One of the best ways to showcase your expertise is to run an online course. The days when you could simply promise your prospects that you’re worth their investment are long gone. Today, you have to prove that you are worth every penny. 

When you teach a topic you are good at, you leave no shadow of doubt about your expertise. You prove to your audience that you know what you’re talking about. It is also a good way of showing that you are a real expert in your field.

Online courses are now an essential part of any expert, entrepreneur, or business owner’s toolbox. Apart from having a website or business card, you may need an online course to brand yourself. It is one of the fastest ways of getting knowledge out to a global marketplace. 

An online course can scale up your coaching business. Your daily activities may include interacting with other coaches from various industries. But you also need a way of showcasing your expertise. An online course allows you to connect with your audience on a personal level. It can convert your prospects into paying customers by showing how good you are.

The major challenge that people face when running an online course is lack of time. There is so much to do for one person. When you’ve just started out, you might enjoy doing everything on your own. But with time, it may be overwhelming to cover everything by yourself. That’s where a virtual team comes in. 

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What is a Virtual Team?

A virtual team is also known as a remote, distributed, or geographically dispersed team. It is a group of individuals in different geographical locations who work together using communication technologies. Each individual is known as a virtual assistant (VA). They participate in a project by contributing efforts in a virtual work environment to achieve a shared goal.

One of the best ways of becoming an online coach is by sharing knowledge. You don’t have to be a technical expert to build a success online coaching business. You can outsource the technical bits to freelance experts. This leaves you time for other things like managing your clients and accepting payments. 

A virtual assistant can help you set up and run a successful online course for your business. Hiring a virtual assistant will enable you to outsource some tasks such as graphic design, video editing, content creation, or build up an email list.

How a Virtual Team Can Help You Run a Profitable Online Course

The best way to benefit from a virtual team is to outsource tasks that suck away your time and the ones you’re not good at. With a helping hand on the side, you can focus more on things that matter the most for your business. You will be able to run an online course that is audience-specific and impactful.

A team of VAs will help develop your online course and grow your business faster. They will help you in setting up, building, launching, and marketing your courses. The team can help you in areas like content creation and editing, marketing, accounting and branding. 

Among the many benefits of virtual teams is that they do not have to be full-time employees. Most course creators hire independent contractors and freelancers from around the world on a task basis. The following are some of the ways you can benefit from a team of experts working in a virtual space.

1. Setting Up Templates

Templates allow you to create a consistent flow within each course and from course to course. Once you have spent the effort, time and money to create a template that works for the course content and identifies with your brand, you can use it for future courses.  An experienced virtual team can help you build templates for your courses. All you need to do is add content and teach!

To run a successful online course, you need to create slideshows, videos, graphics, emails and more. Since you may not good in designing every aspect of your course, outsource the work that you aren't good at and focus on what you’re good at. 

2. Conduct Research and Analysis

In order to identify the course content that your prospective clients would like and benefit from, you need to conduct research and analysis. Research and analysis can take up much of your time. Outsourcing this part of business to someone else can save you a lot of  time.

A freelance researcher will do basic research and gather additional information for your course content. They will look for good sources of information, summarize and organize the information for you. Depending on your data needs, a good freelancer may also conduct online surveys and present reports for you. 

3. Apply Your Brand to Content

You'll want all the content that you create to be consistent with your brand. This may include branding your templates, graphics, video's, infographics.

4. Customize Your Content

Creating an online course is a lot of work. Although you'll be doing most of the content creation, you'll rely on a team of contractors to help you launch this course. Ensure that the final presentation or course goes through several rounds of editing, proof reading and fact checking.

5. Edit and Design Graphics

Graphic elements are a critical component of any online course. This cannot be overstated enough. Graphics include: images, slideshows, infographics, video's logos, and more. Graphics convey a message, they create movement, visual interest and set the tone for the entire presentation.  Brand consistency is key but does not have to be boring. Create visuals that engage your audience. Additionally, they are a great source of social media content. 

