3 Neck Breaking Challenges of Creating an Online Course Business (And How to Solve Them)

While the prospect of having an online course business is enough to make others drool, the fact remains that not many people jump into the venture despite how feasible the business model is. Also, as for those who take the first few steps of creating an online course, a good number of them give up halfway because of how overwhelming and tedious the process can be. When you think about all the shebang that comes with setting up an online course business, seeing others give up halfway is somewhat expected. After all, the hard work that comes with setting up the business can be quite brutal. However, even having said all that, it’s worth mentioning that there are those who have managed to figure out a workable process that led them to create a successful online course business. To help you get a better chance of succeeding in growing your online course business, allow me to share with you 3 of the challenges that most entrepreneurs are hard pressed in dealing with, and how they can solve these problems. Let’s hop right in.

1. Streamlining your process

Establishing an online course business involves truckloads of various processes to it. What processes am I talking about? Think content development, content management, audience engagement, relationship building, lead generation, setting up payment processes, and the list goes on. With all of these elements in place, streamlining your entire online course business can be a nightmare -- if you’re using multiple platforms, that is. It’s worth noting, however, that there are one-stop-shop online tools that online course business owners can use. One such tool that’s popular among seasoned online course owners is Kajabi. The eLearning platform can help its users with their product development, creating their very own website, managing their members/students, setting up their merchant accounts, viewing their reports, and even setting up their marketing campaigns (among other things). When online course business owners are using one-stop-shop eLearning platforms like Kajabi, streamlining the entire business becomes a lot more painless because interweaving the various processes is now made possible.

2. Growing your influence or personal brand

Having an established personal brand can do wonders for online course owners. Not only can it help them with convincing their audience that their online courses are worth buying, but they can also use their influence with marketing their courses. Sadly, with how busy the internet is, and how cutthroat the competition has become online, establishing your personal brand (and influence) is no longer as straightforward as it used to be. In fact, according to Worldometers.info, there are over 3 million blog posts written daily. The figure gives us a clear message of how high the chances are of a person to be ignored if they don’t have a tried and tested marketing strategy to establish their brand. That’s where marketing automation tools, come in. While there are several marketing automation tools that can help you with establishing your personal brand, one of the most effective, yet easy to use is Narrow.io. Here’s how the platform can help online course owners grow their followers: It helps its users “Follow” other target Twitter users automatically.rnIt can “Like” industry specific tweets automatically.rnAnd it can even help them clean their profile by unfollowing those users who do not follow the Narrow.io, the user's back.rnEtc. With these features in place, it becomes easier for the online course creators to grow their Twitter followers. The good news is since their Twitter followers are relevant to their niche, it’s highly likely that they’ll enroll in the online courses.

3. Creating your products/online courses

Just like in most things in life, creating courses that’s of value takes the lion’s share of the time. It requires careful planning, data gathering, countless hours putting words on paper (or creating videos, depending on the medium that you chose for your content), and even pruning (among other things). The content creation process is painstakingly slow, time-consuming, and critical, that the thought of it is overwhelming enough to influence most people to back out from their dream of having a successful online course business. Indeed, those who still choose to start an online course business has a special kind of grit to them that not many people possess. Here’s the thing, while creating the courses for your online business can, in fact, be overwhelming, there’s a method that you can employ to get things done several times faster, all without you having to do much work. What “method” am I talking about? Outsourcing, of course. With the level of connectivity that the internet has afforded the online entrepreneurs, outsourcing a good bit of your course creation task has never been easier. You can visit sites like Upwork, Fiverr, or Freelancer (among other outsourcing sites) to find the ideal freelancer to help you with developing your online course. To give you an idea of how much outsourcing can be of help to you, check these out: Instead of spending days (even months) writing your courses, you can have someone else do it for you. What you can do instead is record a video of yourself, giving clear instructions to the writer on how you want your course’s final version to turn out. At this point, you’d only spend a couple of minutes (maybe hours, tops), relaying your instruction -- depending on how lengthy your course is. Now, compare that to you spending days or months writing the actual content. You can benefit from the expertise of the freelancers. There are those who have years upon years of experience in your industry. If you put together the things that you know and your freelancer’s suggestions, then you’d be able to come-up with an online course that’s far more amazing. You can get your courses done in no time. If you’re the only creating your online course, then you won’t be able to work on it full-time if you have a 9-to-5 job. And even if you can work on your course full time, you’d still have to sleep, eat, or take little Johnny out to watch a baseball game, etc. In short, it’ll take you quite some time to finish your course because of the other todo’s in your life that you need to take care of. When you’re outsourcing your content development task, however, the landscape would look very different for you. Even if you’re out hanging out with your friends, or you’re at a beautiful restaurant with you family, your freelancers can work on your course non-stop. This means that you can finish your courses a lot faster.

What’s next?

What are some of the most memorable and neck breaking challenges that you’ve faced as you built your online course business? Please share your experience in the comments section below. Also, don’t forget to include the steps that you took to address your challenges. Cheers!