GSD 189: How To Create Content For Your Next Digital Course Easily

Welcome to the newest episode of GSDDLE. Today we’re going to talk about creating content easily and quickly. And so many of our clients come to us and they have an idea for a course, or they have a course fleshed out, or they’ve written a book and they want to create a course for it, or they have a coaching program that they’re fulfilling, they have students, men mentees, like in a coaching program, and they just need a way to get their thoughts out of their head and create videos and audio and course material so that they can package it up and sell it.

Now, one of the best ways I know of getting out of your head and structuring a course, structuring a product that you can sell, is by mind mapping. And we’ve covered this on some GSD episodes previously, but basically, the quick way of creating content is always video. It’s always video. Because there are so many modalities that you can cut it up and splice it. So for one can, the courses themselves should be video content. Now, way back in the day, they didn’t have to be. Way back in the day, it was easy to very simply write up a lesson and package it as a textbook or package it as a blog post and people would’ve to read it. And now video is everywhere. My eight-year-old kid watches more videos online than anybody else I know. So video is the method that people are learning from and people are consuming. You need a video for your course.

So if it’s a video like this, awesome. If you have switching, that’s fine too. I mean, there’s lots of different stuff that you can do from a video standpoint. But you can also cut it all the way down to social media content. It can be 15, 30, or 60-second clips. You can caption that stuff. Also, you can extract the audio and pull it off the video, so now you have an audio-only feed. You can be doing podcasts with that kind of stuff.

So there are so many different things and ways you can create content when you start it with video. And unfortunately, if it’s not started with a video, you got to backend into all of it. So a hundred percent, use video where you can. If you’re not comfortable on video, find somebody comfortable on video or do audio over and B-roll, but it will never engage people the way that video does online right now.

Now, Brainstorm what to put in those videos. My absolute favorite tool is mind mapping. So this is a piece of software that I use called MindMeister. Let me show you how long I’ve been using this. This software here, I… Let’s see. 2019, 2014 is when I started using this software. I mean, look at this, Quickest Path to Cash, the first course that I ever created is back here, and I’ve updated a lot of this stuff as it goes. But basically, we were inside the podcasting course.

So if you click the podcasting course, what you will find is that this course is a hundred percent geared towards podcasting. And I wrote it a long time ago, so some of this stuff isn’t nearly as relevant as it could be perhaps. But if you look, I went through and brainstormed all of it out. So when I brainstorm a course, I always start with module one. So module one is always a discovery if you will. It’s a foundational element. It’s the foundation that all of your members, all of your folks, are going to come in learning this one foundational thing. So you can think of it like kindergarten in grade school, or your freshman year of high school is probably a better way. So there are so many different grade schools and elementary schools and stuff that are sending their kids. They’re teaching kids and then there’s usually just a couple of high schools in your area.

So freshman year standardizes the curriculum for the next four years. So you’re taking the pool of 20 or so students, they’re coming in as a freshman. During their freshman year, they are learning… Everybody is brought back up to speed. So no matter where you were being taught before, the freshman year is the foundation for the next four years. Same with college. Your freshman year of college is the foundation for the next four, or seven, or however many years, or whatever. So this course needs to be the same. Your introductory first module, module one, is going to be the foundation for everything else that you build on top. So you need to assume nothing. Like these people, they don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground in module one. So you need to ensure that it is a very introductory level education in module one.

Now, module two, module three, module four, you’re going to build on top of it. So what we’d like to do in the mind mapping, is make sure that everything builds on top of each other. So let’s look at the course here. So module one is discovery. Do we have a why podcasting? What is the psychology of podcasting? Then underneath why podcasting, what are the benefits? What is podcasting? What are the mistakes of podcasting? You want to understand your listeners. So these are just different talking points here.

Now, if we scroll down, we see module two, What You Need. So if you’re going to be interested in podcasting, first, we need to understand what it is, and second, we need to have the things that we need to get it. And back when I created this course, nice microphones like this weren’t available. Lavalier mics weren’t necessarily available. Studio lights, cameras, this little switching unit that I’ve got here, none of this stuff was out there. It was brand new. It was you had a mic, you could talk into your computer, you could record that thing and ship it off to iTunes. Now there’s so much live streaming and podcasting stuff out. But in the olden days, we had to go through what we needed. What hardware do you need? What software do you need? Is it a PC or a Mac? How do you set up a site to send that podcast to iTunes?

And then creating content. Again, even way back here, I was still talking. Start with video, backend into audio. Out of the content, you can create PDFs and downloads, you can do webinars, can do Facebook chat. There are so many different things that you can do once you have the content itself.

Then module four. So we get into… So again, what is podcasting? What do you need to podcast? Then what are the nuts and bolts of creating that content? And then how do you make money from podcasts? So it was a four-module course, five-module course, actually, then how… Because you need to have your money-making elements in a podcast before you can start marketing it. So all in all, this is a five-module course that didn’t take that long to put together from a brain dump standpoint. It took an hour. And this is what I try to do whenever I do courses. Let me think hard about the course for an hour or two. And then once I have thought hard about that course, all I got to do is go in, record the videos, and create the content, but the thinking has already been done and I don’t have to worry about any of that. So all I have to do is just show up, turn the camera on, start recording, and then before you know it, my course is done.

So that’s how I like to create content fast and easily. It helps if you have a solid setup. It helps if you’re able to walk in, stand at your standing desk, turn on a video camera and just go. It helps encourage you to create content when it’s easy. So that’s what I always try to do. Even yesterday, I took an hour and positioned everything that I wanted from a camera setup standpoint to get today’s recording done. If I would’ve waited until today to position everything and get it set up the way I wanted, I wouldn’t have done it because I would’ve just pushed it off. So it’s just a little tip.

But if you have any questions at all about creating content, or marketing that content, ask the question below. Make sure to like and subscribe to the feed wherever you are, on YouTube or Facebook, or whatever. And if you have any questions at all or would like to talk to us about going through and putting together sales funnels for your digital products, coaching programs, and all that stuff, just go to doneforyou.com/start and I will talk to you soon. All right, thanks. Bye.