Planning Your Online Course: Finding a Hungry Active Market

Tim Cooper

May 07 2015

In this episode we look into simple ways to validate your course ideas. Searching Google for forums, blogs, products and courses on your topic is a good start when it comes to seeing if there is any current activity in your selected topic.

Amazon, Facebook groups and fan pages and LinkedIn groups can also shed valuable information on the popularity of your course topic.

Online educational platforms like Udemy are a great place to research your topic ideas and get a good idea of existing courses, popularity and price.

Checking affiliate sites like ClickBank and JVZoo can also reveal trends in popularity and price.

It's not enough for your topic to be popular, your market must be hungry, and they must be willing and eager to reach for their credit cards.

Just because you may find a lot of blog sites and YouTube videos on your topic that does not guarantee that people are willing to pay for your information, they may just be happy with the free information they have available to them.

Along with activity and popularity you must find proof that people are willing to pay for training in your topic. To do this you have to search for and find existing products and courses. The more products and courses out there, the better for you.

Once you complete this exercise for each of the topics on your list you should then choose the topic for which you found the most existing products and courses. Then you will be ready for the next step - gathering your market intel.

Other resources mentioned in this episode

Google Trends

Freshkey - Keyword tool

If you have a question about any aspect of online course delivery, from concept to market, please feel free to send me an email at [email protected]. I'd love to hear from you and your question would very well feature in a future podcast.

I want to deliver relevant material so get those emails rolling in.

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