How To Create an Online Course in 10 Steps (2026)

An online course is an educational program delivered virtually. Creators can earn money when students buy their course and learn through written text, videos, or quizzes.

The online education market is projected to reach $199 billion in 2026, according to Statista, with the average user expected to spend just over $206. You can find online courses on everything from entrepreneurship to cat training. 

To create an online course you’ll need to choose a topic, select the right format, research your ideal customer, and test market demand—all before actually creating the content. This guide shares how to do that and create an online course from scratch.

How to create an online course in 10 steps

Here’s how to create an online course, from coming up with a course topic to finding your first students:

1. Choose a profitable topic for your online course
2. Conduct user research
3. Select the format of your course
4. Test if your online course has market demand
5. Pre-sell your course
6. Outline your course content
7. Set course pricing and sales goals
8. Choose the best online course platform
9. Launch and advertise your course
10. Collect feedback and testimonials

1. Choose a profitable topic for your online course

Before you start on course creation, choose a topic you’re uniquely suited to teach, where you have industry insight, credibility, and expertise. 

Explore the market demand. Niche course topics like “making authentic maple syrup” or “producing ska music” might attract fewer students, but may present an opportunity to establish yourself as a leading educator in the space. These courses solve one urgent problem for a distinct audience rather than teaching a broad subject to everyone.

Amanda Rach Lee, for example, created an online course on art journaling for self-care. It ties into Amanda’s story as a creator. She built a community around her bullet journaling videos, and the link to art journaling follows a similar theme. 

Finding a course topic: Ikigai exercise

Ikigai is a Japanese concept that describes your personal source of inspiration, purpose, and joy. 

A Venn diagram was created to help illustrate a person’s ikigai, and can be used to uncover what subjects may motivate you as a teacher:

1. Draw four circles. On a piece of paper, draw four overlapping circles, as shown in the image below. Label them as follows: What I love, What I’m good at, What the world needs, and What I can be paid for.
2. Fill in each circle. Think of what you’re passionate about, your skills and expertise, gaps in knowledge that people may be actively searching for, and what people are willing to pay for.
3. Identify overlaps. Any overlap between all four circles represent a potential course topic that aligns with your passion, expertise, market demand, and earning potential.

2. Conduct user research

Identify the skills, knowledge, or experiences students are most interested in learning. 

Build a detailed picture of your target audience by putting yourself in a beginner’s shoes. Being an expert in a field can result in forgetting what it’s like to be a complete newbie. This can be detrimental when creating courses for different experience levels. Speaking with prospective users can help you return to a beginner’s mindset. 

Your course should help a learner solve a problem they’ve been facing, support them in acquiring knowledge they’ve struggled to find elsewhere, or assist them in learning something more quickly or efficiently than available alternatives. For your course to accomplish this, you need to know what pain points your prospective students may face.

User research tools

Try these user research tools to understand prospective students before building an online course:

• Google Trends. Search for your topic and see whether it’s increasing or decreasing in popularity over time. 
• Keyword tools. Tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and AnswerThePublic show what people are searching for on Google and social media.
• Browse Reddit, Quora, and niche forums. Explore community questions related to your topic and browse threads containing student discussions.
• Scavenge social media. Follow prominent people in your industry across social networks like X and LinkedIn, paying attention to the conversations related to your course topic. 

Primary research

Connect with prospective customers directly and survey them about their needs and preferences. Keep interactions short and focus on foundational insights like course format and pricing with survey questions that address the following areas: 

• The problems your course can help solve
• Reasons for taking your course
• Expected outcomes after completing your course

Learning outcomes

Consider what learners will be able to do, know, and feel by the end of their journey by creating learning outcomes using the ABCD approach:

• Audience: Who will be taking the course.
• Behavior: The skills or knowledge they will acquire.
• Condition: Where or how they’ll use what they’ve learned.
• Degree: The level of expertise they will achieve.

For example:

“Newly promoted managers (A) will analyze workplace disputes (B) during real team interactions and coaching conversations (C) to successfully implement a ‘win-win’ negotiation strategy (D).”

“Bakers of all levels (A) will elevate their Sunday mornings by making buttery, flaky croissants (B) in their own kitchens (C) that meet the exacting standards of traditional French pâtissiers (D).”

