The solution to “I don’t have an idea for a course”

You’ve known for a while now that you need to create a course of some kind.

If you do, you’ll have an asset that makes money for you while you sleep – and you’ll be on the path to creating the kind of business (and life) you’ve always wanted.

Even better if you make multiple courses.

But maybe you’ve run into one simple little problem: how do you come up with an idea for a course that people want to pay for in the first place?

I’m going to assume here that you’re not already “the” expert on a particular topic (otherwise you’d likely have course ideas already).

In fact, maybe you don’t think you’re enough of an expert on anything to write a full course.

There are 2 solutions to this I recommend.

One is the “hard” way. The other is the “easy” way.

Solution #1: Solve Your Own Problems & Then Teach Others

There’s one piece of advice that “old head” marketers give that drives me a little bit bonkers. (Tim Ferriss even gave this advice in The Four Hour Work Week.)

It’s the idea that you can just read a few books over a weekend and be “expert enough” to write a full, in-depth, comprehensive course on any subject.

I’ll tell you now as someone who has been selling digital courses since 2008 and who also buys a lot of courses:

This is a bunch of crap.

I’ve never met anyone who makes a killing from these “pseudo expert” courses. Your customers can smell a fake from miles away.

The way 95% of course creators do it, when they do it *successfully*, looks like this:

Have problems in your life (that’s easy, they’re all around you).
Learn how to solve one of those problems (spending months/years becoming truly great at it).
Make a course teaching others how you solved the problem.

Here’s a real-life example:
I had a student who started a blog on “mom’s interest topics”. Her blog didn’t have any traction so she was close to giving up when she looked around her house and got fed up with all the clutter (she identified a problem she had).
She started solving her clutter problem, developed her own systems, and got very good/fast/efficient at decluttering.
Then she put together a course around her decluttering knowledge (which has led to a 7-figure digital course empire around decluttering).

What this means is you have to actually have a passion around the problem you’re solving, and you have to have immersed yourself in it for a long time and developed at least some real expertise (or be on your way to have some expertise) in order to teach it effectively AND make real money with it.

You don’t have to know EVERYTHING about a particular field, but you have to confidently know how to solve a serious problem within that field – with real world results to back it up.

I’m just speaking to you honestly from what I’ve observed over the last 15+ years.

I’d love to tell you to just compile some notes from a few books you found in the library on a subject you don’t care about, but I’ve never seen that play out successfully in the real world.

What I’ve just shared is obviously the “hard” way to come up with a course idea.

(If you’re really passionate about the problem you’re solving, it’s actually not THAT hard because you’re living/eating/breathing it anyway. And you can make a LOT of money by definitively solving hard problems for your customers, so the time invested is worth it.)

But, the next solution is a way around it if you’re not yet a true and passionate expert.

Solution #2: Create A One Skill “Challenge” Course

This is what I did for CopyHour at the very beginning.
I picked a skill I desperately wanted to get really good at: writing sales pages.
Every copywriting expert ever said, “To get good, you need to write out winning sales page by hand. If you do this a bunch of times, you can’t help but become really good.”
But I found that while the instructions were simple, actually DOING the handwriting exercise was extremely hard – I’d write maybe one sales letter, have self-doubt that it was doing anything, and give up.
But I knew there had to be something to the exercise since I kept finding so many marketers I admired who swore by it.
So I sold people on joining a challenge to actually do the handwriting exercise for 4 weeks straight (I’d be doing it with them).
Then I simply delivered “proven” sales letters for them (and for me – importantly) to hand write each day. I was selling accountability to the handwriting exercise and I was not positioning myself as an expert.

That was more than 12 years ago. I continued to study and deconstruct and practice copywriting after that until I became an actual expert, and I updated that course (CopyHour) to add more of a teaching component as my expertise improved… and it’s since generated multiple seven figures for me (and helped students of mine generate $800mm+ collectively).

But it all started with one simple “skill building” exercise/challenge that I wanted to do.

Back to the decluttering example:

One of the first really big wins that student had was putting together a 30-day challenge course on decluttering different rooms and areas of your house.

The assignments were things like, “Go declutter your kitchen cabinets. Here are are some basic rules, general guidelines, and mistakes to avoid.”

For that course, she didn’t have to play the topic expert – just the accountability coach.

And the beauty of these kinds of “skill building” courses is that they’re a low-pressure solution. This is HIGHLY recommended.

In the case of decluttering, even if a customer fails the assignment, their kitchen cabinet is probably a little more organized — and you, as the course creator, can take that feedback and make the assignment more effective for students in the future.

You’re not putting your students in danger by giving dangerous, untested advice that requires true expertise.

You’re simply helping them be accountable to a proven system.

And customers LOVE these types of courses.

They don’t need you to be an expert.

They just want the accountability.

And they’ll happily pay for it.

In fact, these kinds of courses also lend themselves to unreal results in your customers – so your sales take off via word of mouth.

Just find a skill you’re desperate to learn, find a simple repetitive skill-building exercise that’s proven to work, and create a 30 day challenge to help people (and you) follow that exercise.

In either situation (Solution 1 or Solution 2), you can then easily build your course in real time as an Email Delivered Course.

I’m not just a solopreneur – I’m also a husband and a father.

Time is scarce for me, and I can’t really risk spending months on an idea only for it to fail, so I’ve developed a bunch of solutions that let me quickly test if a product will be profitable – and then build it rapidly in “real time” with customer feedback, to make sure I’m delivering exactly what people want and giving them world class results.

Email Delivered Courses are one of those solutions.

I spend about 7-14 days to see if there’s any demand for the idea I have
I get payments before I’ve even written a word of the course
And I write the course one day at a time in small bite-sized chunks (generally writing each lesson the day before it goes out) – encouraging & incorporating customer feedback as I go

This destroys procrastination, ensures I don’t waste any time on something people don’t want, and leaves me with courses that my customers LOVE (and experience real change from).

Not to mention I’m also left with a mailing list that’s “trained” to open everything I send.

Every entrepreneur I’ve shown this to privately (or who has simply modeled what I’ve done) has experienced the same.

If you know you need to start building courses but you’re either procrastinating, or you’re finding yourself complicating the process, I’d like to teach you my entire process – whether you’ve never made a course before (and don’t have a list) or if you’re a seasoned entrepreneur.

And I’m going to be doing it exactly the way I’m advertising: as an Email Delivered Course.

The course will start on Monday August 5th. The sooner you join the better though, because I’m getting immediate feedback from those that join early and using their questions to make sure I cover everything you need to hear.

So if you want your personal questions about building a course to get answered, join now, and fire them at me starting today.

I’m confident this will be an investment that returns at least 100-1,000x ROI to you – or you can get your money back.

I hope to see you inside!

>>> Create an ultra-simple, ultra-profitable digital course in the next 30 days — over email

– Derek

P.S. Tomorrow I’m going to talk about 3 drop-dead simple ways to create course content that’s addicting to read (and that will get customers great results while ensuring they buy other things from you in the future).

Whether you build an Email Delivered Course, or go the more “traditional” course building route, you’ll want to read this.

Stay tuned for that tomorrow!