The 3 Most Common Mistakes Online Course Creators Make

October 22, 2020 4 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Adding an online course to your product suite and having a passive income stream on autopilot sounds amazing, right? And it doesn’t only sound amazing, it truly can be if you put in the work and take the right steps at the right time to create a digital product that sells and is scalable. 

But many course creators are guilty of either one or multiple of the following mistakes, which derails their progress before they even create the online course. Let’s shed some light on the three most common mistakes course creators make. 

Related: 4 Crucial Things To Consider Before Creating An Online Course

Mistake No. 1: Not creating a proper foundation

Building an online course is no different than building a house. When you build a house, you make sure that its foundation will withstand storms. You also don’t start building the roof before you know the cement that makes up your foundation has dried properly. 

So before you start recording your course content, you must validate your course idea and identify your dream students. You also need to create a name and a market proposition for your product that expresses the results of your course preferably in one word, or maximum in one sentence. 

Paying lots of attention to building a strong foundation at the beginning will set you off on the right path to be able to scale later on. 

Related: 5 Tips for Creating Your First (Successful) Online Course

Mistake No. 2: Never finishing the course

I speak to dozens of people every single day who have attempted to create an online course and have given up halfway through because they didn’t know what they were doing and didn’t know the next steps to take. Valuable knowledge has been temporarily parked on a Google drive, which then turns out to become a permanent parking spot. 

It’s easy to get distracted and discouraged when you embark on a brand new journey yourself and you haven’t done it before. Many course creators think they can do it alone and it’s easy to “just record a few videos” and “chuck the content into an online platform” … but it really isn’t. 

Creating an online course is a project, and it doesn’t happen overnight. Facing difficulties and hurdles is normal and will happen to you no matter what you do. It’s no different with online courses. You must prioritize and focus on finishing it. 

Related: Are Free Online Courses Worth the Time and Effort?

Mistake No. 3: Not knowing how to market and sell your online course 

At the beginning, the course is brand new to creators themselves, so it’s hard for them to market properly. Many course creators think they can just run Facebook ads to their sales page and see how it goes, only to end up burning lots of cash. If you are just starting out in your field and your course is new on the market, always start off with organic marketing. 

It takes time to perfect your marketing message, learn about your customers’ objectives and write amazing copy. If you write bad copy on Facebook or in an email, so be it. You lost some time, but you can go back and tweak the copy. But if you write the same bad copy and place ads on it, Facebook becomes a black hole for your hard-earned money. 

Being successful with your online course does require you to build a strong foundation, create the amazing content your audience is asking for and figure out how to market it properly, short-term and long-term. Once you do, you will reap the rewards of your labor.