3. Select the format of your course

Online courses come in a range of formats and mediums, including live classes and asynchronous content. 

There are two ways to approach online course design:

• Self-paced courses. Give students the flexibility to progress through the material at their own speed. There’s no live instructor pushing learners forward, so consider interactive elements like formative and summative assessments, downloadable worksheets, or reflection prompts throughout the curriculum.
• Cohort-based courses. Guide groups of students through the material together, often with set start and end dates. Create milestone checkpoints to keep the group in sync. 

Regardless of format, build for accessibility from the start. Create materials that include closed captions for videos, alt text for images, and screen-reader-compatible documents.

Mini-course

A mini-course can take on different mediums, like a series of emails or a playlist of 10 short videos. Ryan Robinson, for example, has a free seven-day course that teaches readers how to start a blog. 

Multiday course

Multiday courses are intermediate digital educational products that generally take students several days to complete.

They might include prerecorded videos breaking down the course into different levels or modules, and include supplementary materials like worksheets and checklists. They may also have live check-ins and social meet-ups to resolve challenges and enrich the learning experience.

Master class

Master classes can be anywhere from weeks to months long and aim to set up students for success in a particular subject or field. 

4. Test if your online course has market demand

A minimum viable product (MVP) is a product you release to the public with just enough features to validate your assumptions. For an online course, an MVP could be a mini-course or a free webinar given out for testing purposes. Gathering student contact info this way also gives you a list of potential consumers to market to down the road.

Mini-courses

Mini-courses narrow in on a specific topic rather than attempting to cover a broad range of ideas. You can choose a topic you know well and package your expertise or repackage existing content (e.g., blog posts, threads on X, email newsletters) into a short-form course. 

Create a free webinar

Validate the market demand of your course by using a webinar with an upsell. It provides an opportunity to showcase your expertise and gather feedback from participants on what they found most valuable.

Miss Excel, for example, hosts a free webinar that teaches people how to use Excel. It leads nicely into her paid courses.

5. Pre-sell your course

Pre-selling means selling your online course before you’ve actually created it. It lets you stress-test your concept, tailor your content to early feedback from buyers, and raise money through pre-sales to fund course creation. 

To pre-sell your course, do the following:

• Use Shopify to set up pre-orders and collect payments for your course. To add pre-order functionality to your store, download an app. 
• Share the course title, topic, and outline to give early buyers an idea of the curriculum they’ll learn. 
• Have a goal in mind of what a successful pre-sale might look like. 

6. Outline your course content

Use the backward design concept to reverse-engineer the learning path for your online course. 

The process follows three stages:

• Identify your desired results. What should the student be able to do by the end of the course? Refer to your course’s learning outcomes to set these.
• Determine how to assess the results. How will you prove they learned what they set out to learn? Examples include building a portfolio piece, passing a quiz, or completing a worksheet.
• Plan learning experiences. Only once you’ve defined the above should you create online learning materials like videos, readings, and exercises.

Let’s reverse-engineer a course about product photography, for example:

• Outcome. Students will be able to capture fabric textures like chunky knits or smooth leather to showcase material quality.
• Assessment. Students must submit a series of close-up detail shots of a garment where the fabric grain is clear and crisp. 
• Learning activities. Now you know to offer lessons on lighting angles, aperture settings, and white balance. You can skip lessons on posing live models for this course because it won’t help them pass the assessment. 

Break content into modules and lessons

The amount of content in your course and how many lessons you include will be determined by the type of course you create (e.g., mini-course, multiday course, master class) as well as the associated completion time and cost. For example, Supakit’s cat harness training course has seven modules. 

“It includes two skills that are not directly related to harness training, which is recall training your cat and then getting them happy in a safe space, like a carrier or a backpack, before you even start harness training. People can interlace the training and do it all at the same time,” says cofounder Leili Farzaneh in a Shopify Masters interview. “It means that by the time we’re sending our cat graduates across the threshold—out on their first trip outside—they’ve got all of the range of skills they need to have a rewarding, safe, and fun experience.”

