my name is Nicholas Cole and I've sold over $10 million worth of digital products on the internet we've had over 12,000 students go through our programs and courses and over the past few years building all our different course modules and curriculums I've probably written over 3 million words so if you're creating an online course or thinking about building an online course or maybe you already have an online course but want to know how to make it better how to increase student success rate uh how to increase positive word of mouth because your curriculum is that
good and how to make sure people absolutely love your product then grab a cup of coffee grab a pen piece of paper because today I'm going to give you my perfect course module framework every single module in your online course curriculum needs to have these five components the first one is reasons why otherwise known as benefits the second one is mistakes to avoid otherwise known as problems the third is steps how to so this would be action the fourth one is commonly asked questions so objections and the fifth one is some sort of walkthrough example
AKA proof and the reason you need all five of these components is because if you leave some of these out or if you only give one or two of them you're going to leave too many open Loops in your student head okay so they're going to finish the module and have too many questions they're either not going to know what to do next or they're not going to know why they should do it or they're going to go do it but they're not going to know which mistakes to avoid right or it's all going to
make sense to them but they're going to go eh I don't know if it's going to work for me so there's all these different things that keep people from taking action and the whole secret to building a really great online course is constructing your modules in a way where when the student finishes consuming the module almost always some sort of text and video combination the goal is when they finish the module they know exactly what to go do they know why they should do it that way and they have no more faulty beliefs keeping them
from getting in their own way that is the goal and if you can achieve those three goals at the end of every one of your modules your student success rate is going to Skyrocket all right so let's go Section by section and walk through exactly how this works so the first one reasons why before you even begin telling someone here's what you should go do you have to first ground them and help them understand here's why I'm recommending this right and within that why there's always a handful of questions that the person has it's like
why should I do this instead of this why are you telling me to go in this direction instead of that direction and if you don't take the time to address maybe all of those questions or all of those faulty beliefs you're going to start from a flawed place of understanding okay so you can't just jump straight to action steps you have to start with here's why so for example in ship 30 for30 which is our beginner writing program one of the first things we explain to people is here's why you shouldn't start a blog here's
everything that's wrong with starting a blog okay here's why it's so important to start writing on social platforms instead and we have to get them to buy into that point of view first before we can tell them yeah and here's how you go set up a profile and here's how you make your first post and here's how you write an atomic essay right because if they don't buy into the here's why then we could give them action steps all day long but they're not going to go do it because the starting point wasn't established so
in every single course module usually and and there's no like one perfect answer here it could be a paragraph it could be a section it could be a module for the module right all that matters is that you address the why first and more importantly you explain the benefits of this why okay so you don't just want to say here's why you should go do something you want to say here's why I'm recommending that you go do do it this way and here are the benefits of doing it that way here are all the good
things that are going to happen if you just trust me if you listen to me if if you just believe that the direction I'm pointing you in is the right one here's all the good things that are going to happen in your life right so it's not just here's why it's and here are all the benefits that come with listening to this why all right the second section is mistakes to avoid and this is almost always tied to problems so first you want to say I encourage you to go in this direction and here are
all the good things that are going to happen if you go in this direction but beware right but beware as you start your journey here are all of the things you're probably going to run into here are the mistakes that most people make right so a lot of this is almost like the value before the value it's before I tell you exactly what to go do first I'm going to tell you here are all the things that you should avoid in the process which immediately makes the person trust you more they go oh not only
do I buy into this new Direction but I also buy into the fact that I believe that you're going to educate me and tell me to avoid all of these other things that I might get caught up with along the way right so again going back to ship 30 here's why you should start writing on social platforms instead of starting a blog the benefits right you got to establish this first the benefits are you tap into hundreds of millions of readers that are already there you have a much faster feedback loop it's much easier to
understand what's working and what's not allows you to gather data allows you to improve faster allows you to tap into networks of people that you would never tap into on your blog here are all the good things that are going to happen right The Next Step though is and here are the mistakes that most people make when they start writing online well mistake number one they get too caught up with virality right they're focused on the wrong thing which is why I'm going to show you how to not do that right so all you're doing
