Tag: business growth

How to Name Your Online Course – Clarity over Everything

Posted on by marg
Reading Time: 2 minutes

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.”

~ William Shakespeare

Naming your online course can easily be one of the most difficult things about building it. Client’s of mine have spend DAYS trying to get the perfect name, and in turn, the perfect URL to launch their online course with.

Don’t get too hung up on this!

Courses, as with websites are a growing evolving creation, and 2 years from now it’s highly likely that your online course will look much different than it does today, especially if you’re just starting out.

Clarity over Cleverness

If your customer has to sit and figure out what the name of your course means, you have lost them as a customer.

Boring course names sell much better than clever and potentially confusing names. Naming your online course is your first opportunity to clarify your offer to your customer. It must be clear, literal and concise.

If a customer is unsure of your offer, they will lose trust in you, and it becomes much more difficult to allow them to see your value.

The aim when selling online courses is to make it crystal clear who you help, and how you help them.

Online Course Name Suggestions

If you’re in the initial stages of naming your online course, use these prompts to brainstorm and get started! Take your primary online course topic and fill in the blanks, mad-lib style.

The _____ Blueprint

______ Mastery

______ Academy

______ Companion

______ Success Path

Your Guide to ______

Mastering ______

______ Masterclass

The ______ Society

 

This activity will get the creative juices flowing, and spark up some succinct and clear course name ideas.

Many course creators will take the examples above and keep them to themselves, but there’s no gatekeeping here!

Drop me a message anywhere @margreffell to let me know what you names your online course.

Take care and happy launching,

M

What do you setup first when creating your Online Course?

Posted on by marg
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Start with the end in mind. Always Setup Your Finances First

At the end of the day, after you’ve sold your programs you want to be sure that the money gets deposited into the right places, and everyone has an easy way to pay through a protected source.

This is why I always set this up first. Here’s a quick overview on how you want to set up yur finances when getting ready to launch an online course.

Who is Collecting the Money?

First off, you need to establish who is collecting the money. Most likely it’s you, but we need to clarify if YOU are a singular person, or a company.

If you are a singular person, and you operate as a sole proprietor, you will be using your own bank accounts to collect money. In this case for organization reasons, I would suggest opening up a separate checking account for these funds so you can monitor this income flow for tax reasons.

If you are an LLC or Incorporated, you should visit your branch and open up a dedicated set of accounts under the name of your company. Your funds should go directly into these accounts once people pay for your products.

How is the money being collected?

People who are purchasing your online course will not be sending you money directly, as there needs to be a payment processor in between the two parties to receive online payments, and then transfer the money to your accounts.

The payment processors you’ll need to setup are Stripe and PayPal.

These are the two most highly used and trusted payment processors in North America, and are generally well accepted around the globe.

These processors are free to setup, but take a fee off approximately 3% from every transaction they process.

When you set these up, they will ask to be connected to your bank account as one of the setup steps. This must be done to achieve the transfer of funds into your accounts.

You can create links to send buyers inside these payment processors, and use these as a checkout for them.

There are other softwares that you can integrate with these payment processors to create a more robust checkout experience like ThriveCart and Sam Cart, but we will dive into these in more depth in future posts.

The Final Flow

The checkout software step is optional, so without it the funds would go directly from the purchaser, through the payment processor, and ultimately deposited into your account in a few days.

Happy course creation!

Stay posted for next week when we cover all in one solution, and I’d love to hear any questions I can answer to support you in your online course journey.

M