We’ve been working our way through a series on Making Money as a Writer. Today, we’re talking about courses, which is one of the most natural ways for you to offer value to your audience and increase your income.

As a former college professor, courses are honestly one of the things that come most naturally to me. When you spend seventeen years thinking about curriculum, lesson plans, and assessment day in and day out, it becomes second nature.

But chances are pretty high that you are NOT a teacher by trade. And that’s perfectly OK, because you just need to know that you can put together a great course! One of the keys to putting together a great course is to figure out the specific objectives you want the learner to achieve by the end of the course, and then work backwards from there to give them the information, experiences, and learning activities to take them there.

But it’s not just about the information in a course—it’s also about the marketing. Because if you don’t have marketing for your course, you probably won’t have sales. Marketing is a giant area that I don’t have time to get into right now, and to be honest it’s not my area of expertise. But suffice it to say that if you are going to be successful with courses, or anything business-related for that matter, you need to become comfortable with marketing and learning how to do it more effectively.

From a business standpoint, courses are a fantastic addition to your streams of income. Readers and learners value courses at a much higher level than books. You can take the same material you have used for a book, translate it into a course, and charge much more for it.

If you enjoy teaching and putting together material in a way that helps other people experience transformation, courses are a great way for you to add value to others and increase your income.

And by the way, if you are interested in learning how to build and market online courses, I highly recommend you connect with my friend, Lucas Marino. He is an expert in these areas and has developed some courses to help you. Check out his website at https://www.marinotraining.com/.

Question: Do you enjoy teaching? If so, have you ever considered developing online courses?