The Top Tips for Launching Your First Course As A Private Practitioner
Diversifying your revenue streams is a key step when growing and expanding your private practice. Creating multiple ways to serve your clients (and earn additional income) outside of one-on-one therapy sessions will help you move away from trading time for money - something that isn’t always sustainable as your life and goals evolve.
One way you can begin to introduce additional service offerings into your practice is to develop courses or workshops that provide immense value to your ideal client while also allowing them to work through the lessons and content at their own pace, fitting into their schedule. There are several things to consider before launching your first course so keep reading for our best tips!
Pick A Topic
Choosing a topic for your course or workshop might seem like a no-brainer but it’s important that you choose something that you are truly passionate about. Part of what makes online courses successful is the delivery of the content.
When you’re passionate about the content, your ideal clients and students will pick up on that energy and use it as a guidepost to successfully work through your course. Students who actually finish courses are more likely to report a better experience and actually attain the goal that your course set out to achieve.
A general rule of thumb is that your course topic should be something that you are passionate about and that you also have knowledge or experience in. Courses need to solve a problem or offer value to the student, so it’s important that you choose a topic that will allow you to do just that.
Ensure Your Ideal Client Actually Wants It
Once you’ve narrowed down your topic, it’s time to ensure that your ideal client actually wants a course. Creating a course can be quite the undertaking, so it’s always a good idea to spend some time on market research before you invest your resources into creating a course that doesn’t sell because your ideal client wasn’t interested in it.
You can perform market research by asking past or current clients to have a 15-minute interview with you or to complete a short survey. You will want to ask them about their current pain points or their goals and desires, as it pertains to your course topic. Not only will this process tell you if your course topic and idea is viable, but it will also give you insight into what outcome your course needs to promise and the types of lessons your ideal client would benefit from.
Determine Your Client’s Outcome
As an added bonus, these market research efforts can also be used to create sales page copy. Taking the exact words from your ideal client and infusing those into your sales copy and your website will help you connect with your audience more effectively. Your content will reflect their exact feelings, fears, wants and goals because you can speak directly to the information they provided you during the market research phase.
This will help you determine exactly what problem your course needs to address in order to be of interest and be successful for your ideal client. Oftentimes, our ideal clients will tell us exactly what they are struggling with or what goal they want to achieve and that is exactly what you want to build your course on.
If you’re stuck on determining what the outcome of your will be, ask yourself the following questions:
What will your student learn or be able to accomplish upon completion of your course?
What skills or knowledge will your clients be able to demonstrate once they have completed your course?
What problem will be solved or what goal will be achieved?
What feelings will your client move away from or what positive experiences will they move toward as a result of your course?
Brainstorm and Build Your Course
Once you have determined your topic, verified that your course is of interest to your audience and determined what end result your students will experience, it’s time to brainstorm and build your course content.
During this step, you’ll want to map out the framework of your course. Determine how many modules and lessons you will include. Decide how you will teach your course content. Will you record video or audio lessons, will you create workbooks with activities and case studies?
It may feel impossible to narrow down all of your knowledge and experience into a single course but it’s important to remember that you can change and update your course over time as you receive student feedback, or notice common frequently asked questions.
The first iteration of your course doesn’t have to be the only version of your course. You can continue to tweak it to ensure that you are supporting your ideal client and helping them achieve the ultimate outcome successfully.
Are you ready to create your first course? Check out our Scale Your Practice program and let us support you in the brainstorming, building and selling stages and get your product in front of your ideal clients!
