How To Create an Online Course in 10 Steps (2024) – Shopify

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Learn how to create an online course that sells—from choosing a topic with high market demand to launching your digital product.
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With a laptop and a talent for communication, your online course can attract students from around the world, helping them master important skills or increase their knowledge.
This article takes you through a 10-step process to create and sell an online course that satisfies learners and generates income. 
You’ll walk away with a blueprint for building a course that positions you as an expert in your industry and sets your students up for success.

The rise of online education and the benefits of creating an online course signals something important: You’ll have competition when bringing your online course to the market. There is no shortage of online courses available on topics ranging from digital marketing and entrepreneurship to gardening and even cat training. 
When considering how to create an online course, choose a topic you’re uniquely suited to teach, where you have industry insight, credibility, expertise, and passion.
Once you’ve narrowed in on topics, explore which has the highest market demand.
Niche course topics like “making authentic maple syrup” or “producing ska music” might attract fewer students, but may present an opportunity to establish yourself as a leading educator in the space.
Targeting highly popular topics like “novel writing” or “golf” will ensure an unlimited supply of students, but are likely too competitive for newcomers. Beware of pitting your content against well-known courses like Yale’s Science of Wellbeing.
Your online courses don’t have to appeal to the most people or be the most popular in their category, but they should cater to topics where there is consistent interest. They should also have a unique value proposition, offering students something valuable that they can’t find in similar content.
We’ll dive further into assessing marketing demand in step four of this post.
Here’s a simple exercise, inspired by the popular Ikigai concept, to help identify the right course topic by aligning your skills, passions, and market needs.
Ikigai is a Japanese concept that describes your personal source of inspiration, purpose, and joy. You can use an Ikigai diagram to uncover what subjects will most motivate you as a teacher.
Here’s how:
On a piece of paper, draw four overlapping circles, as shown in the image below. Label them as follows:
In the circle labeled “What you love,” list the things you enjoy doing and the subjects you’re passionate about. In “What you’re good at,” write down your skills and areas where you have expertise.
Under “What the world needs,” think about current trends, challenges, and gaps in knowledge that people are actively seeking solutions for. The user research you conduct in step two will help you fill out this circle.
Finally, note down topics or skills that people are willing to pay to learn in the circle labeled “What you can be paid for.”
Look for intersections between your circles—areas where the things you’ve written down apply to all four categories.
This overlap represents a potential course topic that aligns with your passion, expertise, market demand, and earning potential. By completing this exercise, you’ll gain clarity on a course topic that is not only fulfilling to teach but also has the potential to attract and engage learners.
With a topic in hand, the next step of creating an online course is to identify the skills, knowledge, or experiences students are most interested in learning.
This requires conducting user research to understand your target audience. You’ll define your ideal student and use that information to design irresistible course content.
Build a detailed picture of your target audience with these techniques:
Approach the task of defining your ideal student in the mindset of someone conducting methodological market research. Try these tools to identify user insights:
For unique insights into your users, connect with prospective customers directly and survey them about their needs and preferences. 
Try to talk to at least 10 people. Keep interactions short and focus on foundational insights like course format and pricing. Consider incentivizing interviewees by offering them your course for free once it’s complete. 
Create survey questions that address the following areas: 
Use the following script to ask prospective customers if they would be willing to sit down with you for a user research interview: 
“Hi. I’m creating a course on _____ and want to make sure it’s incredibly valuable for learners. I’m wondering if you’d be willing to give me 15 minutes of your time for a short video call, where I can find out how my course might be able to help people just like you reach their goals. If you’re interested, I’d love to give you the course for free once it’s launched, to show you my appreciation.”
Taking time to conduct user research will make all the difference in crafting a high-quality course that can be promoted to an ideal buyer and provides value to students.
After completing your user research, you’ll be ready to define the learning outcomes of your online course. These are the valuable skills, experiences, or knowledge that learners will gain, which are essential for marketing your course.
Well-defined learning outcomes serve as a roadmap for your customers, helping them see the benefits of enrolling in your course.
When crafting outcomes, consider what learners will be able to do, know, and feel by the end of their journey.
There are many ways to write a learning outcome. A popular method is the ABCD approach:
Using this method, you can outline what your users (A) will learn (B) upon completing the entire course (C), along with the level of ability or accreditation they’ll gain (D).
