Tyler Basu is the content marketing genius at Thinkific, one of the fastest-growing online course platforms.

In episode 48, we talked with Tyler Basu about how to create a lifestyle business and live your dream life. He had just launched Lifestyle Business Blueprint. Since then, Tyler has gotten on board with Thinkific as their content manager.

Thinkific helps entrepreneurs easily create and distribute online courses to their audience.

Why Is the Online Course Market Growing so Quickly?

The online course market is growing quickly because online learning is so attractive. People want to learn specific skills outside traditional learning environments. They want to have the flexibility to learn at home, and to learn on their own schedule.

Plus, there are a lot of topics that you can learn online that you don’t learn in school. That’s a huge part of it.

The demand for online courses has gone up significantly in recent years, and in response to that, entrepreneurs are creating online courses to serve their customers.

In 2017, the e-learning industry will reach $255 billion in total sales from people buying online courses.

The traditional book industry is between $80 billion and $100 billion—which makes the e-learning industry 2.5 times the size of the book industry globally! The major reason for this is that the price point for online courses is much higher than for a book.

The e-learning industry has a range of price points. There are online course marketplaces like Udemy where you can buy a course for as little as $10, and there are private courses hosted on entrepreneurs’ websites that can go for more than $1,000.

Another factor in the growth of the e-learning industry is that the cost of attending a college or university has skyrocketed in the past few years, making taking courses online a much more affordable option for most people.

On top of that, people are beginning to question the value of a traditional college degree. There are certainly specialized fields that require a traditional degree to enter, but there are a lot of professions, especially in business, where you don’t need the degree—you just need the skill set.

Online courses are perfect for jobs like those. Online courses provide skills at a price point much lower than that of traditional education.

The number-one value of online courses is that they can give you skill sets that you can use in your career.

In the internet age, there’s information available on every topic you can imagine, whenever you want it. If you decide you wanted to design a logo, and you went to Google and typed in “how to design a logo,” you’d have no problem finding information that would help you in designing your logo.

But the best online courses go beyond just giving you information. The instructors go a step further and make sure their students are implementing the information they are given to develop skill sets that make their students more valuable in the marketplace. That’s the difference a good online course can make.

The value for the student of any online course is actually implementing the lessons that you learn.

Design Your Course So Your Students Implement What They Are Learning

Before you create a course with your information, and maybe even before you write a book about it, you should test out your system and approach to solving a particular problem with other people.

Before you put it out in the marketplace, your system should work for more people than just yourself.

Maybe put up a free video on your YouTube channel. Maybe offer to coach some clients for free. Before you put anything up in the marketplace, you need to be able to prove that it works for different kinds of people. You are not your audience.

After you can prove that the information or system that you have is transferable to another person and that it worked for them, the next thing you have to consider is how to create a course that will cause your student to actually go through the material and implement it.

Create Short Lessons

The first thing you can do to increase engagement and implementation of your information is create short, actionable lessons. You want to create a lesson that doesn’t take a long time to consume.

Give Your Students Action Steps

After each lesson, you might want to give your students action steps they can do to implement what they’ve learned so far, immediately after learning it.

The more your students get in the habit of taking action, the more likely they are to successfully implement your course’s lessons in the long run.

Give Students Worksheets or Quizzes about Your Lessons

Another good tactic to use involves giving your students a quiz about the lesson they just took, or a worksheet that helps them implement something they’ve been taught by guiding them through the train of thought that leads to action taking place.

Allow your students to get quick wins. Don’t give them a ton of content without allowing them to experience the benefit of implementation.

“If all you offered was video lessons, you’d be doing a disservice to your students because we all have different learning styles.”

– Tyler Basu

Pay Attention to Learning Styles

People have a variety of different learning styles

There are:

• Visual Learners


• Auditory Learners


• Kinesthetic Learners

And many more!

Some people learn best by watching videos. Some people learn best by listening. And some people learn best by actually doing the activity they’re learning about.

Most people learn through a combination of all three methods. If you want your lesson to be accessible to all of your students, you should:

• Create a video of the lesson.


• Create a slideshow of the lesson with blanks that people can fill in.


• Record an audio presentation of the video lesson so that your students can listen to it.


• Have the audio of the lecture transcribed so your students have a document they can read.


• Create worksheets that students can use to help them internalize and implement what you’re teaching.


• Create different types of media and different ways of teaching that same lesson.

Those are the best ways to approach creating content for your course that makes it accessible to all of your students, regardless of their dominant learning style.

The Marketing Advantage Courses Have Over Books

With books, reviews are practically everything when it comes to selling. Word of mouth is a huge factor in any bestselling effort for an author.

Word of mouth is still the best way to sell anything. If you have a great course that delivers the result promised to the student, that course is going to do well over the long term.

The major difference between an online course and a book is the price point. Because online courses are so much more expensive than books, the return on investment for advertisement is much greater when selling a course than when selling an ebook.

Because you stand to make more money, you can afford to spend more money when promoting your courses. This makes it easier to initially get the word out about your course.

Courses make it possible to have a sales funnel that allows you to extract the maximum amount of money from each customer that you get.

Using Facebook ads to market a $3 ebook by itself is not usually a profitable endeavor. But if your book is the first product in a sales funnel, that makes each customer who buys your book potentially much more valuable to your business.

As a nonfiction author in particular, it makes sense to have multiple ways for people to get information from you. If all you have is a book, you’re really leaving money on the table.

How to Promote an Online Course

So once you’ve created a valuable online course that offers plenty of ways for your students to access and implement the information you provide, how do you get those students?

Stage 1: Create a Minimum Viable Product

One mistake Tyler sees people making when they decide to create a course is that they lock themselves in their office and spend hours creating the course content. Then, when they come up for air, they suddenly decide that they need to learn about marketing.

This almost never ends well for the course creator because they haven’t validated their course concept. They haven’t looked at the market to see if anyone is interested in what they have to teach. They didn’t involve anyone else in the creation of the course content.