When it comes to creating your online course, there are 3 big mistakes I see almost every wellness course creator make.
To be completely honest, these first 2 mistakes are actually what most business coaches are teaching when it comes to creating a course. Yikes! 🤯 Don't fall into that trap, please.
Today I'm going to let you in on what these mistakes are, so you can avoid making them in your own business. I got your back. 😘
Course Creation Mistake #1: Preselling before creating a course
When you pre-sell a course before you create it, you give yourself a few weeks between the pre-sell date and the date the content releases to the purchasers.
Now the few weeks between pre-sale and the day you promised you’d delivered week 1 of your course may be enough time to sufficiently create a course about say… how to color in a coloring book. But a wellness course that often includes assets like meal plans, nutrition programs, and video lessons that simplify complex nutrition information, all while sourcing peer reviewed studies to cite your findings… it’s A LOT of work.
If you make mistake #1, you're likely to rush through content creation, which means it won't be your best work and won't get the best results. Most often, I see students who try preselling before they create their course going back and re-creating the entire course down the line.
Course Creation Mistake #2: Creating a course before selling it
I know, it's a dichotomy. It's a mistake to pre-sell before you create, but it's also a mistake to create before you sell. The risk you run with mistake #2? Spending months creating a course that your audience doesn't want to pay for.
Being that you're the wellness expert on your course topic, it's difficult for you to remember what a beginner wants to learn. Which means you could miss out on creating lessons in your course that are crucial to a successful outcome for your students.
In my online course, Wellness Course Academy, you won't create your course until phase 2. After you've sold, developed, and delivered the curriculum in phase 1 as an MVP. This allows you to perfect the curriculum and test the outcome before you put in all the work to create the final product as an online course.
Course Creation Mistake #3: ‘Watch and Replicate'
Not familiar with the ‘Watch and Replicate' mistake? Allow me to explain.
From the audience, you're watching another business owner launch their online course. You watch their webinar, read their launch emails, and screenshot their IG stories. Then… you replicate what you saw them do, applying it to your own course launch.
Here's what's wrong with ‘Watch and Replicate':
- First, you have no idea the true success of the launch you're watching. Even if the business owner publicly shares the number of sales they made, you don't know how much they spent on ads, if all their sales came from affiliates, or what their conversion rate was. You have no idea what their actual profit was.
- Even if you follow everything they did, you won't know if your course is positioned appropriately for your audience. Sure, you can use their sales page as a template, but are you sharing the right pain points? Are you communicating the transformation? Are you selling the sizzle, or the steak?
WCA guides you through the process of perfectly positioning of your course – creating the copy for your sales pages, emails, and webinar so that it makes your customers feel like you're talking directly to them. Which in return, helps them to feel like your course is the answer to their problems. - With ‘Watch and Replicate' you're only able to see the actual launch. What about the part of your online wellness course that truly matters – the part that transforms lives? What about the course itself? Are you just going to piece together info you find on the internet to create your transformational course and hope you did it right?
Or are you going to learn from a college professor with 9 years of curriculum development experience (that's me!) so you can truly transform the lives of your students with a powerful, and concise yet comprehensive course experience?
On that note, I'll leave you with this:
Would you ever try to watch a friend run a marathon and assume you could just get out there alongside her and keep up the pace? You can see what she's doing, you can match her stride, take sips of water when she does… why wouldn't you have the same success?
What you don't see when you're observing a marathon race from the audience, is the months of prepwork that are crucial to the success of the race.
When you try to emulate the strategies you see someone else share, you're only seeing the proverbial ‘race'. You're not able to see the months of behind the scenes work and research that goes into a successful launch.
The phase 2 launch I guide you through in Wellness Course Academy is called a marathon launch for a reason: you have to put in months of training before the big event if you want it to be a success. As an audience member, there is no way for you to see all this.
