Part 2: Building a Udemy Course in 21 days – Mind Mapping

This post is part two of a four part series on building a udemy course. I will cover idea validation through to content generation and finally to marketing your course to get engaged students and sales.

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Part 1 – Choosing a profitable course idea
Part 2 – Creating an winning outline for your course
Part 3 – How to quickly generate content that sells
Part 4 – Get 1000 students in your first week

I am through week 1 of building a udemy course and in my previous post, I explained how to choose and validate an idea and even show you a promotional vid I created and published to the Udemy Instructor Studio for feedback from the community.

This week, I will review how to structure and plan your course. Keep in mind, when making your first course, it will NOT be perfect. You should strive for completion and not for perfection. You can always go back and adjust the course.

Your biggest challenge will be marketing the course as you can see here from a questionnaire that was given to our instructors on Facebook:

I'll go through marketing in detail at the end of this series but lets continue with outlining.

Setting the Goals for Your Students

My first step was to figure out what 3-5 goals I had for my students. This is important to guide my material and helped me figure out each section and how it was related to these goals. Since my course is about building the correct habits – here are my goals:

This is actually a requirement for creating your course with Udemy as they ask you to fill this out in the “details” section of the course. I suggest you do this first as it gives you clarity on course content.

Generating the Mind-map

The next step was to build a mind-map to throw all my ideas down on paper. I like to do this because I can let my thoughts flow freely and get everything on paper immediately.

Each section of my course deals with one goal I had set for the students.

To start off with, this makes it nice and easy as I then get 3 sections (one for each goal) and an introduction and conclusion for a total of 5 sections.

Great. Now we are cooking.

Let's move on to creating that outline on the Udemy site.

Creating an Outline

Headlines that Convert

If you look at my section and lecture titles – I try to make them individually as appealing as possible. When someone looks at your course, they should be intrigued by the titles enough to make them want to buy.

If you need guidance on writing powerful headlines – head over to this great resource.

Takeaways for Students

I like to end each section with a PDF that the student can use to make sure they can follow through with the lessons they have learned.

Most of the time students will just be absorbing information while watching the video series but having something they can take home and use allows them to get a ton more out of your course.

The next post in the series will cover how to research and put together remarkable content.