is you're pointing out okay if you buy into this new direction and you take one step in this new Direction chances are you're going to get confronted with a bunch of options and I want to tell you up front those are all mistakes okay AKA problems and so that's the second thing you need to explain to someone and you need to help by pointing out very tangible problems don't do that don't do that don't do that that's a mistake that's a mistake okay so they buy into the the direction and then they trust you more
deeply when you say and you want to avoid all of this stuff in the process the third section and this is really the meat and potatoes of any online course is all of the action steps it's how to right step one step two step three but notice you can't just dive right into the steps you have to first establish the thinking in Direction here's why avoid these mistakes don't do some of those things right and only once someone has bought in to the mentality and the approach then can you give them the and here's Tang
tangibly what you should do and if you notice a lot of times you know online courses have a horrible stigma and reputation attached to them and I believe it's because a lot of people will create courses that don't have all five of these components in all of the modules so what they'll do is they'll Dive Right into well here's how to do the thing and they won't address the well which direction are we buying into and what are the mistakes to avoid there's so much of a of the Mind step mentality component that goes into
education and if you don't Prime the person then you can give them the action steps all all day long but they're not going to do it the next mistake that people make when they're building these course modules is they will get actionable and they'll give steps but in a very surface level way so they'll skip over so many of the nuances so they'll say something like you know step one um if I'm using ship 30 as an example step one you should start writing online but they won't tell you exactly where and they won't tell
you exactly how right and so a really good question to ask yourself as the Creator is what is every single piece of information that a robot would need in order to execute this like chat gbt is a great way of stress testing this for yourself if you aren't able to to instruct chat gbt to do a task you're probably not being specific enough to instruct a human and that is the level of depth that you need to go into in the action steps where it's it's literally every single thing like it's not just start writing
online it's here's the platform and then it's not just here's the platform it's here to here's how to set up the platform it's not just here's how to set up the platform it's here's how to write a bio and pick your profile picture and fix your banner image and pin your first thing onto your profile and write your first five posts and then it's not just that it's here's how to write each of the posts here's a template for each of the posts right you have to go seven layers deep in the action steps where
you remove every single piece of friction possible and if you don't do that and if you're just giving people like high level yeah you just got to go do these couple things you're leaving too many open loops and the person's not going to go do it and because they're overwhelmed with questions they're not going to know what to go do themselves which ultimately leads to the negative word of mouth of yeah this course didn't really teach me what I was looking for so the first two components are very mindset thinking oriented and then the middle
the meat and potatoes is the action steps but the action steps are where you have to get so almost painfully so tangible which leads to the fourth component which is some sort of I love an FAQ section and the reason that I started adding in this FAQ section is because I started to notice that it's not that people had additional questions it's that people had objections and objections are often disguised as questions so for example if in ship 30 we explaining like hey you know uh you should start writing on LinkedIn you shouldn't start writing
on your blog well an objection that someone might have is yeah but I think LinkedIn is really saturated I think too many people are writing on LinkedIn or a different objection might be I don't think my Niche is on linkon right but these objections get masked as questions where someone will ask you know but is my Niche on LinkedIn and you have to actually kind of pull back and understand that yes it's a question but actually it's an objection and so whatever you're explaining in a course module as soon as you're finished explaining it 10
objections just popped up in the person's head right is this really going to work for me does this work for my Niche is it going to work if I don't have XYZ years of experience right and so something that I have found to be an amazing upgrade for all of our curriculums is after I go through through reasons why mistakes to avoid and then action steps is then I pause and I do another section that is all it's an FAQ but every question is really an objection and all I'm doing in that section is addressing
every single objection that I've heard someone say where whenever I explain this it's like I can hear it back to me and when you start creating more and more of this type of thing as you build more digital products as you launch more online courses you will learn you'll just hear in your head you will explain something and you'll immediately hear the objection and so all you have to do and this is my process is I just keep a list of all the objections that someone would have whenever I'm explaining something and then I just
dump them all into that section of the module I'm like all right I explained it all to you now you're probably wondering you know or you're probably asking yourself and then I just go question by question or objection by objection and I explain it and I have found that that is so so helpful for dismantling people's faulty beliefs because it's really not that people don't know what to do especially if you build a great course module where you explain the thinking you give really clear action steps all of that can be great but the primary