Arrange the four elements in a way that reflects the priorities of your ideal learners. For example, if your course leads to a professional accreditation, you might start with the degree. If your audience consists of enthusiastic hobbyists, you may want to emphasize the specific behaviors they’ll master.
When writing your outcomes, consider the level of detail that will resonate with users. A one-line learning outcome may suit some audiences, while others will require a full document.
Create your online course with apps
Sell courses that learners can access directly from your online store. Teach live classes, give exams, offer subscriptions, and issue certificates.
Online courses come in a range of formats and mediums, including live classes and asynchronous content (where instructor and students engage with the course content at different times.) How you structure and deliver your course will determine how you market to learners, as well as how much money you can reasonably sell your course for.
When selecting a course format, consider the delivery method. For example, will students access course materials through an elearning platform and complete assignments on their own schedule, without real-time interaction? Or will they learn together via live webinars or scheduled classes?
Self-paced courses give students the flexibility to progress through the material at their own speed. While cohort-based courses bring groups of students through the material together, often with set start and end dates.
Consider your delivery methods when deciding on the overall format of your course. There are three main types of course:
A mini-course generally requires an hour or two to complete. It can take on different mediums—for instance, a series of emails or a playlist of 10 short videos. 
Mini-courses are generally offered at a low price point (e.g., less than $100), or may even be free, to serve as a marketing tool or lead magnet for a more in-depth and pricer course offering. A mini-course is a great way to get started as a course creator to test the market and learn how to create a larger course.
Multiday courses are intermediate digital educational products that generally take students several days to complete.
They might include prerecorded videos breaking down the course into different levels or modules and include supplementary materials like worksheets and checklists. They may also have live check-ins and social meet-ups to resolve challenges and enrich the learning experience.
These courses often fall into the price range of $250 to $2,000. A multiday course is ideal if you’ve already validated your idea through a mini-course.
Master classes can be anywhere from weeks to months long and aim to provide students with a complete system for success. These types of courses are generally sold to professionals and have a price point ranging from $300 to $5,000. If it’s your first time creating a course, you generally shouldn’t start with a master class. Instead, build up your experience creating mini-courses and multiday courses first. 
For example, Jean-Martin Fortier and Suleyka Montpetit, the founders behind The Market Gardener Institute, offer a range of courses, including a master class.
The master class takes 40 to 60 hours to complete and includes more than 40 modules, over 50 videos, and more than 45 technical sheets. A community component is part of the offering. The course includes a downloadable syllabus you can review before buying, which provides information on learning outcomes.
Before spending money and time building a digital product, test whether enough people are willing to purchase your course to keep your operation profitable. 
One way to do this is by building a minimum viable product (MVP), a concept coined in Eric Reis’s The Lean Startup. An MVP is a product you release to the public with just enough features to validate your assumptions.
For an online course, an MVP could be a mini-course or a free webinar. 
Mini-courses narrow in on a specific topic rather than attempting to cover a broad range of ideas. Here are examples of taking a broad course topic and narrowing it into a mini-course MVP:
A mini-course allows you to choose a topic you know well and package your expertise or repackage your existing material (e.g., blog posts, threads on X, email newsletter) into a format like an email course. An email course also lets you capture the emails of people who you’ll eventually market your bigger course to.
Someone signing up and taking your mini-course is validation of market demand for a larger course on a broader topic.
Another MVP strategy for validating the market demand of your course is creating a webinar with an upsell. Webinars generate signup rates of more than 20%. Seeing a high signup rate validates the market demand for your course.
Spend the majority of the webinar providing valuable information on your course topic, but make sure to gather feedback from participants on what they found most valuable and what else they want to learn. 
These methods of validating your online course idea will save you the experience of creating a course that nobody actually buys.
Pre-selling a course means selling your course before you’ve actually created it. This is another mitigation strategy to avoid creating a course nobody wants. 
Other advantages include stress-testing your concept, tailoring your content to early feedback from buyers, and raising money through pre-sales to fund course creation. Plus, having a few early student sign-ups will likely serve as a motivator for finishing and launching your course to the world. 
Getting your first cohort of customers to sign up for a pre-order can be done by creating a pre-sale landing page on your website and incentivizing buyers with a discount.
