Plan Your Next Course 10X Faster with AI! A 10 Minute Guide

Full video transcript

Many people want to create online courses but don’t know how to get started. It’s a lot of work and can be hard to find the motivation when you’re just trying to figure out what your course should be about, and that’s where AI can come in. I’m going to share some really cool tips today, so hope you guys enjoy this.

You can use AI to brainstorm ideas and then turn them into beautiful copy that makes your course feel more real, and that’s the number one thing that I recommend you try out right now. If you have this idea — it could be a book, a course, any product or service — getting into AI and helping do that brainstorming, you can get more results in 20 minutes than you might have made in the last two years of thinking about your offer.

So that’s one thing I’m going to show you how to do today: a process you can go through with AI as your assistant. Sound good? Yeah, let’s do it.

So to begin with, the core promise: getting this figured out so you don’t have to have anything ready yet, just think about that dream outcome. This is a good exercise: “from this to this in x amount of time.” Courses nowadays are much more action-oriented, and information is super cheap now — people can get on YouTube and find information very easily. They’re looking for either really exclusive content that they can’t find anywhere else, but most likely it’s some kind of result that they can get in a shorter amount of time, and you’re going to pave the way for them.

So get that sentence written out, and then use that as your input with AI to have it help you write up the product description. You can also think about what makes your course unique — the problems you’re going to help them avoid, the challenges, the pain, the extra expenses. Take a couple notes, get them out of your head. The transformation, the things you’re going to help them avoid, and then any unique shortcuts you have — what’s your secret sauce that you use with your clients or for your business, or just things you found along the way for yourself that make your life easier. Get those included.

And then the final thing to think about is: how likely are they to succeed? One thing that’ll be unique about your course is you can ideally get a higher percentage rate of success — maybe they’ve tried things in the past that didn’t work, so what’s going to make your product or program different?

So think about these things, get them out of your head, jot them down. You can use AI to help you come up with a course name — that’s one fun exercise I go through with clients. Just putting in this kind of basic information, you can have the AI help you come up with name ideas — that’s an instant win right there, to see, “oh, here’s some different angles I can go,” because you give enough input into the AI it can help you through that process.

The next thing, even if you don’t have the name, that’s fine, you can come back to that later — at least get a quick description, and that alone, when you see it beautifully written, makes it feel way more exciting to you, and it’ll make you more likely to go share with other people. That’s going to be one of the key first steps: please get out of this idea of building your course behind the scenes for the next couple years — it’s got to be more interactive. So the goal here is to quickly get a description that you’re going to go share with a couple of your ideal customers, and that’s going to make it easier to communicate that.

The next step: figure out exactly who it’s for. This is a really good way to work with AI — it can help you define or describe that target customer, and even just have the AI help you do that, like describe who this is for. You can also have it write up customer personas — I’ve had it write up a description of three potential customer personas of people who’d want to buy this course, or should buy this course. It can help you get that done really quick. Another thing I do is put like “this is for you if…” and have the AI continue that thought. So knowing what it knows about your course and what you’re doing, it can help you get that next part of it written up.

Yeah, I love how this is structured too — you can use this no matter what AI tool you’re in. A lot of our people in this training will be using Jasper, so just having this outline is really helpful. Got it, and yeah, whatever you’re using, the key here is just knowing what to do with it. There’s so much power here. I want to see you go through this process, try it out, have fun with it, and just watch it come together way faster than you ever thought.

All right, so this is a really cool idea — I don’t know if you have tried this. I call it AI market research: basically instant AI market research, where you have the AI write a testimonial from a happy customer who’s already bought your course. This is a totally different way of thinking about your product, and it can get you to leap forward way faster because you actually see what it can do for them. It’ll help you describe the transformation you deliver in the words of your customer — it’s crazy, this can help you avoid that robotic sales copy.

Absolutely, we’ve played around with this too — I think they’re in some of our recipes, so I love it. I had a feeling you’ve played with that too, because it’s such a genius move, and what you can do is it sounds so much more real, and this is so key for a course especially, where it’s really important to have that transformation. So you can see how the AI writes a potential testimonial, because the way it talks, it’ll actually write up “I was really worried about this, I was struggling with this, I tried that, then I found this course, and now after taking this course…” It may even describe how you helped them — it’ll make up some ways that you may help them too, so oftentimes you’ll get ideas of what you should include or how you can deliver the content in a powerful way, and then really the benefits.

