Now that your why is out of the way, you can think about your actual course topic. To brainstorm your topic, we'll walk through 3 things:

• What you know
• What you love
• What people need from you

I'm going to break down each of these 3 things. If it's helpful, you can pause the video as often as you like to work through each aspect on your own.

Psst! If you already have a course topic in mind, this video might give you more ideas, or help you think about something you missed! Let's talk about what you know—What are you an expert on?

If you are an educator or trainer and already do in-person trainings or speaking gigs, you're primed to create a course. Which talks or trainings are the most popular? Which ones get the best attendance? Which ones spark the most conversation? Which ones do you find that people are willing to pay for? Chances are you can take a little slice of your training series and break it down into a course.

For example, if you host yoga retreats, you could turn the curriculum of a retreat into an online course, and sell it at a lower price to people who can't travel. You won't be limited by your time or the capacity of the training venue. Anyone can enroll at any time.

Let's look at another scenario. Maybe you run a service business as a consultant or freelancer. If you provide the same services to different clients over and over again, you can translate that to a course.

• Are you unable to meet demand from your clients for certain services?
• Are there systems or processes that your clients find incredibly useful?
• Is there a certain aspect of your work you don't want to do anymore? That you could cover in an online course?

For example, my friend Leslie is a marketer. She couldn't meet the demand from her clients. Luckily, she also found the work was formulaic. She created an online course to sell to clients she couldn't take on. If you already create content on a blog, podcast, or social media account, it's easy to mine your content for ideas.

Which pieces of content get the most traffic?

• If you have a blog, look at your analytics. It's likely others view you as an expert on the posts or podcasts with the most traffic and engagement.
• If you have a social media following, have you noticed that certain posts got you a lot of engagement? What kinds of questions do people ask you in the comments?

The questions people ask can tell you what they see as your area of expertise, and the most popular content is what they are the most interested in learning from you. On my blog, the most popular posts are about renovating an RV that I lived in on the road before working at Teachable. Maybe I should teach people about that!

Or maybe you're starting from absolute zero. You don't have any content, you're not an educator or trainer, and you don't run a service business—that is 100% okay.

The simplest place to start is with your professional expertise. What jobs have you had?

Can you share any insider knowledge from your work life that will help people who aren't on the inside? Or help people get a job like yours? If you're a marketer, you could teach everything from marketing tactics to how to get hired in marketing.

Next, what are your hobbies? Have you become an amateur expert at something, like playing guitar, or finger painting? Have you gamed the system on earning rewards with credit card points? Chances are, you're good at a lot of things, and an expert on a lot more topics than you realized.

One way to narrow it down is to think more about what you really love doing. Maybe you're an expert in accounting software...but you don't want to talk about your work outside of the office. What are the things you do even if you're not being paid? You're going to spend a lot of time on your course business, at least upfront, and if you want to make it a success, you should love it enough to stay motivated.

Finally, look outside your own skills and wants: What do people need from you? How do you help other people? What are the things that your friends and family ask you to do? What advice do they ask you for over and over again? Do your neighbors as you to make the dessert at every holiday meal, because yours is so good? Do they ask you to edit their writing? Help with their taxes? How can you help your students?

At this point, you probably have a lot of words written down. But don't worry about that at this stage. This is your chance to see every possibility on the table and get a sense of just how much you're capable of doing :)