From Idea to Income: Carla Howard on Crafting Successful Online Courses

TRANSCRIPT

Michelle J Raymond: [00:00:00] A good morning for me and a good evening to you Carla. Welcome to the Good for Business Show. It's so cool to have you here.

Carla Howard: Thank you. I've been looking forward to it, Michelle. Thank you for having me.

Michelle J Raymond: Now I'm gonna tell everybody that this has gone from hi let's connect to, can you come on my live show within a matter of maybe a few weeks?

So I really appreciate your keenness and your willingness, because when I saw some of your background, I was like, I really wanna share this with the audience that I have. So thank you for being the kind of person that leaps into these opportunities.

We're gonna be talking about just one of the things that you do, which is online course creation. I know you do lots of other stuff. So tell me, who are you? What do you do and who do you help?

Carla Howard: Thank you. So I'm Carla Howard and I help people go from where they are today to where they want to be tomorrow. That's the umbrella, that everything that I do is under.

So what is under that big umbrella is I [00:01:00] support medium to large businesses with mergers, acquisitions and change management. I help kind and ambitious female entrepreneurs launch and create the business of their dreams. And I'm also a keynote speaker. In addition to delivering keynotes, I help people get paid from the stage and I do that in my six week get paid from the stage program. So that's a whole lot of stuff and it's all about helping people make meaningful transformations in their lives.

Michelle J Raymond: I know that this is something that there's probably a lot of people out there, I'm gonna say, just like me. I've got a friend called "Michelle" and she's interested in creating online courses and hasn't got it started yet and she's gonna ask you a couple of questions about what you think can really take someone from taking it as a concept in their head and turn it into a reality, cause I'm sure there's lots of great ideas out there that are stuck in people's heads.

So if I'm thinking about creating an online course , tell me [00:02:00] what are the key things that I should know about before I actually get started?

Carla Howard: Yeah. That is a great question. There's several things. First of all, you are ready to create your course right now. That is the number one thing I want people to know and I also want them to know that everyone has online courses in them.

We tend to feel like I'll be ready when, and that little voice in our head says when I have enough content, when I have more experience, when I understand more about online course creation, all of the waiting things and you are really, truly ready right now.

There are people out there who know your brand, who know you and who want to be where you are now, today and that's the transformation they're looking for, not the thing that we have in our heads, which is where I wanna get to next. [00:03:00]

Michelle J Raymond: That was something you said just before we met, before we started recording and it really struck a chord with me because in my mind, I forget how far I've come. I forget how many lessons that I've learned in the last two years. And I remember reading a post once upon a time that someone said, find a coach or someone that's two years ahead, not five, ten years ahead. They're too advanced.

So, where I am now, if I look back, there's so much that I've learned that I could share with people and you are right, I was looking forward about where I wanted to get and forgot I've actually got an opportunity to help people and bring them to where I am today. So that just really like hit me between the eyes.

Carla Howard: Yeah and the other thing to remember is more than likely that topic that you're thinking about doing a course on is two courses or three courses or four courses. Because when you think about how much you've learned in your journey, [00:04:00] and you distill that down into a topic, it is so easy to think you need to pack in more. You need to do more and when we do that, we overwhelm our audience.

If I went and took an online course on how to fix my car and they put in there, everything that you need to know to fix every part of your car, I would just be beside myself. But if I just wanted to learn how, I don't by the way, but if I just wanted to learn how to rebuild the carburettor, you know, somebody could walk me through that in a way that I could actually consume it and learn it.

Michelle J Raymond: That probably solves one of the questions that's been going around and around in my mind about how much actually goes into the course. And then for me, I offer one on one training with people that takes two hours and it's jam packed.

Like it is the course when you want a brain dump of everything that I've learned over the last well, eight years creating content on LinkedIn, 20 years in B2B sales, [00:05:00] that course has that in it, but then I'm like, how do I pull pieces out and then offer it for a different price point?

I wanna help more people. I want more businesses to grow. So how do you take a big course and chunk it or is it completely separate?

Carla Howard: That's another great question. What I would recommend is think about five minute segments. Here's the biggest mistake I made. First course out, and it is actually my best seller, but it's how to lead and coach Millennials and Gen Z employees. And each of the videos in there is 20 minutes long. I think one of them is close to 30. That is way, way too long.

What I've learned over time in creating courses is you do the intro. You set up sections. And then you do five to seven minute videos and that's it. You introduce a concept, you give an idea, you give them something actionable to think about or do, and then you go on to the [00:06:00] next thing.

