Week 1 Update: How to Create an Online Course and Earn $1,100+ Per Month - Custom GPTs & Scripting Lessons

Welcome! I'm super excited to have you join me on this exciting, and a little scary, journey where the goal is to hit $1,100 (approx €1,000) per month by creating and selling online courses. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just dipping your toes into the world of online education, this challenge is all about learning, growing, and having a blast along the way.

I'm pumped to share this adventure with you all! If you have any questions, tips, or just want to share your excitement, drop a comment below. Let's make this journey to $1100 per month a fun and successful ride together! 🚀

The first course I'm creating is a supercharged Productivity course for online professionals and remote workers.

Personal Tidbits:

• Personal: my name is James Mew, born in 1981 in Portsmouth, UK. Grew up in sunny South Africa.
• Location: I’m living in the beautiful city of Porto, Portugal. If you’ve never been, it’s an amazing place with incredible food, stunning views, and a rich culture.
• Learning Portuguese: I’m slowly but surely learning Portuguese. It’s not easy, but I’m enjoying the challenge (even if it means a lot of “desculpe, pode repetir?” 🤣).
• Passions: I absolutely love SEO, eCommerce, automation and digital marketing. These are my jam and I can talk about them for hours!

Professional Journey:

• Selljam Founder & Former Head of eCommerce: With 19 years in the eCommerce industry, I've launched and grown multiple businesses. My second venture hit 7-figures in revenue within its first year! I exited that in 2022.
• Corporate/Startup Experience: In 2022, I took on the role of Head of E-commerce for a European food technology equipment and IT service provider, managing 14 e-shops across Europe and South Africa.
• Selljam: This platform is my way of sharing all the eCommerce tips, tricks, and hacks I’ve learned over the years. I hope they help you on your journey to success!

Why This Challenge? 🤔

Despite my experience in eCommerce, I have no idea how to create an online course. This is my first time, and I’m a bit nervous about it. But that’s what makes this challenge so exciting! I’m here to learn, grow, and hopefully inspire you along the way.

So, now that all the who's and why's are out of the way, let's get on with the challenge!

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Week's Focus and Main Achievements

Course Outline and Task Breakdown: Kicked off by nailing down the course outline and setting up tasks in ClickUp. Got the core messages for each slide sorted and designed slick templates in Canva to keep everything looking top-notch.

Template Creation and Custom GPT Setup: I developed a cohesive lesson template, specifically crafting a unique one for the "AI-powered productivity" section. A custom GPT was also setup with best practice documents and a lesson scripting framework added to the knowledge library.

Initial Filming and Scripting: I tested my first screencast lesson, realized the need for full scripting, and began the full scripting process, which is crucial for beginners.

Research and Process Improvement: Conducted extensive research on video course scripting and improved my Custom Course GPT's instructions to enhance the script creation process.

Scripting Completion: By the end of the week, all sections and lessons were fully scripted, setting us up perfectly for the filming phase next week.

Next Week’s Plan

• Prepare the lesson content for the software demos and screencasts. These lesson will take the longest. The mini projects for the Zapier and Make tutorials will also take some time to create. I'm creating an email digest in Zapier and task organiser and collation automation in Make.
• Begin recording both live video (talking head shots) as well as the screencasts for software demos and the automation mini projects (Zapier and Make).

Tool Stack

• Canva: A design tool that lets you create stunning visuals and course materials with ease, even if you have no graphic design skills. You can even create an online course with Canva, simplifying the entire process.
• ChatGPT: An AI assistant that helps generate course content, brainstorm ideas, and answer questions, making the creation process smoother and faster.
• Clickup: A project management tool to keep track of your course development tasks, deadlines, and team collaboration all in one place.
• Make: A workflow automation tool that helps streamline repetitive tasks, integrating various apps to keep your course creation process efficient.
• Zapier: An automation tool that connects your favorite apps and services, allowing you to automate workflows and save time on course creation tasks.
• ChatGPT: Of course, why wouldn't I try create an online course with AI. It's the OG of language models and my trusty assistant during this entire process. ChatGPT is AI assistant that helps generate course content, brainstorm ideas, and answer questions, making the creation process smoother and faster

Resources

• Lesson Script Framework: ChatGPT framework and instructions I created to upload to the custom GPT's knowledge library. It contains the outline and structure to be used for the lesson script.

Daily Highlights

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Monday, 1st July 2024

Completed

• Asked ChatGPT to create the course and lesson outline. See prompt below. Here was the response. After some back and forth I had a structured draft outline that I was happy with. I then added my own techniques, insight, tricks and hacks to get to the final course outline
• Next, I created task breakdown of the entire course creation process in Clickup. See screenshot.
• Once the final outline was complete I began creating the content for each slide in Canva. First the key message of the slide was added, this is basically to flesh out the skeleton of the course. Next step was to create the themed template which will be used for all slides, and adding supporting media and graphics to the slide to give them a professional look.

CustomGPT Prompt for Productivity Course
Act as a professional Course Creator and create an online course outline about time management and productivity for online professionals. The sections I want to cover are below. Create each of the lessons titles. Each of the lessons should be 3-5 mins long (so no lengthy concepts) and each section should have an introduction video as well. 
Section #0 - Introduction
Section #1 - Productivity Key Concepts‌ & ‌Principles‌
Section #2 - Productivity Strategies‌ & ‌Techniques‌
Section #6 - Ai-Powered Productivity
Section #5 - Automation Tools & Hacks
Section #4 - Email Management Techniques
Section #3 - Productivity Software & Tools
See the entire ChatGPT Response Here.

