Managing Your Online Course Business

How to Keep Students Engaged in Your Self-Paced Course (Without Being Available 24/7)

Here’s what happens to most self-paced course students: They buy your course, log in for two lessons, post once in your community, and then disappear forever. The problem isn’t your content. It’s the lack of connection. Most course creators assume self-paced means sacrificing student engagement in online courses. They think real connection only happens in cohorts or live programs. But that’s not true. You can build deep connection in a self-paced environment. You just need to be intentional about it. In this post, we’ll walk through three strategies, including specific prompts, tools, and examples you can use this week, to keep students engaged without burning yourself out. We’ll cover how to design connection into your course content, facilitate peer relationships …

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How to Choose the Right Tech Tools for Your First Online Course (Without Going Down the Rabbit Hole)

You’ve got your course idea mapped out. You know who you’re helping and what transformation you’re going to deliver. Now you’re ready to tackle the “easy” part: choosing your technology. But three hours into researching course platforms, you’ve got 47 browser tabs open, a comparison spreadsheet that’s making your eyes cross, and you’re somehow more confused than when you started. Sound familiar? Here’s the truth: After helping thousands of course creators navigate these decisions, we’ve learned that most people are asking the wrong questions about technology.  Instead of “What’s the best course platform?” they should be asking “What do I actually need right now?” In this post, we’ll share the 5 essential questions that will help you cut through the …

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The Biggest Mistakes First-Time Course Creators Make (and How to Avoid Them)

Most first-time course creators make the same handful of mistakes. Not because they lack expertise or talent, but because creating an online course is a completely different skill from delivering results one-on-one. If you’ve been stuck somewhere between ‘I have so much to teach!’ and ‘Where do I even start?’, you’re in good company. Here are the most common mistakes we see when developing online courses, and more importantly, how to avoid them. Ready to finally get your course out of your head and into the world? Let’s dive in. Mistake #1: Trying to Teach Everything You Know “I want to give my students everything they need to succeed!” It sounds generous, even noble. But cramming 20 years of expertise …

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Building a Team to Support Your Online Course Business

You launched your course. Students are enrolling. Revenue is flowing. But instead of celebrating, you’re drowning in a sea of support emails, tech glitches, and marketing tasks that never seem to end. You’re working longer hours than when you had a corporate job, and your family is starting to wonder if you’ve moved into your home office permanently. Sound familiar? Here’s the truth: The skills that make you a great course creator aren’t the same skills needed to run every aspect of a course business. And trying to do everything yourself isn’t just exhausting – it’s limiting your growth. That’s why learning how to build a team to support your online course business is such a critical milestone. In this …

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Creating Systems for High-Touch Student Support Without Sacrificing Quality

Creating Systems for High-Touch Student Support Without Sacrificing Quality

Ever wonder how some online course creators manage to provide personalized, high-touch support to hundreds of students while others struggle to keep up with just a handful? The secret isn’t working 24/7 or hiring a massive support team – it’s creating intentional systems that scale without sacrificing that personal connection. If you’ve launched an online course (or are planning to), you know that student support can quickly become overwhelming. Questions flood your inbox, community posts pile up, and suddenly you’re spending more time on admin than actually teaching or growing your business. But here’s the truth: You don’t have to choose between quality support and a sustainable business. The most successful course creators have figured out how to build systems …

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Our Favorite Course Creation and Online Business Tools in 2025

Running an online course business in 2025 requires the right mix of tools to create, sell, and deliver your content effectively. After years of testing different platforms, we’ve settled on a core set of tools that help us run our business smoothly. Here’s our tried-and-tested tech stack that we can’t live without. Ontraport Ontraport is the backbone of our business operations, serving as much more than just an email service provider. After using it for over a decade to manage our customer relationships, we can confidently say it’s an invaluable tool for any serious online business owner. Key features we love: What sets Ontraport apart is its ability to give you a complete view of your customer journey. From the …

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The True Cost of DIY Online Course Creation

“How hard can it be? I’ll just create my course myself and save thousands of dollars.” Sound familiar? If you’ve had this thought, you’re not alone. The allure of DIY course creation is strong, especially when you’re just starting out or working with a tight budget. After all, how hard can it be to record some videos, create a few worksheets, and upload them to a course platform? It’s one of the biggest reasons course creators hesitate to invest in done-for-you course creation support. But here’s the reality that many course creators discover too late: DIY course creation often ends up being far more expensive than initially anticipated—and not just in terms of dollars spent. The true cost includes your …

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How to Know if Your Online Course is Successful (and What to Do if It’s Not)

As a coach, consultant, expert, or author, creating an online course is a powerful way to share your knowledge and expertise with a wider audience. But once your course is launched, how do you know if it’s actually successful? And if it’s not meeting your expectations, what can you do to improve it? In this post, we’ll explore how to analyze your course’s performance, identify areas for improvement, and make strategic changes to boost student engagement and success. Defining Success: What Metrics Matter Most? Before diving into your analysis, it’s crucial to define what success looks like for your online course. Here are some of the items to consider: Of course, business metrics like revenue and profit matter too. In …

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How to Move Beyond One-on-One Work as a Coach or Consultant

Wondering how to move beyond one-on-one work as a coach or consultant? This question is the key to making the shift to really grow your business fast. The problem is there are so many different options for how you could do this. Here are just a few ways to move beyond one-on-one work as a coach or consultant: All you have to do is look in your inbox to get overwhelmed with all the different ideas for how you should expand your business. The key to avoiding overwhelm is this: instead of asking yourself what you should offer next, shift your question to “what do I want to get up and do every day?” That question is what you need …

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How to Outsource Course Creation: The Roles to Hire (and What to Pay Them)

If you’re building an online course, it’s easy to assume the whole thing lands on you: the content, the copy, the video, the design, all of it. Here’s the truth: it doesn’t have to. The course creators who scale without burning out are the ones who bring in the right people for the parts that fall outside their expertise. That’s what outsourcing course creation really means: handing off the pieces that aren’t yours to do, so you can focus on the work only you can do. That’s when the practical questions show up. Who do you actually hire to help build a course? How do you tell which curriculum developers have actually built online courses like yours? And what should …

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4 Tips to Create Your Online Course When You’re Busy and Overwhelmed

The reality of creating an online course is that once you realize it’s a ‘must have’ in your business, you’re probably ALREADY extremely busy coaching, consulting, speaking, or just running your day-to-day business. We see this all the time with our clients, where they have been trying to piece together their courses in between meetings for years. You know the whole saying, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.” The same can be said for trying to squeeze in creating your online course from scratch, while juggling all the things required of you as you manage your business (or while working full time trying to start your own business). Getting your course to …

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7 Strategies for Preventing and Handling Online Course Refund Requests

When you’re first starting out and gearing up to publish your course, one of the last things you may be thinking of is the idea of one of your students requesting a refund… It’s a scary thought at first, but it’s an inevitable part of running an online business (or any business in general). Whether it’s a customer who had a technical issue or simply changed their mind, you need to be prepared to handle online course refund requests in a way that will satisfy your customer and protect your business. After managing our own online courses for over 15 years and helping our clients launch their courses, we have developed systems and processes that work extremely well for handling …

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