The Process of Productizing Your Teaching Skills Into a Course

You’re a teacher or an educator and you’re looking for a way to scale? You feel like the world of education has changed tremendously, and the traditional way of teaching isn’t ideal for you anymore?
Since the pandemic hit, teachers had to become self-employed or freelancers. They had to learn how to teach on their own, without depending on institutions to place students in front of them and pay them to work. In this article, we want to help teachers and educators like you to learn how to create a course profitably, thanks to productization.

Productizing teaching skills: meaning 

Productization of a skill or a service simply means to stop trading your time in exchange for money. On the contrary, to productize allows you to transform what you already know how to do into a business. How? You can sell products like digital courses, offer consulting services, webinars, etc. Most importantly, having a business means being able to scale, to sell, to replicate, to market. You engage in helping people differently. 

For teachers, to productize teaching would be to free yourself from the traditional education system where you have to be in front of a class of students to share your skills and knowledge. You find new ways to broaden your activity. You become a business owner who has learned to depend on systems to offer services and/or products to help people who are in need of your solution. You’ve probably guessed it by now, one of the best ways to productize your skills as a teacher is to create an online course. 

You build once, you sell over and over again: that’s what marketing and productization will allow you to get. You won’t have to adapt your consulting service or your teaching to the students in front of you. You’ll create your course once, but all of your customers will access the same product.

Create an online course

As an educator or teacher, you need to learn how to create a course profitably online.

The ideal ascension of a teacher who wants to productize his time and knowledge would be: 

1. To start as an employee – learn to trade time for money
2. Become self-employed – learn to offer services for money
3. Become a business owner – learn to depend on productized systems to offer services and products to clients.

The job of a teacher has literally been transformed in recent years. Learning doesn’t happen only through books sitting in a classroom. 

The teachers who have succeeded to become self-employed are often teaching to a few students only. They are often underpricing themselves because they don’t have a sustainable flow of new students requesting their service. But still, they’ve become independent and that’s great.

The problem at that point is that they don’t have the systems to create digital products or courses that they can sell to potential students. The same students who’ll become, in fact, customers. They don’t have a business. Everything depends on them, and it becomes extremely hard for them to sustain their activity. These are some of the reasons why they haven’t learned how to create a course profitably:

• They don’t have time for themselves
• They don’t have the money to expand on what they want
• They don’t have the energy to truly invest in things they care about

Start a business to depend on your own systems

That’s where starting a business comes in.

To become a business owner, you need to start depending on your systems.

The most important system you can have in your online education business is a system of productization that allows you to recover your time, energy, and money and invest it into your business.

The best thing online educators can do is turn their high ticket program into an on-demand course that they can sell for a cheaper price where they don’t have to teach themselves.

There’s an infinity of ways to go about turning a high-ticket program into a product and then systematically selling it… 

To have success in how to create a course profitably you need to learn how to productize your time.

The process of productizing your teaching into a course profitably 

What seems to be the most natural way to productize your teaching would be as follow:

1. Pre-sell/validate the course on sales calls for high ticket offer
2. Record a live version of the course with a cohort (get paid to record)
3. Package it as a product 
4. Use it as a down-sell on your sales call for those that the high-ticket offer is not the right match.
5. Launch and create marketing and systems around the product 
6. Automate the process and scale!

Granted, it’s easier said than done. If you’ve already tried to do this, you’ve probably faced a couple of obstacles. Building and marketing your online course is not an easy process. However once you have it together, it can easily double, triple your current education business. 

The good news is literally any teacher or educator can start productizing their skills whatever their specialization is. Over the years, you’ve acquired knowledge and experience you can share with others. You have diverse skills. That means you can offer value to clients who are willing to trade money to access your skills.

Several possibilities to distribute your online course

Once your course is built, you have many ways of getting it to the right customers. 

You can do it through online course platforms that offer many features. The advantage behind choosing a course platform is that you can host, build, design and market your content on the same website without coding. There are many course platforms out there, but we recommend Thinkific as it has many benefits. Check out our review of the 3 best platforms to sell your online courses in 2022.

Another possibility you have to distribute your digital training is to build your own website using an LMS (Learning Management System). An LMS is a software that allows course creators to host and track learning content. You can check on and report the progress of your learners.

Productizing your teaching skill isn’t an easy process, but it is definitely worth it. Imagine the sea of possibilities you’ll have if you acquire that type of freedom. If you’re struggling to take your education business to the next level, or even have problems starting it, we’ve been specialized in course selling for the past 5 years and we love helping people in your situation. Nothing’s more rewarding than helping teachers and educators to bring value to the world at scale.
That’s why we created our DFY program and we suggest you take 90 seconds to apply for it. Even if you’re not the right match for the program or it’s too costly for you, we certainly have something of value to offer to you and your time will be 100% worth it, guaranteed. Good luck productizing your offer!