Hi there friend,

Last night I lit the first fire pit of the season. I settled down with a stick I use to stir the logs when out of nowhere I had an urge to carve something into my fire poking stick. I’ve never done anything like this before; but I usually follow these interests to see where they go.

Since I had no idea where to start I did what I usually do and headed over to YouTube. An hour later, my fire had burned down to embers and I had signed up for a mini course on wood carving and had taken my first few tentative steps towards my first carving (it’s going to be a wizard).

The point of this story is that if you’re an expert in something - say woodcarving - someone wants to learn what you know. The internet has made it possible to connect experts with willing learners at a scale never seen before in human history.

It’s easier than you might think to monetize that big, beautiful brain of yours through an online course (learn how to create your own online course). I know this firsthand because we’ve created a paid course of our own.

Over the quarter of a century AWeber has been in business we’ve run hundreds of experiments, talked to tens of thousands of people sending email, and seen just about every clever tactic and mistake in the inbox. We took that accumulation of expertise and turned it into an Email Marketing Master Class to help creators and businesses spend their email time wisely.

Along the way, we learned a few lessons that could help you create a course of your own with minimal headaches.

1. Repurpose, reuse, recycle. If you’ve been publishing anything online you likely already have at least part of your course content. Remember those blog posts you wrote at 2 a.m. when you finally figured out that thing you’d been struggling with, or the videos you’ve been creating to teach a coworker how to use pivot tables that one specific way? You can actually repurpose them into lessons in your course.
   
   We did this ourselves. We had a number of lead magnets on specific aspects of email marketing. We pulled the best bits from some of these mini-courses to make our master class.
    
2. Try to start with an audience. It doesn’t have to be a massive audience, but you’ll want to have at least a few people take your course early on. Why? So they can offer feedback on how to make it better.
   
   It also helps to have early students rate your course or share testimonials on whatever platform you host your course on to help with discoverability.
    
3. Perfect is the enemy of done. In product management we have this saying that “shipped is better than not shipped.” It basically means that spending time constantly polishing a product is a complete waste if you never ship it.
   
   Get something out early, get feedback, and iterate. Just because something has shipped doesn’t mean you can’t improve it. In fact, shipping is the first step to improving.
    
4. Shamelessly self-promote. Even a company like AWeber can’t just put a course out there and expect to people to flock to it. We needed to get it in front of people who needed it when they were in a headspace to want it.
   
   We promote our online course in all sorts of places like our onboarding emails, social media, and our website.
   
   If you have a newsletter, your sign up thank you page could be a great place to promote your course. If you’re posting blogs or videos about your course subject, they’re a great place to promote the course to people who want to go deeper.
    
5. Here’s the last one, and it’s a biggie. Get out of your own way. I can already hear your self-doubt creeping in: "But do I really have anything worth sharing? Who am I to teach others?"
   
   Friend, if you use your expertise in your day to day to earn a living, make your life easier, or increase your quality of life, other people are likely looking to learn what you know. So don't self-sabotage. You've got knowledge to share, and by golly, you're going to share it!

What are you waiting for? Set aside the next half hour to get started on your course. We recommend using a platform like Teachable (more on that below) to get you started with your first course. They integrate directly with AWeber and make the process of delivering and charging for your course super simple. They also have tools to speed up the process of going from idea to launched course.

Did you find this content helpful?

Create and sell your online courses with ease

When you use AWeber with Teachable you’ll be able to make the process of building, launching and making money with courses easier than ever.

Use Teachable’s easy-to-use, no code platform to build and sell your online course.

Then set up an automated email campaign in AWeber to fulfill your online course and to send your audience additional course content.

Since Teachable integrates with AWeber you’ll be able to communicate with your students before, during, and after the course.

With Teachable you get:

• Customizable branding so your course feels like your business.
• An ecommerce suite that includes affiliate programs, lead generation, bundling, and order bumps; unlock more value from every product you create.
• Get the answers you need from Teachable’s award-winning support team and our free educational resources that help you scale and succeed.
• Better learning, better earning with bespoke student features including quizzes and course completion controls that drive engagement and learning outcomes.

So it’s time to turn your passion into revenue using AWeber along with Teachable’s easy to use course builder.

Get our latest expert advice and helpful tips 

👉 Did you know you too can add your most recent blog posts ⬆️ with the images, headlines and descriptions in your next email. And it populates automatically and it only takes 10 seconds. See how you can do it in your AWeber account.

As always, thanks for reading!

- Chris and the team

P.S. Need to migrate subscribers, landing pages, or templates from another tool? We'll do it for free! Schedule a migration today.