Alright, welcome to this lesson, which is all about finding the one. And you might have been on previous training or had previous instruction that talks about finding your ICA, or ideal customer avatar, or pen portraits or understanding your target audience, and so on and so forth.

And what I’m going to say to you is that it is much better for you, when creating an online course to imagine just one person when you are creating that course, as the person you are creating it for. And this might sound really obvious to you, in which case, great, but if it isn’t, there are some reasons why this is important.

It absolutely makes the process of marketing and selling your course much easier if you only have one person in mind when you’re creating it, because it’s much easier to think about that person as having a finite number of questions, thoughts, opinions, ideas, ways in which they will best learn.

If you’re trying to create something that is appealing to too many different people, you’re going to end up cramming your course with lots of information, trying to cover all the different what ifs those people might come up with. So it just makes your life so much easier and definitely from a marketing and selling point of view, if you’re just imagining one person.

And really you want that person preferably to be known to you. So if you’re a trainer, and you are about to create an online course, on a subject that you have trained, then think about the people that you’ve trained and pick out a person that you have trained, that was a really engaged learner with you.

And just sort of think about the sorts of questions that they asked and how they approach the material, that kind of thing. Or it could be a friend, it could be a colleague, it could be anybody. If you’re not a trainer, that’s fine. You might still have had conversations with people, you might have been at a dinner party with somebody who was really interested, or a networking event with somebody who was asking you lots of questions about your subject matter.

Picture that person. It needs to be somebody that you can imagine having a conversation with and saying, Hey, I’ve got an online course about that, would you like to take a look at it? Not even would you like to buy it just would you like to take a look at it.

And if you can imagine who that one person is, then what you can do from there is think about what questions are they going to be asking what language do they use when they’re talking about your subject matter? What are the big obstacles they think are in their way.

So challenges, otherwise known as pain points, the big things, the challenges, the obstacles, the things that are standing in their way of achieving what they want, which is either to know more or to have a particular skill, or to be able to do something. So what they want to have what they want to do, what do they want to be.

And finally, it makes it much easier for you to understand the outcome they’re looking for. What would feel like success for them, because that then can translate into the outcome of your online course.

Hello, We interrupt this program to bring you editing Ginette, you can tell because it’s less makeup, more glasses. I was just editing this particular video and realized that I had left out one pretty significant reason for you to want to picture just one person whilst you are putting together your online course. And that’s when it comes to the recording.

So if you are already used to doing lots of recording of particularly pre-recorded videos, but even if you’ve got lots of experience talking on Zoom or on camera in a live situation, this probably won’t apply to you quite as much. But if you are very new to recording yourself, and particularly for pre-recorded videos, then one of the things that you will come across is a really weird phenomenon where your inner voice, your inner gremlin, your inner mind monkey will start telling you that being you on camera isn’t good enough.

And it will start to tell you that you need to behave in a certain way or you need to do things in a certain way, you need to speak in a certain way you need to have certain gestures, certain mannerisms, you need to look a certain way that might be different to how you would normally look. And this is a really weird thing and until you get there, you won’t understand it.

But, if you are just picturing one person that is known to you and you know them, they know you, then you are much more likely to not try and be somebody else on camera. You’re much more likely to just be yourself on camera. And trust me when I say that is the most important thing for getting across authenticity.

Getting across this connection that you want to have with your learners, in order for them to feel really comfortable learning from you. Alright, that’s it. We’ll go back to our regular programming. Thank you! Okay, so that was your fast track lesson in the what and the why for finding the one, the person that you’re creating for. If you’re going to stick around for the second video, which shows you how to do that, I’ll see you there. If not, I will see you in the next lesson.

