Online Course School
Online Course School
8.8
(5 ratings)
10 Weeks
·Cohort-based Course
The accountability you need to take your online course from idea to your first paying students.
Online Course School
8.8
(5 ratings)
10 Weeks
·Cohort-based Course
The accountability you need to take your online course from idea to your first paying students.
Get notified about the next cohort
Hosted by
Dr. Melvin Varghese - Psychologist Founder @ Selling The Couch
Psychologist + Founder @ Selling The Couch
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
8.8
(5 ratings)
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
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
01
How To Validate 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.
02
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 multiple exercises to help you get uber clear on your niche while getting helpful feedback from cohort members.
03
How To Create An Irresistible Course Title + Subtitle
In this workshop, we'll do a series of exercises to craft + iterate your course title and subtitle. After this workshop, you'll have a title and subtitle that provides a clear map of what your course is about + and who it's for and not for.
04
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.
You'll learn the method we use to plan every online course + will have the opportunity to brainstorm course bonuses with your fellow cohort members.
05
How To Crafting An Engaging Course Lesson
In this workshop, you'll learn some of the best practices when it comes to crafting lessons for your online course, get a "behind the scenes" at the template we use here at STC, and craft your first lesson!
After today, you'll feel more confident and have a template to make your course lessons.
06
How To Record Your Online Course
Recording and uploading a course is completely overwhelming for most of us. There are 8 million different options, and it’s really easy to get stuck.
To help, you’ll learn how to record a “more than good enough” first recording + higher priced tools. You’ll receive a custom course lesson tracker that we developed for STC to stay organized.
07
How To Get Your First Paying Students
Getting those first few paying students is super intimidating for all of us.
To help, you’ll dissect how other successful course creators get their first students (whether they had an existing audience or not) and get the exact tools and scripts others have used. You’ll develop a concrete plan to get your first 3-5 paying students.
08
How To Market Your Course With Webinars
Webinars (aka online workshops) allow us to help potential course students and “market through teaching and service.” You’ll be given the slide deck that we’ve perfected over 80 live webinars + learn how we transition from free content to a paid invitation.
You’ll also get helpful feedback from our colleagues to perfect your free 1-hour workshop.
09
Bonus Workshops + Peer Mentors + Accountability Buddies
In each cohort, we invite up to 2 experts (a successful colleague course creator + an expert in course marketing).
You'll also be assigned a "peer mentor": a colleague from a previous cohort who's a few chapters ahead in the course journey.
Finally, we'll assign you 1-2 buddies within our cohort for even more accountability.
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a max number of students in each cohort?
What happens if I can’t make a live session?
What’s the refund policy?
I want to create an online course but I'm way too busy. How much time will this take each week?
What if I create an online course and it doesn't sell?
This is a big investment. Why should I sign up?
This sounds awesome, and I'm really interested. Would it be possible to meet with you before I sign up?
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