Let me ask you a question- when you create an online course are you primarily focused on sharing information? Or are you focused on creating an experience for your learners? Well, my friends, I am hear to tell you that if you focus more on the content and less on the experience, you are cheating yourself out of future sales. Consider this hypothetical (yet simultaneously oh, so real!) example: 

Let’s say two business owners, Jack and Jill, decide to launch their own courses on how to launch a successful Etsy shop. Both are successful Etsy shop owners themselves and are experts on everything Etsy. 

Jack cranks out 20 modules jam-packed with information on everything from how to choose a name for your shop, to how to open your Etsy shop, to what to do the weeks before launching and everything in between.  

Jack does a great job marketing his course and hits his target sales in the first few weeks of launching. Way to go, Jack! 

Thanks to automation, he doesn’t have to do a dang thing at this point. Bling! The course link and login info gets plopped into the student’s inbox, and they are free to access the course whenever, wherever, and however they want. 

One of Jack’s students, Brenda, diligently works through the course and gets an Etsy shop up and running. Thanks to what she learned in Jack’s course, her shop is off to a good start. Brenda’s friend finds out about Brenda’s new Etsy shop and sees the relatively quick success, and asks her how she did it. Brenda then tells her the information about how to set up a shop on Etsy and what she did to launch it.

STOP RIGHT THERE.

Did you catch it? No? Let’s keep going. 

Now Jill also creates an online course. Her course, however, is only 10 modules and focuses exclusively on what to do before launching your shop. In fact, she states on her course sign up page that this course is “designed for people who want to launch or relaunch their Etsy store, or who want to launch a new product line.” She offers a separate, free course on how to set up an Etsy shop. 

Jill’s audience excited to learn from her, and she gets her first batch of students. Jill decides that rather than having all the information available at once for her students, she is going to drip the content out in intervals. 

Before she sends out the first module, she sends out a welcome email, thanking the students for signing up, outlining the flow of the course, and also asks them specific questions about their shops- what they sell, how long its been open (if applicable), what their goal is for the launch, etc. She also lets the students know they will each receive a beautiful, tangible workbook for the course in the mail in the next week. 

Throughout the course, she sends out personalized emails to each student with specific feedback from assignments in the course. She follows up on each student’s goals. Thanks to her networking prowess, Jill has made contacts both with fellow crafters and craft fair venues throughout the country. Jill makes it a point to put her students in contact with some of her connections where possible. 

She also hosts a virtual launch party the week after the last module comes out for all students who successfully completed the course. All participants are invited to share a bit about their store and provide an exclusive discount for their “classmates.” 

Jamie’s newly launched Etsy shop is thriving, thanks to Jill’s course. Jamie’s friend, Susan, has always wanted to sell her calligraphy prints and has thought about opening an Etsy shop of her own. She asks Jamie the secret to Etsy success. 

“You have to take Jill’s Launch your Etsy Shop course!” Jamie tells Susan. 

Now do you see? In Jack’s case, his students were telling their friends all the information in the course because, well, that’s all there was to it. 

In Jill’s story, her students were telling their friends all about the course because it was an experience that they couldn’t just pass along to their friends the way they could pass along the information. Now Jill is getting more sales, thanks to the referrals, without having to spend an extra penny on marketing and advertising. Even though her course had less information! Bananas, right? 

Now don’t get me wrong- the content of your course must be good content. In fact, it must be great content! But content alone isn’t going to get you future sales. It’s all about the learning experience! 

That’s why smart entrepreneurs outsource the course creation part to me. It frees them up to spend time creating experiences for their audience.  Experience over content. Every time.