online course comes into play. Don’t project your feelings of quote-unquote someone won’t pay for this on others. Of course, you’re not going to pay for your online course because you already have the information. It’s not information that you need. It’s not a problem that you have. So don’t let that limiting belief.
Prevent you from moving forward with creating an online course and really coming up with a profitable online course topic. So that’s just my preamble about what makes for a profitable online course. So now let’s talk about five. Ways that you can position an online course that can be applied to any niche. So these are basically types of online courses you can create. So the very first one that I want to talk about is a mini course.
Now sometimes we think that I have to, if you’re going to create an online course, it has to be some huge in depth, super detailed Course that covers absolutely everything under the sun about a topic and that it couldn’t be more true, more untrue, rather, even for large courses, we’re not overwhelming. We’re not, our goal is not to overwhelm people with information.
It’s purely to include enough information for somebody to get from a to B. And no more than that. But you can also create a mini course. So if creating something big intimidates you, this is a great place to start. So with the mini course. You take one specific topic that you get asked about a lot.
And you dive deep on that one topic. So for example, Sports nutrition or nutrition for running. That would be a bit of a bigger course. Cause there’s a lot of topics within that topic that we want to talk about. But if we wanted to just really hone in on running nutrition supplements.
We could create a mini course about that. It’s just diving deep on one topic, making it short, making it sweet. So typically we’re going to be charging less for a mini course, but there’s also a lower barrier to entry. So one example for my own life is that. I actually purchased a, I remember I purchased a mini course on.
And it was just specifically, it was from somebody who teaches about sales and it was just specifically talking about how do you sell via Instagram DMS. So what does that process look like? And it was a $27 course, and it was a really easy decision for me to make. Because it was like cool. This solves my exact problem. I’m sitting here being like, how do I even, how do I start conversations with people in Instagram, DMS without feeling cringy and spammy and gross.
And so that’s what I learned in this mini course. It was $27. And because I had a great experience with that course, it made me purchase her larger sales course because I was like this was really valuable. I know I’m going to get a lot out of the larger sales course. This can be a mini course can be a great entry into a larger course.
And so again, mini course can be a great starting point. If you’re worried about the. At the time and the effort that goes into creating something bigger, if you feel like you’re. You’re not really sure if you will be able to stick it out and you’ll actually finish creating your larger course, just create a mini course and then you can create another one and your business can be all about mini courses. That’s totally fine.
Or, you can graduate once you made a mini course. You’re like, okay, that wasn’t that bad. I know how to do it. Now you create something bigger. And some people even use a mini course as a free lead magnet. So that’s really interesting too. Once you have these skills for creating an online course,
You can apply those skills in any number of different ways, like a free mini course makes for an amazing lead magnet because we see many course and we think, oh my God, that’s a lot of value. That’s a lot of value for something for free. So maybe if you do, if you have a bigger course on something like the low FODMAP diet, maybe you have a lead magnet that is just a mini introduction and overview of the low FODMAP diet. You don’t dive deep into any of the stages or any of the like specific okay. Problem solving action planning within each one of the stages, but you just go through an overview, so people understand what exactly is involved in the low FODMAP diet.
And maybe you cover, who is it for and who is it? Not for. That can be an amazing lead magnet.
So that’s our first online course idea or format is a mini course. And then of course, on the flip side, we have medium or large. Courses now in online course blueprint, I differentiate the three. So I have like small, medium, large course because I give you price ranges that are typically common for small, medium and large courses.
But if we’re just speaking a medium and large courses right now, obviously the opportunity there’s opportunity to capture more information. We’re thinking about, what are the themes that I find myself teaching about consistently? How do I turn that into a step-by-step course? And by creating something medium or large, this is really where you have the opportunity to start stepping away from one-on-one. If that’s something that you do and you don’t want to do as much anymore, because you can charge a higher price point for a medium or large course,
and so this can be a great strategy. If that is your ultimate goal. And you can also still include small, medium, large mini courses in your one-on-one packages. So it’s an opportunity to be able to charge more for your one-on-one services. You can also of course sell them as standalones.
But, if you’re including them within your one-on-one packages or within your one-on-one sessions, it can be a great opportunity for somebody to, for you to offload the education piece. The instruction is for somebody to watch a module. And then when you meet, they already have that background information so that your sessions can be shorter. They can be more focused on goal setting, problem solving, action planning.
Versus education.
And or of course you sell it as a standalone, and this is again, really where we start to see that scalable income, passive income piece. Of our business. And so for example, with online course blueprint, this is a standalone program because I was finding that I used to help people with the online course process through one-on-one coaching.
And then I realized that making, turning this information into something automated. It was information I was repeating again and again anyways. And in fact, the course is better because somebody gets a more comprehensive view and really a step-by-step for how to create, sell and market their course.
Versus, me piecing together things for them. And when they, we get on a call, we do a bit of education. But they’re getting, they just have all of the information there that they can view on demand when it comes to a standalone course. And as a business owner, it allows me to reach more people too. So I’m able to teach more people how to create online courses.
