How to Create and Sell Mini Courses: Definitive Guide

There are specific reasons that can make you create a mini course.

Maybe:

• You’re new to creating online courses and want to test if your niche is profitable.
• You want to use it as an incentive to attract prospects to your main course.
• Or you’re looking to share a specific skill without overwhelming your students with huge amounts of content.

A mini-course is a great way to try out an idea without spending much time or money.

But to create a successful mini-course, you need to know how it works and the tools you need to achieve that.

So in this guide, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about creating and selling mini-courses.

What is a mini-course?

A mini-course is a short instructional program that focuses on a particular topic or ability.

Usually, a mini-course is short and only about two to three hours in length. Mini-courses are shorter than full-fledged courses and are meant to help your audience solve a specific problem or reach a single goal.

Mini-courses can be taught in many different ways, such as through online courses, workshops, seminars, and other types of classes.

Benefits of Mini Courses

There are huge benefits to creating mini-courses.

Firstly, a mini-course can help you attract more leads to your sales funnel.

Here’s how.

Suppose you’re an SEO expert. And you decide to create a full course to help your audience learn SEO.

A mini-course can be used as a lead magnet to get people who might buy your course to sign up for your email list.

After sending a couple of drip email campaigns, you can pitch your main offer, which is your full SEO course.

The other benefit of mini-courses is that they take less time to create.

A mini-course can usually be made in less time, which takes away a lot of the stress that creators of larger courses usually feel.

Lastly, mini-courses help you, as a creator, figure out if the market you want to go into is a good one.

By creating a mini course, you get a chance to see if there’s an audience interested in learning about the topic on which you want to create a course.

Before you jump into the deep end of whatever niche you want to create a course in, you can put out a mini-course to see if there’s an audience and an appetite for the learning you want to provide.

How to Create a Mini Course

By now, I bet you know what a mini-course is all about. In this section, we’ll take you step-by-step through how to create one.

That’s from getting the best mini-course idea to using the right tool to create one and knowing how to promote it.

Let’s get into it.

Find a Killer Mini Course Topic

If you want people to sign up for your mini-course, you need to come up with the idea that will interest your target audience.

The question is, “How do you find a great mini-course idea?

Use your already high-performing content types to find a great mini-course topic.

As a creator, you can get a mini-course idea by looking at the most popular content types.

If you have a blog, you can log in to your Google Analytics account and find the posts that perform well in terms of traffic and lead generation.

If you’re an Instagram creator, you can gather a few of your most viral posts and find a common thing that helped your content become viral.

Suppose you’re an educator who’s never created content before and wants to create a mini course to test the waters in your niche.

You can find great mini-course topics there as well.

Here’s how to find one.

Let’s start with the obvious one.

What skills do you have and think can benefit your audience?

This can be a skill that you have a degree in, learned at work, or have as a hobby.

For example, say you are a really good chef. But to be specific, you make great tacos, especially the Birria Tacos.

You can create a mini-course and show your recipe to your audience on how to make birria tacos.

After you find the topic, you’re most skilled at and love, it’s time to know if there’s an audience interested in the same.

You can use a tool like Google Trends to assess the topic’s popularity and trend over time.

If you look at the keyphrase “birria tacos recipe” on Google Trends, you’ll see that the keyword has been getting interested for the past five years.

This means that people are interested in learning how to make Birria tacos.

Here are other tools you can use to research a mini-course topic:

• SEMrush: for finding high-performing content on search engines.
• BuzzSumo: finding viral content on social media.
• Leads Quizzes: for surveying your audience and learning more about them
• Reddit: for uncovering new ideas that your audience is actively talking about

Create a Learner Persona

A learner persona is a fictional character that represents your ideal student.

It represents a set of fictional characteristics that paint a picture of your ideal audience.

Creating a learner persona for your mini-course has tremendous advantages.

• It helps you figure out the main pain your ideal audience faces, allowing you to create a course that helps them solve their pains.
• Before creating the mini-course, you’ll learn what your ideal student knows and doesn’t before taking the course.
• Help you make better decisions when designing your course and the technology you want to use.
• Creating learning objectives helps you design a better learning experience.

You can research your audience by running surveys, interviewing them, or running group discussions.

Make Concise and Value-Packed Course Content

While a fully online course has the time to go into all the encompassing details and frameworks, mini-courses do not have that luxury.

Your minicourse needs to be concise and still pack a punch.

Remember, your audience has a limited attention span, so you need to get into the meat of the content immediately.

