Do One Thing and Grow Your Online Course Business

Everyday, do one thing, even if it is small, to move you towards your goal. Discipline is extremely important, and this concept applies not only to students, but also to online course creators.

Focus on improving one specific aspect of what you are learning or what you are creating. Spend at least some time everyday (even 5 minutes to start) to help yourself progress. Build a habit for yourself. Even if it is hard, make sure you spend a bit of time each day to move forward towards your goal. As you build a routine it will come more naturally and you’ll be able to fit in more time easier. Even if you don't feel inspired to, commit to working on your project at a specific time in the day and stick to it.

The first app we built for ourselves as a company was in fact a personal productivity and goal tracking app to help people form habits around recurring goals: https://cleargoalsapp.com. We firmly believe that forming good habits and spending time each day on your goals is far more important than checking off todos, because if you are stuck doing the latter, then you may never give yourself time to progress with your real goals.

Trying to do everything at once doesn’t help you get better. If you are trying to learn and improve a skill, the best way to do that is to focus on one very specific aspect of it. Let’s say that skill is playing basketball. If you know that you always miss shots from a specific position, then you should practice shots in that specific position and situation. If you are playing a pick-up game, you can benefit from purposely putting yourself in that position that you are lacking in, in order to help yourself improve that specific aspect. As you continue doing that with all the different little techniques that come into play with your specific skill, then you end up with something that as a whole can blow people away.

“Ever since I was a child I have had this instinctive urge for expansion and growth. To me, the function and duty of a quality human being is the sincere and honest development of one's potential.” ― Bruce Lee

Keep yourself Motivated by Measuring Small Wins

When you are just starting out with creating your online course, it can be hard to find motivation to improve everyday, especially when you don’t yet have the sales coming in to drive you forward.

Searching for motivating videos online usually isn’t what you need to solve your problem. Forcing yourself to simply get started is what you really need. Once you start working on your goal, you’ll be able to continue. If you didn’t feel like going to the gym, but you went anyway, and took those first couple steps on the treadmill, are you going to stop running after 10 seconds? Getting started is sometimes the hardest part, but once you beat that hurdle, you start to grow.

If you aren’t taking action, don’t expect results. Doing nothing every day wasn’t growing your business before, it isn’t going to in the future. If you feel resistance and feel stuck in not knowing what to do next, take a step back and think to yourself, “what is it really that is preventing me from taking the next step”? Oftentimes some of the things that we believe are trapping us from moving forward really aren't a big deal. Here's an example:

Problem: “I can't launch my online course business and even find out if the content I have is good enough yet because I haven't formed a legal business entity. So I can't collect payments and do business yet.“

Solution: “Get your product in front of potential students and offer it to them for free, while you go and have a site like legal zoom help you form your company.”

Often the things we perceive as major roadblocks, aren’t really that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. Learn how to separate yourself from the worry the problem has created in your mind, and many times you’ll find the problem isn’t as big as you initially believed.

Instead of focusing on the big end result which can feel paralyzing in scope, break your project down into smaller goals so that it is easier for you to see progress and keep yourself going.

For example, creating a course outline could be one goal. Creating an individual lesson could be another. Assuming you don't have any existing content that will be going into your course, here is what your first week of course creation could look like:

Checklist for your first week of building your online course

• DAY 1: Create your initial course outline in our outline editor, and optionally setup your program settings for payment, and add your branding. (1 hour)
• DAY 2: Gain feedback from existing clients or potential students for structure and needs (2 hours)
• DAY 3: Write the text or script for a single lesson (2 hours)
• DAY 4: Setup lighting and audio for your first video lesson (see our guide for great lighting and audio) (1 hour)
• DAY 5: Record your first video lesson (3 hours)
• DAY 6: Start promoting and talking about your upcoming course launch to your audience and on social media, even if you haven't committed to a launch date yet. (2 hours)
• DAY 7: Create a project for students, and describe what they need to do in order to put your teaching to use. (1 hour)

If you ever find yourself stuck and not sure if your new online course business is ready to launch, please reach out to us! Hopefully we’ll be able to help you remove those roadblocks keeping you from taking the next step.

Imperfect action, beats inaction every day of the week, so just do it!