Online Course School
The accountability you need to take your online course from idea to your first paying students.
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Course overview
Launch Your Online Course + Create A Life You Love
Stop getting exhausted from seeing clients and start creating your dream life full of meaning and money.
Online Course School is for therapists who:
01
Have a message to share and a people to serve beyond the therapy room.
02
Might struggle to take action alone but thrive walking through a step-by-step system alongside others.
03
Are successful private practitioners (5 years + $100k+) but want to pull back on clinical work.
The Skills You'll Learn
How To Create A Niche But Lucrative Course
200 students paying $500 is a $100k course. You'll learn to use exercises and real-life conversations (don’t worry, we’ll give you scripts and frameworks) to hone in on who your 200+ students are.
How To Get Paying Students BEFORE Recording Your Online Course
You'll learn the step-by-step process we use to make sure your course idea will have buyers BEFORE spending time and money on recording. We’ll work through exercises, scripts, and templates customized to your online course ideas.
How To Design Effective Course Lessons
You'll learn gold-standard teaching best practices that allow your personality to shine and make students excited to go through your videos and motivated to complete the course.
How To Efficiently Record Your Course Using Starter And Hollywood-Level Setups
We’ll show you “behind the scenes” to record your online course using less expensive but quality setups + our $10k home office set up so that you can charge premium prices. You’ll learn tips and tricks that we learned 6+ of course recording to speed things up.
How To Market Your Course In A Way That Doesn’t Overwhelm Your Schedule.
Marketing an online course scares many therapists. You’ll outline a workshop to drive traffic to our course. We’ll share insights from over 80 live webinars, 2 evergreen webinars, and over $180k in course sales from these webinars
How To Springboard From Your Course To Related Products + Services
Many therapist course creators simply stop at their online course. But there are rich opportunities to further serve and guide our students. You'll learn the things that have worked for us and get personalized feedback on your 10-year build-out plan.
Top 3 Struggles For Therapist Course Creators
Kind Words From Colleagues
Heather McKenzie, LCMHCS
Nikki Sewell, LCSW
Case Study: Dr. Melisha Franks (Keys to Hope Counselling Services)
Melisha is a successful group practice owner who wanted to intentionally pull back on clinical work.
Dr. Melvin Varghese - Psychologist Founder @ Selling The Couch
Dr. Melvin Varghese - Psychologist Founder @ Selling The Couch
Psychologist + Founder @ Selling The Couch
I went from being a burnt out psychologist in a group practice to a fulfilled and successful online business owner. And now I’m helping other therapists do the same.
In our community, I have witnessed so many therapists who look successful on the outside but on the inside, are unfulfilled.
The crisis calls, loads of paperwork, the overfilled schedule of clients. It’s a lot. And it can take a toll on their mental health. At the same time, all of their income is from a single income source, which is stressful too.
At some point, many therapists in private practice start feeling like they are not reaching their full potential. Like they're wasting their life and meant to do something bigger. Or they have discovered that trading time for money doesn’t allow them the freedom to spend their time how they most want to.
My goal is to help you go from feeling overwhelmed with creating an online course to getting launched with your first paying students. The most rewarding thing is knowing I made a difference - helping therapists move away from exhaustion and towards balance - finally creating the life they love.
Why You Should Learn From Me: From Burnt Out To A Life I Love
2015
Launched my first online course
$180k/year
Average revenue from course + related products and services.
4
The number of days I work each week.
16
The number of hours I work each week.
Course syllabus
Week 1
Sep
7
Session 1: Welcome + Meet Our Cohort!
Week 2
Sep
12
Session 2: Validating Your Course Idea
Sep
13
Open Office Hours
Sep
14
Session 3: Validating By Studying The Marketplace (Part 1)
Week 3
Sep
19
Session 4: Validating By Studying The Marketplace (Part 2)
Sep
20
Open Office Hours
Sep
21
Session 5: Nailing Your Niche
Week 4
Sep
26
Session 6: Creating An Irresistible Course Title + Subtitle
Sep
27
Open Office Hours
Sep
28
Session 7: Designing Effective Modules, Lessons, and Bonuses
Week 5
Oct
3
Session 8: Crafting An Engaging Course Lesson
Oct
4
Open Office Hours
Oct
5
Session 9: How To Find Your First Course Students
Week 6
Oct
10
Week Long Break + Catch Up Week (No Class)
Oct
11
Open Office Hours
Oct
12
Week Long Break + Catch Up Week (No Class)
Week 7
Oct
17
Session 10: How To Diversify Income Beyond Your Online Course
Oct
18
Open Office Hours
Oct
19
Session 11: How To Craft A High Converting Sales Page - Part 1
Week 8
Oct
24
Session 12: How To Craft A High Converting Sales Page - Part 2
Oct
25
Open Office Hours
Oct
26
Session 13: Recording Your Online Course
Week 9
Oct
31
Session 14: Marketing Via Webinars
Nov
2
Session 15: How To Get Your First Paying Students Before Launching
Week 10
Nov
7
Session 16: Goodbyes + Reflections
Bonus
- 📄
Week 1 Workbook
Orientation - Welcome & Meet Our Cohort
Orientation - Welcome & Meet Our Cohort
Welcome to our first week of Online Course School! So excited that you're with us. Our first gathering is all about getting to know one another and learn about one another's "deeper why" of building an online course. All call links are in the "events" section in the left menu here.