Okay, so here we are at the How To video for finding the one. And we’ve talked about the importance of you being able to, if at all possible picture that one person that is preferably known to you.
And what I’m going to talk about now is what you need to do with that picture of that person, your understanding of that person. And what I’d like you to do is to get either a piece of paper, or open a document or open up a note on your phone, however you prefer to take a note of various things.
And I want you to start a new file, or a new piece of paper, whatever it might be, just purely about the things you know about this person, when it comes to your particular subject matter. And you’re going to be adding to this information.
So I want you to start off by thinking about, okay, this one person, when it comes to your subject matter, what is it that they already know? So you want to make a note of their existing knowledge. As far as you know, of course, as it pertains to your specific subject matter.
So it would be easy if there are particular levels that people can reach. In terms of academia, of course, people understand sort of postgraduate degrees, and all those different types of levels of education. And there might be levels that are naturally contained, or that are within your particular subject matter that everybody knows about and understands.
And therefore you can say this person is likely to be at this level or that level. So it could be a diploma level or something like that. If there aren’t accepted levels contained within your subject matter, that’s absolutely fine.
But what you want to try and do is just have an understanding of okay, are they likely to have a rudimentary understanding of your subject matter? Are they likely to have been able to complete a couple of tasks, specific things, that kind of thing, whatever you need to write down to give you a really good understanding of their starting point, because their starting point is really important for you to know so that you don’t end up including a load of information in your online course that they just don’t need.
So what do they already know? What’s their existing level of knowledge? And then based on where they are at the moment, and given what you are likely to be talking about, in terms of your subject matter what sort of questions are they likely to ask?
You might have already been in a position where you’ve had people ask questions about your subject matter, in which case, great, those are going to be really helpful. But even if you aren’t, you want to be thinking about okay, what questions are they likely to have? In order to help them understand your subject matter better?
Okay, so what questions are they likely to have? And then thinking about those questions and thinking about the things that they ask, also, you want to separately make a particular note of the language and or the terminology that they are going to be using. And this is really, really important, so language, and, or terminology.
And part of the reason for this is so that you can ensure that you are speaking to them in a language that they will understand, that they don’t have to think too hard about in order to interpret what you’re saying.
So for example, I work a lot with trainers with corporate trainers, people that go into businesses and train the employees in that business. And we talk about ourselves as trainers, it’s certainly something that I used to do as well.
So we understand what we mean by trainers. But of course, if we were in a room of physical trainers, personal trainers, fitness people, then using the word trainers might be something that gets a bit confusing.
So we would need to understand what additional terminology to use to distinguish ourselves from being professional business trainers, as opposed to professional personal trainers or physical trainers, personal instructors, that kind of thing.
And then again, there’s a difference as well between being a trainer, a tutor and a teacher, but somebody who is perhaps quite new to the environment might not necessarily get the nuances between those and might use those terms interchangeably.
Now, if they were trying to speak with authority to a group of trainers and referring to them as tutors, it would sound okay, we would understand what was being said. It would just be that little bit off.
So remember when I have talked about toast and the process of making toast. And if somebody said, Oh, how do I ‘cook’ toast, you kind of understand what they’re saying, but it just sounds a little bit off, right. So that’s why it’s important to understand what language and terminology is being used by your ideal learner, you’re one person that you’re picturing.
Or if you do have happen to have been in a situation where you’ve been talking with a lot of your target audience, for your online course for your subject matter, then think back to conversations you’ve had with them and the terminology that has been used, really important to make note of that one.

All right, the next one is equally as important because this is going to come to the crux of what you might be putting in your online course. And that is to understand something that is commonly referred to as pain points.
But that can be seen as a bit of a marketing jargony type term. And I use it a lot, I’m not going to say that it’s something that I don’t like using, but some of you might find it easier to think about pain points in terms of the perceived barriers or obstacles that your target audience has. And these are, in particular, “ob tacles?” obstacles that your target audience has, that is getting in the way of them being able to learn more about your particular subject matter.
Okay, so what do they think is standing in the way? Why aren’t they able to have learnt as much as you have, for example, what’s stopping them what’s holding them back?
This doesn’t have to be something real, that might be holding them back, it could be something that is perceived. And most often, the sorts of things that we’re going to be tackling with our online courses are tackling those perceived obstacles or perceived barriers, because we know being the expert how easy it is to break through those, or how certainly, it is possible to get around, over, under, through, bash ’em out the way, all of those barriers that might be in the way.
So start making a note of those as well. Okay, the next thing I want you to think about, and again, don’t panic, if you don’t have the answer to all these questions at the moment, this is just a sort of an outline for you to start writing down so that you can add to it as we go through further information.
And certainly in the next lesson, I’ll give you more information about how to go about doing that. But you want a section that talks about by the time they’ve taken your online course, what will they be able to know? And or show? So know and show. And this is what level of knowledge will they have?
So it might link back to their existing knowledge that what level of existing knowledge they’ve got, particularly if there are common steps and accepted steps that go with your subject matter? Are you taking them from level one to level two, for example. So by the time they finish their course, they will know what it takes to be at whatever level two is of that knowledge? Or what will they be able to show? What will they be able to do? What skill will they now have, that they will be able to take forward and show? So you might have both know and show, you might just have one of them?
That’s absolutely fine. But this is thinking about, Okay, what’s the outcome for the person who’s taking your online course? What are they going to be able to either know, and or show. And then last but not least on this particular list, and again, this might not apply to everybody.
But is there a particular status that they will be able to have or to talk about after taking your online course. And this is particularly important for those of you that are thinking about offering accredited courses. So perhaps you are in some way connected to the organising body that is connected to your subject matter. And you’re looking at getting accreditation for your online courses and after people have taken your course, they will be able to call themselves a whatever diploma or a graduate or or whatever it might be.
Okay, so is there a particular status that they will have? If there isn’t a status, don’t worry about it is absolutely not essential. But just in case there is it’s important to mention that one.
Alright, so this is the start of finding out all the information that you need to know about your ideal audience. Obviously, if you can picture that one person and you can answer all of these questions from that one person’s point of view, then that’s absolutely fantastic.
But remember, the most important thing is to think about it from the point of view of your learner, rather than thinking about it from the point of view of what you think they need to know. Okay, I’ll see you in the next video.