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If you want to build a software business, there are a lot of advantages to the world of WordPress plugins.

To begin with, you have a built-in audience of committed users. That audience is massive — around a quarter of the planet’s websites use WordPress. And that number is growing every day.

But we all know that “Build it and they will come” is a myth — for software or any other business.

There are tens of thousands of plugins with just a few downloads, and a few successful standouts.

Here’s how to put your awesome plugin in the second category.

#1: Start with the user experience

User experience should drive your code, not vice versa

Successful plugins are built on a foundation of excellent user experience.

Chris Lema, the popular WordPress evangelist, sees an awful lot of popular plugins.

He had this to say in his article on The one thing many WordPress plugin developers seem to forget:

” … Most developers seemed to think about the user experience only after most of the development of their plugins was complete.” – Chris Lema

His recommendations include:

• Getting users involved early on — don’t try to design your plugin in a vacuum
• Measuring the number of clicks to complete each main task — keep tasks as simple as possible
• Designing the screens and experience before you write your code — experience should drive your code, not vice versa

Sometimes technical folks are tempted to start with the functionality first, then “figure out the user experience part” later. That’s a recipe for expensive mistakes and a less-than-awesome plugin.

#2: Design matters

Successful plugins leverage great design.

Starting with the user experience will get you a good way down this road, but if you aren’t a strongly visual person yourself, make sure you get one involved.

Even if your plugin works perfectly, it only makes it harder to get traction if it’s ugly and visually disorganized or cluttered.

It’s not about eye candy for its own sake — it’s about careful design thinking that reinforces your plugin’s functionality and makes it a pleasure to use.

#3: Serve a real need (or want)

Successful plugins address a real-world user problem or desire.

If you’re not building something WordPress publishers actually want, you’re going to have a tough time.

You may have a highly technical improvement that you’re sure all WordPress publishers should add to their sites. But if it’s solving a problem they don’t care about, you’ll never get any traction.

Get to know lots of WordPress users and you’ll quickly learn what they want from their sites. Great plugins usually make WordPress simpler or more powerful.

Some examples include:

• More easily customizing the look of the site
• Improving the site’s SEO
• Enhancing the audience experience with community-building elements
• Reducing spam
• Adding a complex and desirable feature, like a membership site

If your plugin is on the technical side, remember to translate the benefits for non-techie users.

A plugin that “improves origin caching” is great, but make sure you also translate that to: “Makes your site load a lot faster.”

#4: Have skills (or know where to get them)

Successful plugins have rock-solid code.

If you’re new to programming, working on plugins can be a fun and interesting way to get better.

But if you want to create a truly great plugin, you need to pay your dues and become an excellent coder. (And no, this does not happen overnight.)

If that isn’t you yet, you can shortcut this by partnering with an excellent coder. You might supply the vision, the marketing mind, and the business knowledge, and they bring their sweet dev skills.

Solid developers don’t just write great code, they also work within a defined process to make sure they’re releasing a quality product.

Beyond your standard programming best practices, I think the best thing to do is to test, test, and test. Keep up your code. Have development environments with commonly found themes and plugins. Test against different configurations. If it’s a commonly used theme (like Genesis), make sure it functions as expected and if not, see what needs to be done before releasing it.
~ Andrew Norcross, founder of Reaktiv Studios

#5: Carve out your position

Successful plugins stake out clear positioning in the WordPress marketplace.

Just like any other software product or service, your plugin needs to occupy a well-defined position in the market.

You need to be able to communicate in an instant:

• What your plugin does
• Who it’s for
• What specific and remarkable benefit it brings to sites

Keep the simplicity factor above in mind, if your plugin is intended to reach a broader audience than the most tech-savvy users.

#6: Consider working within an ecosystem

Successful plugins are part of a greater ecosystem.

Every WordPress plugin, of course, benefits from the overarching ecosystem of users and developers.

But in an era of so many plugins, many developers niche that down further, coding for a particular framework such as Genesis.

For example, one of Andrew Norcross’s most popular plugins is Genesis Design Palette Pro — that lets users change the look of their Genesis sites with just a click or two, without any coding.

