What is a Digital Course? Why EVERY Musician can Build and Profit off of Digital Courses
So you've heard a lot about digital courses, but you're not sure if you could do it or even how to start. Well, I'm here to tell you that you CAN! Listen in to hear more about creating your own course, marketing it, and making passive income from your very own online courses!
Enjoy this week’s transcript!
Today's episode is unique as we are talking about course creation, which is a topic that I really love. Obviously, I've created a lot of courses now and I thought I could dive even deeper into this topic today. I can't wait to get in today's discussion with you about course creation. This is likely a topic that is completely new to you and maybe it's even something that you've never considered. So I'm inviting you to think differently today as we consider an alternative way to create income. As a musician, I'm going to walk through a couple of different topics. We're first going to talk about what a digital course is, then I'll be giving you examples of musicians creating incredible digital courses. Then we'll talk about the types of courses you can create and what you need to do to get started.
So what is a digital course? A digital course is a virtual education experience that others can get access to to help them master a new skill or learn a new subject. How amazing is it that we have the Internet at our fingertips or maybe even on your wrist, and we're able to so quickly and so easily get access to any information we need? There's a big difference with searching the web or YouTube for a specific subject and then having an actual course that you're going through or a digital course. So I broke this down into three different areas, and why it’s different. So with searching, let's say you're learning how to be how to Cook vegan, which is actually something that I'm learning right now. If I wanted to learn how to be a vegan Cook or how to Cook vegan meals, I could easily go to the Internet and search vegan cookbook, vegan blogs, and I can get a ton of ideas.
The difference between this and actually having a course are these three main areas. The first one is a mentor. Having the same mentor or group of mentors that have built a very specific roadmap for you. It's so valuable to have a person or group of people around you that are doing something similar, so you have them to rely on. This is different from finding a whole bunch of mentors and a whole bunch of different ideas on one subject, which sometimes can contradict each other or you can find I think the contradictory things that you can find on one topic can be confusing, and it doesn't really help you know where to start. It just is getting to be confusing.
The second one is accountability. When you have some skin in the game or you've paid money for education, you are much more likely to commit some time and energy towards learning something new. Think in your own life. When was the time that you invested a little bit in some education, a new skill, a new hobby, versus just looking things up for free? And which one gave you a bigger transformation?
The third one is convenience. Unlike enrolling in a program at a school and then having to go and attend in person, a digital course is available to you anytime, anywhere. And I love this. I love this. This is something that I think about as a busy parent of three daughters. I love that I can pull out my tablet at night, and I'm currently working through a jazz piano course, and I feel like I have a teacher sitting right with me at my piano in my piano room. I have another course on writing copy and being better with marketing and being a better writer, thanks to Ashlyn Carter. It's a course I got from her a few years ago, and she's my mentor in that area. She's the mentor I've chosen, so I invest in her, and I love learning how to be a better writer through her, even while I’m out running errands or waiting at the doctor’s office. Anyway, the convenience of it is just incredible and you can go at your own pace. A lot of these courses are go at your own pace.
So that's a little bit about why or how a digital course is different from just going to YouTube or free blogs to learn about a specific topic. Let's talk a little bit about examples of musicians who are creating digital courses. So maybe you're wondering if content creation course creation is for you. You might have thought that it applies to a lot of other subjects, but maybe not to music teaching, because maybe you've thought music lessons are just better live. We could talk all day about that, about the pros and cons. I think that there is definitely a market, a huge market for course creation for learning music for music teachers. I want you to think about some of the mentors you've had through the years, some of the people that you've worked with. Wouldn't it be so amazing to have some of their best lessons and advice available to you in video format in an order that makes sense? Wouldn't it be fantastic to be able to look back on some of those most important lessons that were taught?
I will say a huge yes to that. I can think of lessons I had while I was at Berkeley with some of my mentors that I was just furiously writing notes just as fast as I could. Or at the time I tried to take short little videos, but if I had courses from some of those mentors, they would be invaluable to me and I could go back to them for years. Here are a few musicians that I'm aware of that are creating successful digital courses. Lauren Bateman has Make Guitar Make Sense. Check out episode 54 of this podcast to hear about her discussion on how she built a huge following on YouTube and sells guitar courses and creates incredible passive income for her business. Another creator is Tara Boykin, one of my good friends with the Cascade Method. She teaches piano teachers how to use her method books and teaching system to help beginner students learn music, and she has lots of resources that come with it. Joseph DiAmico, who also was on the podcast recently, he's created Flex Lessons, which is a hybrid or a combination of live one-on-one lessons, group lessons, and lessons that are prerecorded. Melanie Shore has Bebop to Beethoven. I also did an episode with her, and that's the jazz course that I'm going through right now, which I highly recommend.
There are so many great examples of teachers out there, examples of educators and musicians who are taking their expertise and packaging it up into something that's more accessible to more people. So what is a course that you could create? What is something that you really enjoy doing that you really enjoy teaching? And could you create passive income with a digital course of you teaching this subject? Here are some ideas for courses: theory, composition, ukulele, beginner piano, adult piano, improvisation, playing with a band, reading sheet music, playing with an orchestra, accompaniment skills, growing a music school, hiring other teachers, advanced piano repertoire, college auditions. I mean, the list goes on. There's a lot you could do. And I would even say the more niche you get or the more narrow you get on a subject, the easier it is to sell because you're solving a very specific challenge for somebody. Getting started with course creation may feel extremely overwhelming, and that's why I'm creating a course creator for musicians, and this has actually grown into a very big project for me.
