This is the show for creative entrepreneurs who have a message to share and want to live a life of freedom. Learn how to grow your network and net worth. Hear from exciting guests and more. My name is Dylan Schmidt and Welcome to Digital Podcaster. I meet a lot of people that are like Dylan, this is awesome. I love what you're doing with Podcasting Academy. I love what you're doing with Digital Podcaster. I would love to do something similar. I have an idea for an online course. How do I monetize with an online course I'm super familiar with launching and selling an online course, I have my own, which is Podcasting Academy. But in this episode, I'm going to be talking about why you should maybe consider monetizing your podcast with an online course and how to go about it effectively. This is going to be fun. So let's dive right in. So if you're looking for a way to monetize your podcast, you may want to consider creating an online course, an online course can be a great way to generate income from your podcast by providing valuable content for your listeners, it's just another way for you to add value. How to create an online course is a logical next question right, there are a few things that you'll need to do. First, you've got to determine what topic or topics you want to cover in your course, once you've decided on a topic, you'll have to create a lesson plan or an outline. Also, you have to create any of the materials that you need for your students, such as like quizzes, videos, worksheets, any type of tools, something like that. Now, this can all be digital, right? I use Kajabi to host Podcasting Academy. But there are a lot of options out there that cost less than Kajabi. And there are options that cost more than Kajabi teachable being one of those that costs less. And when it comes to creating the content for the course itself. Oftentimes creators will guess at what their audience wants. But the best thing to do is to have an understanding of what your audience wants, before you create anything, you can build it through the feedback of your audience, when it comes to marketing your online course, because you've got your podcast going, it's a great place to talk about your online course. So you have that as a marketing channel. And because you're the maker of the course, you don't want to only talk about that, right? Where it sounds like people are just like this is just an ad at this point, because there's going to be people who are not going to work with you. So you don't want to alienate anybody. But you do want to let people know that it's available. Besides marketing your online course, only on your podcast, you can also mark it on social media, do some email marketing, you could do paid advertising, you'll have to experiment with different marketing strategies to find out what works best for you. But I've also found that setting a date and a time gets people to take action. If you can say, hey, enrollment for your course ends by this date. Or you can sign up only between this timeframe, that's going to make a difference in people taking action. If it's always available, you're going to find your audience saying I'll get around to it one day, I'll do it. But if you can set a start and a stop time for when someone can join your online course you're going to see enrollment easier. So the next part would be delivering your online course right? Let's say you've created it, you've started to market it. Let's say you've sold it, you've got to deliver the content, right, you can't just sell it and then forget about it, there's a number of ways you can actually deliver the online course itself. So you could do it live every week, you could do a call like a group call or something, or they get access to pre recorded videos that are released once a week or all at once, you have to determine what exactly is going to be the best delivery method for you. Because if you overwhelm your students, you're going to find that the retention of your students is going to be lower, because you've given them too much, and they can't fit it into the lives. And if you give them too little, they might be bored, right? So you've got to walk the line, a little bit of how much is too much. And this is something you usually won't know until you start doing it. As much as you want to be prepared. It's one of those things you just have to learn as you go. Now monetizing through an online course isn't the only way, right. There's a lot of ways to generate income with your podcast, some of which I have talked about in past episodes, some of which I have yet to talk about and will cover in future episodes. But if you've been thinking about monetizing through an online course, I would say go for it. It's never been easier to create an online course if you start small, you can pivot and really make something that your audience wants. If you start big, you're going to find yourself in burnout and overwhelm really quick. So my suggestion would be start small, don't try to commit to a whole Academy like I did with Podcasting Academy. Podcasting Academy is the result of me taking what I've learned over the years, and I started smaller, and then I built it a little bigger. And a year ago, it looked different than what it looks like today. And a year from now. It'll look different than what it looks like from today. So there's a constant evolution and growing to it. You discover what your students like, what they want more of what they don't really care about which you thought that they would care about. Maybe you give them too much, maybe you need to scale it back a little bit. And you'll start to find the sweet spot of what your students will want in your online course and how you can deliver that value through your course. I have a lot of fun with it. But I understand it's not for everybody. But if you've listened to this far in the episode probably have some curiosity about it. Other than that, speaking of online courses, I made a free four day course it's like a mini course all about social media for podcasters best practices and what you need to know when it comes to promoting growing and collaborating with others on social media using your podcast. To access that all you got to do is click the link in the episode description. And I'll see you inside there. That's it for now. Talk to you soon.