Designing Powerful and Profitable Online Programs that Work for You and Your Audience with Emily Walker
Episode 541: Show Notes
Today, on the podcast, we welcome Emily Walker. She helps brilliant entrepreneurs turn their big ideas into powerful and profitable courses so they can improve thousands of other people’s lives while building more spaciousness into their own. Having worked with a diverse range of clientele all over the globe, from groundbreaking courses and bestselling authors to seven-figure mindset queens, Emily knows that, sure, you can just dive in and start teaching online, but taking that knowledge and tweaking it into something actionable is not always easy.
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If you have ever wanted to create a course, a program, a workshop, a masterclass, a tiny offer, a big offer, it doesn’t matter; this episode is going to give you a lot of great things to think about before you get started! Emily shares her perspective on creating content by doing equal parts what feels fun and good to you while also serving your audience, your clients, or your future students. It’s a blend of both worlds, and Abigail and Emylee certainly walked away from this conversation with a lot of ideas and questions to ask themselves as they refresh some of their own programs, and we know you will too!
Face Planting into the World of Learning Design
In the corporate world, it is common to hire people like Emily. Known as learning designers, instructional designers, learning experience designers, they go by a lot of different names, but their fundamental objective is to help you be a better subject matter expert in your field. A learning designer is brought in to assess a few different things: how can you teach your expertise in a way that is not overwhelming, that is going to get results, that is going to leave your people doing what you want them to do? Emily just knew that there had to be so much more opportunity out there for someone with her knowledge and skill set than there was in the corporate academic world where she felt stuck. Inspired by a Pinterest vortex, she set out to build a bridge between corporate learning and the online business world that would allow people to build courses that both convey their knowledge and amplify their impact. Essentially, she says she face-planted into the world of learning design, and she never looked back!
Questions to Ask Yourself Before Creating a Course that will Benefit Learners
Emily believes that you should always design an experience that keeps your people at its core. Whenever you are designing any kind of learning experience, whether it is a workshop or an online course, it’s about finding the balance between designing with one specific person or an ideal learner in mind versus what is known as universal design for learning or making it accessible to a wide range of people. The first question to ask yourself is: what makes your audience tick? What are their personality traits? The more you think about your people, the better you get to know them, the more likely you are to be able to predict what issues they might encounter as they move through your learning experience. Emily even recommends using that knowledge and putting it right into your materials and instructional videos!
The Power of Journey Mapping
The next step, once you have an idea of who you are building for, is a process that Emily calls ‘journey mapping’. Tuning into where people are and how they are feeling right at the beginning of your program allows you to map out where you are capable of taking them with your program, which is an incredibly powerful process that Emily believes is oftentimes skipped over. Not only are you able to ascertain what skills or knowledge a learner may or may not have at the beginning of their journey with you, which allows you to adjust or reassess your course content based on that knowledge, but journey mapping also gives you a glimpse into their mindset so that you can improve the learner experience and better set them up for success along the way!
Allowing Course Creation to be an Action-Driven Process
A common mistake that Emily sees a lot of people make is trying to cram everything they know about a topic into what is ultimately an overwhelming and under-effective course. We are experts in our field, after all! Why wouldn’t we want to share as much of our expertise as possible? But Emily says the secret is allowing it to be an action-driven process. Instead of asking yourself what you know or what you want your learners to know, ask yourself what action steps learners need to take to reach the end of the journey. She suggests writing down every single one of those action steps, whether they are big steps like ‘build a website’ or breaking it down into smaller steps like ‘write the tagline for the homepage’ or ‘put together a bio’. Often, when we focus so much on content, we miss the necessary action steps behind it, and that’s when learners get bogged down.
What the Assessment Phase Looks Like
Your courses and your programs are living creatures, not static objects! As you grow and adapt, your learners grow and adapt, and their needs change. On a micro level, building feedback cycles into your programs are key. At a minimum, put one in at the end where you ask what is working well and what could be working better. Especially if it’s a longer program, Emily recommends including a mid-point check-in plus a feedback cycle at the end so that you can gather data from your learners and make informed decisions about the tweaks or revisions that might be necessary to optimize their experience. Emily uses the analogy of home renovations: either you can rearrange the furniture or you can rip it down to the studs and completely redesign but, either way, once you have gone through the assessment phase, you have the essential user feedback needed to guide your decisions.
Scaling Your Team of Knowledge Providers
Having a faculty support you and taking the pressure off yourself to be the only one teaching certain things can be an important part of scaling your online business, but Emily believes that transparency and proving that it will benefit learners is key. If you are thinking about bringing someone else on to help you teach a program, make sure to showcase that on the sales page and share it in the program orientation to explain why you have made that decision. Emily emphasizes the importance of intentionality in every aspect of program design; the more you explain why you are doing something a certain way, the more powerful it becomes, rather than allowing learners to buy into your program and be surprised by who is teaching it.
Quote This
The more that you explain why you are doing something a certain way, the more powerful it becomes.
Highlights
Face Planting into the World of Learning Design. [0:04:07]
Questions to Ask Yourself Before Creating a Course that will Benefit Learners. [0:09:50]
The Power of Journey Mapping. [0:13:39]
Allowing Course Creation to be an Action-Driven Process. [0:18:34]
What the Assessment Phase Looks Like. [0:30:14]
Scaling Your Team of Knowledge Providers. [0:35:47]
#TalkStrategyToMe [0:37:24]
Get crystal clear on who you are building this program for so you can intentionally build the path at their feet.
Understand what that path is; where is the starting point? What is the endpoint?
Ask yourself what the action steps are that your people need to take to move from the start point to the endpoint.
Only include the content that they need to know in order to take action.
Give yourself permission to do things your way!
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Emily Walker
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Emily Walker helps brilliant entrepreneurs turn their big ideas into powerful and profitable courses so they can improve thousands of other people’s lives while building more spaciousness into their own. She has worked with a diverse range of clients all over the globe, from groundbreaking coaches and bestselling authors to seven-figure mindset queens. Emily knows that truly powerful learning experiences that house the best of your brilliance cannot be designed in a couple of hours. So, if you’re worried about cookie cutters, forced formulas, and same-same structures, you can breathe a big sigh of relief because she's allergic to all of them! When she’s not deep diving with her clients or creating new content for her community, Emily can be found hanging out in yoga pants with her two kitties, puppy, and her partner, and dreaming of their next trip to France.
KEY TOPICS
Learning design, Audience, User experience, User feedback, Scaling
