There are proven step-by-step secrets to earn long-term income by scaling and automating a service business through the rapidly growing trend of eCourses, other types of digital products and automation.
That’s the point of view of the new book by Theresa Ashby and Laura Neubauer, Exposing The eLearning Mystery: Secrets To Digitizing Your Business (2023, Indie Books International).
The term eLearning has become a broad, catch-all term used across all business sectors for transformational learning experience delivered electronically.
Many elements can make up an eLearning program: live or prerecorded content, videos, quizzes, simulations, games, activities, and other interactive features.
Courses can be produced as a single topic or by combining multiple courses to make up an academy and can be full-length multiple-hour lessons or shorter microlearning sessions.
The following four principles from the book can help service business owners prepare content and organize courses into modules, lessons and components:
Designing Your Course. Courses are the overarching digital online product, wheremodules are your high-level topics, and lessons are your subtopics for each module.When designing your course, it is essential to stay consistent with yourterminology. To teach you how to design your course, we will use the terms “course,” “module,” and “lesson.”
When designing your course, you maychoose to use these terms or be more creative. For“course,” you may want to use “academy” or “track.” For“modules,” you can use “level” or “path,” and “lesson”could be “session” or “class.” Whatever terms you use,make them consistent throughout your course.
Selecting Your Course. Start by knowing what you love to teach. Think back and identify what others have said they want to learn from you. Pick a niche. Identify your avatar.
Know if your goal is to help your avatar overcome a challenge, build a skill, or change a habit. Now that you are clear on your niche, let’s find out what the competition is doing. Check out other online courses and take a course. You might find other courses like yours, which is good because that usually means there is a high demand for your topic.
Understanding what the competition is doing helps create your unique message. You will use your stories, delivery style, and personality to craft something meaningful for your avatar. Gaining clarity on your competitors only helps you develop, name, and price your course.
Preparing Your Content. Here are a few things to keep in mind when designingyour content. Your number one goal in creating youronline course is to take the participant to the desiredoutcome quickly and efficiently.
People will buy yourcourse because of the promised transformation. You arethe expert and have a lot of knowledge and experience,and have researched your topic, but don’t give theparticipant information overload. Please don’t take thelast 20 years of your life and provide them witheverything you know at once. Stick to your content planwhen developing your course. Be focused and keep theend in mind.
Organizing Your Content. When organizing your content outline into the main topics or modules, begin at the end. Your last module should be the content closest to the desired result.
For example, let’s say you’re creating a course on “How to Lose 20 Pounds in 60 Days.” The current situation is that someone is probably overweight, and their desired result is to weigh less or lose 20 pounds. The last module could be something like “How to Lose the Last Difficult Five Pounds” or “Now You Have Lost the Weight, How Do You Maintain It?”
Components are the real guts of your online course. There are various components you can use to deliver your lesson content. But before we share the specific elements, it is essential to understand why it is so important to use the com- ponents model for course design. Components allow you to deliver your information logically, sequentially, and consistently.
About The Authors
Theresa M. Ashby, MBA, PhD is the COO of Kaleidoscope Media Services. Known as a “stratologist,” she is a savvy, provocative and genuine individual who is widely respected for her business acumen. She is the author of the book Better Implementation Now!
Laura Neubauer is the CEO of Kaleidoscope Media Service. She is a recognized expert and serial entrepreneur who has built and sold multiple multi-million businesses.