reason why someone doesn't act on it is almost always because of an internal objection and so you have to bake into your course module an entire section that does nothing but address objections and then lastly component number five is some sort of walkthrough example so this is where things can get a little meta but if you take the time to do this I promise every person who ends the module they will know exactly what to do and they will no longer be telling themselves oh this won't work for me or yeah that worked for you
but I don't think it's going to work for my Niche or whatever it is and the way that you dismantle those faulty beliefs is first you have that objection sort of FAQ section but then you give them some sort of walkthrough that shows exactly how you did it or exactly how another student did it and really the whole goal here is just establishing proof it's not just hey I can explain this to you it's actually showing them visually hey this works and I I want to drive home a Nuance here this is not a testimonial
this is a very tangible example ideally another video that shows them hey when you do this this thing works right so like for example in our PGA curriculum in one of the modules I'm explaining how to do free Consulting via Loom so how to find prospects how to find ghost writing clients I walk through here's exactly how to do it here's how to do free Consulting here are the problems to point out here are all the things that you need to know here are all the objections I address all of them and then the last
thing I do is I go now watch me do it and there's something so powerful about going I'm not just going to explain it to you I am going to literally show you a version of me doing it so that you can start to build the pattern recognition and go oh I'm seeing it in front of me right and then I took it a step further and feel free to you know steal this framework if you want to but then after I showed myself doing it and what I did is I recorded a mock basically
a mock uh Loom free Consulting pitch so I was like if I was pitching someone here's exactly what I would do let me I'm going to show you the loom that I would send then I created another video of me rewatching the thing that I just used as an example and paused all throughout it pointing out here's why I did that here's why I did that here's why I did that so I actually took it multiple layers deep going here's how to do it here's a video of me doing it and now here's a video
of me watching the video of me doing it critiquing myself pointing out all of the things that I did and why and that's the level of depth that you have to go to in order to make each course module accomplish those goals because again the measure for Success isn't really does the person understand what to do the measure for success is do they understand what to do do they understand why it's important do they understand what mistakes to avoid do they understand that all of their internal objections are probably wrong you've educated them on why
those things aren't correct and you've given them something tangible to watch or look to to go oh and I I can see how this actually gets played out I can watch you do it that instills a lot of trust in me and the final goal is for them to get to the end of the course module and go I have no other questions I know exactly what to do I know why to do it I know what to avoid right and I and I am not going to get in my own way I believe that
this will work for me because you've successfully educated me and dismantled a bunch of those faulty beliefs and objections that I have in myself and if you do that then you've built an amazing course and if you don't do that then you have more work to do and I think just a point I want to end on here is it's really important to internalize that you probably won't get all of this right the first time I didn't get it right the first time every time we launch some new product I always see room for improvement
the question is whether you're going to go through the hard work of improving it ship 30 for 30 I rewrote that curriculum probably 20 times top to bottom PGA I've Rewritten that curriculum I can't tell you how many times top to bottom thousands of hours okay and so you have to embrace the fact that an online course is not it's not what everyone says it is it's not oh I just build a couple modules I record a couple videos I put it up on the internet and then I make passive income and I can go
live the 4our work work week just like Tim Ferris told me I could right that is not what it is what you're doing is you are helping someone achieve a specific goal learn how to do something dismantle all the faulty beliefs surrounding that thing and doing it to such a degree in depth that by the time they finish consuming the thing that you built they no longer have any other questions they should be fully confident in their ability to go execute and more importantly they shouldn't get in their own way with some sort of faulty
belief and I often find that the courses that have the worst reputations are the ones that lean too far in either direction they are either all mindset not enough action or they're all action and not enough mindset and so you really have to you know grck that you need both you have to really help and dig into why the person should listen to you why they should trust you why they should move in this direction and all of the faulty beliefs that they have and how do you dismantle them but then also give them very
tangible action steps and leave no stone unturned so I love building digital products I I think if you can write an amazing course module you can pretty much write anything in the non-fiction world if you want an amazing forcing function for being able to write non-fiction books okay books are really just full text versions like non-fiction books especially are just text versions of an online course that's all it is and if you're really really good at compressing your thinking down into the perfect course module like this you can write anything in non-fiction so I love
building these types of products I think very hard and thoughtfully about how we can continue improving these for our students but this is a framework that's been crystallizing for me for a while so I wanted to share it with you here this is the perfect course module
