Tiago’s Comprehensive Guide to Creating a Profitable Online Course

This is a comprehensive guide to creating a profitable online course, based on my experience developing 6 courses over 7 years, which have been taken by more than 25,000 students and generated well over $1 million in revenue.

It introduces my 4-P model for developing a course, referring to the 4 main stages of Planning, Preparation, Production, and Promotion. This doesn’t include the actual running and delivery of the course, which is a whole different topic and depends a lot on the format you choose.

This guide also assumes you want to create a profitable, self-sustaining course. There are a lot of excellent reasons to create one, including learning, personal fulfillment, fun and experimentation, and simply to share what you know. But the level of preparation and effort I’m recommending in this guide is aimed at those who want to make a business out of it.

Here is a Table of Contents of the 36 specific steps that I use in my own course development. Under most of them I’ve included multiple examples of what it looks like in my own courses or those I’ve learned from. I’m sharing them in their full, messy glory because this process is inherently messy. I hope it gives you some guidance and ideas for your own course creation.