Determine lesson formats

Consider a mix of formats to keep learners engaged. Some formats may also be better suited for teaching the central lesson. These can include:

• Video content
• Screencasts and walkthroughs
• Text content
• Downloadable content
• Workbooks and checklists 

Creating your scripts with AI

In a 2025 Shopify survey, content generation was the most common AI use case among store owners, at 69%.*

AI content creation tools like Shopify Sidekick, ChatGPT, and Google Gemini can help you build an online course:

• Generate outlines and scripts. If you’re unsure how to structure a lesson, provide the AI tool with your thoughts, the lesson title, and clear learning objectives. It can help generate a logical flow and a first draft for your script.
• Critique your lessons. Ask the AI where a lesson may be confusing or lacking in knowledge. It may be able to suggest solutions and include perspectives you haven’t considered. 
• Develop supplementary materials. Prompt the AI tool to suggest relevant quizzes or cheat sheets based on your lesson transcript.

Always treat AI-generated content as a draft. It can help build your framework, but always edit and personalize the content to make sure it’s accurate, engaging, and authentic to you. 

“AI is great for your first draft. It’ll save you the first 40 minutes of writing or idea generation,” says Nik Sharma, CEO of Sharma Brands. “But the final draft is something that should be massaged by you, the owner and operator, before it goes out.”

Recording video classes

You don’t need expensive video equipment to create a video course. Smartphones have high-quality recording features you can use to create an online course. 

Tips to consider when recording video classes:

• Perfect your setup. Choose a location with minimal noise and a clean, uncluttered background. Use natural light with a tripod to keep your camera still, and consider an external microphone for clear audio. Use the rule of thirds when framing your shots.
• Focus on your delivery. Speak clearly, at a steady pace, and use of visual aids. Recording in short segments can also make editing easier.
• Refine the video with editing. Free video editing tools let you add transitions and cut pauses or mistakes to keep videos concise. You can also add captions for accessibility.

7. Set course pricing and sales goals

Set a price to sell online courses. This can depend on factors like:

• Niche demand. Consider the industry your course falls in and how price-sensitive your customers might be. Research similar courses in your niche to see what they’re selling for. 
• Authority of the course creator. Take your perceived authority into account while pricing your course. Jeff Ellis, for example, leans into his Grammy Award wins and the artists he’s worked with on the sales page for his Mixer Brain course, which sells for $369.99.
• Payment methods. If your course is comprehensive and you’re using a higher price, consider buy now, pay later options or monthly subscriptions. 

8. Choose the best online course platform

The best online course platform depends on the format you’re using and the tools you need to create and sell your course. An all-in-one platform is suited to longer multimodule courses, while a basic landing page may be enough for a short class. 

Here’s a comparison of some different types of online course platforms:

To choose the best online course builder, evaluate each type on the following criteria:

• How intuitive is the platform for both you as a course creator and for your students?
• Does it support the types of content you want to create (video, audio, text, quizzes, etc.)?
• Are there features for student engagement like discussion forums or live sessions?
• Can you customize the look and feel to match your brand?
• What are the costs involved (setup fees, monthly fees, transaction fees)?
• Does it offer built-in marketing tools like email marketing or affiliate programs?
• Can the platform handle your growth as you add more courses and students?
• Is there a mobile app for students to access courses on the go?
• What level of support does the platform offer to you as a course creator?

The content of your course is more important than where it’s hosted online. If the course platform you select lacks the features you need, you can always switch later on. 

Standalone course platforms

Standalone platforms give control over your own course design process and data. However, you may need extra app integrations for advanced features like email marketing or landing page building. 

Options include:

• Thinkific. Features a drag-and-drop course builder and native payment processing. Pricing starts at $54 per month ($40 per month on annual plan) with a 2.9% plus 30¢ transaction fee for courses sold
• Teachable. Suitable for a variety of digital products, including online courses. Pricing starts at $39 per month ($29 per month on annual plan) with a 7.5% transaction fee. More expensive plans have no transaction fee.

