How Do I Create an Ecourse for my Therapy Practice

As an art therapist, your core business model is around providing therapy for clients. As a business owner, you may realise that in order to diversify your income and provide more secure avenues of income, it’s important to generate other income producing services and products.

For ideas on how to diversify your income as a therapist, you can read our previous blog post: 10 Ways to Increase Your Therapist Income

One of the ways to generate income as a therapist includes developing an ecourse. Ecourses are different to workshops. Typically workshops are conducted in person in a classroom whereas ecourses are conducted online. Ecourses allow you the ability to upscale your course delivery to potentially thousands of people compared to the limited number of people that are taught at in-person event. Providing ecourses allows you to control the content and marketing efforts to reach as many people as you like who fit your demographic instead of only delivering workshops to those who live in your local area.

Your ecourse can be hands on or hands off. You can walk your ecourse students through each part of the course and interact with your students as much as possible. Alternatively, you can offer ecourses using a more hands-off approach, where students can guide themselves through your course content. Even though you may not be participating as actively as a hands-on approach, you should always make yourself available to students through email, Q&A sessions, or regular announcements and check-ins.

An ecourse is a good way to generate income, however, it’s also an effective way to promote your therapy services. When you view your ecourse in terms of its effectiveness to market your therapy services, you can then decide whether to charge money for your ecourse or provide it for free as a way to generate interest in your business.

Your first major decision will be what your ecourse topic should be about. Your ecourse idea should be a blend of providing what your potential students are looking for as well as topics that you are personally interested in and possess the skills to teach.

If you already have an email list of subscribers or social media following you can ask your readers what topics they would like to learn more about.  You can run a survey asking readers what they need the most help with. If you already have a topic in mind, then you can still contact your readers to clarify the most important components of that topic that your reader is interested in. For example, you may already know that you want to run an ecourse on anxiety, however, after feedback from your readers, you may find that your readers have identified anxiety and family as their primary concern, or managing anxiety at work as an immediate concern.

If you don’t have an audience to ask, you can read online forums about your topic (Facebook groups, Reddit, etc.) where people discuss their most common concerns or problems in the field of your ecourse topic

To help you further define your topic, ask yourself these questions:

• Who is your audience
• Why do you want to help the students who purchase your ecourse
• What is the number one challenge your potential student is facing about your topic
• If this one challenge is not big enough to fill a complete course, consider adding 2-3 more challenges that are commonly experienced by people

If you are a member of any Facebook groups, Reddit sub-reddits, or other online message boards, review the most posted topics that relate to your topic idea.

Using online forums, social media, and talking with current clients will help you narrow down your topic. It is important to keep in mind that your ecourse should:

• Fall under your expertise of knowledge
• Be what your clients and customers are seeking help for
• Be teachable in an online format
• Meet your ethical obligations as a therapist

Now that you’ve decided on your ecourse topic it’s time to actually create your ecourse.

BRAIN DUMP

The best approach to initially planning your ecourse content is to do a brain dump. Grab a blank piece of paper (or document) and write down everything that comes to mind that you think is relevant to your course topic.

This is not the stage to edit yourself. This stage is to let your mind run free with whatever ideas come to mind. You can edit your ideas at a later  stage and formulate a meaningful strcuture to your ecourse.

You may also want to use external sources of similar information to help formulate your ideas. Amazon can be a huge resource for content by looking through the contents chapters of popular books. Use these ideas to help fill in any gaps you may have missed in your original brain dump.

STRUCTURE CONTENT

Once you have your brain dump complete, you can start to refine your ideas into a more structured progression of content. Start to define the main ideas within your course and use these as the basis of your core modules within your ecourse.

The number of modules you create will depend on the length of your course. Most online courses range between 1-8 weeks in length. Your ecourse should be short enough to ensure that your students have a high success rate of completing the course.

If you find your ecourse has about 10-20 main ideas that could be defined as a separate module, then you may want to consider dividing your ideas into multiple ecourses. For example, you could have:

• Art Therapy and Anxiety Ecourse 1
• Art Therapy and Anxiety Ecourse 2
• Art Therapy and Anxiety Ecourse 3

You could then deliver these ecourses concurrently or over the course of a year for example.

