How To Create Your First eCourse

An e-course is fairly straight forward to create and deliver when you’re using an email service provider like AWeber or Mailchimp.

When creating a newsletter you use the ‘broadcast’ option. To create an e-course you use the ‘followup’ or ‘autoresponder’ option.

Using followups or autoresponders you can create a sequence of emails that are delivered to members in order at pre-determined intervals.

Subscribers can join the e-course at different times but they all start from email one (or followup one) in the sequence. This means that at any one time there will be subscribers at various stages of the course. All this is done automatically by your email service provider, you simply create the sequence, decide the frequency and let your email service provider do the rest.

Here are some basic steps to setting up your own e-course;

Step 1 – Topic

First you need to decide what your e-course will be about.

Step 2 – Breaking it Down

You need to break your topic down into seperate e-lessons. I usually tackle one sub-topic per lesson and throw in the occasionally ‘bits and pieces’ lesson to cover the rest.

Use spider diagrams or mind mapping to create an order for your lessons, shuffle them about until everything seems to flow correctly.

Step 3 – Write E-Lessons

Write the e-lessons. I like to do this in order and I write directly into the email dashboard, by doing this I feel I’m almost taking myself through the course, I find it helps me to notice if things don’t flow correctly. I also imagine myself as a beginner and read things back, it helps me cut the jargon and break things down in a way people can understand.

When I’m writing the e-lessons I try to keep them as short as possible but packing in as much valuable information as possible – no fluff! My pet hate is being told how to do something three different ways, just tell me how to do it already!

Step 4 – Decide Frequency

Decide how many days to leave between each lesson. I usually base this on how long it would take the recipient to consume and act upon the information provided.

I like weekly for ‘hobby style’ courses, but for my paid e-courses the lessons are daily and pretty intense.

Step 5 – Promotion

Promote your e-course using your blog, network and social media sites. Drive traffic to a sign-up page either on a page on your blog, or create a new blog and have a sign up page there.

I could go quite a bit further on this topic and discuss things like analysing conversion rates and open rates, carrying out split testing etc but I think that covers the basics.