I originally wanted to launch this course early on in the year, and I have decided just to make it as comprehensive as I can. So I've been adding more and more modules and working with an editor and producing something so that you have a very specific step by step for creating a course that you can add to your existing studio business. Or maybe you're a musician and you're not teaching, but you want to sell courses. There are so, so many options for you, and it's really, really easy to get started. So I, of course, want you to be in my course where I can teach you how to do it. But in the meantime, I would say here are a few things that you can do to get started.
The first thing is to validate the idea that you have something to offer. It’s a good sign that it's a great idea if you are getting a lot of questions about the topic that you teach. Let's say that you are a writer and you have maybe method books that you create and you're getting questions from other teachers about writing or about composition. That's a great sign that you could create a course on composition versus answering all of these teachers questions or doing one on one classes with them. Another great way to validate an idea is if you see a lot of people out there asking questions in Facebook forums or on the internet or YouTube videos popping up on the topic. If you see any sign of the need for that topic, then it's a really good sign that you could create. One thing to be aware of and to not fall into is this thought that there are too many people doing it. Like, let's say, let's take the topic of Beginner Piano. You type in Beginner Piano in Google and you will get so many amazing resources. And I think about this a lot because I can think of ten off the top of my head. Hoffman Academy, Pianote, Simply Piano, there's Piano Maestro, there's Flow Key. And all of these are made for people to learn piano. But then we have teachers inside the membership, too. One specifically who created a beginner course for piano students. And she has such a large studio and so many requests for teaching that she's just sending her new students over to this course, and she gets like a few sales a week on her beginner piano course.
So there's something to be said about the trust put into who people want as their mentor. So when you start feeling like, oh, there's too many people teaching beginner guitar or there's too much already out there for composition or jazz or whatever it is, I want you just to completely get rid of those thoughts because they aren't true. There isn't enough out there, and you aren't out there yet. You and your personality and your experience and your expertise and everything that has created who you are and what you do now is not there right now, and it's not available. And because of that, you don't know. You cannot say that there are too many people doing this or that. And that's why I'm so excited about Course Creator for Musicians that will be launching soon, because I walk you through exactly how to validate your idea how to do the market research. I even get down to the very specifics of creating or how to name your course, whether it's a starter course or a signature course. And then we talk about everything. With pre-production, I give you a very specific template for how to script your videos so that they're really easy to record, which is something that I've learned over the years, is that scripting your videos makes a huge difference.
The first course that I created in 2017, so five-ish years ago, I kind of scripted it. It was like half-scripted and I had bullet points and a lot of thoughts, and I rehearsed it all and it was a mess. I mean, it was totally a mess. I don't want anyone to see those videos because I was trying to just speak candidly, but then I would say things that I knew sounded funny. And so we'd have to go back anyway. I have a very specific formula for scripting your videos so that people enjoy watching them so that they actually finish your course. That's another topic that I cover is creating videos that are watchable and doing a really good job with your video production so that you get a really high success rate for your course. I am so proud of the courses that we've created inside Teach Music Online. I can remember two years ago now, in 2020, when I did a pay-what-you-can-afford for the Teach Music Online course.
And we were in Thailand at the time and so many teachers needed the course that I had. And so we said, you know what, let's just have teachers pay what they can afford. And this is before it was like a coaching program. This was just a set of videos. So there were around 45 videos that I walked teachers through for how to get set up online. And it was the coolest, most rewarding thing to sit on my little laptop and see all of the comments from teachers telling me how helpful, informative, easy I was, helping them feel less stressed. I remember this big long post a teacher shared about how she went to bed at night the night before feeling just so overwhelmed with having to go online and feeling like there's no way she'll be able to do this. She found me the next day and got the course and she was just raving about how she can finally sleep at night knowing that her business is not going to fail. And I just wanted to share that because I think that's a little glimpse into what you can create and what you can bring to people.
There is something that you have that other people want and it might feel small to you, but being able to package something up that's digital that you can just sell online and then get messages and comments like that on is so rewarding. I mean it's so hard and it takes a lot of work, so I don't want to downplay that like you don't just do this in a night. I think to do it really well and to be comprehensive about it is the way to go, but then the outcome can be amazing. So I hope that I got you thinking just a little bit about maybe spending some time in the area of creating prerecorded lessons that you can share with either your students or that you can market and really build a business off of. I'm positive you can do it because I've seen it done. I have done it. I know the process. I'm so excited for you. If you are thinking about it, the Course Creator for Musicians that I'm working on is coming. Go to teachmusic.online/waitlist. If you're on the wait list, I apologize that it's taking longer than I expected. But the good news is it's just because it's going to be that much better and that much more in depth helping you really have success with it.
My new course, Course Creator for Musicians will be available soon! Click this link to be added to the waitlist. https://www.teachmusic.online/waitlist
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