How to Create Time to Start or Finish Building Your Online Course

It can be difficult to balance striving to be world-class in your profession while finding time to teach what you’ve learned in the education program you are building. We'll share a few ways you can make progress towards completing and launching your first online course as well as a couple of reasons why you might be able to launch your course sooner than you think.

Dedicate Time Every Day

1. Build a habit of doing one thing every day (even if it is small), to move you towards your goal. Whether you aren’t quite in the mood or you don’t feel that you have time, force yourself to spend even 5 minutes to help yourself progress. Likely once you get started it will be easier to continue working.
2. Break down your work into smaller tasks and goals. In the same way that you will help your students learn by separating your content into chunks of lessons, focus on one small thing at a time to help yourself make progress towards finishing your online course.

Choose the Right Online Course Platform

The Climb Outline inside Heights Platform online course software is a great way to sketch out ideas for your program content. Worrying about all the lessons and courses you will need to create and the material for all of them can be daunting. Instead, start by breaking down your program into the courses that you will include in it (this may only be one course, or you might separate your program into a few sections of different courses). Next, think about the titles of each of the lessons that you would have in that course. List them all out, organize them in the sequence that you believe is best for your students and then review to see if there is anything you are missing. Now that you have your outline, you can go in and work on one lesson at a time.

Most people starting out will try to do much, and the number of tasks to complete will overwhelm them, causing them to never finish their course. With Heights online course platform, we try to eliminate as much work as possible for you. There is no need to hire a developer, to learn landing page software, to set up a payment gateway and merchant account, or to fiddle with web hosting. Heights Platform online course software is the mighty yet functional supercar of online course management and course platform.

In fact, attempting to create a big launch for the first time you’ve ever launched an online course, is likely going to be setting yourself up for unnecessary stress and suffering. In reality, it is actually best to launch your course before it is completely finished, and doing this will not only be easier for you, but it will be actually better for your students.

Why You Should Launch Your Online Course Before You Finish

Even if this is the first time you’ve launched an online course, you’ve likely taught your knowledge in some other way before as a mentor, coach, or consultant. Think of your process guiding your students or clients and how you would write or record it to put it into a course. If you haven’t taught in this way before, the best thing to do would be to first experiment with a small launch of your program as a group training of 5 - 10 students where you can guide them through your course more personally. This will allow you to find potential roadblocks and learn how you can structure your content to help future students avoid pitfalls.

Taking time to polish a course before having any students going through it will delay your course launch and will create an end product that doesn’t provide as powerful a result for your students because you do not yet have the experience to know where the average student will need more help.

Speaking to this same point, it is important to not trap yourself into thinking that you need an elaborate launch process. Start with one landing page or video that you promote to a few students and then provide those students with personal training to optimize your course. Then once your content is polished, and your student success rate where you want it, you can continue to grow and promote to a larger audience. After you are growing and stabilized, you can begin to work on more complex promotions, automation, and supplementary material. Remember you are selling the result that your program creates for your students. Getting to the point that your program provides that result as quickly as possible should be your goal in launching. Spending time on the new marketing strategy or additional video editing work to have the flashiest course is a distraction if you haven't launched yet.

Big launches are risky, stressful, and overrated. Small growth allows you as a one-man or woman mentor to build a truly sustainable business with less dependency on an all-or-nothing course launch. This approach also provides smaller, more manageable goals to work towards, and getting started quickly will provide motivation for you to continue and improve once those first couple enrollment sales come in.

In summary, spend time on your course every day, even if it is just a few minutes at first. Break down your program into smaller tasks, embrace imperfection and launch early to create a product that evolves from real feedback and successful students.