Imagine going through all the work to create an online course – and then nobody buys. Not good, right? So let's talk about what your course needs to make it sell.
1. A step-by-step system on how to do something. Not only will should teach how to accomplish something, but it should also do it in an easy to follow step 1, step 2 etc. system.
2. The big benefit – what will they be able to do once they've gone through your course? What's the big payoff, the concrete result they can expect? If you can't show a big (HUGE!) and desired benefit from taking your course, then your course won't sell.
3. Proven results. Demonstrate that by using your course - or the system taught within the course - someone had success and attained the results you're promising. That person can be you, by the way. This is the proof that your course works. If you know your system works but you don't have proof, you can get it once you complete your course and get a handful of people to take the course and become your case studies. To speed up the process you can let your case studies in for free on the condition they give a review.
4. Smartly niched. As with any information product, you're not trying to sell it to the whole world. Pick a niche and be specific on who you are targeting, what problem you are solving and what you're going to help them achieve.
As with any other product, the more niched it is, the more you can generally sell it for. If you have a course on marketing for small business, you can charge a good price. But if you niche that course even more and target just dentists or chiropractors or art galleries, you can charge a whole lot more. This also makes it easier to find your target audience and easier to convert them as well.
But on the downside, your target audience is also a lot smaller, so you'll want to weigh the pros and cons of how much you want to niche. Ideally, in this case you might create a generic course for all small business owners and then start creating advanced courses for specific industries.