Things To Do Before Our Next Gathering
Bookmark https://sellingthecouch.com/ocscommunity (URL for our community here on Circle) + block off 10-15 min daily M-Th to post + help a colleague out.
Week 1 Meeting 2 : Validating Your Online Course Idea
Week 1 Meeting 2 : Validating Your Online Course Idea
You’ll learn how to "stress test" your online course idea and "build in public" to have future students co-create your course.
Mel and the STC team will share exact templates + frameworks to have authentic, non-salesy conversations with potential students so that you have interested buyers before your course is even live.
Week 2 Meeting 1: How To Nail Your Niche
Week 2 Meeting 1: How To Nail Your Niche
We'll use this gathering to focus on an idea that niche course creators know: "the riches are in the niches." We'll walk through research exercises to find 3 experts, 3 conferences, 3 webinars, and 3 Facebook groups related to our course topic, and we'll share tips on how to search for them.
Week 2 Meeting 2: How to Nail Your Niche
Week 2 Meeting 2: How to Nail Your Niche
We'll walk through our research exercises to find 3 podcasts, 3 Twitter accounts, 3 , and 3 YouTube channels and 3 companies or products related to our course topic, and we'll share tips on how to search for them.
Week 3 Meeting 1: How To Create An Irresistible Course Title + Subtitle
Week 3 Meeting 1: How To Create An Irresistible Course Title + Subtitle
We'll create our transformation statement by identifying our hopes and dreams, fears, and transformation we'd like our students to realize at the end of the course.
Week 3 Meeting 2: How To Create An Irresistible Course Title + Subtitle
Week 3 Meeting 2: How To Create An Irresistible Course Title + Subtitle
We'll finish our titles and subtitles and write our outcomes and benefits, and outcome and objection crushers.
Week 4 Meeting 1: How To Design Effective Modules, Lessons, and Bonuses
Week 4 Meeting 1: How To Design Effective Modules, Lessons, and Bonuses
In this workshop, we'll use good ole fashioned post-it notes + some tech to actually outline your course. We'll plot out our modules and lessons. It's a heavy lift this week but well worth it.
Week 4 Meeting 2: Design Effective Modules, Lessons, and Bonuses
Week 4 Meeting 2: Design Effective Modules, Lessons, and Bonuses
We will do our favorite teacher exercise and give thought to how we'd like our audience to feel when taking our course. We'll take a deep look at how to use the online course planner, review video tips, and do a build my course exercise.
Course schedule
7-8 hours per week
Mondays & Wednesdays
10:00am - 11:45am EST
We meet for 4 weeks, take a week off, and wrap up with 4 final weeks.
Tuesdays (Week 2 Onward)
10 AM-10:45 AM EST (Optional)
Weekly Office Hours With The STC Team to continue to get personalized feedback + walk through any stuck points.
Weekly projects
3 hours per week
We believe that this intentional time will set you up for success. It will also save you countless hours and costs in the long run.
Bonus Workshop 1: Cam Houser
Course Marketing Expert
Cam is a professor of entrepreneurship at UT-Austin’s McCombs School Of Business. Cam's students have had exits to Google + Etsy and raised $187 million in funding. Cam is going to be teaching us how to create a dynamic free webinar that sells our online course with integrity.
Bonus Workshop 2: Heather McKenzie, LCMHCS
Course Creator Colleague
Heather is a colleague who was part of our beta group of OCS. Heather recently launched the pilot group for her course and was able to generate $4798 in revenue with 8 students. Heather will be sharing with us what worked and what tweaks to make your pilot successful.
3 Benefits Of Joining Online Course School Today
Learning is better with cohorts (Pic is colleagues from our initial alpha cohort who rated OCS 9.7/10)
Active learning, not passive watching
Instead of a boring PowerPoint lecture, we do interactive and hands-on learning every time we meet. This means we're doing everything from break-out rooms to journaling to videos to case studies to group processing around our theme for the day.
Learn with like-minded, supportive colleagues.
You’ll be building your online course together with other smart, successful, and savvy business owners.
According to research by social psychologist Dr. David McClelland of Harvard, "[the people you habitually associate with] determine as much as 95 percent of your success or failure in life.”
Create alongside forward-thinking therapists
You’ll be surrounded, inspired, and encouraged by colleagues who genuinely want your course to become wildly successful.
Designed for therapists, led by a therapist.
This allows us all to be on the same page in our cohort (e.g., we don’t have to pause and explain when someone mentions creating a DBT-related course).
This also allows us to consider nuances that are unique to our field (e.g., what if a client buys my course). We also have on staff an attorney who specializes in mental health private practices.