According to Statista, the thriving e-learning industry is set to touch the milestone of 400 billion U.S. dollars in market size by 2026. This space is growing very fast and everyone wants a piece of it.
Creating online courses is the most popular part of this industry. Anyone with proper knowledge, skill, and experience can make a career out of it.
For the next few minutes, You and I will go on a little journey. We will discover the answer to today’s burning question “How to create an online course or eCourse with Dorik”.
We’ll unravel the secret of the online course-making process. Then, you’ll learn about how to publish them online, and handle the marketing part. It’s going to be a blast.
First of all, let’s see how Dorik can help you to reach your goal of becoming an online teacher or instructor.
How Dorik Can Help
Dorik is offering a platform where you can set up your personal website and run all your courses from there. You can create course outlines, upload tutorial videos, share blogs, add a membership feature, and so much more.
You will appreciate the easy-to-understand functionalities of this website builder. You will get a great collection of tutorials to watch that will explain all the fundamental concepts of this platform.
You can get started by using one of the pre-built e-learning templates. You will have some options in your hand to choose from.
Select the one you like, customize it as much as you want and you’ll have your own course-sharing platform in no time.
After that, divert all your focus to creating new courses that will help a lot of people.
With a website built with Dorik, you will have the flexibility to offer both free and paid courses. That way you can create customized content for your students and followers.
The membership feature of Dorik will let you have total control over your subscribed students.
You can integrate Stripe, PayPal, and Gumroad payment buttons into your site to receive payments from the students who will buy the course. You will get this option with the Dorik Premium Plan.
You will also love the organized dashboard of Dorik CMS. It will let you manage your website’s content in a way that will take a lot of pressure off of you. Content organization is a crucial part of any content-sharing platform. So it is important to have a tight grip on that section.
How to Create an Online Course: The Journey Begins
Creating something new is always fun and thrilling. That becomes even more exciting if you work with something you love. That’s exactly what you have to do when you decide to create a course.
Find something you are good at and you think that others will love to learn from you. You can apply the divide and conquer rule to crack this process.
Here’s how:
Make a List of Your Skills
Before thinking about anything else, take a notebook and start making a list. The list should include all the skills you mastered throughout your lifetime.
I’m sure the list will have some interesting inputs. Now, separate those skills that have brought you any kind of achievement or awards. Those are your strong zone.
Once you complete that part, it’s time to make a priority list. Things you love to do and enjoy spending time with should have the top priority.
That’s because it is likely that you will enjoy teaching things you are passionate about. Try to avoid things that you learned for a particular reason but don't care about.
Find a Skill That Has Market Demand
Has anyone ever come to you to find the solution for a problem they’re facing because you are good at it? Or do you provide help and support on a particular topic either online or offline?
If yes, then you should consider that topic as the subject for your next online course or eCourse.
If someone is facing a problem, many more people are also facing that problem. It's a reasonable assumption.
The same goes for the case of someone who wants to learn something. That is the concept of market demand.
Now, where there is a demand, there is an opportunity for business. After all, creating an online course is not only about teaching others. It's also about making some money for yourself.
Select Your Niche
You can’t make a course that will appeal to everybody, right? So, you have to choose the audience for whom you will create the course. Explore some communities related to your course topic.
Try to identify what they want to learn and what problems they are facing. Doing that will make your job a lot easier. That way, you will be able to focus on particular pain points of your audience.
Now you can plan your course outline focusing on those points. That will help you to generate a course that is right on point. Everyone loves watching a video that doesn't beat around the bush.
Begin Your Online Course Creation Adventure
Whenever you find a potential course topic, ask yourself, will people show interest to pay for a course like this? Because if they don’t want to spend their money on it, then it’s not worth your time and effort.
You can follow some strategies to create a successful course that will create a regular income source for you.
Choose a Specific Course Topic
Try to avoid broad topics for any course. If you put too much information in one course, it will be tough for the audience to keep up. Rather select a topic that answers specific questions that people are searching for.
Do some online and offline research and surveys (if possible) to get a better grip on the subject matter.
Once you find such a topic, try to dig out some subcategories within that niche. Doing this will help your content to reach more audiences.
Suppose, you have a course about how to become a better photographer. There you can give out some extra information about photography-related things.
Talk about different types of cameras, lenses, photography angles, etc. It will add value to your course for sure.
Let me give you another example to further clarify my point. Now, you’re a Dorik website builder expert and you are making a course on how to create an online course-sharing website using Dorik.
For this, you must make some video tutorials showcasing the process of creating a website using Dorik. That’s easy to decide, right?
Now to make this even more interesting for the students, you can explore some additional features offered by Dorik.
