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Creating an Online Course
Hosting your first online course on a website of your own is a bold move but it can pay off massively if you do it right.
Even if you intend on publishing it on an established platform, it’s still a good idea to have your own website to promote your brand.
In this post, we’ll go over everything you need to set up your own website such as:
And everything else in between.
Let’s get started.
The first step that comes with creating your first website is to choose a domain name for it.
It’s important not to overthink this as oftentimes, the simplest of options are often the best.
When you’re thinking of what your domain should be, make sure that it’s:
As long as you’re able to do these three things with your domain name, you should be good to go.
Once you’ve settled on a domain name, you need to get in touch with a domain registrar.
There are plenty of domain registration companies out there with some of the best being:
It doesn’t particularly matter where you get your domain name from as all of them provide the same basic service.
What you can look into is buying a web hosting service alongside your domain name.
The three options we listed above (except for Hover) provide web hosting services along with being domain registration companies.
It can be a good idea to opt for web hosting with the same company that you used as a domain registrar since you can manage your hosting as well as domain name registration in the same place.
Let’s look into web hosting in more detail…
We mentioned above how it doesn’t really matter which domain registrar you choose.
However, if you intend on using that same company as your web hosting provider, it’s important to put a little more thought into it.
This is because while it doesn’t really matter who’s registering your domain name, it definitely does matter a lot who’s providing you web hosting.
This is because hosting refers to the computer server that your website will basically be online from. This means that the quality of the hosting will affect several aspects of your website.
The 3 factors you should be looking at when choosing a web hosting service are:
If the site speed and performance are bad, your visitors will face slow page load times and they’ll most likely leave before they even check out what you have to offer.
If the site security is bad, then your online course business as well as your customers will be vulnerable to malware attacks. These can be lethal and can cripple your online business entirely.
If the customer support of your web hosting provider is bad, it can take forever for you to fix critical issues. Some of which may even cost you loyal customers and sales.
Thus, it’s highly important that you do your research and read as many reviews as you can before opting for a specific web hosting provider.
Some of the best hosting providers we prefer are:
Chances are that you don’t know how to code and even if you do, very few people these days create websites just using HTML5 and CSS.
The most popular one out there is WordPress but there are many other alternatives you can consider for creating your site such as:
And many more.
We have several posts on our site comparing different website builders that you can check out to determine which one is most suitable for your online course project.
Once the website builder is installed, you can start working on the different aspects of your online course site such as:
And many more.
Yes, you should still create a site for your brand even if you’ve published your course on an online course platform (such as Udemy, Coursera, etc.)
This is because you should not expect customers to magically find your course just because you’ve published it on a platform.
If you don’t intend to sell your course from your own site, then the site can act as a tool to reach new audiences and extend your reach.
Hence, whatever the case may be, you should definitely be creating a site for your online course business.
If you don’t have your course on your site, you can still provide a link to its landing page on whatever online course platform you’ve published it on.
That way, people who visit your online courses website will have an easy way to access your course, if they’re interested.
Other than that, there are a number of techniques you can employ:
It’s a good idea to have a blog section within your website where you write about your specific niche.
To be clear, this would be the same niche that your online courses are about.
Be sure to use SEO tools to identify rankable keywords and use them within your content to make your website rank better on search engines.
As part of promoting your online courses, you will also be trying to boost your presence on social media.
Hence, every time you make a new post on your blog, it’s a good idea to share it on all your social media.
Who knows?
Maybe a potential customer may find your product through this route.
Creating a site is not just important if you intend to host your online course on it.
Its main purpose is to boost your online prominence and introduce your courses to as many new audiences as possible.
Helping you make passive income by creating, managing, selling and scaling online courses.
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