To validate your online course idea, we'll follow Jeff Cobb's framework of searching, listening, asking, and testing.

Pssst. If you haven't used the searching, listening, and asking techniques, go do that before continuing here!

You can learn so much from searching, listening, and asking. But to really assess your audience's interest in your course topic, you need to test them. The idea is to put an offer in front of your audience and see if they bite. If they do, it's a good indicator there's an audience for your course.

The easiest and best way to get started is to create a free piece of content—like an ebook, whitepaper, mini course, etc.—and see if your potential students opt in. This free content is called lead magnet. And how exactly does offering a lead magnet test your audience? It allows you to see if they are willing to give you something in exchange for your expertise. In this case it's just their email address. If they'll give you that, it's more likely they'll also give you something else—their hard-earned money—in exchange for you online course.

You can also use lead magnets to test course topics. To use a lead magnet to decide between two course topics, create two lead magnets, each aligned with one of your ideas. Make them both available and see which one is more popular with your audience. For example, maybe I'm not sure if my audience cares more about renovating RVs or batch cooking. I could create two lead magnets:

• The Ultimate Checklist for Buying a Used Camper every Renovator Needs
• The Definitive List of Kitchen Equipment every Batch Cooker Needs

If one garners more interest, maybe I should make a course on that topic. The other benefit of a lead magnet? It builds an email list of people you already know are interested in your course topic.

All of that said, this kind of testing is NOT something you need to complete before you're farther along in your journey as a course creator. For now, you don't need to do anything. All you need to know is that you shouldn't jump from having an idea to create your full course.

In the Teachable course Build Your Audience, you can learn exactly how to use a mini course as a lead magnet to test your topic and start growing your business.