Like, show some e-learning website templates that you really like or how to upload tutorial videos or teach them how to publish blogs on the website using Dorik CMS and add a comment section.
Doing all these will help to show your expertise and increase your course quality.
Create a Course Outline
This is the curriculum of your course that you will follow to produce top-quality content. To convert your idea into reality, you have to create a step-by-step lesson plan.
The lesson plan includes the main topics that you are going to cover and their sequential order. Creating the order is up to you, you have to decide which topic you want to teach first and which one after that.
Every little topic you cover should have a precise aim and goal to ensure the best outcome for your audience. You can do storyboarding if you are familiar with the concept.
Storyboarding is an excellent way to document your work plan in an organized way.
Give some attention to making the course interactive too so that the students don’t get bored. Try to include some fun examples and materials in the lesson plan.
Your aim should be to keep your audiences engaged.
You can start each lesson with an introduction. Then follow with some theoretical discussion. Showing some relatable examples and applications are always a good idea. Now end the session by handing out some assignments to keep them committed.
This is a good practice to follow for any type of course.
Decide The Content Types For The Course
The content types you choose for a course can dictate the quality of the course. You can make a course either very interesting or immensely boring by choosing between the right and wrong content types.
The most common content type includes a recorded video with the instructor’s face, screen recorded video, animated video, slideshow, blogs, eBooks, etc.
You have to understand which content type suits best with what type of course topic.
For example, let me recall my previous example where you have a web development course using Dorik. Now all the popular courses on web development use screen-recorded video tutorials where the instructors sometimes show their faces too.
Website development is all about coding and visuals so those content types are most compatible with that course.
Therefore you can follow in their footsteps for your web development course. You can make videos and add voice-overs to show and describe the steps of making a beautiful website.
Doing this will make the course intriguing and effective. That’s exactly my point here. You have to decide what types of content will engage your audience more with the course.
Start Making Tutorials
Tutorials can be in many formats like videos, blogs, podcasts, slides, etc. The most popular among them are video tutorials.
You have to filter out the best suitable format according to your course topic.
Recording tutorial videos is a very crucial part of the process and you have to master this art. You have to become the face and voice that people will want to see and listen to more and more.
Train yourself to be a better presenter and smooth talker. Keep a smiley face throughout the whole video to send some positive vibes.
Gather some knowledge about recording equipment if you want to use them. Knowing some basic videography rules and editing techniques will go a long way.
You can use free video editing platforms like Veed, and Canva to save some time and effort.
The best way to make a tutorial is to record it by yourself but let’s face it, nowadays we rely on technology for every little thing, right?
We want to automate our work as much as we can and that’s alright. There are some automated video-making platforms available too that you can consider.
If you think that AI-generated videos will serve the purpose of your course content, then you can check out this list of popular AI Video Generators. You will find some interesting options to turn your script into videos.
The words will come automatically if you are properly knowledgeable about a topic. You just have to make sure that your word choices are simple enough to understand by any level of viewer.
Try avoiding unnecessary sounds, animations, and graphics to make it cleaner.
Bring Your Course Online
You have to bring your course online because that’s what all the hard work was about, right? Once you publish your course and make it available to the audience, you will open the portal to earn money online. The journey of your passive income starts right here.
There are several ways to make your course available in the virtual world. I will discuss only the two most popular ways here.
Publish on Your Personal Website
This is the best option to run a course. If you publish your course on your personal course-sharing website, then you’ll be the sole proprietor of that business.
You won’t have to share your profit with anybody else, so you’ll have a better profit margin. Besides that, having a personal website will serve you in many ways.
A course-sharing website built with the Dorik E-learning template will have sections like the image below.
Another upside of having a personal website is you can be sure that whoever visits that site either knows about you or is interested in what you are doing.
That’s the textbook definition of a potential customer. You just have to motivate them enough to convert their interest into a purchase.
On your personal website, not only do you get to share all your courses but also you can write blogs, start a podcast, create a community, share photos, and much more. It opens a whole new world of possibilities for you.
Now, if you don’t have a personal website, you can set one up with Dorik website builder within minutes. You don’t need any prior coding or design knowledge to do that. You can do it even faster using the amazing pre-built templates available in Dorik.
Let me tell you the steps of how to create a tutorial website using Dorik:
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Step 1: Go to Dorik and Sign Up. Though you can start working without signing up, if you wish to publish your site, then you have to Sign Up. After signing up, you will get access to the Dorik dashboard with the option of creating a New Website.
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Step 2: Once you click New Website, you will see many templates that you can select and customize. In this guide, I will suggest you select the E-learning template. It’s specifically built for creating a course-sharing platform.
This template has a pre-built course showcase, course outline, tutorial display, testimonials, and pricing sections plus some more.
