The Beginner’s Guide to Setting Up a Teachable Course
You’ve got the intention of setting up a Teachable course, that’s great! But how do you know that your course is going to be in demand from your target audience? How do you pick a subject for your course students will want to engage with?
The likelihood is that you already have an initial idea about what you want your Teachable course subject to be. It will be your passion, your area of interest or even what your business is centred around. Whichever it is, you will have knowledge in this area which you can pass on to others. But how do you pick the specifics that will make your course stand out from this crowd?
Now you COULD just create courses for all your great ideas within your Teachable school and chances are, some of these courses would be a success. However, this would be a massive waste of resources — namely your time setting up and creating content for all these ideas, just to figure out which courses flew and which flopped. Something you could have worked out before you spent time creating all these different courses. So, how do you do this?
Narrow Down Your Ideas
Do not make your Teachable course too broad. If you do, you risk creating content for your course even harder for yourself. You will be indecisive about what information to include and go into detail about, as there will be too much of it to include! You also risk not giving your students the valuable content they crave as the advice will be too broad and general. If you make your course specific, you can go into much more detail about what you are teaching, making for a better experience for your students.
Get Specific
Write a list of all your ideas and the pros and cons of each one. Which inspires you the most? Which is the most viable? Which do you have the resources at this present time to create? Remember, saying no to courses at this time doesn’t mean you will never create them. It just means you might be best creating them further down the line for them to be successful. Once you have a shortened list, move on to the next stage.
Is there an audience for your course?
You have your shortened list of what YOU want to create, but is it what your potential students want? Is there an audience ready and waiting to buy your course? Try searching for the most common questions or concerns where your target audience hang out. Join Facebook groups surrounding your expertise and see if there is a need for your course idea. If no one is asking for it, it’s probably not the best course to make your Teachable school profitable. And it’s not just Facebook groups you can utilise for your research, Quora and Twitter could be good places to go searching too. Even looking for the top-selling books in your area of expertise on Amazon could tell you what people want to know.
Ask, ask, ask!
People want to help! Especially the ones who are in the same position as you or whose input will actually benefit them in the long run. Put a poll up in the Facebook groups discussed earlier asking which course would benefit them the most. This also leaves you an open window to then advertise your course when it’s ready! If you have picked a course, but can’t decide on a course name, ask the ‘Teachable Tribe’ on Facebook! These course creators are in the exact same position as you and love the community aspect of giving advice. Creating a simple poll asking which course name is the best hook for your course will provide you with the opinions of others who are used to marketing courses.
Search for competition
Unless you have a super niche field, the chance of you providing a course that is COMPLETELY different from anything else are slim. However, you don’t want to be entering a completely crowded market either. Try searching Udemy, unlike Teachable, you can search for specific courses that are similar to yours. If you find a lot of courses similar to your idea, it might not be a great idea. But if you find a few courses, and you feel that your course will provide students with a different viewpoint, you might have picked a winner. There’s nothing wrong with searching for courses online and looking at how you can make yours different or even better. In fact, this is what you should be doing! After you have done this, try searching Google. This will show you if people are searching for your course idea and how much competition there is out there.
Hopefully, you will now have a few, viable options for your course. And the beauty is, in time, you can create all of them! But the first should always be which scored highest in all of these categories. Which is the most viable, inspires you the most, which is it that people are asking for the most and the one where you don’t have a great amount of competition. This should be your first course that will get you noticed on Teachable, the rest can be created in time.
For more information on Teachable marketing, visit our Reachable website