And when you do that, they can consume it in a bite size way and people will stop and say, oh, you know what? I'm enrolled in that course of Michelle's, I've got five minutes, I'm gonna go watch that video. To find 30 minutes is really hard. And then the other thing to think about is how can you create activities inside your courses that are going to engage people in a way that makes the learning sticky.

It can be as simple as a reflection exercise. So you do a five minute concept and then you ask them to reflect on how they could apply that and then you lead into the next concept. So you're gently pulling them through. It's really easy to forget that the things that you're gonna teach them are new to them, so it's like a rush of information.

Michelle J Raymond: So we're not getting married on the first date is what you're trying to tell me?

Carla Howard: That's right. We are gonna court them through the course [00:07:00] and help them take small, actionable steps along the way. And when you do that, it is more consumable. The other thing that I would say is, what my students have said is really helpful, is I'll create guides that they can print or look at digitally for the course that has the key learnings that just helps them when they have to go back and do a refresher.

Michelle J Raymond: I think that's really critical for someone like myself, I learn by reading, I'm not a great listener. So listening to videos or podcasts, which is ironic, given how much I'm happy to be presenting on them. But when it comes to learning, my style is definitely reading, so I struggle when it's video only. And so I think what I've learned with creating content over, this period of time, is that not everybody learns the same.

So I love that you've combined those two things so that it's more inclusive and that everybody gets a win and can go back and take which version [00:08:00] helps them more to make small steps, because people don't want to go from, I'm a beginner to I'm Olympic athlete level, overnight. And I think that's, in my mind, I keep forgetting that step, which I think is critical from what you've said.

Carla Howard: And the other thing along with the learning, you're absolutely right. The other thing is some people like those reflection exercises, that really helps them to engage. I also do assessments inside of my content where I'll say, okay, now take this assessment and see where you are in your own project.

And it's that way that I can consume it and learn from it and see how I can now go and relate it and make it make a difference in the work that I do. With you and your background, I'm just sitting here imagining. We could probably sit down for 10 minutes and come up with four or five different, completely different courses that are gonna walk them through. [00:09:00] Different types of marketing, different types of content creation. You'll be surprised when you start doing the outline, all of the things that you have learned over the last several years.

Michelle J Raymond: I was doing this exercise, as I told you with my friend, Michelle Griffin, my power partner on LinkedIn, and we were bouncing things off each other yesterday and it was her that really pointed out to me, Michelle, what you've done in two years, other people dream about. Even somebody from a previous industry, we were messaging just this morning and she said, Michelle, look how far you've come since I worked in the industry with her.

I don't think I've taken a moment. I think that's the important part here is sometimes we need to just take that moment and stop and go, what have I learned? And it's an incredible amount. Building a business from scratch in front of people on LinkedIn and all the lessons that I've learned along the way. Yeah, I've got enough to probably fill a hundred courses if I'm being realistic.

 It's like an MBA, learning how to grow a business [00:10:00] online in front of people. Yeah, I could teach that with my eyes closed.

Carla Howard: You absolutely could. So my corporate superpower is change management. So the course I just published in September is around change management communications and how you make change stick. It's about an hour and 40 minutes and there's 38 videos in there.

So it is really chunked down into small pieces, single ideas, and it's amazing when you sit down and you think about, oh yeah, I learned that. Oh yeah, I know how to do that. And then you start slotting them in a spreadsheet. All of a sudden you're like, okay, I have actually too much content and I need to figure out how to break this out.

Michelle J Raymond: That is possibly what's going on in my mind right now is, how do I take something that's so big and bring it down into those smaller pieces. I like the idea of putting it into a spreadsheet because no matter what I do while it stays in my head, [00:11:00] it's so hard to make sense of. But when I write it down, you know, or put it in a spreadsheet, whatever your preference is, that for me is what really brings clarity, then becomes way more obvious and not overwhelming.

So one of the other reasons I'm gonna tell you Carla that I have, probably avoided it and there's lots of reasons, but how long does it actually take? So say you've got all these videos and they're roughly five to seven minutes, like you said, and how long is it taking you to put this thing together? What's realistic as opposed to in my mind, it's either too hard and never gonna get done, or, oh, it'll only take me a week, it'll be fine. Where does it fit in your experience, having done multiple courses?

Carla Howard: So the one that I just finished, that one took me quite a while. That one took me about five months to do, and I deliberately stretched the time out because I knew I just had so much going on in that first half of the year.

