Avoid These 7 Mistakes As a Course Creator | Tips From Experts

You do not want to put tons of time and effort into creating a course that ends up failing, do you? In that case, you want to pay attention to the mistakes most online course creators make when running their businesses and launching their courses. 

 This article outlines the mistakes and reasons for failure after talking to different course creators, who shared their stories and solutions with us. Avoiding these common mistakes increases the chances of launching a successful and popular online course. 

And if you are also looking for solutions, you are about to find out how you can make your eLearning business more effective. 

What can we learn from statistics?

If you think you are the only one who has made these mistakes and has high churn rates, we are telling you—you are not alone! 

According to statistics, even though more students now prefer online learning, they still drop out of most courses (40-60%). Another thing is that not every class will be purchased, and some will fail without even getting visibility. Why is that happening? After completing some research and reading various forum posts about why students stopped taking the course, here are the two most common reasons. 

1. If you create not engaging content, students won't be motivated to continue the course and complete it. Secondly, if you fail to explain the material well enough or provide additional resources, syllabi, learning outcomes & or objectives, that also will contribute to the failure rates. Make sure to make your course engaging, use the correct voice intonation, body language, warm-up games, quizzes, and other motivational factors, and include personal feedback. 

Here is what Eli Natoli, a course creator and marketing strategist, shared with us. 

“Your students will sign up for your course, and they will have all the intentions of learning, but they get sidetracked because life happens. One of the ways you can encourage them to get to the finish line is through mobile applications. Ensure to utilize mobile notifications and gamification to help them progress and finally get to the finish line”. 

 

-Eli Natoli

Course Creator, Coach, and a Marketing Strategist

2. Besides students failing or not wishing to continue the course, online courses may fail due to the wrong marketing strategy or not having one at all. Sharing it on social media with paid advertisements is not a strategy. Your marketing strategy should be based on research, and you should know your niche, audience, needs & wants alongside the overall demand of the course in the market. 

Now, let’s look at what the most common mistakes in online course creation are, so you can make your course even more successful. 

#1 Skipping the research 

Yes, we know! Research is not the funniest part of the whole funnel of creating and selling online courses. And what happens most of the time, is that you overlook the research part, thinking you know all that you need before getting in creating the content and putting your course together. 

Hoping to reach your destination without knowing the way is clearly senseless. So is going right into creation without doing the market research. As a result, you get low enrollment rates or no enrollments at all. To avoid this, your first step should be to start with research. 

Here is what you can do!  

Jessica Terzakis, who has helped thousands of creators launch successful online courses and multiply their incomes, advises the following. 

“My greatest suggestion is to start with your research. You should look at other people who create courses on your topic, see how they frame and position it, and analyze whether they are successful. You should, in no case, copy them. If people buy their courses, chances are high that they will buy your variation”. 

 

Jessica Terzakis, 

Business Growth Consultant and Course Creator

At this stage, you really want to have interviews with your students and ideal clients who will potentially buy your course. This way, you will hear directly from your audience what they want in your courses. At the end of the day, it is all about your ideal client and what they want to learn from you. Once you are done with your market research, you can go to the techy part. 

#2 Not validating the course idea 

The biggest mistake you can make as a course creator is going straight into the module and thinking, “Is this something that my students want? I don’t know what I can add here.” What we feel most passionate about does not necessarily suggest that others need it or find it fascinating as well. 

“Is it really a hot button for your community, or is it something you're passionate about? It's nice that you want to be passionate about what you do, but you need to make sure that both of those things are there, that your community is interested and you're passionate, and those are the things that you're promoting out there.” 

 

Jessica Koch

Founder of Virtual Assistant Membership Program

To save yourself time and effort, take your time to validate your online course idea. Course idea validation is a long process. You cannot do one poll on Instagram with few people voting for you to create a course, and that it is a good idea. 

Here is what you can do! 
You should aim to find answers to the following questions:

• Is it trending now?
• Is it on top of my ideal student’s minds?
• Is it something my students find challenging and need a solution?
• Is it different from the solutions that already exist?
• Is it filling any kind of gap?

Of course, the best way is to ask your audience directly. This includes online surveys or face-to-face interviews. If you have an exciting audience, that’s better! Do a survey, send the results via email, and analyze the overall results. 

Another great way to find out if your online course idea will work is by researching what people are googling. This way, you get the idea of what's being asked. 

Related: 10 Easy Ways To Validate Your Online Course Idea.

The next way is to use Uteach’s AI Course Idea generator. The tool suggests many ideas you can choose from and automatically creates your course description and online course outline. 

#3 Not communicating the value of transformation 

Another mistake course creators make that can potentially become a reason your course fails is not articulating the value your course provides. It is not really a secret that students will end up not buying your course if they can’t see the beautiful transformation you are offering. 

“You really need to make sure you communicate the message of your transformation well.”

 

Jessica Koch

Founder of Virtual Assistant Membership Program

Here is what you can do! 

