Planning Online Courses – Do You Know Your Audience?

Who do you create your classes for? Do you know your audience?

In the movie Field of Dreams, the slogan was “If you build it, they will come” It could work with two teams of long-dead baseball players, but unfortunately it’s not a good strategy for online courses

You must know who your audience is. The image you create of your ideal student is called an avatar – nothing to do with this movie either! You create this profile based on your knowledge of the type of people who will take your course.

How do you find that – is the next obvious question. Simple. Talk to them and ask them. My audience for my online courses on creating online courses is less demographically specific and has no gender bias.

Overall, these are people aged 15 to 50, entrepreneurial, creative, expert, intelligent. They can come from any part of the world – my courses cover 164 countries.

Start listening to your audience. Ask them questions. Create email dialogs. Organize Skype calls. Get under their skin.

Find out who they are.

I ask my students at the beginning of my classes to introduce themselves. It helps me understand a little more about them and when they leave a message in the class, it’s a great opportunity for me to ask them a question and continue the discussion.

This information is very powerful.

When you talk to them or send them a message, start looking for key phrases about their difficulties, motivations, goals, ambitions and goals. This information is in gold and will be particularly useful when we discuss the next section – Problems.

Do not be afraid to niche your audience.

By being very specific about your audience, you will resonate with them. If you maintain your definition very broad, in order to capture a wide audience, you will not meet anyone. When you start, it’s best to focus on one niche, but over time you can go to several niches with your classes.

Try to create a written profile of your Avatar.

Even give them a name. With whom are they married or in partnership? Do they have children? Where do they live? What does their house look like? What is their income? Do they have a car? The more you can enter this profile, the more you can know them.

When you create your classes for them, it is much easier to feel that you speak to them directly, that you engage with them. Although you teach for hundreds or even thousands of students, it’s still a very personal method of passing on knowledge. In the course, there are only two people. You, the instructor and the student, and the more you can make your classes intimate and personal, the better the student’s experience.

This is one of the reasons why Alun Hill is so successful. He works very hard to answer all the questions and discussions with his students, and when you take his classes, you get the impression that he is speaking to you directly. He does not give lessons in the traditional sense of the word, he communicates the information you need to know in a very relaxed and unadorned way that makes you feel that you know him as well as he seems to know you.

It is not an accident nor easy to do well. Many of the courses I followed seemed like the instructor transmitting information to a disembodied spirit somewhere. Learn from this by really getting to know your audience and you will create better courses.

So, before starting to create your classes, I strongly recommend that you devote your time to making sure you know who you are!