 It's like anything else, we want to jump into the [00:12:00] filming part of it. We want to jump into the doing part. The more time you spend upfront planning, the less time it actually takes, when you sit down to do the filming, the uploading, that type of work.

So sit down first and the steps that you wanna go through are you want to sit down and think about, okay, what is the body of content that I want to teach? And then just brainstorm all the different pieces of knowledge that you have around that and then group them into courses, cause you will find right away, multiple courses.

So let's just say yours is, an entrepreneur's guide to growing your business on LinkedIn. I'm just throwing that out there .And then you say, okay, what are all the pieces to that? And you start lining it out. I would recommend you then put 'em into sections. So what's your first section, what's that kind of overall umbrella gonna be? Then, what's the meat of it? Once you line all those out, what does that look like? It might be marketing on LinkedIn. It might be [00:13:00] another one that is connecting on LinkedIn and you put your video titles and add about how many minutes you want that to be, right? Now you've got this framework.

Also sit down and write out who is your target audience, who is the ideal person who's going to be watching this course, cause you wanna keep that in mind as you're filming. And then I want you to say, what guides do I need to create in advance that's gonna have the content these folks are going to need, who go through my course. And once you have the framework set, then you create the guides. Now you start scheduling your filming.

So this is where I got all wrapped up in my head. My first videos are not near as engaging as the ones that I do now and if you could see behind the scenes, it's ridiculous, they are so chopped up because I was going for perfect. If I said the littlest word wrong, I would start over or I would c hop it [00:14:00] with the video editing and put it all together and I quit doing that.

So I'm like, I gotta talk five minutes on this topic. I know this stuff. So I would have a quick bulleted outline of what are the key messages and then I would film and you know what, if it wasn't perfect, that's okay. I would edit it, put a little rapper on it, upload it and say, it's good enough.

Interestingly, they are more engaging and it takes less time to do the filming. So the big thing is plan upfront and decide how much time you're going to spend on the activities. So I quit doing this, putting in my planner "today I'm going to record four videos" because I would get that number in my head.

I'd get all anxious about it. And 20 minutes later, I got nothing done cuz I keep screwing up. So now instead I would say, I'm gonna film for an hour. If I [00:15:00] get one done, that's OK. If I get four done, that's a win. I'm going to film for an hour. So my recommendation is plan, time box and then if your schedule loosens up and you can add extra hours, you'll just finish faster.

Michelle J Raymond: I think bringing it down into those smaller bite sized chunks, both as the creator and as the consumer, it works on both sides. Because as a creator, sometimes things can be overwhelming. If we look at it from a big pile of, I have to get all of this done in amongst whatever your normal work is, client work, or what you get paid for. Or some people, may have full time jobs, and this is a side gig for them. There's all kinds of different ways, but I think what I've had to learn in my business is any little small step forward is a, monumental step over the course of a year. They all add up and compound and to not put the pressure on myself to have it all done today.

You'll laugh at this, when I first started my business, [00:16:00] I wrote down a to-do list of how one would create a business and I worked as hard and fast as I could to tick everything off and then sat back and went, okay, I've built a business. yeah. Yeah I'm not even lying. I nearly killed myself in the process. I got to the end and went. Oh, I've gotta make this better. Oh, I didn't know about this. Oh, I've made a mistake. I've gotta learn about this. And ultimately there's so many lessons that I've learned and I would say as well from that first course to the multiple courses that you've done, you've probably had some learning experience.

But let's talk about the elephant in the room. What if nobody buys it? What if I put all of this effort in and nobody buys it cause I'm pretty confident that's probably someone out there that's listening, fear of what if I do it and it's a flop.

Carla Howard: Oh my gosh, I've done that. And I've flopped. So what you do is you look at it as a learning experience. It's okay, nobody bought that course or people bought it and it got terrible reviews. I have that [00:17:00] and then you just unpublish it's not that big of a deal. It's a learning and you just keep going. So my journey has been to me pretty interesting, it's not at all what I expected. I started on I'm still on Udemy. So Udemy, which is a online learning platform. And my very first course is the one that caught an audience early on. I published courses after that, that didn't do well at all. And then I published a course on change management, cause that is my corporate superpower and that one caught on and I had Udemy reach out to me because two of my courses ended up in Udemy for business, which is like LinkedIn learning and asked me to create another course and they actually paid me to do it, which is super cool. Then I also get money when people buy it or when a certain number of minutes are watched on the Udemy for business platform.

