Leveraging Your Blog to Create a Course

By: Justin Ferriman • December 12, 2017
Filed Under:

You spent a lot of time creating your blog posts, why not leverage that hard work to create your course?

One of the best ways to determine if your course idea is worthwhile is to start a blog around that particular subject first.

As you write on the subject you will start to see whether or not people are interested in the topic by looking at your things like your site traffic stats and most popular blog posts.

In fact, I know first-hand that this is a viable way to start a business. LearnDash started as a simple two-page blog. I would write about e-learning topics as well as the idea of a WordPress LMS. At the top of the page was a place to enter your email address to learn more. The thinking was simple: if we saw a lot of people sign-up for the email list then we would pursue building out the software.

Well, the rest is kind of history. People signed-up, the software was built, and here we are today! 🙂

Building Your Blog and Course at the Same Time

What’s great about first starting a blog around your potential course idea is that you can essentially build your blog and your course at the exact same time. Your blog posts act as a way to gauge interest across the sub-niches in your topic area.

By simply looking at your website analytics you can see which topics resonate more with your visitors. The popular posts can then make their way into your course as various lessons. And there is no reason to spend your time recreating your content.

As the video above demonstrates you can quickly add content to your LearnDash powered courses by simply converting the blog post into a lesson. This means that the time and energy you put into writing great content on your site can be leveraged for your course. This significantly decreases your overall development time and gets you to market quicker.

If you do this strategy then you might want to make sure that you go back through your converted blog posts and update them so that they are more conducive to your course. There may be certain elements that you wish to remove (or perhaps add) based on the overall flow of your course content.

One last tip: you may consider doing this for only a few posts initially so as to create a mini-course. This can help you test the waters first before you spend a significant amount of more time building the full course.

Justin Ferriman

Justin started LearnDash, the WordPress LMS trusted by Fortune 500 companies, major universities, training organizations, and entrepreneurs worldwide. He is currently founder & CEO of GapScout. Justin’s Homepage | GapScout | Twitter