If you want to create a course with WordPress that sells out, you need to create a flagship online course that’s unique and surpasses all others like it.

A flagship online course is a signature course for the person that created it. Its content is masterfully and thoughtfully put together so it blows all other competing courses out of the water.

WordPress is a free platform to build striking and professional websites and it’s the preferred software for 29% of the world wide web. It can also be used to create your own flagship online course.

Today, I’ll share how you can come up with a winning idea for your own flagship online course in any industry that outsells all your competitors as well as different options to create one with WordPress.

Why Create a Flagship Online Course?

When it comes to creating online courses, it’s important to create at least one flagship course that represents you because they’re signature courses. They’re unique to you and are designed based on your specific expertise and personal touch.

The idea behind flagship online courses is that they include your personal touch from the idea to the execution. That also means that no one else is going to have a course quite like yours which ultimately gives you an advantage when it comes to marketing and selling the course.

Because it’s a course that’s unique to you, it means you have the exclusive rights to it. You can sell it and market it however you choose.
It’s your specific level of expertise that brings both a unique and fresh perspective. This is the secret to a successful flagship online course.

The idea is to not regurgitate general information that’s already widely available online. It’s about adding your own unique spin to the topic you choose that can better teach and serve your students.

That’s a key reason why people would choose your course over a competing one. It’s your take on the subject, your expertise and teaching style that will convince them to enroll and this is a key point you’re going to need to communicate later on when you’re ready for marketing.

No matter what topic you want to create your course around, you can do it. If you have expertise in your industry, you can create an online course.

If you’re not well-known in your field, that’s not a problem. Your signature course can help you get recognition. That’s where marketing comes in after you have created your online course.

You can use your signature course to launch your career or expand your business.

For details, check out How to Scale Up Your Business with Online Courses.

You also don’t necessarily have to come up with an original idea as long as the way you present your course is original.

Let’s dive in and take a closer look at how to create your own flagship online course.

The Anatomy of a Flagship Online Course

When it comes to creating a successful flagship online course, it’s crucial to understand a couple of key ideas:

• Any course needs to solve a problem or a pain point.
• You need to figure out what people need and what they’re willing to pay for, but that you can also provide.
• You need to offer a transformation, not a quick solution, answer or general information.

It may sound like a mouthful and difficult to solve, but with some research, you can find out. This also means you’ll be left with a perfect topic for your signature course.

For details, check out How to Scale Up Your Business with Online Courses.

The idea of offering a transformation can be tricky to understand. What this means in the world of courses is that you need to be able to provide something tangible or quantifiable to your students by the end of the course.

Your students need to be able to measure their success and clearly see proof of the results they wanted to get from taking your course.

This is a crucial aspect of any course because otherwise, users won’t be able to tell that your course helped them out as expected and advertised.

This is especially the case because learning a fact is different than understanding it.

Remember the last time you learned something and it felt like it went in one ear and out through the other? It’s different than those “Eureka!” moments where a light bulb goes off in your head, you finally understand something completely and it all finally makes sense.

The latter is what you want for your students. You want your course to be able to provide your students with profound moments of understanding that bridges the gap between information and knowledge.

You can offer this to your users with tangible and measurable results. This comes from giving them practical advice and exercises that they can try immediately to see results. It also helps them better absorb what they’re learning.

Offering interactive elements like these and other strategies helps build student understanding and engagement.

Helping students be more active with answering questions on the fly or being able to conveniently form an online study group to discuss and ask questions helps a lot as well.

In fact, a study done by MIT shows that online courses are more effective with interactive elements such as online study groups:

“[T]hose who were least prepared, as shown by their scores on pretests, ‘learn as well as everybody else.’ That is, the amount of improvement seen ‘is no different for skillful people in the class’—including experienced physics teachers—’or students who were badly prepared. They all showed the same level of increase,’ the study found.”

Students who took online courses were also more successful than compared to a traditional lecture setting when they were able to interact with online study groups at their convenience.

The Secret to a Best-Selling Flagship Course

There’s an especially critical aspect of a successful signature online course and as touched upon earlier, it’s to present and craft the course in your own personal and unique way.

It’s paramount that you design your course as a step system with your specific skills and expertise.

This is your personal and exclusive way to solve the pain point you decided to teach and offer a transformation for in your course. You accomplish this by creating an original step-by-step system and this is the bread and butter of a best-selling flagship online course.

It’s not about presenting the basic steps to complete something. It’s about teaching the unique way you discovered that only you know to get a desired outcome and you present it in original steps.

I’m going to go meta here and offer this example: you want to create an online course that aims to teach students how to create their own online course. Many people would teach the basic steps such as creating a WordPress site, setting up the course, then selling it

Instead, you offer your own unique approach. You would also design each step of the course based on your unique expertise and discoveries such as using WordPress to link it to software you developed to create better online courses, then teaching students how to use your software.

Alternatively, you could teach about a method you stumbled upon that sells more courses than any other method out there.

So instead of compiling the information that’s already out there on your industry, decide on how you can offer your own twist on an old topic.

Going the Distance

To create an online course that’s more successful and that engages your students all the more, consider infusing gamification into it.

Gamification is applying the engaging elements of games into other mediums such as online courses to enhance learning.

Since games bring a sense of accomplishment when levels and points are gained, adding similar elements to courses like awarding badges, certificates and even levels can help motivate and engage students while also helping them to learn more.

For details, check out How Gamification Boosts Online Course Engagement and Delights Learners.

Wrapping Up

Formulating and researching a winning idea for your own signature course takes time, but it’s so worth it. When you do, it’s a whole lot easier to create a best-selling flagship online course that sells out.

With these tips, you’re well on your way to making it happen.

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Have you decided to create your own flagship online course? What is the turning point when you made the decision? What pitfalls and problems have you come across or are concerned about? Share your insights in the comments below so we can offer our expert advice.