You’ve decided to create a course to teach your potential students from. However, you quickly run into a problem – you don’t know the type of course model you want to use. You begin searching online, looking at what others have done but quickly become confused. With so many different types available, how do you pick the right one? It depends on several different factors.

With a huge market for online courses, the types of courses you create are unlimited. But you can easily get overwhelmed trying to figure out what you should or should not include in your own course.

Online courses can be created in virtually any topic in any niche with prices ranging from $50 to more than $1000. But if you include too many different types of content that your course becomes confusing and overwhelming to the student, you lose customers.

What about the type of online class? You can create email courses; have training via a private Facebook group or some other type. How do you choose the style that works for your prospective students?

Before you jump in and start creating your product, you need to do your research to find out what your potential students want, need, and actually prefer.

Online Course Models

Here, you’ll see examples of profitable course models and learn how you can use them to create a unique model for your own digital product.

Paid Email Course

Paid email courses are easy to set up and for the student to access. The things you need are the ability to write great content, your idea, and an email service to deliver the emails. Then you set up the course to be delivered with its sequence feature.

You want to include some type of action item in each lesson and possibly a workbook or some other type of download that goes with the lesson.

An example of a paid email course would be a 30-day journaling course where each day for 30 days your student receives a simple journaling prompt along with instructions for journaling each day for a set amount of time.

Paid Virtual Workshop

This is a type of course where students take part in a live, usually 2-6 hours, workshop that includes information, workbooks, and PDFs. It’s like a high-value paid webinar without the pitch at the end.

This course is usually on some type of LMS platform, such as Thinkific or a password protected page. You could put your workshop on a page on your site where your students are giving a private password to access the course workshop.

An example of a paid virtual workshop might be teaching authors how to set up a blog using WordPress with live examples. The typical cost for a virtual workshop ranges from $97 to $1,000 or more.

Private Training Groups

Another option to consider is the social learning groups. Facebook has Social Learning Groups on the platform. This is good for marketing leaders who need to train teams, speakers, authors, or coaches to teach about their topic with an easily accessible host for training videos, documents, and links.

If you already have an existing Facebook group, you can add Units. It’s a great way to organize lessons, training modules and frequently asked questions that can be easily referred to.

Using the social learning groups is easy. Just create your unit and upload your content. You can use it many ways including as a private course platform or for a challenge, that converts participants into your course.

Types of Content

Your course module can include any type of content that will help your students learn. Some of the most popular include:

• Text-based content such as written assignments, downloadable PDFs, or posts on Facebook.

• Audio content is good for those who like to listen to your course while driving or at work before doing any assignments.

• Video content is one of the most popular forms for course content. Videos work well when trying to explain how to do something. They’re also a good way for students to see an actual person and feel like you are real.

• Image-based content often includes items such as mind-maps, infographics, graphics, photos, and other image types.

• Printable checklists, worksheets, or assignments are types of content that are easily digestible your course participants can use to quickly grasp concepts.

In Summary

There are many courses you can use as a model for your digital course and/or challenge. However, you want your challenge to include several elements and content information that are unique to your product.

There are paid email courses that allow you to send your course work through an email while online virtual workshops allows the student to get hands on work done in a specified amount of time.

Challenges are a fun way to create a paid course that encourages the students to do the assignments, before moving to the next level while the full-fledged course has all the components needed to finish a course. Another option is to present your course to your students through a private Facebook group using units.

The different types of courses range for the beginners course with the basics to a mid-range course that focuses on specific area of your topic to the all-inclusive signature course or masters course that showcases your knowledge on the topic.

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Aletha McManama

Aletha is a "Digital Marketing Maven" who specializes in online marketing using WordPress, social media and email marketing to assist her clients in marketing their business. She is a WordPress pro that designs websites and blogs. Plus, she trains business owners to create and maintain their own WP site and blog.

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