• Make sure you mention the learning outcomes the students will achieve and show tangible outcomes with the help of your website and landing pages.
• Share the success stories of previous students through your social media accounts and website as well.
• Emphasize the benefits and positive changes that participants can expect to see in their lives or careers after completing the course in every message you transfer
• Try to interact with your audience through social media, webinars, or live Q&A sessions to address their questions and concerns directly. 

Especially if your course and program are relatively expensive, all these points are essential to justify the price and show the value of the transformation. 

#4 Offering a standard solution

You can provide high-quality courses as much as you want, but it will be tough to promote unless you offer something different. 

 A critical reason for the failure of creators is the absence of the USP. Each course needs its unique selling point. What is the one thing that differentiates your course from many others? Why would anyone consider getting YOUR course? 

The answer to these questions is your own experience and a new perspective. 

“What you really need to pay attention to is whether or not the course you are creating is filling a gap in your industry that nobody else is filling. Once you figure out the unmet gaps, think about how I can infuse more of my unique way of solving the problem into this topic.”

 

-Eli Natoli

Course Creator, Coach, and a Marketing Strategist

Here is what you can do!

• Reflect on your own skills, knowledge, and experiences to identify what sets you apart from others. This could be a specialized skill, unique approach, or personal journey that you can share with your community. 
• Conduct research to understand what other courses are available in your niche and identify any gaps or opportunities where you can offer something unique.

Once you've identified your unique expertise and the gap in the market, clearly define your USP. This could be a specific topic you excel in, a distinctive teaching method, or a promise of results based on your own success story.

Related: Define The Best Unique Selling Point of Your Online Courses

#5 Overlooking the marketing piece

The worst mistake course creators often make is overlooking the marketing aspect of the process. What oftentimes happens is you get this brilliant moment when a great idea strikes, and you commit to bringing that course idea a reality. And when the content and modules are ready, you think, “Okay, how am I gonna sell this?". 

If you do not want to face that ever again, make sure you start marketing your course even before it is ready! 

This is what Jessica Terzakis told our team, as someone who has been helping people create their courses for more than seven years. 

“I cannot tell you how many people have come to me and said, I spent months putting this course together. Yet you spent all this time putting this thing together, and that's not really yielding any revenue.”

Here is what you can do! 

What Jessica does to avoid this is that she works on the modules and focuses on work on other pieces like marketing and speaking to her audience all simultaneously. 

If you follow this pattern and build your community right from the beginning. So that when you have the course ready to go, there are people who are excited and willing to say yes to working with you. 

Listen to feedback. Customers are your most valuable assets because they can help you succeed or fail. Make sure to build good customer relationships, ask for their opinions, and create good experiences so they will share a reasonable idea about your services. Thus, this will create a positive public image and increase brand awareness. 

#6 Not being able to justify the price

There is nothing like an overpriced or underpriced course. Yet, if, as a course creator, you fail to communicate the price for your course, this can be another mistake! 

When potential participants consider enrolling in a course, they naturally want to understand the value they will receive in return for their investment. Failing to justify the price results in skepticism or even reluctance to enroll in your course. 

Here is what you can do! 

Know your market’s pain points. This is important in every aspect of course promotion. You can better meet your customer's pain points when you know them. Therefore, you can offer a compelling solution that will let you sell the course above the average price and still get a good amount of sales, meeting the equilibrium point. 

As mentioned before, you should be able to clearly articulate the unique benefits and outcomes that participants will gain from taking the course. Emphasize all the uniqueness your course has. 

Another thing that can help you to set the correct price is the additional materials you offer with the course. If you provide an e-book, extra resources, or syllabi, all of those affect the final pricing. 

Related:  5 Tips To Price Your Online Courses and Make Money.

#7 Choosing many unnecessary and wrong tools

Let's sit back for a moment and think. Do you need that editing app for videos, the other for presentations, zoom for video conferencing, and a virtual classroom in an entirely different space? Will it make you more organized? Or will it just be time-consuming? 

All the extra apps that promise to make your life easier make it harder and scattered instead of organized. And this inefficiency of using too many tools affects the quality of the course and the student's learning experience, which can fail the system. 

Here is what you can do! 

Choose a platform such as Uteach that offers everything from one place. 

 Thus, it makes your life easier, time saved, and students' experience better. With Uteach, you can hold live lessons with integrations such as Zoom, InSpace, etc., control email marketing, set automation for routine tasks, save time, and have a blog. Also, you can publish as many courses as you want and have unlimited purchases from a total number of students. You gain control over every area, including course marketing, from one single easy-to-use dashboard.        
 

Every cloud has a silver lining

No matter what happens, remember the importance of keeping trying. Of course, there is no need to hit the same wall again; be more competent and find a way out by following the tips by the successful creators presented above. 

Also, remember, if a baby falls 50 times, they will stand up and walk again until they can do that perfectly. None of them will give up on walking till they can, so you follow your dreams and try as many times as needed to succeed.

Most importantly, choose the right course creation platform to help you with further promotion. For example, one of the best platforms is Uteach. With Uteach, you can create a full-featured website,  market and sell your courses and programs all from one dashboard. 

Start your 14-day free trial and make your next online course launch a success.