Also, you can use Dorik AI to generate a tutorial website with Dorik. Check Dorik AI.
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Step 3: Now click Publish and set a project name as well as a subdomain name under Dorik to publish your site. You can also add a custom domain name if you own any.
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Step 4: All you have to do now is keep customizing the template with your preferred position for each element and content. You can change and design every single element of the template.
You can read the documentation and watch the tutorials to learn more about what you can do with your website and how you can do it.
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Step 5: Once you complete the designing and customization part, you can check out all the plans offered by Dorik and choose your preferred one.
Enter The Marketplace
You can upload your course to an online course-sharing platform. They offer the creators to upload and sell their courses. For that, you will have to agree to a partnership contract.
That means, for every sale, the platform will get a share of the money you make. Platforms like Thinkific, Udemy, Skillshare, Whop, etc. offer this service.
The downside of entering the marketplace is that there is a lot of competition there so it’s tough to stand out. Visitors of that platform will see many courses on the same topic so the traffic will be distributed.
Set a Competitive Price
Pricing is very tricky when it comes to online courses. There is no way to find out the perfect price for a course but we can always make calculated assumptions. Like, find out how much other courses on this topic cost and calculate an average.
It is likely that your course topic won't be unique and that's alright. A course doesn't sell on the basis of its uniqueness.
It sells for its quality and depth of learning opportunities. Find those other courses and see how much they cost.
This part is very important to maintain stability in the market rate too. Some people intentionally set the bar too low to invoke more sales but it’s the wrong approach.
That’s because they are not getting proper value for their invested time and money. Moreover, they are generating low revenue.
One trick that seems to work for pricing is to set it on the higher side. The reason behind this has to do something with people's psychology.
People seem to think that free or low-cost courses are not that good in quality. They fear that the outcome won't be fruitful.
That's why they try to avoid them especially if they’re serious about learning. Of course, it will depend a lot on the course length.
People adore the things they buy with a handsome amount of money. That's another point in favor of high pricing because people will be more hooked on learning when they pay a higher amount for a particular course.
They are likely to complete the course too. So it’s better for both creators and learners.
Some Marketing Tips to Gather Crowd
We only buy the things that we see and know about. So don’t hesitate to share your course with the world.
You never know where your audience will come from so doing some publicity is the best approach to gather the initial crowd.
Once some people start loving it, you won’t have to worry about the traffic anymore.
Your audience will start doing the publicity for you. Sometimes they might need a push to do that so don’t be shy about telling them to share it if they like it.
You should definitely share it from your social media profiles too because that’s where most people are nowadays.
Some popular marketing strategies that you can follow:
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Email Marketing: Sending customized emails with early discounts and promotional offers can bring a lot of traffic to your course. But for that to happen, you’ll need prior subscribers on your site who shares the same interest as you. Otherwise, if you send cold emails to people who aren’t a part of your niche, it’ll only waste your time.
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Social Media Marketing: Social media plays a vital role in marketing for any type of business. You should target Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram to gather followers to make those platforms your potential sales channel.
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Writing Blogs: Writing a blog for your course is an excellent way to optimize and boost the SEO performance of your website. Doing that opens the door for lots of organic traffic to your site.
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Paid Ads Marketing: If you have a budget for marketing, then you should spend some of them to run ads on social media and google searches. Targeted ads tend to have a high conversion rate than normal publicity.
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YouTube Marketing: As soon as you decide to make online courses, you should create a youtube channel. You can make some promo videos of your course and share videos on other topics too. That will automatically bring together a lot of people who are interested in those topics and they will be your target audience.
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Affiliate Programs, Referrals, and Reviews: Encourage others to become an ambassador and promote your site and courses. In return, they’ll get a percentage when someone purchases so it’ll be a win-win situation for both of you.
Also, motivate your current and past students to give reviews and testimonials about their experience with the course. You can offer them some rewards if they refer someone to take the course.
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Webinars and Free Preview: You can make a short free preview of the course and share it with people to pique their interest. You can also host a webinar or Q&A session to engage people with your idea and tell them what you have created. There is a good chance you’ll get some new students from there.
You can also try to translate your course into other popular languages to attract an even larger audience group. Once you go international, the market will be bigger and the business opportunity will be huge.
Evaluate the Results
Once you are done with the marketing, it is important to evaluate the results you are getting. Like, how many new users are coming to the course page and how many of them are buying the course.
It will instantly give you an idea of how engaging your marketing strategy and course outline is.
You will also get valuable insights to implement in your next course and marketing content and make them perform better.
You can use tools like Google Analytics to get a detailed analysis report. You can easily integrate Google Analytics into a website built with Dorik.
