How To Test Your Course Idea

By: Justin Ferriman • January 4, 2016
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stacking-coinsCreating and selling an online course is an exciting prospect, but it is also a lot of work.

Unfortunately many courses never see the light of day.

People spend hours working on their website, course outline, and content but get burned out as they realize it takes a substantial time investment.

Even worse is when people create their course and release it only to have no one actually purchase it. There are a variety of reasons why this would happen – one could be that people just aren’t interested in that subject.

If you want to create and sell a course then you want to avoid this possibility, but how?

Understand The Market

There are two easy ways to test your course idea. It will involve some work on your end but can ultimately save you a lot of wasted time and money down the line.

In both of these scenarios you need to create at least some course content.

The lessons that you create should be the more exciting elements from your eventual course. The “hot topic” subjects that you strongly believe people are interested in learning.

You’re going to put together these lessons and essentially give them away in one of two ways:

  1. From your own site (preferably)
  2. From Udemy

The first option is going to be more valuable to you in the long run since you’ll be building your own business asset in the process. However, there are some advantages to at least started on a site like Udemy.

In both cases, label your course as a “mini-course” for learning how to do “X”.

If you go the Udemy route, create your course and set the price to “free”.

This will help with obtaining some initial registrations and feedback. You’ll also save money on buying a domain name, hosting, and setting up a website (though these are all things you’ll eventually want to do).

The point of giving away some of your course content has many benefits, not least of which include:

  • Building an email list
  • Gathering feedback on the content
  • Validating a market for the course
  • Saving you time and money

Once you establish that the market does exist (and that you are able to satisfy a certain need), you can pursue building out the rest of your course accordingly, and with confidence.

Justin Ferriman

Justin started LearnDash, the WordPress LMS trusted by Fortune 500 companies, major universities, training organizations, and entrepreneurs worldwide. He is currently founder & CEO of GapScout. Justin’s Homepage | GapScout | Twitter