All-in-one course platforms

All-in-one solutions can provide marketing tools, website builders, and content delivery all in one place. Examples include:

• Kajabi. Includes an AI creator hub to draft course outlines, social posts, and sales pages. Plans start at $179 per month ($143 per month on annual plan) with a 2.9% plus 30¢ transaction fee.
• Circle. Online course builder with the option to create a virtual community and membership program around your content. Plans start at $89 per month. Processing fees typically start at 2.9% plus 30¢ per transaction, but additional fees may apply.

Online course marketplaces

Online course marketplaces come with a built-in audience of students who can discover your course through the platform’s search engine. This often comes at a cost.

Gumroad, for example, charges a 10% plus 50¢ transaction fee, as well as a 2.9% plus 30¢ credit card processing fee or PayPal fees, for sales made through links you’ve shared directly with customers. There’s a flat 30% fee per transaction, inclusive of processing fees, when customers find you through the Gumroad marketplace.

Marketplaces like Coursera, Udemy, and Skillshare are also options, though each requires you to apply to teach on their platform. 

Your own online store

An online store gives complete control over the customer experience. Shopify, for example, has an AI website builder that lets you customize your online store’s appearance. You can also process payments with Shopify Payments and build an email list with Shopify Messaging.

Shopify integrates with tools to deliver online courses once customers buy, such as:

• Digital Products app
• Tevello Courses & Communities
• LDT Online Courses
• Courses Plus
• Inflowkit Membership & Courses

9. Launch and advertise your course

Marketing and finding customers top the list of Year 1 challenges, according to a Shopify survey of store owners—37% and 36%, respectively.*

After putting in the work to make your course as good as possible, make sure it’s visible to potential customers by implementing some of these marketing strategies:

• Prioritize email marketing. Building an email list of prospective buyers lets you share updates, information, and discounts related to your course. 
• Get your name out there. Advertise your expertise on a subject. Pitch yourself to news websites and podcasts in your niche, explaining how your knowledge fits with their show or a trending topic. Ask to include a link to your course on the site or in the show notes. 
• Use social media marketing. Identify which channels your target audience use, then build a social media strategy to reach them there.
• Run paid ads. Google Ads or Facebook ads let you target ideal buyers. Monitor return on investment—the cost of acquiring a customer should be less than the price of the course.
• Adopt SEO tactics. Optimizing your website helps customers discover your course in search engines. Learn how to rank your site with this SEO checklist. 

“Advertise as much as you can online and don’t be afraid to change up the advertising and try different things,” says Amit Mahtani, owner of Bagels on Greene, in a Shopify Masters interview. “The worst thing that’s going to happen is somebody won’t click on it.”

10. Collect feedback and testimonials

Some 57% of shoppers think user-generated content like reviews and ratings are among the most important product page elements when completing a purchase online, per Salsify’s 2026 Consumer Research report. You can also use critical feedback to revise course material that is underperforming. 

Be specific in providing direction to customers about what you want when asking for a testimonial. Here are examples of targeted questions:

• How much new revenue have you seen through taking my course?
• How prepared did you feel for the real estate licensing exam before my course versus afterward?
• How much did your business grow after taking this marketing course?

Note: If you’re in the US and use student testimonials in sales pages or ads, make sure disclosures and claims follow FTC guidance on endorsements, reviews, and testimonials. 

The benefits of creating an online course

With no inventory issues or supply chain problems to solve, selling online courses is an online business idea with benefits worth considering:

• Online courses can generate passive income. Once you’ve created an online course, you can generate income from it continuously. This is especially the case if your course is download-only and isn’t a cohort-based course with a live or community component. 
• Online courses are low-cost. There’s no inventory to buy for an online course, and no logistical hassle of delivering physical products. 
• Online courses have high margins. After the costs that go into production and marketing, the remaining revenue from a course can be profit. 

Online course creation mistakes

Here are some mistakes to watch out for when creating an online course:

• Overloading content. Focus on the most important points and break them into smaller, manageable lessons. 
• Neglecting feedback. Regularly ask your students for feedback. This will help you understand what’s working and what might need improvement.
• Inadequate marketing. Even great courses need to be promoted. Develop a marketing plan to reach people who would benefit from your course.

*Based on a 2025 survey of 500 Shopify merchants conducted in English across Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United States. Respondents were established merchants with two or more years on the platform. Results reflect the experiences of this specific sample and may not be representative of all merchants.