Building your own cohort-based course, 101

September 29, 2022

Good morning, this is the Not Boring Personal Branding. Your weekly tour guide for all things personal branding.

In Today’s edition:

A Quick Guide To Starting Your Own Cohort-Based Course

Listen.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about how to start your own course:

  • Course toolstack

  • How to price your course

  • How to build out a curriculum

And so so much more.

So I want to give you the 30,000 ft overview here today.

Let’s dive in.

What Tools You Should Use To Build Your Own Course

  • Email Marketing. Convertkit.

  • Course Sales. Podia, Teachable, Kajabi.

  • Course Curriculum. Podia, Teachable, Kajabi.

  • Course Community. Slack, Circle, or Discord.

  • Events. Lu.ma​

How to price your course

I started Brand30 at $0.

My goal initially was to build some buzz around the course AND build a community.

People thought I was crazy as cohort based courses are usually $1000+.

Now should you start your course and give it away for FREE?

Depends:

  • Do you have a big audience?

  • Do you have other successful courses that people know you for?

  • Do you have a distribution method to get your course in the hands of people at a high price point?

Think about it.

When I started B30 I had ~10k followers on LinkedIn and had never sold any type of course.

How To Build Out A Course Curriculum

Here’s how I would approach it:

Step 1: Ask yourself what you want the outcome of the course to be?

Brand30’s promise is 30 posts over 30 days.

Other courses promise things like 3 polished songs in 30 days, 10 new TikTok ads in 10 days, etc.

You want to make your outcome tangible.

What’s the clear benefit they are receiving after taking your course.

Step 2: Outline what you need to offer to help students achieve your outcome.

You are now working backwards from the outcome in Step 1.

Ask yourself:

If you were to teach a 1-3 hour class on your subject, how would you do it.

Create an outline.

Step 3: Organize your content into modules.

Brand30 is 5 weeks total (1 week of onboarding and 4 weeks of posting/learning).

You don’t want to give everything to students at once. They’ll get overwhelmed. And you want them to complete the course.

A simple formula:

  • Module 1 = Week 1

  • Module 2 = Week 2

  • Module 3 = Week 3

  • Module 4 = Week 4

Now these 3 steps are the absolute basics.

I could create an entire course on how to build a course (so meta!).

Would you be interested? If so, shoot me a reply to this email and let me know.

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