How to Turn Your Blog Content Into an Online Course

Ready to turn your blog content into an online course?

If you've been creating content for your blog, you've likely wondered how hard it would be to convert blog posts into course content. After all, everyone out there is creating courses, why can't you.

Today I'm going to show you how I suggest you make this happen.

It's not nearly as hard as you may think, but there is a strategy that can help you.

Let's start with the topic and the outline

Your blog may have a lot of different content on it. That's fine. The first thing you need to do is pick a topic that you have enough content to pull from.

In this case, even though I have a lot of content about WordPress on this site, I also have a lot about communication and public speaking.

So let's say I wanted to create a little course on public speaking. But my challenge to you is to always be more specific. Don't build generic courses. You'll compete with a ton more people.

So taking my own medicine, I'm going to focus on the Delivery of a Keynote. That's more focused, which makes the next part easier.

The Outline.

When I work on an outline, my structure is normally:

1. Goal – What does the customer want (after they master what you're teaching)
2. Strategy – How are they trying to get there (tools, tactics, approach)
3. Pain / Struggle – What's holding them back
4. Solution – What they need to succeed

Want to see me explain it better than that quick outline? I call it the Bridge Framework and you can see me explain it in this quick video.

So back to my Delivery of a Keynote, I would likely do something like this:

• Goal – high engagement
• Strategy – stories (don't get into the main point too quickly)
• Pain – slides, images, vocals, time management and endings
• Solution – pulling everything together

Review your blog content

Let's look for a post I might have on engagement.

• Here's one on improving audience engagement.
• I have another one focused on being performers not professors.

Now let's look at what I have on stories.

• I have this post on your first five minutes, telling stories.
• I have this other one on telling better stories.

Now I need posts that dig into all the areas where people struggle.

• Here's one on slides.
• Here's another on imagery (on those slides).
• Here's one on how to use my voice.
• And another on peaks and endings.

Each of these posts have both pain and how to solve it. So I would pull the pain from each and then use the solutions in my last part – where I pull together all the solutions.

The final step to convert blog posts into course content

I know I'm making sound like all you need to do is assemble your posts. But there's one last part when you want to turn your blog content into an online course.

It's editing.

The difference when you write a blog post is that it's a contained unit. When you're creating a course, each lesson may be contained, but it needs to connect to the next (or the previous lesson).

So you need to go through all the content and clean it up. Be ruthless. Remove anything that doesn't help someone move forward.

In the end, and this is just my opinion, no one wants a 5 hour course if you could get them the material in 60 minutes. Focus on ruthless editing so that you can get give people what they want without wasting their time.

Wait…how do I create the actual course?

The answer to this last part is pretty simple. You already have a blog, likely on WordPress. So all you have to do is add a plugin for courses. There's several out there (and I'll do a comparison soon). But the two most popular ones out there are LearnDash & LifterLMS, and you can't go wrong with either of them. I'll add another just because I can't help myself, and that's AccessAlly. Any of these three will get your course launched in no time!