Dividing your ecourse into smaller ecourses has a number of benefits:

• Your students can consume smaller amounts of content at a time and sign up for additional courses later
• You can use multiple ecourses to include more detailed content than you would if you only had one short ecourse
• Multiple ecourses provides you with additional streams of income over time as you release each ecourse
• Once all ecourses are released, you can choose to bundle all ecourses and offer a bundled discount to purchasers

Once you have your main ideas for your ecourse, you then need to decide on the outline for each module. You can choose to create each module as one single lesson,  or you could choose to create sub-units within each module.

By breaking each main topic down into smaller manageable units, you improve the likelihood of your students completing your ecourse. A typical guide is to create about 2-4 sub-units within each module.  As you end each module and sub-unit without your ecourse, ensure that you give your student a summary of the most important points to learn within that section.

You can help your students retain more information from your ecourse by providing revision information at the end of each section including:

• Summary worksheets
• Quizzes
• Exercises

TOOLS TO USE FOR THE PLANNING PROCESS:

• FreeMind
• MindNode
• Scrivener
• Trello

TYPES OF CONTENT TO INCLUDE IN ECOURSE

Your ecourse will consist of information resources for your student. You may deliver your ecourse using a primary source of media such as video, however, you may wish to provide supplementary material, such as pdfs, that your students can download and use outside of the ecourse.

The most types of content to include in an ecourse are listed below. Most ecourses will include a mixture of many different types of content as many people learn through different media including visual, audio, and written. Consider the demographics of your audience and determine what types of content would suit your audience the most.

LISTS (usually one page summaries)

• quick tips
• cheat sheet
• flow chart
• reference sheet
• glossary of terms
• checklist
• Forms

 GUIDES (usually mini-books)

• quick start guide
• tutorial
• Planners

 INFORMATION WORKSHEETS

• case studies
• statistics
• templates
• Spreadsheets

AUDIO/VIDEO

• Presentations
• Slideshows
• Screenshare tutorials
• Lectures
• Interviews

CREATE YOUR ECOURSE CONTENT

Once you have decided on your ecourse structure and the types of content you will include in your ecourse, it’s time to start creating your documents, videos, audio, and visual aids as required.

This part of the process has the potential to get away from you and become an unyielding beast of never ending ecourse creation. To reduce the potential for chaos, it’s best to set some initial guidelines of how much content to create. You can always expand or reduce these guidelines once you start creating your content as well as in the editing process.

An example of how you could structure your content is listed below:

NOTE: Assume your ecourse has 4 modules and 4 sub-units within each module.

MODULE 1

• Unit 1 – 500 words
• Unit 2 – 500 words
• Unit 3 – 500 words
• Unit 4 – 500 words
• Module handout

MODULE 2

• Unit 1 – 500 words
• Unit 2 – 500 words
• Unit 3 – 500 words
• Unit 4 – 500 words
• Module handout

MODULE 3

• Unit 1 – 500 words
• Unit 2 – 500 words
• Unit 3 – 500 words
• Unit 4 – 500 words
• Module handout

MODULE 4

• Unit 1 – 500 words
• Unit 2 – 500 words
• Unit 3 – 500 words
• Unit 4 – 500 words
• Module handout

This guideline would be an initial plan to get you started on your planning process. The guideline also ensures you stay on track with creating succinct and relevant information in your ecourse.

As you create each module you may find situations where you need to provide additional resources such as images, audio, or video files.

In summary, the above course module would mean you need to create 8000 words of content over 4 main topics and 16 sub-units. Not all modules may have the same number of sub-units and resources. Your guideline should be useful enough to help get your started but remain flexible as you create your actual content. By creating this initial plan outline, you now have a guideline as to the amount of content that you are creating and can then decide how to plan your time to spend on creating ecourse content.

Marketing your ecourse can be done in a variety of ways. You can make your ecourse available for purchase on your website at any time. You then email your mailing list and market your course via social media or advertising. 

This process is a direct sales method that clearly relays to your customers that you have a product for sale that is available immediately for purchase and use.