You might think that working within a niche ecosystem would result in fewer users, but often the opposite is the case. You’ll stand out more easily, because you’re crafting more specific solutions to your users’ desires.

#7: Recognize the community

Successful plugin developers respect the WordPress community.

Along with the many benefits of the WordPress ecosystem, there are also community responsibilities.

Here’s how Andrew Norcross put it when I asked him about the importance of nurturing the relationship with the community:

“I firmly believe it means the difference between success and failure, overall. While you can easily make a living cranking out WP code in themes or plugins for clients or agencies, there’s a definite ceiling (in my opinion) with how far you can progress without being at least somewhat active in the community. More importantly, however, having a bad reputation can be a career killer. Many people put personal recommendations above all the marketing they see, and once someone develops a bad rep, it’s really hard to shake it. We’re beyond fortunate that at Reaktiv Studios, we have developed a solid reputation with our clients, in that many of our new leads are referrals from our previous clients.”
~ Andrew Norcross, founder of Reaktiv Studios

Would you like some help with that?

Digital Commerce Academy helps you build the business of your dreams by teaching you how to create and sell profitable digital services and goods (like plugins) without squandering time and money, stumbling to find the right path, or making unnecessary mistakes.

And you can join for free.

There’s nothing to be gained by waiting. Get started today.

SaaS (Software as a Service) is today’s digital commerce darling. Delivering your software on a subscription model provides recurring revenue. Your business gets more predictable cash flow, and your users reduce their sense of risk.

It’s easy to think that the most important success factor for SaaS is the technology.

But even folks who don’t primarily think of themselves as “technical” can build a strong SaaS business — if they have the business and marketing know-how to make it work.

Defining the problem set is 90% of the battle

One theme that you’ll find running through Digital Commerce Institute is this one:

The most important skill set you can develop as the owner of a
digital business is … business.

Being a brilliant writer, programmer, graphic designer, or even marketer isn’t enough. You have to become a damned smart businessperson.

Luckily for you (and me), those skills are 100% learnable by anyone. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is speaking from their own insecurity and lack of experience.

“Sorry to burst your bubble, but an idea you come up with is a terrible place to start a new business.” -Nathan Barry, founder of the ConvertKit app

And the most important business lesson of them all is: Build the product or service that your market wants.

Not “needs” (from your point of view). Not “should have.”

And most definitely not “I have this killer idea …”

If you don’t start with a SaaS idea that your market wants and will pay for on a recurring basis, none of your other skills can make your app successful.

First the who, then the what, then the why

So how do we come up with this idea?

If you already have an audience who follows you (on your Facebook page, blog, LinkedIn group, etc.), you have a giant advantage — take advantage of that. Observe and question that audience to find out what they want from your topic … and from you.

For most of us, the most important question to ask at this stage is, “Who do I serve?”

If you don’t have an audience yet, find someone else’s that you can serve. Look for a cohesive group with a shared set of interests, problems, and challenges to solve.

Again — these folks might be congregating around a Facebook page, a blog, a LinkedIn group, etc.

Business is really the art of finding a cohesive group of people and then serving those people in a meaningful way.

Observing their complaints, their wishes, and their frustrations will lead you to some ideas on What will solve their most annoying problems?

Take your time during this phase. You’re looking for as many opportunities to problem-solve as you can possibly find. This is the phase of product design that leads you to solutions that are:

• Focused on a specific market need
• Simpler to design and build, because you know the core functionality needed
• Highly marketable

The right way to approach “Why”

Once you know who you serve and what you can help with, you’re ready to craft a meaningful Why.

I’m not a fan of most of the “Why-centered” talk in business these days — because it focuses on “Why am I in business?”

To be brutally honest, your potential customers really don’t care. The question to answer instead is,

Why are you the best resource to help?

What is it about you and your business that uniquely qualifies you to solve this problem?

The answer may not come to you right away, but keep asking. Often, this question will lead you to tighten up your “Who” or your “What” (or both), until you have a problem you can serve like no one else can.

Effective execution is the other 90% of the battle

Like so many ways of making a living online, there’s a mythology out there about launching a successful SaaS app.

