how to validate an idea for an online course

How to validate your idea for a digital product?

5 Steps to Validate an Online Course Idea Step 1: Analyze the demand for existing content. Pay attention to what people do, not what they say. What they do is... Step 2: Validate demand with search tests. Now, it’s time to go broader with your search beyond the people who frequent... Step 3: …

How to test your online course idea before launch?

Jun 05, 2021 · Similarly, you can head to other popular eLearning platforms like Coursera, Skillshare and more to validate your online course ideas. 6. Interact With People. All the above-mentioned ideas were rock solid methods to validate your online course idea based on existing data and proof. But this one is slightly different.

Should I pre-sell my online course?

Oct 07, 2021 · The Step-by-Step Process for Validating Online Course Ideas Step 1: Define your learners’ pain points The first step you need to take in the course validation process is to make sure that the topic you have come up with aligns with your learners’ challenges.

How can I make my course topic more interesting?

Feb 17, 2022 · How to Validate Your Online Course Idea: The Step-by-Step Guide Concerns & fears. Is there a demand for my topic? Will people be willing to pay for what I have to offer? Is the market... Solve a problem or fulfill a desire. When creating anything, product, service, course, etc, the first thing I ...

What does it mean to validate a course?

How do you validate learning?

How can I improve my online course design?

What is educational validity?

What means academic validation?

What makes online courses successful?

What makes good online learning?

What is the best learning platform for online courses?

Prepare for the Course Validation Process

To test whether your idea has merit, you must first condense it into a value proposition. Answering these questions will help you refine your idea.

5 Steps to Validate an Online Course Idea

You may learn, after doing steps 1 and 2 below, that there isn’t sufficient demand for your online course idea. However, doing these research exercises will give you a better sense of what your audience is seeking.

1. Get Search Volumes By Using Keywords Planner

Search volumes for keywords related to your topic is a great indicator of student interest in your niche and when it comes to search, nothing beats Google. To get search volumes on Google for your keywords, you can use this handy keywords research tool called Keywords Planner .

2. Search On YouTube

YouTube is the largest video platform in the world. On Youtube, you can find videos on almost any topic and in any possible niche. Go to YouTube.com and do a search with your keywords. You should see a lot of tutorial and how to videos related to your niche.

3. Search In Online Forums

There are numerous Q&A forums on the internet and it's very likely that your niche has a few as well. Your potential students hang out in these forums, so you should join the community and follow and participate in the conversations. This will help you understand their pain points and you can fine-tune your course topic based on this intelligence.

4. Search On Udemy And Other Course Marketplaces

While Udemy is the largest online course marketplace, there are other popular marketplaces like OpenSesame and Coggno. Searching your course topic on these marketplaces is one of the best ways to gather market intelligence in your niche and validate whether students are willing to pay or not.

5. Search On Amazon

While Amazon is not directly related to online courses, it's the largest marketplace for ebooks which are nothing but information products like online courses. So, if you find any popular ebooks related to your course topic on Amazon, this is a great news for you.

6. Survey Your Audience

If you have an audience, you can consider creating a survey to get direct feedback from your potential students. You can use a free solution like Google Forms or a paid solution like Survey Monkey to create a survey and send it to your audience. With this method, you can also get feedback on your course curriculum in addition to your course topic.

7. Pre-Launch Your Online Course

If you’re still not confident about your online course idea, you can use pre-launch strategy to test it. With pre-launch, you sell your course even before you create it. Generally, instructors offer a heavy discount or, offer other benefits to motivate students to pre-order their online course.

Method 1: Pre-sell your course

Pre-selling your course is one of the most popular ways to validate your online course idea. Put simply, it means selling your course before creating the content itself and setting a future date that your students will get access to your content.

Method 2: Offer a live round

This is really similar to the pre-sale option, except your students will get access to your expertise sooner after signing up. You’ll launch your course exactly the same as you would normally, but this option means you’ll have a fixed start date and you’ll do it live using a video platform like Zoom.

Method 3: Recruit beta testers

In my experience, this is the most common method of course validation but not one I’m a big fan of. This method involves developing some or all of your course, then finding testers (discounted or free) to go through it and give you feedback—on the content itself but also on whether they think the course will sink or swim.

Method 4: Create a public survey

This method involves creating a survey to understand whether your potential audience would be interested in your course and then sharing that survey in places you know your audience hangs out. You should be able to validate your online course idea based on that survey data.

Method 5: Poll your own audience

This is a very similar way to validate your online course as the previous method, except this time you’ll send your survey to your own audience via social media or email.

Method 6: Run ads to free content

Note: Shout out to Tim Ferriss for this idea. I tried to find the original info from him but it’s been so long that I can’t find it!

Method 7: Interview ideal students

This simple way to validate your online course needs little explanation. Essentially, you find people who might be the kind of person to buy your course in future and ask them a bunch of questions similar to the survey method.

Is it good to search for a course?

Searching is always a good place to start. Search engine results are , after all, a record of what actual people are looking for and what they have tended to click on the most. The key to using them effectively, though, is to have a crystal clear understanding of the value your course will be designed to provide and then think hard about the words or phrases a prospect seeking that value might type into a search engine.

What is feedly blog?

Feedly is a great tool for aggregating feeds from a wide variety of blogs. Subscribe to the blogs of people—particularly those with a significant following—who are already creating content related to your target topic area. Ask:

What is a focus group?

Doing this gives you the opportunity to see the reactions and ideas that arise when different viewpoints are shared. They almost always reveal opportunities or challenges related to your course idea that you had missed.

What is a lead magnet?

The term “ lead magnet ” applies to pretty much any content you offer to get a prospect to hand over his or her e-mail address. Most typically, it is going to take the form of a downloadable eBook, a checklist, a video, or a Webinar.

What is a live pilot?

A live pilot really is the ultimate way to ensure against course failure, and it can be used in combination with “Pre-selling” above. The idea is to pull together the core concepts for your course and present them in live Webinar sessions—using a platform like Zoom or Webinar Ninja —over a period of days or weeks.

What is Buzzsumo?

BuzzSumo. BuzzSumo, a search engine that gives you visibility into what content is popular by topic or on a specific website, is a great tool to have in your mix for many reasons. You can use it, for example, to see how your own content—or your competition’s content—is doing on social media. You can also use it see how popular a course topic you ...

Is Udemy a marketplace?

However, since Udemy is one of the largest course marketplaces in the world, if people are paying to learn about topics in your prospective niche, those topics are probably ending up in Udemy courses. I would encourage you not to look to Udemy for guidance on actually creating your course.

What is Buzzsumo?

Well, so do billions of other people. BuzzSumo is a tool that collects social media mentions which can then be searched by keyword or topic. It’s also a very helpful website for evaluating the “buzz” around your course topic. Keep in mind that once again, you may need to zoom out if your course topic is very specific.

Who is Nate Johnson?

Nate Johnson is one of the co-founders of Fly Plugins, creators of the first and most widely-implemented learning management system for WordPress, WP Courseware. Since 2012, he has helped thousands of entrepreneurs, corporate training departments, and higher education institutions develop and deploy online training courses from their WordPress websites.

What is Tim Ferriss's four hour workweek?

In his best-selling text, The Four Hour Workweek, author Tim Ferriss walks the reader through the process of developing passive income-generating products which, in turn, lead to location, time, and lifestyle independence. He calls them muses.