6. Publishing and Converting Content

To engage your audience, you need to create workbooks or worksheets for your students. These worksheets add value to the course and can be used for reference.  After a template has been created by a great graphic designer, an experienced VA can help convert and publish your content in various formats to meet the needs of your audience.

Your VA can create an eBook, convert content into ready-to-publish format or convert your slideshow into a video, using music or audio t0 make it more engaging. Once you have a great video, upload it to  YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. There are so many ways to leverage the content that you have created! 

7. Running Your SEO Campaign

Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential when marketing your online course. It requires ample time and attention to create content that ranks high on search engines. An SEO expert will create SEO-rich text, meta-data and choose the right keywords for your course.  

They will help your course be more visible to your target audience, and drive useful traffic to your business. You can be sure of more conversions instead of random traffic to your course. 

8. Set up Your Online Course

To be successful, your online course must be properly set up. Assign the time consuming task of course set up to an experienced VA. The VA will set up the outline structure on your platform and upload to the relevant modules.

The outline structure may include basic module titles, individual lesson contents and graphics. Once set up, you will have placeholders for everything ready. The VA can go ahead to add the content when it is ready and make sure that everything is working.

9. Setting up Your Marketing Funnel 

When you are starting off, you may be comfortable setting a series of emails and other marketing funnels by yourself. But as your business grows, the task may be too much for one person. You can outsource this area to a virtual marketer. The marketer will set up email follow-ups, opt-in pages, sales pages and thank you pages.

Ensure you understand your funnel before outsourcing this area. You can even have your funnel in place and teach your VA how to set it up. This makes it easy for them to replicate the funnel to other courses.

10. Managing Your Social Media Platforms 

Social media is a powerful marketing tool in this age. They provide a great platform for customers to interact with your brand. You get to talk directly to your customers, market your brand, and provide feedback. But with so many social platforms, it is not easy to manage them all by yourself.

A virtual social media manager will help you manage your social media accounts. You need to brief them about your platforms, the kind of contents to post, and the frequency of publishing. Over time, they can also moderate comments and requests on your behalf. 

11. Offer Customer Support 

Adding customer support to your online course guides your audience to using your services correctly. A customer may have difficulties navigating through the course. Guiding them or answering their questions builds a great customer experience.

Since you will not always be there to answer questions, a virtual customer support assistant can help. Let them know your business and understand your values. They will answer customer questions, and help customers access your content. They can also deal with refunds requests and share links to helpful resources. 

12. Setting Up and Moderating Webinars

A webinar allows you to share documents, audio, video, and applications with your audience. Due to its interactive feature, it gives you the ability to give and receive information in real-time. It requires set up and moderation during the webinar

Hire a VA that can help you set up the webinar and moderate comments and questions. Additionally, the VA can download the recordings and edit them for future use. The video can then be uploaded to YouTube or your course platform.

13. Handling eCommerce Aspects 

Running a profitable online course is a form of eCommerce business. It requires the ability to handle transactions seamlessly, and provide customer-oriented services. An eCommerce adept freelancer will manage your online course to keep it profitable.

They will handle transactions for you and take care of order processing. They will create SEO-friendly descriptions for your course and edit images to make them attractive. They will also conduct competitor’s analysis and help in strategy development. 

14. Support and Manage Projects

As a business owner, you probably have so many projects running simultaneously. You may need someone to ensure that all projects are meeting their deadlines. A VA in project support and management will manage the project for you and write progress reports. Here are some great tips on what to expect when working with a VA

What are you waiting for? 

A virtual team can save you time to run you online course. You can hire individuals from all over the world to tackle specific areas of your course. While some will help in setting up your course, others will help in launching and marketing it. Although you may wish to have a single VA doing all the task, it is rare to find an individual good in everything. 

You need to build a team of individuals with unique skills and expertise. You have to pick and choose individuals who are most important to you. Your virtual team can comprise of freelance researchers, social media managers and graphic designers. It all depends on the aspects of your business that you want to focus on and what you want to outsource.

A great way of deciding who to hire is creating a to do list. Identify areas of the business that you want to do on your own, and the others that you can delegate to someone else.