From the outside, it might look like a question of getting your 12-year-old nephew to program it, running a few Facebook ads, and figuring out how to count all the dollars that are raining down on you.

To paraphrase Christine Kane, There’s no such thing as business like that.

Building a useful, successful SaaS app is hard. You need to have a good appetite for problem-solving, for developing business skills, and for hanging on tight during those rollercoaster days.

A dedication to serve your audience, combined with a little intelligent stubbornness, goes a long way to helping you stick it out. If you’re not quite sure you’re ready for that at this point, you might go back to your Who and your What and consider some easier-to-implement solutions to their problems.

For example, an ebook or an online course are typically faster to design and build, and can be run successfully with a very small team.

And that challenge to build a brilliant SaaS app will still be there when you’re ready for it. (Even if the specifics will look quite different down the line.)

What to do if you aren’t the programmer

Can you build a successful app if you aren’t a programmer yourself?

Absolutely — because it’s the business aspects that are the most challenging, not the technical aspects.

Here’s what Laura Roeder, who founded the social media scheduling app Edgar had to say about it:

“A non-technical founder needs more than just a great idea — generally what they bring to the table is marketing/business acumen. I can’t program my way out of a paper bag, but I crafted the strategy to get us to the 4,000 small business owners we serve today. Without tech we would have no product, but without marketing we would have no customers.”
– Laura Roeder, Edgar founder

Nathan Barry talks about how he found a developer for his successful and well-regarded Saas app, ConvertKit:

“The next thing that I did was turn to my own audience, and if you have an audience, that’s the most amazing place ever to get employees of any kind. I put out a call to action, and I said, Hey, I’m looking to hire a developer for this project. If you’re interested, please get in touch.“

Because he wasn’t an expert in the language his app was being written in, Barry also brought in an advisor who could take a look at the actual code being written.

He also recommends going from one developer to two as quickly as you can, so you can create redundancy and resilience in your coding team.

“Software has a tendency to go down and have problems and bugs and things like that, and often those need to be fixed really quickly. If you’re relying on just one person, you’re going to be in trouble.”

The secret weapon of smart digital entrepreneurs

You might notice that Nathan went to his audience to find the coders for his app.

An audience is an incredibly powerful “secret weapon” for anyone looking to create or grow a business online.

The audience is the collection of people who are paying attention to your content. It’s normally made of a mix of customers, leads, prospects, other experts in your field, and the occasional heckler.

Whatever kind of digital business you might be building — an ebook empire, a series of digital courses, the next killer SaaS app, or some other model — you’ll want to get started building an audience.

Many business owners think of the audience as simply a group of prospects, but it can be much more. An engaged audience will:

• Spark new business ideas
• Let you test the marketability of your projects
• Help the word out about your business
• Connect you with valuable resources, like Nathan’s programmers
• Build your authority and reputation

Want to know more?

Obviously, there’s more to building a terrific SaaS app than we can cover in one blog post.

But we do have an in-depth case study for you inside Digital Commerce Institute. In it, Nathan Barry talks about the seven-step process he used to get ConvertKit designed and built.

He drills down into:

• How he developed ConvertKit on a tiny fraction of the usual budget
• Why starting with a killer idea is the worst place to start a new business
• The “idea extraction” process Nathan used to find a marketable idea for his app
• The hard-nosed, zero-BS way to validate your market idea
• The single factor Nathan chose to ignore when hiring his app developers
• Why you don’t need to be a designer to design a high-quality product
• The secret sauce in his marketing
• The counterintuitive move that increased his success by more than 10x

And you can get instant access to this case study simply by activating your free Digital Commerce Academy membership.

Click here to get started … and find out everything else you get with your free membership.

Once upon a time, there was a straightforward solution to “monetizing” your website when you got tired of trying to make AdSense work:

Write an ebook!

Having something of your own to offer, even a simple $7 ebook, virtually always beats trying to monetize your traffic with advertising.

And that’s still true. (In fact, sales of ebooks hit $9 billion in 2015.)

But as more and more people have taken that advice, we need to get a little more strategic to build strong businesses around ebooks.

