How to create a minimally feasible course in 3 easy steps

Many developers want to sell their online courses.

At first glance, it seems like the best way to earn passive income during sleep. But let me tell you one thing. The "real world" often doesn't look that pretty.

The truth is that most course creators struggle to sell online courses.

This is a repetitive pattern I have witnessed in trenches over a decade. Just because it doesn't cost you to create an online course doesn't mean you need to start creating it right away.

A wiser approach is to test your ideas before building anything.

In startup terminology, you need to create a minimally viable product before allocating more resources.

Fortunately, course authors can also borrow this concept for their creative practice.

This article will show you how to ethically create a minimally feasible course. This allows you to test your course ideas before wasting time creating something that doesn't sell. At the end of this journey, you will feel more confident and avoid the disappointment of the emotional roller coaster ride quality and mistakes.

For the purposes of this article, I assume you already know or have a specialty that you can monetize.

upset? Let's get started.

Step 1: Generate traffic

Want to rely on "free" organic content? It's all okay. However, keep in mind that it takes time to create

Or do you want to spend less time displaying ads and creating content? Well it's up to you. But I let you say this:

Traffic is never free.

You will spend money or time to drive traffic to your content. So choose your poison.

I spent a lot of money to get the ads to work. Over $ 8,000 in recent months. And this is what I found:

I didn't like the process of displaying ads. I couldn't stand looking at the charts and percentages every day.

guess what? I gave it up.

I encourage you to find the traffic generation process you are enjoying. why? Because it's much more likely to be consistent with what you're enjoying than what you don't like. And keep in mind that starting a business is a marathon, not a sprint.

After realizing that I didn't like to advertise, I started publishing articles. I love writing, so I had a lot of chances to turn an article into a source of traffic.

Until I saw the "engagement pattern" start to appear, I focused on publishing the article on Medium.

The bottom line: Find your favorite traffic source and listen to market feedback. Step 2: Piggyback about what works

This stage is to piggyback on what went well.

Let's talk about this. Most of what you do in step 1 doesn't work. Only a few do so. But that's okay.

Choose a winner and fill the loser. Don't be too emotional about it.

Look at the article (or ad) that lifted you and try to find a pattern.

Ask yourself the following two questions.

What is the article? What's the next logical step to keep the conversation going? At this point, you can start creating a landing page for users to sign up. In return for their email, I suggest you develop a free email course. What I did was create a 7-day email course on a topic that came to my mind: taking notes.

I knew that I could build a course around it, so I just started measuring the temperature of the market. The goal is to make sure your assumptions and ideas for creating an online course are correct before building anything.

It's about collecting real market feedback. I added people to my email list and started engaging with them. I read each email and replied personally to better understand their needs.

I was overwhelmed by the autoresponder's reply to emails every day because I was only dealing with articles with a proven track record of engagement.