And that one is doing really well. I've got one course that's [00:18:00] out there it's called "this is how professional women rise". You guys can go look at it, nobody signed up for it. I thought this one was gonna be like my big winner. Women were gonna love this thing and it's probably gonna get unpublished because nobody's signing up for it.

It happens.

Michelle J Raymond: It's like the sporting analogy we can't hit home runs every single time without the risk of strikeout sometimes. Like if only everything we did was a home run, whether it's a LinkedIn post, a course that we're doing and building online, the fact is when you are creating things and when you're putting yourself out there, you have failures and sometimes you don't.

But the process becomes the important thing, 'cause I'm sure from the failures, you learnt things that you now put into the courses going forward. Was there a reason you particularly chose that platform in the research that you did? Was that one easier? Was it cheaper? What, what made you pick Udemy?

Carla Howard: All of the above and I had no flipping clue what I was doing. [00:19:00] Literally, I was like, I'm gonna go build a course and I did it in a CRA, like I had this terrible background and but anyway, it all worked out. So UDemy for business is easy to use, it has the curriculum lined up. There's you know, like anything there's good and bad.

You have the opportunity, if your course gets a lot of play than they'll pull it into Udemy for business, and then you have much more earning potential. It's free. So when I started, I did not really have any extra money and I really wanted to dip my toe in the entrepreneurial bucket. So it's free you you do your course and if you sell your course, you get 96% of the proceeds.

I signed up to be a Udemy partner, so if they sell it from their promotions, I get somewhere between 25 and 50%, which is fine with me cause they're promoting it to people. I don't have an audience with anyway. So for Udemy, I saw it as first of all, it's [00:20:00] free. It's not gonna cost me anything. It has a very easy to use interface and I could use it to learn. It wouldn't cost me anything to learn and to try it. The other thing that I do, I'm a keynote speaker and a workshop facilitator, and I work with organizations on teaching their leaders, how to lead change more effectively.

So the other thing that I do, that's really cool once you create that content. You can use it in so many ways, so sure do I sell courses? I absolutely do .You know what else I do is when I am in an engagement with a company, I will give their leaders free seats to those courses, to the change management communication course and to the change leadership course, because it's already out there.

It doesn't cost me anything. It's added value and they love it. And they're much more likely to enter an engagement with me cause I'm bringing a [00:21:00] value, other consultants aren't going to deliver. Same thing with my keynotes. When I'm speaking from the stage on a topic that I have a course on, I'll give their participants free seats.

It's already there and created. It's just my way of adding value to the packages that I'm creating.

Michelle J Raymond: That's amazing value and this is something that I see for my future in my business and why I'm so keen to, talk to you today is that I see it in being used in corporate land. If I create, employee advocacy as a huge part, social selling.

Again, things that I could do with my eyes closed, that I forget are not what everyone can do with their eyes closed. And that's my lesson is to keep reminding myself of where I've come from, what I've learned, how hard it was, how uncomfortable it was, how hard it was to find answers out there that I could trust. Google is not always your friend. You can find conflicting evidence for both sides of most arguments if you look for it. And so for [00:22:00] me, I wanted to create something for employees that I could sell into corporates after I'd, maybe done some one-on-one training and things. So I can see there's all kinds of markets and opportunities to go back to your point, who is your ideal audience as with any content that we create is always the most important step I believe because when you have them in mind, you can create using their language, how they describe problems, in a format and really target them.

And it feels like Carla just did this course for me. That's what I think your successful courses probably are. There are people on the other side that. Wow, this one's for me.

Carla Howard: Yeah. The other thing that I like about the Udemy platform is it offers a 30 day money back guarantee, which I love because, I can invite people to come in and invite them to enroll in my program and it's really no risk to them. If they take one of the courses and eh, not really what I thought it would be. Within 30 days, they just push a button and their money comes back. I don't have to do a [00:23:00] thing, it's all within the platform. I just find it easy to use. And like I said, free was a big box click for me in the very beginning, cuz I just I didn't have all the extra money to invest and I didn't wanna host it on my own site and figure out the payment portals. And I was looking for the easy button and it, that was definitely my easy button.

Michelle J Raymond: Look and easy gets people started. Look, your five courses in nearly 10,000 students I think if I remember from your profile. That's an amazing impact, that's an impact that you if you trade time for money and had to do that face to face with each person, there's just not enough hours in the year, for you to have done that. So that is, where my mind goes. Just the impact that you've been able to have by getting this out there, getting over the fears, not getting caught up in blaming tech there's solutions and platforms that make it so easy for people to do now.