It can still be done, and I’ll be talking about folks who are doing it. But you can also let ebooks become part of a bigger game, within a larger digital business strategy.

The straight ebooks-for-sale play

We all know that some fiction authors are making a killing selling digital-only books on Amazon.

In fact, a few of those authors are dear friends of ours.

But that’s not what we’ll be talking about today. The world of fiction is a fascinating one in its own right, but it’s not where we put our emphasis at Digital Commerce Institute.

The other type of ebook — the somewhat traditional “information product” designed to teach something valuable — is one we have a lot of experience with.

Two powerhouse ebook publishers

It’s getting trickier to build a business around ebooks alone, but if you look at Darren Rowse’s Digital Photography School, ebooks have long been a cornerstone of his site’s revenue model.

(DPS has also recently expanded to offer courses, which will be fascinating to watch from a business perspective. But for many years now, ebooks have been their heavy hitter.)

The DPS ebooks each focus on a topic the audience wants to know more about — with titles like Life in Natural Light and Captivating Color.

There are a few keys to the success of their library:

• The books are gorgeous. Darren’s team does an exceptional job with the design of their ebooks, creating digital equivalents of “coffee table books,” featuring, of course, lots of superb photography.
• The books are also ultra useful, walking the customer through a specific photography technique so she can get better results in her own work.
• And the ebooks offer impressive value at just $10 each. That’s a small transaction, but because there are lots of them, and because DPS enjoys a large and passionate audience, the revenue adds up.

Kelly’s more expensive book won the war because it was, quite simply, massively more useful than the cheaper guides.

And of course, the poster child for the ultra-successful ebook is Brett Kelly, author of Evernote Essentials.

Brett wrote the definitive guide to the popular app Evernote. Despite the fact that there were dozens of $1 and $2 guides available, his (at $29) won the war — because it was, quite simply, massively more useful than the cheaper guides.

Brett has done lots of projects since then. He even worked for Evernote for a while — the company loved his book so much, they brought him on, while allowing him to keep his lucrative ebook business.

Both Darren and Brett showcase three features that any successful ebook needs:

1. Great design
2. Incredible usefulness
3. Excellent value for the investment (of time or money)

The low-cost introductory product

With the explosive rise of Amazon’s Kindle, readers have become accustomed to paying just a few dollars for ebooks.

You can use the lower price point to your advantage by using ebooks as ultra low-risk entry points to your business.

(Note that isn’t always the case — Brett’s pricing, mentioned above, has survived because of that book’s excellent reputation and quality.)

If you’re trying to make your entire living with ebooks, a low price point can be tricky. But you can also use the lower price point to your advantage by using ebooks as ultra low-risk entry points to your business.

For example, on Big Brand System, Pamela Wilson uses low-cost ebook guides as launching points to an ongoing relationship with her business.

Titles like Business Name and Tagline Guide and Quick-Start Guide to Branding your Business showcase Pamela’s expertise and give potential clients a taste of how she can help grow their businesses.

Her library of low-cost ebooks creates a list of buyers for Pamela’s pricier offerings, including private coaching slots.

Why is that cool? Because a list of buyers (even if they’ve just picked up an inexpensive item) is always much more responsive than a simple interest list.

Buyers have already made a micro-commitment with your organization, which research has shown often leads to a greater willingness to take similar actions.

For many of your lower-priced buyers, going on to a more intensive offering will be a natural next step. And if you put the work in to make your low-cost ebook exceptional, there’s no better “ad” for how you will handle a larger project or product.

A list of buyers, of course, also weeds out the “looky-loos” who subscribe to lists but don’t read them or are only on the list to get free resources.

The thought leader

For a long time now, writing a book has been a way to open many more doors beyond the revenue you get from the book itself.

Josh Kaufman, author of The Personal MBA and The First 20 Hours, puts it this way:

“Writing a book still tends to have a positive effect on your reputation: if you invest the effort to write a good/useful book, you’ve spent more time thinking about the topic than other people, which makes you rare and valuable to people who are interested in the topic.”
– Josh Kaufman

Given enough time and exposure, an excellent ebook (or series of books) can provide both revenue and a doorway to greater things.

