I've Launched 89 Online Courses — This is My Best Advice

Make your next $10,000 by productizing your expertise

I remember that day in 2013 as if it were yesterday.

Me in my tiny one-bedroom apartment. Kids screaming in the background. And softboxes taking up half my living space.

That's how my first online courses were born.

Since then, I’ve created (and launched) 90 of them and generated over 1.4M in sales.

These are the shortcuts I bled for—use them and skip the suffering.

Your course content doesn't matter

Most creators get this backward.

They obsess over the content and neglect the packaging. But the angle of your course matters way more than what's inside.

Think about it like a book cover. I'm sorry. But people judge books by their covers and titles. And they judge courses the same way.

The wrapping paper is more important than the gift itself. Not because the content doesn't matter – it does – but because nobody will ever see your brilliant content if the packaging doesn't grab them first.

This is why most of my time now goes into figuring out how to position a course, not just what to put in it. What's the angle that will make someone stop scrolling and think, "WTF. I need this!"?

Sometimes a course that's bombing just needs to be repackaged, not rebuilt. I've completely transformed sales by changing nothing but the title of a course. The information? Almost identical.

→ If you want proven angles to find best-selling courses, you can grab a secret checklist on this link (with examples). Click here.

"Build it and they will come" is garbage

The old "audience vs. product" debate isn't really a debate at all.

Facebook & Reddit are full of course creators whining that the course doesn't sell. Why? Because they neglected the audience problem. They have no email list to launch to. It's like spending 3 years building a rocket but not having the fuel to launch it.

That's why audience wins. Every time.

And building that audience? It's a grind. The first 8 months are the hardest.

You'll feel invisible. You'll feel like a loser. You'll wonder if anyone's even paying attention.

I've been through this cycle multiple times. In 2020, I started fresh with a new business and had to rebuild from zero. Even with experience, that initial growth was painfully slow.

When people ask me about making money with courses, they're usually thinking product first. They know what they want to teach.

Wrong move.

Keep your course idea in the drawer. Get the audience, then create the offer. Not the other way around.

And please, for the love of God, don't spend months crafting the "perfect" course for an audience that doesn't exist.

Focus on consistently creating content first. Plant your flag somewhere – Medium, Substack, YouTube, whatever – and show up daily. Build that email list.

Then when you finally launch a course, you'll actually have people who give a damn.

This is the best copywriting tip I ever found

I don't remember from which copywriter I learned this.

But there was this idea of creating the sales letter before actually creating the product. And it has since become a rule I never break.

Sounds backward, right? It's not.

When you force yourself to write the sales page first, you're forced to articulate:

• The exact problem you're solving

• The specific transformation you're offering

• The concrete outcomes students will achieve

• The "features" you should add to your course

• The objections they'll have (and how to overcome them)

When I skipped this step, I'd create entire courses only to realize, while writing the sales page, that I missed key elements people actually cared about. I'd find myself scrambling to re-record sections or awkwardly edit things together.

Because it doesn't matter how good the information in your course is if nobody buys it.

Now I craft the promise first.

I figure out what's going to make people pull out their credit cards. Then I build a course that delivers exactly that—no more, no less.

This approach keeps me focused on what matters to my students, not just what I think is cool or interesting to teach.

It's like a compass that keeps the entire creation process pointed in the right direction. And it saves me from those painful moments of realization when I'd otherwise discover I built the wrong thing.

Write your launch material first.

Get the most mileage out of your marketing material

I used to burn myself out creating marketing assets.

Two weeks on the sales page. Another week on emails. More time on social posts. Even more on ads. By the time I actually launched, I was already exhausted.

Stupid.

Now I work smarter. I create one core piece of marketing and repurpose the crap out of it.

Today, my marketing channels are simple: emails + sales page. That's it.

The reason is that you sell 10 times more with email than with any other marketing channel. That's the 80/20.

If I write a good sales page, I can reuse sections of it word for word in my emails. And vice versa.

It's all the same message. And your audience needs to hear the same core message multiple times before they buy. If you confuse, you lose.

Consistency matters more than variety here.

Plus, it frees up mental bandwidth. Instead of juggling five different marketing angles, I can focus on refining one powerful narrative.

When you're a solo creator (like I am), this approach is a lifesaver. You get 5x the impact for the same amount of work.

I've launched courses bringing in $20k+ using essentially the same copy in my emails and sales pages.

The easiest way to record your course

I wasted thousands of dollars on fancy gear I barely used.

I used to think I needed to look "professional" with perfect lighting and crisp 4K video of my face. What a waste of time and money.

My students don't give a damn about seeing my pretty face. They want results. They want transformation. They want solutions to their problems.

Back surgery forced me to adapt my process anyway. Now I do most of my recording on a recliner because it takes pressure off my lumbar.

Not exactly a professional studio setup.

The most important thing in your course is the sound.

There was a time when I would recommend buying an external microphone, but with AI sound editing, you can just record your course with your crappy built-in microphone.

The second most important thing? What people see.

I hate talking in front of a camera, I hate taking pictures of myself, so what I do is I simply screen record. Either a mind map. Or me drawing on my iPad. Or me simply writing on a Google Doc.

Today, recording a course doesn't require professional equipment. Period.

And guess what? Sales didn't drop. If anything, the more casual approach makes the content feel more authentic and accessible.

So please, treat your course recording like you're just explaining something to a friend. Your students will actually learn better that way, and you'll save yourself a ton of unnecessary stress.

Don't turn it into an encyclopedia

This was one of my biggest course creation sins.

When I first started, I thought more content = more value. I wanted to include every single thing I knew about a topic.

The result?

Bloated courses that took forever to create and overwhelmed my students.

I spent months procrastinating on launching because I felt like I had to add "just one more thing" to make the course complete.

It was stupid perfectionism dressed up as thoroughness.

People don't want to know everything you know. They want a focused path to a specific result.

They don't want a 20-hour comprehensive encyclopedia. They want the 20% that will get them 80% of the results.

Now I'm ruthless about trimming the fat. If something doesn't directly contribute to the promised outcome, it gets cut.

My courses are shorter. Completion rates are up. People see results.

Think about it – when was the last time you actually completed a massive online course with 100+ videos?

Most people don't. They get overwhelmed and quit.

So do your students a favor: focus your course on what they really need, not on proving how much you know. They'll thank you with better completion rates, better results, and better testimonials.

And you'll thank yourself when you finish creating the course in weeks instead of months.

Kill that gremlin in your head

Most of what holds people back from creating successful courses is in their heads:

• The impostor syndrome

• The tech overwhelm

• The perfectionism

But here's what a decade and 89 courses have taught me: done is better than perfect. Your first course won't be your best – and that's okay.

But you need to launch it to just become good at it.

So take the pressure off yourself. Focus on solving one specific problem really well. Package it with a compelling angle. Build an audience first. And don't get hung up on fancy equipment.

Just start. The rest will follow.

Want my complete playbook for creating profitable courses without losing your sanity? Check out my free course…