Alternatively, you can employ a more complex method of marketing your course by extending the promotional period and methods of promotion to your potential customers. This involves building up the anticipation of your product through blog posts, social media sneak peeks, and email previews. This extended communication warms up your potential customers to your ecourse and educates them about how it can help them.

EDUCATING YOUR ECOURSE CUSTOMERS

If you take the approach of marketing your ecourse over an extended period of time to your potential customers, you should plan to use a number of strategies when you communicate with your potential customers.

Your potential customers may not know about you or what services you offer. If they have only found you online and not had any personal contact with you they may not be aware of your skills and your approach to helping people.

In the lead up to your ecourse launch, it is a good opportunity to introduce yourself to your potential clients and educate them about how you can help them.

Some common ways you can educate potential customers about you and your upcoming ecourse includes:

• Tips and tricks download
• Checklists
• Worksheets
• Psychoeducation eguide
• Email mini course series

The types of educational strategies that you use should always relate to the topic of your ecourse so that you are showing your potential customers your knowledge about the topic and how you can help them. Your educational promotional material will also give your potential students an insight into your teaching style and the type of content that will be included in the ecourse that you are selling.

The educational methods you provide should always be free to your readers. They should also require that your readers provide an email address to enable them to download the free item. As you are educating your potential ecourse customers about you and your ecourse topic, you are also collecting email addresses to email about your ecourse when it launches.

Need help with creating your ecourse?

If you need help to create your ecourse, we provide an Ecourse Planner Package in the store. You can purchase the package in a variety of different formats including:

• Microsoft Word
• Scrivener
• Evernote

The course planner package provides a roadmap on how to get your course completed from choosing your course topic to creating course content and then launching your course with a strong marketing strategy in place.

If you’re ready to create your next course or workshop then this package is perfect for you.

Creating an online course, or in-person workshop could be exactly what your therapy business needs to help bring more exposure to your business. Courses and workshops are also an excellent way to create alternative income for your art therapy business.

Maybe you’ve considered creating a course before but abandoned the idea because it seemed too much work for an uncertain outcome.

Creating a course can be daunting from designing your course structure, to creating your course content, and then finally putting into place the most effective marketing techniques to sell your course.

This course planner package provides a roadmap on how to get your course completed from the first step of coming up with your course topic, all the way through to creating course content and then finally launching your course.

The course planner package does not contain generalised information about courses but instead provides nitty gritty detail on how to execute the necessary steps to get your course completed.

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The package includes 4 major sections:

1. Course Admin – the course admin section will help you to establish the administrative foundation that will help support your course creation process. Setting up the basic admin structure you need will help boost your productivity and efficiency in getting your course completed.
2. Course Design – this section will help provide you with the core decisions that have to be made about your course topic, format and delivery method. Included is the essential components of creating your course modules.
3. Marketing – once your course is completed, you will need to implement an effective strategy to market your course. This section contains specific details about the marketing assets you will need and the sales channels you should market.
4. Worksheets – here’s where you get to work! These worksheets provide all you need to complete your course fast!

Using the resources in this package makes the process of creating your course so much easier.

This package will save hours of wasted time trying to understand what you need to organise, create and market your course for your therapy business.

If you’ve always wanted to create a course but struggled to find a place to start, this package will provide you with a clear direction to get your course completed.

The package is full of actionable worksheets to help get your course done!

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After working through this package you will:

• Have a step by step project plan to create your next course
• Centralise all of your course assets for easy updating
• Select tech gear to create your course and 3rd party platforms to host your course
• Create an effective customer sales funnel to sell your course
• Construct your sales emails using our email outlines
• Decide on your course topic, form and method
• Create your course using the module template
• Create the necessary marketing assets you will need for your course
• Devise a blogging strategy to help market your course
• Use the 30 day planner to complete your course

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The contents of this package include the following sections:

COURSE ADMIN

• Master Checklist
• Admin
• Tech
• Financial
• Folder Structure
• Planning
• Customer Sales Funnel

 COURSE DESIGN

• Course Topic
• Course Format
• Course Delivery
• Course Creation

 MARKETING

• Marketing Assets
• Blogging
• Social Media
• Email
• External

 WORKSHEETS

• Worksheet List
• Master Checklist
• Important Links
• Financial
• Folder structure
• Sales funnel
• 30 Day Planner
• Course modules
• Sales page content
• Email outlines

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Below is a breakdown of the individual sections within each major category in this package.