“When we launched Copy Hackers on Hacker News in 2011, we sold $20K worth of ebooks in a few days’ time. That money was everything to me then. It was a signal that our little ebook experiment could turn into a business, that there was a market for what we had, and that the market would pay us for what we knew. Without our ebooks, I would have had to find a job (ugh) at someone else’s business (ugh); with the ebooks, I could afford to try my hand at blogging.

“Years after our launch, our ebooks have become far less about generating revenue. Promoting them on sites like AppSumo and Freelancer has helped us grow our list. And getting them in the hands of makers and influencers has brought us consulting projects, interviews, and speaking engagements.”
– Joanna Wiebe, Copyhackers

The relationship builder

Many have written about using an ebook as an opt-in reward. In other words, you can use an ebook as an “ethical bribe” to get people to sign up for your email list.

And it works really well for that — but it’s smart to understand the deeper business reasoning.

Offering something valuable, like an ebook, is a reward for taking action. But it also needs to become the cornerstone of an ongoing business relationship.

As any competent sales professional can tell you, before they make a purchase, buyers need to:

• Know you,
• like you, and
• trust you.

An ebook that only gets the prospect to sign up for your email list isn’t living up to its potential.

Those “ethical bribes” need to entice the prospect to take action, and they also need to further the professional relationship to build the case for an eventual purchase.

By using ebooks as the cornerstone of a valuable free membership experience, we’re nurturing the relationship for more advanced products.

For example, over on the Copyblogger blog, we created a completely free membership site with an extensive library of free content marketing ebooks.

This took the traditional “trade an ebook for an email opt-in” to a completely new level (and increased our email sign-ups by about 400 percent).

Could we have offered them for sale and made a few dollars? Definitely.

But by using them as the cornerstone of a valuable free membership experience, we’re nurturing relationships for more advanced products like Digital Commerce Academy.

A rose is a rose is a rose

As you’re deciding the role an ebook might play in your business strategy, remember that you don’t actually have to call it an ebook.

In fact, ebooks in other guises can be powerful business-boosters.

So, a values-based, inspirational digital entrepreneur like Chris Guillebeau might (and did) call his ebook a manifesto.

If you offer B2B products or services, at least some of your ebooks will probably be white papers.

At Rainmaker Digital, we’re fans of the special report, but we also like other downloadables like checklists, worksheets, and infographics.

And one of my favorites to play with recently has been the workbook, with the pragmatic, hands-on associations that label brings.

The more flexible you are in how you think about and package your ebooks, the more powerful a tool they can become in your digital strategy.

Would you like some help with that?

Digital Commerce Academy helps you build the business of your dreams by teaching you how to create and sell profitable digital services and goods (like ebooks) without squandering time and money, stumbling to find the right path, or making unnecessary mistakes.

And you can join for free.

There’s nothing to be gained by waiting. Get started today.

Online courses are one of the most popular forms of web-based business today.

• They’re in-demand, which makes them easy to market
• They support premium pricing, so they can quickly become profitable
• They’re a smart way to leverage the time you put into product creation

Those are all great reasons that developing a digital course might be a smart idea for you and your business.

But if you start from there, you’re going to have a hard time.

The best online courses have their success “baked in”

Because, just like any business (online or off), your business needs to serve the needs of your audience and customers if it’s going to survive … and thrive.

The best online courses have their success “baked in.” Start with thoughtful preparation to craft the exact educational experience your audience wants to buy. And then, of course, deliver that experience.

You might be tempted to skip these planning steps. But if you do, your digital education business will take much longer to get traction.

Pave the road to a successful course with these five steps:

Step #1: Find your market of hungry learners

You may be familiar with the old marketing “riddle” that copywriter Gary Halbert liked to ask:

What’s the most important success factor for a restaurant?

No, it’s not the menu, the service, the quality of the chef, or even the location.

It’s a starving crowd that will show up to buy what’s being sold.

Finding that “starving crowd” will make everything about your business so much easier.

The same is true for all businesses. Your online course needs to find its “hungry learners” — the starving crowd — that will make it a success.