But if you get a question for you obviously Udemy has helped you with some [00:24:00] promotions, but have you ever used LinkedIn to promote your online courses? Or do you have other tools off this platform that you use that you found effective to get the course out there?

Carla Howard: So that's such a funny question. Not as much as I should, because what you can do is for all of my courses inside the instructor portal there's a link and if I copy it, I can put it anywhere. I can put it on LinkedIn. I can share it on my website. I can put it anywhere and I get like 98% of the money that comes in. They get very, very little money. The way that I have promoted it is, people who take my courses when I have a new one, you can actually email all of them inside of Udemy and they're already your students and they're already interested. So I've promoted them there. So I do, I have over 10,000 students now in 120 countries, and they've translated my courses into five languages, which is nuts. They do that with subtitles.

So it's all over the place. And my [00:25:00] biggest population is actually in India where I have almost I think it's 4,500 students there. But I haven't promoted it because the way that I use it is just a little bit different. I really use it to partner with my workshops and I use it as an enticement for people to come and bring me in as a speaker.

That's really where I get the bigger value. And so it just sits in the background and earns money. So I make between 350 and $600 a month. Typically I do nothing. They literally just sit out there and run. I had one month where I had so many students, my husband and I were laughing, cuz I woke up in the middle of the night and I said, two people have to be watching my video right now because the number of minutes I have people watching my video, I have two to three people all over the world, watching it every fricking second of the day, like what is going [00:26:00] on?

It's just mind boggling the reach that you can get on these platforms. So I haven't, I could. I just haven't.

Michelle J Raymond: Well, and I guess there's a strategy behind it, because as you said, you can package it up with your other speaker arrangements and it adds value. So you get a return on that, which is not measured in those numbers, which I'm sure has, opened up doors for you and maybe distinguished you from other speakers who may not be able to offer something like that.

And again, how do we put a price on that? That's difficult. For me, I've loved listening to this and I think the breaking it down in bite size chunks and recalling of all the lessons I've learned for the last two, two and a half years in building a business online, as I said on LinkedIn is something that there are a lot of new business owners out there that I know I can help.

That I can say you don't have to go through this again. Stay tuned. There will be something I'm just working on the LinkedIn Branding Book with Michelle Griffin, which is out November [00:27:00] 18. So that's my next project. But I promise after this, you'll start to see some courses come through. Now Carla, before we wrap this up every week on the show I ask my expert guest to leave one tip with the audience that they can take away today ,that you think if someone's got that idea of creating a course, we'll move them to take one action, which will help their business grow. What's the tip that you'd like to leave people today?

Carla Howard: Oh my gosh. I know just exactly what it is. What mistakes have you made on your journey? Write those down. That's what your course has to be about. I am constantly sharing in my online courses and in my programs I'll always say, so this is the mistake I made and here's what you don't wanna do, cause this is what happened when I did this and this worked out so much better. If you're thinking, okay.

Yes, I have a lot of experience in whatever area. But I've made a lot of mistakes. Then you are in the perfect position to go create a course because other people do not want to [00:28:00] go through the years that you went through beating your head against the wall. They don't want to have to make those mistakes.

They don't want to feel all that frustration that you felt as you were doing the thing that you're now really good at. And so don't be afraid to say, gosh, I really made some mistakes and I'm gonna fast track you past years of making mistakes and being frustrated and so that is your content.

Your past experience is there is gold in there.

Michelle J Raymond: Look, I am just sitting here going, oh, the list of mistakes, boy, do I have that? I've got those ones ready and when I talk to people about LinkedIn training, I say to them, you could learn everything that I've learnt, if you invest eight years, like I have, it's only that I've invested I can't even count how many hours, daily, weekly, yearly. Over time. But if you did the same, you would end up an expert like me, or you could spend two hours with me and fast track, eight [00:29:00] years, completely up to you. So yeah, totally, that message resonates with me and I appreciate you sharing that with us.

So next week I have a guest, Danielle Guzman, who's coming back on the show because we said that we would continue the conversation on employee advocacy. It's gonna be another practical conversation about how do you get employees active on social media being your advocates? Because we say it like it's easy, but we know that in reality, it's not so . Carla, Thank you so much for everything that you've shared so generously warts and all, I think that's the important lesson is that there will be flops and that's okay. Just keep on going. So I appreciate your time today.

Carla Howard: Thank you. It was fun.

Michelle J Raymond: I know, right? So thank you again, and thank you to everybody that's joined us and we will catch you next week.