COURSE ADMIN

Master Checklist

The master checklist contains the necessary steps to complete your course. It also includes an additional checklist of things to do for an in-person workshop.

Admin

It’s important to centralise the administration of your most important documents and files used to create your course including lead magnets, sales pages, your folder structure, software, payment system access, and policy documents.

Tech

Use our comprehensive list of tech gear including administration tools as well as content creation, course delivery and marketing tools and software.

Financial

Included in this Course Planner Package is an excel spreadsheet that you can use to calculate the number of courses you need to sell to break even. You can also use the spreadsheet to record your estimated profit and your actual profit once your course has been completed.

Folder Structure

Included in the Course Planner Package is a suggested folder structure to help keep your documents organised for quick access. We’ve also included a file naming template to help you improve your information management process.

Customer Sales Funnel

A sales funnel helps you craft your marketing message to your audience. Included in the Course Planner Package are 3 different sales funnels and the steps involved in marketing your course.

Planning

Included are the basic steps to plan your course workflow, including suggested programs to use to set up your course management system.

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COURSE DESIGN

Course Topic

Included in this section are the questions you need to consider before finalising your course topic. Also included is a list of online sources to help consolidate your course topic ideas.

Course Format

You can choose to deliver your course using a variety of different formats. You can also mix and match different formats. Included is some suggestions on how to structure your course format.

Course Delivery

This package will help you decide on your course delivery method including suggestions on how to host your course online.

Course Creation

Use the provided checklist to create your course content. Use the module templates as a guide on what content to include in each module. Included are 2 examples of a module structure including single lesson and multiple lessons.

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MARKETING

Marketing Assets

Throughout the marketing process, you will need to create many documents, files and images to create your marketing materials. Included is a list of the common items you will need to market your course. Also included is a sales page example layout and a checklist of key components that should appear on your sales page.

Blogging

Your website is a central hub to market your course and your blog is the key place to promote your course. Included are details about creating your necessary lead magnet along with a list of 20 Lead Magnets you can use for your course.

Social Media

In this package is a simplified list of the items you should be publishing on your social media platforms while launching your course. Included are important tips about creating a hashtag/tag list to help boost the visability of your course.

Email

Included is 2 example of how you can schedule your email content based on your course structure. Learn about the educational emails you should include in your email content, including some useful examples of specific educational emails you can write.

External

In the Course Planner Package, you will find details about where to market your course externally.

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WORKSHEETS

Worksheet List

This is a summary list of the worksheets available to use in your Course Planner Package.

Master Checklist

The master checklist contains the necessary steps to complete your course. It also includes an additional checklist of things to do for an in-person workshop.

Important Links

Use this template to record your important links used in your course including payment systems, course pages, social media, course management software, marketing links and more.

Financial

Use this Excel spreadsheet to calculate the number of courses you need to sell to breakeven. You can also use the spreadsheet to record your estimated profit and your actual profit once your course has been completed.

Folder Structure

Use the suggested folder structure to help keep your documents organised for quick access. Also included is a file naming template to help you improve your information management process.

Sales Funnel

Use the 3 different scenarios below to build your ideal sales funnel. You can use one of the examples below or use a combination. Your sales funnel should suit your course and your audience.

30 Day Planner

Use this 30 Day Planner to set weekly and daily to-do’s to get your course completed. Included is the 4 main goals you will need for each course you create.

Course Modules

Use the module templates as a guide on what content to include in each module, including your welcome module and final summary module.

Sales Page Content

Use the sales page layout graphic as a guide to create your sales page. Also included is a template to craft your headlines, details and benefits and overall sales page structure.

Email Outlines

Use these outlines as a guide to construct your email content for each step in your sales funnel. Includes 6 email outlines that are necessary for your course launch.