And then we have a community forum for people to ask me questions which I plug into every day. So anybody who has a question, they just posted in there and I’m in there. I’m responding. So you get responses from me directly. So that’s number two is a medium, large course. The number three type of online course.
Is an introductory course. So asking yourself the question of, is there information they need to know before they work with you or that you want somebody to know before they work with you? This can be a really great strategy. If you feel like there is a specific type of person or a specific ideal client that you really want to focus on.
But you still have skills and knowledge in other areas, and you want to be able to leverage that. For example, what if you’ve decided that you really love working one-on-one with people during pregnancy? Maybe your course is a preconception course, preconception nutrition course. So it could be an introduction to working with you.
On pregnancy or on prenatal nutrition, or maybe you even have a postnatal course that people graduate into after working with you. One-on-one. Specifically for prenatal or for pregnancy rather. That’s definitely an idea too. Or let’s say that you’ve decided that you really love to work on baby led weaning.
But you want to still offer something to people who are in an earlier stage. And are looking for more of that infant feeding. Amazing. Just create an infant feeding course, and then your one-on-ones can be specifically focused on baby led weaning. This is also a really great strategy to increase the lifetime value of a customer or of a client. You have something for them to graduate into. You have an offer.
That is a natural next step for them. That’s a really smart business move.
So number three is an introductory course. Number four is a membership. So some people don’t think of memberships when they think about online courses, but really what a membership is it’s just a way. To package your course content. In a different format, right? So we’re just charging for a differently. We’re not offering it as a one-off.
Cost it’s something that people continue to pay to have access to. And so a membership is essentially a library of all of your content, right? So you can take all of your. Course videos. All of your training videos, you could create how to videos. You can have recipe videos, you can have recipes, you could have meal plans, any of your handouts and resources.
You basically put them all in one library and people pay to have access to all of that information. This type of a membership can work for any niche. So if you create resources, Or you create content, a membership might be a good. Choice for you. The reason why I love a membership is because it adds that like recurring revenue model to your business, where you have this monthly recurring income versus just the I’m selling my online course for this two week period every quarter. And so I’m expecting I’m going to have sales coming in.
Only during that two week period, but you can also, you can also set your course up on something called evergreen, which basically means it’s just for sale. All throughout the year, all year round and people just come in and they purchase it when they want to. But. Membership, obviously I’m biased because I have a membership. So I really liked the membership model.
So a membership is great. If you see yourself wanting to actively add more content or really create that robust library of resources. So that’s number four is a membership style course. And then number five is a how to course. So typically, when we’re talking about online courses for a lot of topics in the world of nutrition, we’re thinking about more informational style courses.
And you know where we are teaching people about a specific topic. And the way that we film course videos for this, I have a really easy process that I like to use for creating these informational course videos where. We create slides in Canva. Or another platform we record ourselves teaching through them.
Either on zoom or via Canva, they have a built-in screen recorder. And we might opt to have our little face showing up in the corner. Like when you go on a zoom call and somebody’s presenting their screen in their face, shows up in the corner. These, we can create an MP4 file and this is your online course lesson. So it’s an easy process. And so I typically I’ve had people come to me, with this misconception that an online course has to be, you.
Just you sitting in front of a video camera and teaching through material without any sort of visual guide that is not effective. It’s a huge waste of time. You do not have to memorize a script to create an online course. However sometimes. And going back to this online course idea. And it is with an, with a, how to sometimes there’s going to be times when you may be, want to show someone how to do something, right? If you’re teaching, cooking or food skills, you may want to actually set up.
Camera or even set up your laptop, set up zoom and film via zoom. In your kitchen or walk people through, step-by-step how to make certain meals, how to do different food prep skills. Maybe your course is a mixture of how to. And and you teaching through material. I had a past online course blueprint.
Student who did that? They had a plant-based cooking course. And so it was a mixture of both. Yeah, so it, or, maybe it’s not so much food skills or specific dishes. I guess this would still be considered food skills, but like for instance, in our baby led weaning course on dietician success center.
We have videos, like course videos that show. How to prep foods. For baby led weaning because that’s something that you need to just show people versus telling them how to do it. That’s going to be showing people is going to be more effective. And so we have a mixture of both. But a how to course is definitely an idea as well.
So just to summarize five different types of online courses, we have many courses. We have medium, large courses. We have introductory courses. Membership courses. And then we have how to courses. So I hope that you enjoyed this episode. I hope that you’re starting to think about what it might look like to have an online course in your business.
I want you to check out online course blueprint. If you feel like that’s something that is aligned with your vision for your business. It’s a great program. I love the program and check out the free training. Head on over to online course blueprint.info. Click on free training in the top search bar and you’re going to be directed to.
The how to choose your profitable online course topic. Step-by-step and I think it ends up being about 27, 28 minutes. So it’s not short, but it’s also not an hour of your time. You could potentially walk away from that. From that training, actually having your online course topic chosen, which is pretty fun. All right so i hope that you enjoyed this episode i hope you have an awesome week and i will see you next thursday