You can run surveys with a custom survey form to collect your student’s opinions. Also, you can integrate Zapier to receive subscription and contact form data. You can watch relevant tutorials to learn how to do that.
Some Additional Tips on Conducting an Online Course
Create Private Community
If you wish to be a regular instructor or course creator, you must find new ways to keep communicating with your current and old students. As they have already completed a course with you, they will likely participate in another. Creating a private community group can help your old and new students to find updates on upcoming or old courses. Also, they can share their questions and thoughts on the group with you and others.
So, check on them every now and then, assure them that you’re there if they need you, and keep the constant communication line open.
Gather Feedback and Get Better at The Game
There is no better way of self-evaluation as an instructor or content creator than taking feedback from your direct students and audiences. They can tell you what they liked about your teaching and what can be improved. It’s the quickest route too.
You can include a comment section below the videos and your blog, or you can create a survey form and ask the students to fill it out. You will immediately get to know about the scope for improvements and implement those in your next courses.
Dorik offers an easy way to create a comment section for your site by integrating Disqus in any section of your website. The process is very simple. The same goes for creating survey forms; they have pre-built custom form elements to implement anywhere on your site.
You can also do these additional things:
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Create a Facebook Group: Having a Facebook group makes it easier to create an active community. Your students can share their problems and receive help from others. Also, you can share announcements, create threads and take opinions using that group.
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Create a Members-Only Area: You can introduce some features to your website that only your subscribed members can access. It can be something like a chatting option, blog, forum, podcast, etc.
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Offer 1-on-1 Discussion: You can provide more personalized service to the subscribed members by offering them a 1-on-1 problem-solving session. You can charge them for each session separately or you can offer them a special package right when they purchase the course.
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Brainstorming: This part is totally up to you. Do some brainstorming to come up with new ideas to interact with your audiences and keep them hooked. Don’t let them detach themselves from the course or your platform.
FAQs on How To Create and Bring Your Course Online, Answered
Why Become an Online Course Creator?
The first and most important reason is to follow your passion and share your expertise with others. On one hand, it will take you to the Boss Level on that topic, and on the other hand, you will be able to impact people’s lives by making them skilled.
I already mentioned the e-learning market growth prediction from Statista in the beginning so you know how big of an opportunity there is in this sector.
You can rely less on your day job when your online course starts generating revenue. You have to create a course once and you can sell it as many times as you want. So the income is also reliable.
Is creating online courses a viable way to earn money online?
Yes, it is. E-learning became very popular even before covid hit and during the pandemic, the market growth skyrocketed. More and more institutions and organizations are choosing online platforms to train their employees and conduct meetings.
People who want to learn new skills are looking for online courses as it is easier and more convenient to learn. Online course-making is a very viable way to earn money online. Plus, you can join some best recurring affiliate programs related to your course topic or niche to earn some extra money.
Can I create an online course for free?
The answer to this question is both Yes and No. “Yes” because you can record the course videos using your phone and then upload them to your website. This process is totally free.
However, you need to invest some money to own your personal website. The amount is not a lot, but it’s not free either. So that’s the “No” angle. It is indirectly related to your course-sharing process.
How to Earn Money from Blogging?
There are many ways to earn money from blogging. One of the popular ways is displaying ads on your website using various advertising programs like Google AdSense, AdThrive, etc. Another way is through affiliate marketing, where you can join multiple best recurring affiliate programs related to your blog niche. You can also earn money by writing sponsored posts for brands or companies.
Do I need to learn video editing and coding to create my personal course-sharing website?
No. You can create and publish an online course without prior video editing and coding knowledge. But learning some basics about video editing will surely help you to make your course videos more professional looking and engaging.
There are also some AI tools available that can help you on this matter.
For the website creation part, you have a lot of options available. The easiest way is to pick a website builder like Dorik. Watching basic tutorials provided by Dorik is enough to understand what you need to do.
If you feel like exploring other website builder options, you can read our ultimate list of the best website builders available in the market.
Wrapping Up
I hope I was able to provide you with enough insights on “How to create an online course or eCourse” and how you can do it with Dorik. Now all you have to do is implement the things you learned from here.
With each passing day, we are relying more and more on technology to solve our daily life problems. This rate will only go higher and that’s a fact.
So we should also make ourselves compatible with this situation and act accordingly. If we can earn our livelihood from online platforms without any side hustle, nothing can be better than that, right?
Running online courses using all your skills and expertise can allow you that freedom. It’s completely legit and viable to build a profession around it.
So, don’t waste any more of your time by doubting your ability, create a website with Dorik and start making online courses. Do proper planning and enough research and you will be victorious for sure.
Happy teaching!