To pre-sell your course:
For instance, your aim might be to make 25 pre-sales. If you make less than this in a given time frame, it’s worth considering whether you want to continue creating the course. Instead, you could opt to refund customers what they’ve paid and go back to the drawing board.
You can use Shopify to create a pre-sale page and collect payments for your course. To add pre-order functionality to your store, download an app.
Shopify also integrates popular course platforms like Thinkific.
Read more: How to Create a Coming Soon Page and Start Marketing Before You Launch
Coming up with the contents of your course and logically dividing it into lessons requires a lot of careful work. You’ll need to put yourself in the shoes of a student and start from the desired end state, working backward in manageable chunks. 
The amount of content in your course and how many lessons you include will be determined by the type of course you create (e.g., mini-course, multiday course, master class) as well as the associated completion time and cost. 
For instance, if you created a multiday course on content marketing, here’s what breaking that course into five modules might look like:
MODULE 1: Setting a Content Strategy
MODULE 2: Writing Content that Converts
MODULE 3: Search Engine Optimization
MODULE 4: Managing a Content Calendar
MODULE 5: Content Distribution
From there, you can break modules into a series of specific lessons that go into detail about a given subject matter. Here’s how you might break down the above modules:
MODULE 1: Setting a Content Strategy
MODULE 2: Writing Content that Converts
MODULE 3: Search Engine Optimization
MODULE 4: Managing a Content Calendar
MODULE 5: Content Distribution
Once you have an outline that details topics for each module and lesson, you should have a structure from which to start building your course content, one lesson at a time. Each lesson should have detailed steps, information, and exercises for students to work through. Within each lesson, set learning objectives students who buy the course will accomplish. 
Depending on the type of course you decide to create, the medium of your course could take many different forms. For a mini-course that’s free or low-priced, you might opt for an email format where you limit the formats you use to text and some illustrative images or screenshots. 
However, for more intensive and higher-priced courses, it’s best to use multiple formats to keep your students engaged throughout the course. For example, rather than using only text or exclusively video, use a mix of formats to keep your students engaged. Here are a few popular course formats and their benefits:
As a best practice, keep videos less than 10 minutes long and aim to create focused and actionable content. During your research phase, look at what formats your competitors are using and consider asking prospective students about what course medium they find most engaging.
Creating high-quality video will keep your courses engaging. Bear these tips in mind for setup, shooting, and editing:
The price of your course is limited by its type and format. Typically, a mini-course is free or low-cost, while a master class is more expensive. However, the pricing of your course should also depend on factors including:
To get a better idea of how you should price your course, conduct competitor pricing research to see how other digital course creators in your niche are pricing their own digital offerings. Ensure you’re not selling yourself short by pricing too low. 
On the other hand, remain realistic and avoid pricing too high. Don’t be afraid to study what competitors are offering, add more value to your own course offering, and price your course accordingly. 
Alongside dedicated pricing research, set a sales goal that will also inform how you price and market your course. For example, if your sales goal is $50,000, there are several ways to price your course:
Scenario 1:
Scenario 2:
In the first scenario, you price your course lower and need a higher volume of customers. In the second, you price your course higher and need a lower volume of customers. So, which scenario is better? 
Generally, pricing your course too low is not a good strategy. For one, you’ll need to spend time and money marketing your course to drive traffic to your course page. 
Assuming 1% of the customers who land on your page buy the course, you’ll need to drive 250,000 visitors to your page in the first scenario and 20,000 visitors to your page in second. Plus, it’s often favorable to have customers who are less price sensitive. 
Consider these factors when pricing your course, and avoid pricing that’s too low and forces you to market more aggressively. Put the time and energy into creating a course you’re proud of, and can price at what it’s worth. 
Next, decide where you want to host your course content. There are a range of different course platforms with unique features, but there are three basic types of online course platforms: standalone, all-in-one, and online course marketplaces. 
Standalone platforms give you a lot of control over your content and data. Examples of standalone platforms include Thinkific and Teachable.
All-in-one solutions put your marketing tools, website builder, and content delivery platform in one single place.
Generally, all-in-one course platforms are the most expensive, but can be worthwhile because they let you sidestep using multiple tools to accomplish the same thing. 
All-in-one course platforms include:
For a cost-efficient all-in-one option, many course platforms integrate with Shopify. These apps simplify website and course management:
Online course marketplaces come with a built-in audience that can help surface your course more easily than you could on your own. However, you generally have less control over your pricing and data. 