Key Learnings

• Create the lessons in phases/sweeps. Don't get bogged down creating each lesson slide by slide. Put down the core message for the lesson then once all of them are complete you can go back for a second sweep and add the additional elements like graphics, icons, images and more.
• Learned how to use the bulk create in Canva, which uses a CSV file to import a spreadsheet containing all the lesson information.

Challenges Faced

• Nothing too challenging here

Next Steps

• Complete the lesson content in Canva then move onto creating the scripts.

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Tuesday, 2nd July 2024

Completed

• Created a lesson template and used it throughout all the sections. Except for the "Ai-powered productivity" section which had its own unique template.
• Updated the slides and lessons in Canva to give them a more professional look. See example screenshot above.
• Created own "Online Course GPT". Added a GPT Instructions knowledge file which includes some "best practice" documents and also a lesson scripting framework.

Key Learnings

• Custom GPTs are a great way to have highly contextual responses in your own tone of voice and style but they also save time by not needing to upload or provide documentation or specific prompts instructions every time. You can simply reference any documents in it's "knowledge library".

Challenges Faced

• Canva: Had to manually update a lot of the page animations and also text animations.

⭐ Pro Tip: It's a good idea to create all of the animations for the text elements as well as the page animations first and then duplicate those slides there after for the rest of the lessons.

Next Steps

• Scripting

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Wednesday, 3rd July 2024

Completed

• Filmed first test screencast lesson, and winged it with the lesson narration but wasn't happy with how it came out. I seemed a bit unenthusiastic. Did some research and see that a full script is recommended for beginners who are just starting out in online course videos, and even YouTube videos. Full scripting was the next task.

Key Learnings

• Winging it on camera just wasn't working as well as I had hoped. Trying to read naturally from a script was the next step. Scripts are a great way for beginners to get practice at being in front of the camera. It's just one less thing to have to think about.

Challenges Faced

• During the test screencast I noticed the Tonor condenser microphone is quite large in the frame but for the best audio quality it’s not good to have it too far away from my mouth but still needs to be close enough to get the best audio quality.

Next Steps:

• Complete the scripts.

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Thursday, July 4 2024

Completed

• Researched online video course scripting. It's recommended for newbies to script word-for-word in the beginning to get a feel for the process and develop confidence while speaking on camera. Already I can see this helps, the trick now will be to sound as natural as possible.
• Improved the scripting instructions for the Custom GPT to give an engaging and enthusiastic video script which has parts to it like hook, intro, body, conclusion, call to action and goodbye. Click here for the Lesson Script Framework & Instructions it's free for you to use and modify as you wish (note: these are instructions for the Custom GPT and added to the knowledge library but could also be used on their own)
• Came up with the idea to give weekly updates on the process here. The original idea was to have weekly YouTube updates, so this will have to be for the next course journey. For now I just want to focus all time and energy on getting this course live.

Key Learnings

• Scripting the videos is such a key part of the process, but also very time consuming 😰

⚡Scripting Tip: break the script into chunks, ie a paragraph at a time, and get that right on camera before moving on. Sure, it means a little extra time editing out the bad ones but at the end you'll have a string of really good takes you can use for the final edit.

Challenges Faced

• The Custom GPT was throwing out some weird responses so discovered that it may be due to the size of the document. Below are the GPT limitations for a document. Once I trimmed it down and reduced the wording the output was improved.

Next Steps

• Complete the scripts for all the sections and then re-shoot the lessons to see if it's improved.

ChatGPT Document Limits
The limit is 8,000 tokens per document. The number of words that equates to can vary, as tokens can be as short as one character or as long as one word, or even a combination of words and punctuation.
On average, 1 token is roughly 4 characters of English text. So, 8,000 tokens would be about 32,000 characters. Given that the average word in English is about 5 characters long, plus a space, this roughly translates to about 1.33 tokens per word.
Thus, 8,000 tokens typically equate to about 6,000 words. However, this can vary depending on the specific language and content of the document.

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Friday, July 5 2024

Completed

• Full day of scripting and finally have all the sections and lessons scripted out! 🥳 Hopefully one day I'll be good enough at this to not need a script, because wow, that would be a huge time saver. But doing this without ChatGPT would take 10x longer though, so am thankful to have an amazing tool to help with this.

Key Learnings

• Needing to check ChatGPT responses as it does make mistakes and skip lessons from time to time, so this scripting process is not automated and completely "hands off".

Challenges Faced

• All went smoothly on the work front. But feeling carpal tunnel /RSI coming back. Will have to start using my NSD powerball to work on tendons and muscles. I remember CBD oil works incredibly well but it’s pricey and I’m on a tight budget at the moment.

Next Steps

• Now that scripts are done Monday I start filming the screencasts, demos and live "talking head" videos. Wish me luck!

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If there is anything you'd like to see more of, or you have your own ideas comments or tips, I'd love to hear your thoughts! Use the comment section below to drop me a message.