Producing Your First Online Course: Tips From LearnWorlds CEO, Panos Siozos

For first-time creators, content creation is usually the hardest part. Even if someone is an expert and knows a topic by heart, it’s not always easy to become a teacher. You’ve done this, so you know what it takes: how to break things down and make them practical. That’s where we come in, giving advice and templates for online courses. We also provide a lot of customer education by publishing papers and eBooks, trying to convince people to keep it simple. Sometimes they’ll say, “I have an idea—I’m an expert in one subject and have a one-hour presentation. Should I record it all in one video?” We always say, “Hell no, don’t do that.” It’s too hard to produce and edit a 60-minute video, and you’ll never be able to update it. So, break it into six 10-minute videos. That way, you can easily update or add new content in between.

Another big issue is perfectionism. Fortunately, 2020 helped ease that. Now everyone’s on Zoom in pajamas with kids and cats wandering around, so we understand “good enough” is sometimes perfectly fine. You don’t have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on multiple cameras, green screens, and so on. If you can, great—but it’s not necessary. People can still make money by producing solid content, applying good teaching skills, and delivering the knowledge that students want, without needing a Hollywood studio setup.

Those are the two main obstacles new course creators face. For people who’ve already taught courses, the usual challenge is dealing with complexity. That’s also what we aim to solve at LearnWorlds—handling the technical side. You realize you need a website, eCommerce or checkout options, memberships, payment processing, enrollments, coupons… At some point, it’s overwhelming, especially if you rely on plugins. That’s why we offer an all-in-one platform—sometimes we call it “Shopify for online courses”—so you can be up and running in just a few hours. We’ve had users sign up and start selling the very next day. Our goal is to remove all that complexity, so if you know something valuable, you can focus on your content and your students—and hopefully make some money, too.

Sorry to interrupt, but that’s also our motto. We did a challenge here to help some people get through the funnel. Our motto now is, “Just launch it.” Hopefully we won’t run into any copyright issues, but sometimes “good enough” is fine. We try to give people the framework to just put it out there. The first version is supposed to be terrible. You’re supposed to look back six months later, hate it, and realize you’ve learned a lot, so you can do better. So just launch it.

We also help people sometimes by letting them pre-launch their course. Don’t spend six months creating, I don’t know, a 30-hour video course. Just create the first couple hours, put it out there, do a mini-launch, or launch it for free—or just charge a dollar. Even if you end up selling it for $500 later, get it out there in front of actual users. They’ll give you honest feedback, not your mom or your wife, who love you and will say, “Yes, that’s great.” Put it in front of customers who might come back with very honest, even brutal, feedback. That’s the best thing you can do today: get it in front of people. So just launch it.

Well, I think a great course is well-structured and interactive. That’s also part of what we’re trying to do. You mentioned community, and how important it is to create a community around your online course. We’ve seen that the best courses are those that manage to build a sort of flywheel community—bringing in more people and more user-generated content and comments. Sometimes the teacher doesn’t even have to answer their students’ questions, because you have other students jumping in, showing off what they know, helping and supporting each other.

This is also where we try to help with our own platform, by letting creators make the best versions of their online courses. One example is video. There’s a lot of video out there—on YouTube, you name it—and anyone can just record something on their phone camera or do a screencast, but it often ends up being linear or sometimes even boring. We try to detail that in one way or another, adding our own expertise. For example, in our platform, we added an interactive video editor: you can take a plain, linear video and convert it into an interactive experience. So the student watches something, then a question pops up. They have to answer in order for the video to continue or branch off, getting them further down or back to where they made a mistake. That way, they’re no longer passive viewers (like someone watching Netflix); they have to interact—they’re in the game.

This creates happy students who actually complete their courses. A lot of online courses suffer from low engagement and high attrition. And maybe after a few weeks, you’ve seen the big MOOCs like Coursera—people drop off. So what we’re trying to do is create engaging, interactive courses where you really interact with the content and with your fellow students. By the end, you’ll be happy with the course, and hopefully you’ll buy another one from the same source. That’s the kind of experience we’re helping our creators achieve.

As I mentioned, education is the best form of marketing. This approach does wonders for marketers who want to offer free knowledge and get people onto their platform so they gain something valuable. Having an easy funnel and making the sign-up process simple is crucial, and it’s one way we use our own platform. We always say that the best way to start your funnel is with a free course and a great landing page—somewhere it’s super easy for people to come in, sign up, and sample what you offer. That’s the first step in getting them to stay.

Good design also makes a huge difference. People pay a lot of attention to design and branding. Once you have a landing page, you only have one chance to make a great first impression. So that page should be fast, bold, and beautiful, with strong design. It can be expensive if you have to hire designers or spend a lot of time refining templates. That’s also where we try to help, making it easy for people to launch beautiful websites—whether e-learning or otherwise—with just a few clicks, and ensuring they’re mobile-friendly. That’s especially important since, during COVID, many of us were at home with limited computers, relying on tablets or phones. We now see more than 50% of traffic for most websites coming from mobile devices. So launching a beautiful, mobile-friendly website that easily converts visitors is critical for any e-commerce venture—especially online courses.

And that’s too much for most people to learn. If you’re a creator or a teacher, you don’t have time to learn SEO, mobile-friendliness, responsive design, landing pages, new design paradigms—things like that. You need something that just works, something easy and beautiful, so you can focus on what you know: your knowledge, your courses, and how to sell more of them. That’s what we’re trying to do: be the right partner with the right platform, so people only have to deal with what they know best.