Here are a couple of online course marketplaces:
To choose the best platform for your online course, evaluate each type on the following criteria:
Remember, the content of your course is more important than where it’s hosted online. If the course platform you select lacks the features you need, you can always switch later on. 
Creating your course is one part of the equation; launching it to the world and marketing it to buyers is the other. 
After putting in the work to make your course as good as possible, make sure it’s visible to potential customers by implementing some of these marketing strategies:
Webinars are generally low cost and a good way to generate leads for your course. If someone sits through a 30- to 60-minute webinar, there’s a greater likelihood they’ll purchase your course, too.
Prioritize email marketing
Building an email list of prospective buyers is a powerful way to share updates, information, and discounts related to your course. While someone might not buy your course when they first arrive on your landing page, asking for their email and setting up an email marketing funnel may convince them to buy down the line. 
Appearances on podcasts are a great way to increase your authority and naturally demonstrate your expertise through conversation. Pitch yourself to podcasters in your niche, explaining how your expertise fits with their show and could be valuable for their listeners.
Identify the best channels to speak to your prospective followers, home in on them, and build a social media strategy that prioritizes adding value consistently.
Running paid ads, like Google Ads or Facebook ads, to your sales page can be a powerful strategy to target your ideal buyer and turn them into a customer after seeing your ad. With a paid channel like online advertising, make sure you’re making a return on investment—your cost of acquiring a customer should be less than the price of the course.
Optimizing your website so it’s surfaced in search engine results is valuable for having customers discover your course. Learn how to rank your site with this SEO checklist. 
Creating free educational content about your course niche can build your authority and help your course rank in search results. This form of content marketing generates traffic that may convert into paid customers.
Successfully selling your course through marketing takes some experimentation. Start with a few marketing channels to see what works. Double down on strategies that are effective at bringing in customers and ditch the tactics that are more time, effort, or money than they’re worth.
While many customers may be convinced by your marketing materials, having real students sing the praises of your course is the ultimate stamp of approval.
Collect feedback and testimonials from happy customers who have seen results from your course. Having positive anecdotes about transformations on your landing page and throughout your marketing is a powerful way to convince prospective customers of the value of your course and the results it can help them achieve. 
To collect customer reviews and testimonials, ask for feedback from buyers who have taken your course. Ask customers who provide glowing feedback whether they would be willing to provide a testimonial to feature in your marketing material. 
Be specific in providing direction to customers about what you want in their testimonial. Rather than simply asking for a blurb about their positive experience with the course, ask more targeted questions like:
Specific details on how your course was helpful are more powerful than vague generalizations. If possible, ask for a video testimonial rather than a text one. 
Of course, asking for feedback should not be about only testimonials. Use positive feedback to inform what parts of the course are resonating with students and use critical feedback to revise course material that is under-performing. Taking feedback to heart with each cohort of students that buys your course will allow you to gradually improve it over time and give your students the best learning experience possible. 
With no inventory issues or supply chain problems to solve, selling online courses is an online business idea with benefits worth considering:
Avoiding common pitfalls can enhance the quality and success of your online course. Here are some mistakes to watch out for:
Reflect on the unique insights, valuable knowledge, and marketable skills that you can share with the world through your first online course. 
Creating an engaging and successful online course means packaging your passion into a digital product. Starting on your journey as an online course creator will set you up to earn money through your enthusiasm and expertise, while helping others learn what you know in the process.
An online course is a series of educational lessons or modules delivered via the internet, allowing students to learn at their own pace, often from the comfort of their homes. These courses cover a wide range of topics and can be accessed through various platforms.
Choose a specific topic that has market demand and where you have industry insight and expertise, credibility, and passion. Choose the type of course you would like to create, the medium you’ll use for content, how you’ll structure the course curriculum, the course platform you’ll deliver it on, and how you would like to price and advertise it.
A basic course could be created for a few hundred dollars using simple equipment and free hosting, while a high-end professional course might cost thousands for video production, custom software, and marketing.
With the rise of online education, creating an online course can be profitable. The goal is to make sure the content you offer is valuable and attracts a large audience. A successful online course isn’t a “set it and forget it” thing—you have to proactively promote it.`
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