6 essential tools for creating and selling digital courses online

When it comes to creating and selling your online course, deciding what tech to use can hurt your brain! There's so many different platforms and processes to choose from that it can quickly get in the way and stop you in your tracks. So, in today's episode, I am sharing the go-to tech tools that I use in my business, so that you can crack on with getting your online course out into the world, instead of spending weeks trying to figure it out for yourself.

– How to avoid getting overwhelmed by all of the tech tools available and instead focus on what's really important.
– The one platform I've chosen to run my entire business from.
– How designing webinar slides and workbooks can be simple (and something you can easily delegate to your VA).
– The video recording and editing tool that can save you thousands in professional filming costs.
– Why choosing a webinar hosting platform that's user-friendly for you AND your audience is so important.
– The program that makes live coaching and Q&A calls a breeze.

Mentioned this episode:
– Get my Cheat Sheet – The Complete List of Tools for Creating and Selling Digital Products (including a link to some great Canva templates to purchase): DM me TOOLS on Instagram stephtaylor.co

 

Today, I'm sharing six essential tools for creating and selling digital courses online. Now, this is one of the most common questions that I get asked all the time, “How do you create them?”, “How do you sell them?”, “What tech is involved?”, “What is the best tech for all of this?”.

So in today's episode, I'm sharing the one tool that I use for hosting and selling digital courses. 

Your tools don't matter as much as what the offer is. The tools that you are using to host the course don't matter as much as what problem the offer solves, who it's for, and how you communicate it to the right people. You don't need to spend weeks researching the best platform to host your course or the best tool to record and edit it.

 

Tool #1: Kajabi

Honestly, if I had to pick just one tool to run my entire business, it would be this one. It does check out sales pages. It can do your email marketing. You can build your email list here. It hosts your course videos. It makes them so that nobody, random people can't just download them and share them and sell them to other people. It creates a course portal with a login so your students can log in and access all of the courses that they've purchased from you.

It's really nice and neat. It's not the cheapest option out there, but I also believe that if you expect your audience to invest in you, you need to invest in delivering a great experience for them. So if you expect somebody to invest in you, if you want to attract people who invest in your offers, then you need to invest in your offers. 

Kajabi is really good at creating that nice, smooth experience for your clients and the layout of the course portal, the one that your students see when they log in. I think it's much more user-friendly, it's easier to navigate than a lot of other platforms. I've been a student of many courses and I've been on the experiencing end of other hosting platforms, and I think Kajabi is just always miles ahead. Right? And that means it makes your students' experience so much better.

 

Tool #2: Canva

For designing slides and workbooks, I don't think you can beat Canva. Unless you're a graphic designer and you're really well versed in using InDesign. I think Canva is going to be the simplest option. There are so many great templates that you can buy for Canva. 

The other great thing about Canva is that many virtual assistants are now also familiar with Canva, which means that if designing things isn't your cup of tea, if you don't like editing templates, you don't like doing anything design-focused, you can get the workbook and slide creation task off your plate. 

Although I would pretty much always suggest that you give somebody a template to work with unless they are a professional designer who already knows how to design a really effective worksheet or slide deck for a course.

 

Tool #3: Descript

For recording and editing videos, that is Descript. We love this tool. This is what we use for everything that is recording audio and video. And you know, I don't believe that you need to spend thousands of dollars getting your digital course professionally filmed, especially if it's the very first time that you are teaching it.

Because I can almost guarantee that you are going to want to update the content after your first round of students go through it. And when you've had it professionally filmed, it becomes a lot harder to edit that content because you can't just jump in and quickly edit the slides and quickly rerecord it.

No, you have to rebook the person who filmed it and get it professionally edited again, and it becomes really expensive. So even though it might look nicer, it's actually compromising the student's experience because the content might not be the most up-to-date. So like I said, we use Descript to re-record podcast episodes, but I also use it for recording course videos. 

It's really good for basic video editing. My team can edit it easily. I can record myself speaking over slides. I can record a video of myself direct to the camera, and then edit it really easily because as I'm speaking, it transcribes the recording and my team can just highlight the bits that they want to delete, like a text editor and it deletes that out of the video.

And you could honestly just use your webcam, or if you want to get slightly better video quality, you can buy an external webcam. 

I use the Lumina Pro. I love that one. The Elgato Facecam is also really good, and both of those will just give you a slightly better video quality than your built-in webcam. Although saying that the new Mac, they have really good built-in webcams so you might not even need an external one if you are using a New Mac laptop. 

 

Tool #4: Demio

Now, if you've been listening to this show for a while, you know that I am a big fan of live webinars. So where I run my live webinars, I use the tool Demio. It has been my favourite webinar platform so far. I have tried a lot of them. I've tried pretty much all of them, all of the major ones, and this has been the easiest to use. It's been the most user-friendly. It also delivers a great experience for my attendees. It's a really neat experience with a nice chat. It just all looks really nice to them. 

 

Tool #5: Zoom

But if I'm delivering the live Q and As and the hot seat calls inside my courses and programs, I will use Zoom. Now we use Zoom a lot in this business, as I'm sure many of you do as well, and that's because most of our audience is really familiar with Zoom.

So it removes any of the friction that comes up when it comes to adding calls to the calendar or finding the link to show up or downloading the latest update, and figuring out how to use the chat. Most people are familiar with it, so they already know how to do these things now. That is where I will do the Q and A calls, and if I'm teaching any live lessons as part of a program, I will also teach those using Zoom. I will share my screen, share my slides, and that way they can see me, they can see my slides, and they can ask me questions. 

 

Tool #6: Airtable

For collecting Q and A questions and keeping track of which questions I have answered, we use Airtable. For that at the moment, we could probably also integrate it into ClickUp, which is where all of our task management lives now. We have this beautiful Q and A form for Launch Magic where students can submit their questions ahead of time for me to answer on the calls and for freedom fast track where they can submit the challenges that they're experiencing in their business, and they can workshop those in a hot seat with me. 

So how that works is we're on that Zoom call and I will have a list of who has challenges they want to workshop, and then we go through that list and I unmute them. We spend a couple of minutes workshopping their challenges like they're getting basically one-on-one coaching from me. 

Sometimes it takes five minutes, sometimes a little bit longer, just depending on how many we need to get through in that call, and how in-depth each question or each challenge is. And then what we do is we go through that list of questions or challenges and we tag them afterward as answered so that I can see which questions have been answered and which ones haven't.

And this really helps me to see where people are getting stuck with the actual curriculum or with the content in the courses, where do they need more support? Where do I need to tweak the content? What do I need to change? And that's how you create a course that delivers what your audience really needs by being flexible and by being open to tweaking things.

 

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