The market for courses can be very competitive. When you’re trying to sell courses to your audience, should you divide and conquer or focus on quality over quantity?
There’s no right answer that applies to everyone. You need to look at your individual situation and the industry you’re in to get a better feel for how many courses you should create.
Here’s how you can decide the right number of courses to keep in your catalog.
Checking Your Individual Ability
The first thing to look at is your own abilities, interests, and plans.
Define Your Expertise
The first important rule of thumb for courses is that you shouldn’t make a course about something you don’t thoroughly understand unless you’re outsourcing course creation. You want to stick close to your expertise so you can provide the most value possible.
Courses that don’t offer value can tarnish your image and make people hesitant to purchase again. It’s better to focus on courses where your knowledge and expertise can shine, leaving people feeling empowered and wanting to hear more from you.
Focus on letting your strengths shine. If you’re starting to create courses outside your expertise, you may be trying to make more courses than you should.
Outline Course Ideas
A good way to see how many courses you can reasonably create at this point in your career is to outline what you want to make courses on. Write up basic outlines of potential course topics with a short, simple description of what it would cover.
Outlines help you see the bigger picture. You can get a bird’s eye view of how your courses would be related, how they might overlap, and if they’re necessary or not. Some courses might be better broken into smaller chunks while others could be combined together to make a more comprehensive deep dive into a subject.
By creating simple outlines, you get a chance to arrange them and make your plans carefully to decide how many courses are appropriate for your current position. It’s easier to adjust a list of outlines than to try to edit or change courses you’ve already made.
Eliminate the Overlap
There’s no reason to have multiple courses covering the same topic. It will be easier for you to sell courses that cover individual topics without overlap. Where there’s too much overlap, your customers may stop seeing the value in your courses, instead seeing that they’re repetitive.
Each course should add unique value to the participant. It should help the participant to address a specific want or need. Having multiple courses that address the same needs or that address needs with parallel solutions can cause you to cannibalize your own market share.
Observing the Market
The next thing to look at is the broader industry you occupy. You’ll want to examine how your courses will fit into the existing landscape and what needs or wants you’ll be addressing.
Target Specific Needs
Courses work best when they’re targeted to your audience’s actual needs. For the best results, you need to research your industry to find out what your audience wants and needs before you create your courses.
If you’re not sure what your audiences’ pain points are, it’s time to do some research! Search around, do some audience polls, look for customer surveys, and find research done on your industry. Reddit, Quora, and topic-specific forums are great places to find opinions and questions directly from your audience.
With a clearer idea of what your audience needs, you can take a second look at your course outlines so you can refine the list even more. If you find needs that are largely unaddressed, it could be an opportunity to create a new course in response to that need. Or, if you find out that there’s very little interest in a topic you want to make a course about, you might want to assess whether it’s worth it or not.
Analyze Your Competition
The online course market is very full. You’re not the only one who’s had the idea to create courses. While this isn’t a reason to avoid making courses, you have to be smart about what you’re doing.
If you have a big enough following and enough authority in your industry, you may be able to sell courses on highly competitive topics. But, if you have a lot of competitors who have a larger, better-known presence than you online, you may want to look for less competitive niches to start off.
Use the information you gather to further refine your topic list and make notes about what you should or shouldn’t create courses on. Plan around specific niches your target audience wants, searching for a unique perspective that sets you apart from your competitors.
Don’t make unnecessary courses in an already crowded market unless you have the following to make a mark for yourself.
Look for Audience Engagement
You can’t sell to an audience who doesn’t want to buy. If your target audience is genereally uninterested in courses, you may be able to successfully advertise one or two courses, but any more than that could be difficult to manage.
It’s best to sell digital products that your audience will be interested in. Trying to force your audience to buy courses when they’re not interested is unlikely to be successful. You’re better off creating a different digital product that they’ll be more interested in.
Where audience engagement is high and people are interested in the knowledge you’re sharing, a course may be a good call. You can also test the waters and post more content giving tips and teaching people from your expertise, or running an email marketing campaign focused on teaching. If this content is well received, it could be a sign that people would be interested in courses from you. If not, it might be a sign that you should focus on something else instead.
When you’re ready to get started creating your first course, the platform you use to host it will be important. If you want to make a more engaging course with different types of modules and access to expert advice, check out Thinkific.
Thinkific – Course Creation
Create, host, and manage online courses to sell online.
So, how many courses should you create? The answer will vary, depending on what kind of knowledge you have to share and what your industry looks like, in terms of courses available from other experts.
By examining what you can do, how many courses you could reasonably make, and what your market and audience look like, you can come up with an appropriate number of courses for you, even if that just means sticking with one all-encompassing, comprehensive course.
Don’t waste your time and effort making courses you can’t sell!