Too many digital business owners skip past this step because they think they have a killer idea. They jump right into developing a product before they really understand the market.

Sadly, that’s a recipe for expensive failure.

Some ways you can find your market of hungry learners include:

• Serving a market you already know well, because you’re a part of it
• Using your existing knowledge about an existing audience to uncover what they want to learn
• Partnering with a subject-matter expert (ideally one who already has a good-sized audience)
• Looking for a niche (paper) magazine — if there are enough enthusiasts to support a physical magazine, there will normally be a big enough audience for an online course
• Choosing an “evergreen” topic, such as fitness, nutrition, crafts, dating, beauty, finance, or any type of vocational training

What you’re looking for is an audience of potential learners that is:

1. Big enough to make for a commercially viable business
2. Interested in spending money on this topic (you can find out by observing which products or services are already being sold)

Step #2: Uncover your unique positioning with your audience

Once you’ve identified that “starving crowd,” it’s time to figure out how to position yourself with that crowd, so they choose your business instead of another option.

Positioning is a blend of art and craft.

You want to come up with a promise you can make to your audience. You’re looking for something that’s significantly different (or that feels different) from the promises made by your competitors.

If positioning is new to you, start by thinking about:

• The beneficial improvement you make to your customer’s life
• The unique approach or angle you use
• A memorable difference you can communicate
• The remarkable element of your business
• The timeless aspect to the promise you make

There are, as you can imagine, lots of ways to come to an effective, memorable position in your market. A few include:

• Putting timeless principles into a new context: When I created my first online course, I put proven marketing principles into a softer context that was fun and digestible for a somewhat marketing-phobic audience
• Leveraging experience of an industry insider (you or someone else): Publishing expert Michael Hyatt makes good use of this one, using his background as a high-level publishing executive to teach aspiring authors how to build a promotion platform
• Telling a better story: Enterprising folks have been setting up pet-sitting businesses for decades, but Josh Cary (one of our students) told a better story around professionalism and entrepreneurship, and created the successful Petsittingology course and live conference

Step #3: Build an effective learner profile

So: You’ve got a starving crowd, and you’ve identified a compelling promise you can make them.

Now it’s time to craft your plan to deliver that promise in a memorable and useful way.

Most marketers have heard of “buyer personas,” which are also sometimes called avatars.

The learner profile is a very similar exercise. But the focus shifts to who this person is as they come to your course.

It starts with empathy — putting yourself in the emotional shoes of your learner. You want to understand what they’re thinking, feeling, doing, and feeling as they approach your topic and move toward their goals.

You can get started by building an Empathy Map — this article walks you through how to do that.

Empathy Maps: A Complete Guide to Crawling Inside Your Customer’s Head (includes a downloadable blank map that you can fill in)

The Empathy Map exercise is interesting and enjoyable — and it’s also a potent tool for making any product or service more marketable.

An underused tool for uncovering the needs of your learners

Want to take advantage of a powerful but underused tool for finding out exactly what your potential customers want?

“You have two ears and one mouth. Listen twice as much as you talk.”
– DCI founder Brian Clark

It’s social media — too often used as a “megaphone” by businesses who want to shout about how great they are.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with getting into conversations with potential users — that can be a smart and rewarding business tactic.

But it’s also incredibly useful to just keep your (virtual) mouth shut and listen.

Keep an eye out for these “power questions”

• What (and who) are people complaining about in your topic?
• What’s frustrating them?
• What are they worried about?
• What are they dreaming of doing?
• How do they feel about what they’re doing now?

Social media conversations are free-form and unscripted — and that’s why they’re such a great way to get business ideas. Listen in to discover how people really feel about products and services in your niche.

To do this effectively, find the popular social gathering spots for your topic. These might be Facebook pages, LinkedIn groups, the comments on a popular blog, or any other spot where people can congregate and share their thoughts.

Then spend some quality time in those spots just listening, without jumping into the conversation. Watch for the “power questions” above, and capture them for your ongoing analysis and business thinking.

Step #4: Identify the benefits of knowledge

Wise marketers know about the difference between features and benefits.

Features are what your product or service does.
Benefits are what your customer gets out of it.