So you can uncover those fears and doubts — “I wasn’t sure if this was for me or if I could actually make it work” — it can actually get into their mind, and you pull that stuff out and use it later for sales copy. That’s how you get really powerful headlines — by looking at this. You don’t actually put fake testimonials on your site, you pull out the ideas. So this is a quick win, do some instant market research.

At that stage right here, you’re so far along — you have way more clarity on what your course is, who it’s for, what makes it powerful. You should have a good description written up, and clearly a list or bullet point list of who it’s for is pretty helpful, or at least a paragraph. Do some market research by coming up with fake testimonials to figure out their fears and doubts, their ultimate desire.

Now, when you sit down to outline your course — here’s a huge win — I don’t recommend using AI for this. You can try, and it could be a great way to again brainstorm ideas — you can even tell the AI to write an eight-step outline of what should be in this course.

Interesting, I’m curious to know why you’re thinking we don’t use AI for the outline. I just — the thing with courses is, like I said, information is really cheap, so the mistake people make when they think about making an online course is they’re like, “okay, I can teach them this, I can teach them that, I can teach them this.” You need to get out of this teaching concept — less theory, more action. People are really looking for action-based courses nowadays. So the information, you can sell it for 20 bucks as a download or something, but is that really what you’re trying to do here? Most people want to create a higher-price course that’s going to make them a lot of money and create real transformation, so that takes a little bit more thinking.

And I do recommend, since with an online course you have video, you have more interactive stuff, you can do live coaching — there’s so many more elements to an online course at your disposal. So this is a chance for you to really take the time to deconstruct your own process and make it more actionable, less theory. And to do this, what you should do at the early stages is go find someone who would be the perfect customer, and either reach out to them and say, “hey, I’m putting this course together and I would like to help you through this process for free, or a discount” — or even if you don’t do that, at least think of that person, and then think about if you were to sit down with them.

Let me show you this: don’t think about all the things you need to teach them — make it much faster, and think about this question: what’s the fastest way to help them achieve their goal? Imagine they’re sitting in front of you and you only have a few hours to help them achieve their goal — that’ll definitely come out much different than what an AI would do in a course outline.

I agree with you there, that’s amazing. Our first challenge that we did, it was just 13 of our friends, and it’s like “how do you write a book in record time” — we didn’t know it was going to be seven days, we gave ourselves a week to do it, but that’s how it starts. So getting a group together, or walking someone through it for free — totally awesome.

Yeah, and that’s just the thing — maybe the AI can do that in the future, but really you’ve got to have your own magic sauce here to make your course stand out. You can go to udemy.com and there’s a million information-based courses for 10, 15 bucks — you don’t want to be just one of those, maybe that could be a marketing tactic for you to get an audience, but when it comes to your signature course and program that’s going to make you all the money and the freedom that you want, it’s going to take a little bit more effort on your part to come up with that outline.

Now, after that, you actually only need to get the key steps — you don’t have to go all the way through this process, just figure out what are the key milestones. We usually say 3 to 12 steps or modules, so break it down, and ideally too it would take them about a week to get through each one. So for a lot of people that do 30-day programs or four-week programs, eight-week, 12-week — those are really popular, so think about that as what would it really take them to get through this. Days is another way to do it, maybe it’s a seven-day thing.

So whatever length of time it would take them to actually do the things, that’s how you should structure your course and break it down into steps. Then you just use the AI to write up all the fancy, fluffy, beautiful language to sell that. So your outline is one thing, but now you’ve got to think about what exactly is included, and that could be useful to just jot down and then have it weave that together nicely — how it works. This is great for any of those touch points, like the emails or inside your course where you’re telling them how to get access or what they need to know, or thank you for joining — those are great for AI to help you get done, important dates. But this is really just the planning phase — get all this written out and you’ll be way more prepared for success.

Let me show you this diagram to make it more visual. This is the overall sales funnel strategy that most of our clients use to sell their course. The paid course sales page is down here, and you’ll notice this whole free marketing — your email list, using social media to drive people to a landing page, get them on your email list — that’s a little bit later down the line. You really just start over here, and I recommend actually starting with your course sales page, because that helps you bring all of your ideas together — everything that you just listed out in that previous exercise, the planning stage. Your next stage is actually to start to put together a compelling offer.