Also, you want students to feel like they’re getting value without consuming a bazillion words of content.

Find A Great Online Course Building Tool

After creating your mini-course learning materials, you need a platform to host them, build your community, and sell your mini-course.

The choice of your online course platform can make or break your mini-course success. In that case, we would advise you to pay attention to a platform with these core features:

• A foolproof built-in course builder: to help create and design your mini-course easily.
• Third-party integration tools: to allow you to extend the functionality of your e-learning platform with third-party apps.
• Community building tools: to enable you to build a community around your expertise
• Detailed analytic tools: to gauge the performance of your mini course.
• Cloud-based: to ensure faster implementation since it doesn’t require onsite installation.
• E-commerce support: to allow you to monetize your online course via an effective checkout system.

In this case, GroupApp seems to check all the boxes and is even more perfect.

The online course builder has a user-friendly interface that allows you to launch your mini-course faster.

In case you want to price your mini-course, you can easily do so with GroupApp.

You can make your mini-course free or charge a one-time fee.

From there, you can upload and organize your learning materials.

You can also easily add different content formats, like PDFs, and even add text quizzes to assess how well your audience has understood your content.

Promote Your Mini Course

You have now created your mini-course. What’s next is bringing it to your audience’s eyeballs.

Like any lead magnet, your mini-course has an active audience. With that in mind, you need to leverage your digital marketing platform to attract leads and scale your business.

Here are steps you can take to promote your online mini-course:

Create a Conversion-Focused Landing Page

In plain language, a landing page is a stand-alone page that you create with a conversion goal in mind.

You need to attract your potential students to your mini course. Otherwise, it will be challenging to gauge the profitability of the niche you want to delve into.

And if you are using your mini-course as a lead magnet to attract your prospects to your main course, you need a well-polished landing page that will entice them to take action immediately and convert.

Here’s the general appearance of a landing page:

Here are specific things you need to consider to create highly converting landing pages.

• Create a persuasive headline and sub-headline.
• Use visuals.
• Clearly outline your value proposition.
• Powerful CTA.
• Write customer’s focused copy.

We have a guide on creating a highly converting sales page. Steal the tips from the guide and incorporate them to build a sales page for your mini-course that converts.

Preselling

A presale enables you to promote and sell your digital product before its official release date.

When you pre-sell your courses, you provide your audience with the privilege of being among the first to access your content as soon as you release the course.

You also allow yourself more time to prepare your course contents and minimize the time you spend generating sales when you launch the course.

This method, when executed perfectly, combines urgency and regular marketing practices to enhance conversion rates.

Online Advertisements

It takes money to make money, and advertising an online mini-course is no exception if you want great results.

Running advertisements is an excellent way to promote your course.

You can run Facebook ads to reach more audiences on social media or even run PPC ads on search engines like Google to attract more leads.

Share to Your Social Media Audience

Social media has transformed marketing over the years. It is more than just a platform where you sign up to meet friends; it can also be a great advertising powerhouse.

The best platforms are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.

However, you must be aware of how varied each platform might be in terms of interaction.

For example, Linkedin caters to a professional audience. It can be a great place to start if you’re in the B2B market.

And Twitter, on the other hand, needs you to post short CTAs. That’s because, with a character restriction of 280, you need to keep your post straight to the point.

That way, you can highlight the nuances of your mini-course in the fewest words possible to grab your audience’s attention.

Create and Drip Campaign

Drip marketing is the process of gradually revealing some information to your target audience in order to entice them to buy.

To run a drip campaign, you need automation marketing software.

Using GroupApp, you can integrate an email marketing software like HubSpot that allows you to run drip campaigns for your email subscriber list.

To run a successful drip campaign for your minicourse, send fresh content via email every few days, all related to your minicourse.

You can start with a welcome email that invites your customer to join your newsletter. Please mention that you’ve created an online short course that they might find useful.

Your next email can address your customer’s pain. In short, what is the problem that your audience is facing, and how can you help?

The last email can include your strong sales pitch and a link to your main course. Because your consumers are used to hearing from you, they will be more responsive to your offer.

Conclusion

Developing a short course is a great technique for anyone who wants to create an online course but is still determining if the topic they want to create will appeal to their audience and have a good financial return.

A mini-course enables you to test and sharpen your skills before embarking on a larger undertaking.

• Before you think of spending more time and effort on a more sophisticated course:
• Construct a short course to learn about the tools and technical resources required.
• Establish a teaching style.
• Assess its public acceptance.

Get started with GroupApp today and create your first mini-course in minutes.