When you’re structuring your online course, the features are elements like:

• The curriculum — what’s in the course
• How the course is delivered
• Bonus elements, like Q&A calls or a member forum
• All of the course materials, including workbooks, tutorial videos, PDFs, etc.

And, of course, they all have to be there in order for you to have something to deliver.

But the benefits, and more specifically, the “benefits of knowledge,” are what your learners are going to gain by investing their time and money in this course.

• Positive: What will they be able to become, have, or do as a result of your course?
• Negative: What will they no longer have to deal with (expense, hassle, discomfort) when they’ve completed the course?

By the way, don’t assume that positive reasons are more effective.

In fact, the human brain has an innate bias for negativity — it’s often easier to capture our attention with the negatives we can avoid over the positive elements we might gain.

When you understand the meaningful benefits of knowledge that your course will deliver, you can structure the course so that it works better for learners — and you can market the course more effectively, so that more learners will be motivated to buy.

Step #5: Structure your course for success with learning objectives

Once you know what learners want to get out of your course, you can craft learning objectives that help them attain those benefits.

Instructional design expert Robert Mager pioneered the use of these explicitly stated objectives, as well as a three-step process for crafting them.

Each learning objective needs to be a manageable “chunk” that the learner can readily envision herself completing. Typically, each lesson will have a learning objective.

You’ll also have an overarching learning objective for the entire course.

(Tip: If you have a lesson that seems to require more than one learning objective, or a learning objective that feels overwhelmingly large, break it down into smaller objectives and more focused lessons.)

To craft a learning objective for each lesson:

# 1: Figure out the behavior

For each lesson in your course, you need to understand what real-world behavior your learner will be able to do at the end of the lesson.

What will she be able to do differently, that she doesn’t know how to do today?

# 2: Figure out the conditions

What conditions or context is this behavior going to take place in?

In other words, specific conditions like:

• At work or at home?
• In how much time? A day? An hour? A month?
• How much focus and dedication will this take? Will the learner need deep commitment, or can this be done in her spare time?

#3: Figure out the standard

How well will your learner be able to do this behavior when she’s mastered the lesson?

Will it be at a professional level? Elite level? Or is the course designed to learn a skill at an enjoyable hobbyist level?

How well should the learner be able to implement the behavior to say she has mastered your course material? That’s your standard.

The quick version

To get a jump-start on crafting your learning objectives, fill in the blanks for this statement:

After completing this course or topic, you will be able to [SPECIFIC, REAL-WORLD BEHAVIOR] in [DESCRIBE THE CONDITIONS OR CONTEXT] in order to [DESCRIBE THE STANDARD THE LEARNER WILL ACHIEVE].

This sample sentence will need to be massaged to make sense for your individual context, but it will get you started.

Would you like some help with that?

 

Build Your Online Training Business the Smarter Way, with Brian Clark

 
Rainmaker Digital’s founder and CEO, Brian Clark, has created a complete course for you on how to structure and build profitable online courses that your audience will want to buy.
 
What’s the learning objective for that course?

Build and operate an interactive learning environment in your spare time within four months of signing up for Digital Commerce Academy.

Brian dives deeply each of the five points here — and more — and that’s just Module Two.
 
In all, the course includes six modules — each one progressing step by step until you’ve built a profitable, marketable online course.
 

1. 5 Key Concepts for Information Entrepreneurs, so you understand what business owners need to succeed with online education
2. Designing your Course, to “bake in” the success factors that result in a highly marketable product
3. Business Models you can implement easily so that your course meets your financial and business goals
4. The Minimum Viable Product framework, which lets you efficiently test the market so you can get to a profitable product as quickly as possible
5. Developing Content for your course, so you don’t get bogged down in your product creation
6. Launch and Marketing your course — because as fun as building courses is, it’s a lot more fun when they’re making great revenue for you

 

 
You can probably figure most of this out with trial and error — but if you’re ready, this course is a useful short cut that lets you get right to the most important activities that will get your course built, launched, and filled with happy customers.

The best part? You can check out the initial lessons of the course for free.

Just start your free Digital Commerce Academy membership today.