Here’s a question for you, what has Henry Ford, Berry Gordy of Motown Records and Pete Waterman of PWL records all got in common? They all mastered efficiency in their businesses by building production lines. They found a formula and replicated it over and over again to create massive and far reaching success.
What if you could apply this to your online course creation? Imagine how you could expand your course offerings to reach more people across the world How would that change their lives and yours.
How could you start thinking about streamlining and moulding your business into a course production line, what would you need to do?
Create Workflows For Your Content Creation
The first thing you’ll want to think about are your workflows. When you’re creating a piece of content for your course, how do you go about it. Is it different every time, do you spend an enormous amount of time getting traction every time you sit down to write and record a new lesson? Maybe you could break down the processes you go through each time for writing, recording and constructing a course into a process document that you could follow the next time you do these tasks.
Take an example of recording a piece of content. Maybe you use a particular camera to record your video, why not write down the settings you use to get the optimum picture quality. If you’re using any kind of video lighting have you written down the brightness settings you use for each light? If you are using portable lighting, how about writing down a floor plan of the position of each light and the camera to reduce setup time the next time you prepare a recording session.
Use Libraries & Favourites To Save Time
When you’ve recorded your videos, what is your editing process? Do you have to keep setting up your video editor each time? Does it have libraries or favourites where you can store and recall custom settings. If your videos have similar intros and outros, have you saved templates of these in your video editor that can be pulled in quickly and easily to future recordings? Have you made a checklist of all the things you need to do in the video editing process before you can deem a video finished.
Create Checklists Of Commonly Used Settings
And how about course construction? As easy as it is nowadays to publish courses on a learning management system, have you got a list of the settings you need to adjust for each course? As you start to create more and more courses, over time it’s easy to miss crucial settings, things like setting up a completion certificate, adding personalised merge tags into your course signup and completion emails. Having a checklist for these repetitive tasks makes it easy to improve the quality of your courses, and speed up the time it takes to get them to market.
You could use a Google document to write out your processes for each part of your course creation, or use something like Asana to build out lists of tasks and tick them off as you complete each one.
Creating plans, processes and workflows helps you replicate yourself in your course business, keeps things more consistent, but crucially it’ll help you reach more people with your training and change more people’s lives.
What processes do you struggle to set up for your online course business? Got a question, let us know!
