Creating online courses can be overwhelming at first. What if you have a solution that made creating an awesome online course simple? Now you do.
How do you start? Where do you start? What lessons should I teach? What order should I teach them in?
All of these questions swirl around your head, keeping you from getting started.
What if you have a solution that made creating an awesome online course simple?
Well now you do.
This simple framework is going to help you be efficient in outlining and jump-starting your online courses.
This framework will help you organize your thoughts and lay everything out in a way that’s logical.
The great thing about this framework is not only is it simple and easy to use, but you can use this for more than just creating your online courses.
If you are creating an online membership program, modulated courses, or simple info products, this framework will help.
Need help creating your lead magnet, your five day boot camp, creating slide decks, and presentations?
This framework will help you accomplish all of these things and more.
If you'd prefer to listen to this content from the video above, play it or download it from the podcast episode below.
It’s a versatile framework that will help guide you in creating a successful online course and building an organic business based on content marketing.
Escape and Arrival Framework
Frank Kern has this philosophy that every person is simultaneously moving away from something and moving towards another thing.
When we build our products we are helping people leave where they are, which is somewhere they do not want to be, and we are helping them get to where they want to be, which is accomplishing the goal outlined in your teachings.
This is called the Escape and Arrival Framework.
This framework clearly outlines what you need to do to get from not having a result to having one.
You will create an outline that shows what milestones you need to reach to accomplish your end result and will use this outline to decide what key milestones you want to focus on and what milestones you need to complete to get there.
In order to see this framework in action to get a better understanding of how it works, you can can follow these steps to create your own framework.
Creating A Timeline With Milestones
Want to be efficient and effective in laying out every single step in the process of creating an awesome online course?
Creating a visual of where you want your audience to be and how you are going to achieve these results will help you to clearly outline what needs to be included in your online course.
Take a piece paper and write ‘E’ on the left side to represent what you want your audience to escape from and then write ‘A’ on the opposite side of the page to represent where you want your audience to arrive.
Draw a line that connects the two letters so you can begin to outline what milestones you will need to cover in order for your audience to be successful in reaching the end goal.
This is where you need to take what you are working on and understand your niche in order to apply it to this framework.
Say your focus is that you want to teach people how to create a WordPress funnel.
Using this framework, you can organize your thoughts and outline what your audience needs to know and what they need to accomplish in an order that will quickly and effectively get them from having no funnel to having a functioning WordPress funnel.
Using the WordPress funnel as your focus, you could outline your milestones in the following way:
Zeroing In On The Core Content
Everything laid out on this timeline is everything an audience would need to go from not having a WordPress funnel to having one.
Every milestone listed on your timeline may not be something you are interested in “teaching” or “selling”, and that is okay.
This is where the framework works really well.
You can look at your timeline and find which areas are the areas that are really important to reaching the ultimate goal and what areas you can best help people with.
Using the WordPress funnel example, that could be creating the landing page, OTO page, delivery content, and testing/optimization.
These would be the core content.
Using Freebies and Opt Ins
Once you finalize what your core products will be, you can then decide on what your opt in and freebie can be.
You need to decide on what you are going to give your audience as a freebie that would prime them and get them ready for your core content, so they will want to opt in for your paid courses.
In the example, web hosting and installing WordPress could be the freebies with learning about installing thrive themes being the opt in to get them to continue on into the paid courses.
These would be a free giveaway to help people get on the right path.
The freebie would be a free offer for people to learn how to get three things set up so they can start their WordPress funnel fast.
They would opt in for the offer and would be given a series of pieces of information that walk them through the process of getting web hosting set up, WordPress installed, and thrive themes/plugins set up.
At this point, they have the basics and are ready to learn more.
An affiliate product can even be offered here in the first training with these three themes and can have the opportunity to generate a little bit of cash flow.
Creating Milestones and Sub Milestones
This is how you can create a successful online course in an easy and efficient way, resulting in success for you as well as your audience.
Once you have how you are going to get your audience invested in your online course, you then need to focus on the details of each milestone and how you are going to create successful lessons that will help your audience achieve the end result.
You need to focus in on every single milestone and create a new framework timeline for each that outlines sub-milestones that need to be achieved.
Starting with the next milestone in the WordPress funnel example, a framework needs to be outlined for creating a landing page/squeeze page.
These are all the steps a person would need to accomplish in order to have a fully functional landing page.
Once you have created a framework for each of your milestones, you can then move on to creating modules and lessons.
Creating Modules and Lessons
This versatile framework will help guide you in creating a successful online course and building an organic business based on content marketing.
You have your framework created for your online course with the milestones that your audience needs to accomplish and have created sub milestones for each of these milestones.
You now have your outline for your modules and lessons.
Once you have the outline, you can focus on one module at a time, and within that module, one lesson at a time.
You can then use one of the best course platforms, here are my favorites, to create these lessons and modules.
Create a slide, page, video module, whatever it may be for each of these sub milestones.
Using the WordPress funnel example, the milestones listed in the original framework would be the different modules, while the sub milestones listed for each module would be the individual lessons within the module.
Each module will have individual lessons to accomplish the milestone as a whole in order to be able to move on to the next module/milestone.
Once you have your lessons and modules completed, go back, read through and review them.
By reading them out loud, you can see if something is out of place or if an area does not make sense in order to guarantee that your message is coherent.
You have now been efficient and effective in laying out every single step in the process in order to create an awesome online course.
Take Action
Run with this.
Get your content laid out using this simple framework, then get it out there for people to start using.
Come up with your focus on where you want to get your audience, outline your milestones to achieve that focus, and then create those sub milestones.
Accomplish this and you will have your modules and lessons outlined for you to start generating the content.
Do not forget your opt in and give away part of your online courses.
This is where you will attract people to invest in your online course.
Make sure the free level content gets people to what they want and what is next, which is your paid course or membership program.
That is the easy way to creating courses online.
This super simple framework started out as an outline and has resulted in you creating modules with individual lessons to help your audience achieve the end result.
Whether you want to use this for a content marketing strategy, a 90 day video challenge, or a full blown ongoing membership subscription, this simple framework will help you effectively and efficiently organize your thoughts and present a cohesive message.
That is how you can create a successful online course in a easy and efficient way, resulting in success for you as well as your audience.