Course Creation HQ: Notion for Course Creators

1. Introduction: Creating an online course can be such a huge juggling act. All the way from the brainstorming stage to researching, to scripting, filming and launching, and everything in between. It really requires a lot of organization and planning to get to the finish line. In fact, I think the key to a successful course launch is made much more possible with an organized and streamlined system in place. And the system that I've been using to organize all of my courses in the last couple of years is a system that I built on notion or what I like to call the course creation HQ. Hello, Hello, I am Cheryl here and I run a brand and website design business and a Youtube channel called Made on Sundays. I'm also a top teacher here on skill share and I create resources and courses for creative entrepreneurs and freelancers, helping them find more clarity and confidence so that they can build ambitious businesses with more calm. As an entrepreneur myself, with many parts in sides to my business, the only way I've been able to keep things organized and productive is by creating a custom productivity system on Notion. Notion is an all in one platform that helps me centralize everything I need to do in one place. It's like a note taking app, a Google Doc, an Excel sheet, a calendar, and a task manager, and all of those main building blocks you need to build an all in one hub. Not only have I been using Notion to boost my productivity in all things life and business, I've also been loving specifically using it for course creation. And I want to show you how you can as well. In this class you're going to be learning how to use Notion to create your very own custom course creation headquarters. This will include a space for accessing all of your courses in one place. As well as a course hub template that will help you plan out all the different phases of course creation, such as ideas and planning, course content marketing and launching. And finally, course tracking, helping you stay productive and organize throughout the whole process. And also giving you a really great base system that allows you to customize it and add to it during your whole course creation journey. So if you're ready to plan and organize your course on Notion with me, I'll see you on the other side. 2. Class Project: In this lesson, let's go over your class project. Throughout this class, you'll be learning how to create your course hub on notion. As we go through the lessons, you're going to learn how to add to the different sections and customize it for your own business. For the class project, I'd love for you to share your completed course Hub with us. Take a screenshot of it or share us the link to the Notion Hub And share it with us in the class project section. Keep it as simple as you like or decorate it as much as your heart desires. I cannot wait to see your completed work. 3. Basics of Notion: This lesson, let's get started with the basics of notion, all right? I am just opening up this notion pricing page for everything you need to do with planning course creation by yourself. On notion, you just need the free account. If you don't have a notion account yet, you can go ahead and my referral link will be in the course resources document if you want to use my referral link. If not, you can also just head onto the Notion website and get started with the free account. Once you've signed up, You can actually use Notion in two different ways. You can use the browser version or you can use the app version, which I personally prefer. I would also recommend just downloading the free app for Windows or for Mac and you can use it as the app version instead. All right, so once you have your notion account set up and downloaded again, I'm going to be using the app version for this entire class. If it looks slightly different than what you're seeing on the browser, that's probably why. But generally speaking, it's pretty similar. The first thing you're going to see is probably this little navigation on the left hand side. And then we have your like a blank page that they start you off with. Now just so you know, if this is not your first time using notion, you can probably skip ahead. But basically what I'm going to do in this lesson is we're going to go through just some of the basics of what you can do and how you can navigate on notion. And we're going to be creating a home dashboard together. I think that for any notion, if you're going to be using it to organize even your life or your business, it's best to start off with a home dashboard where you can access all different parts of whether it's your life or your business, or everything together. Personally, I organize all of my life and business stuff on one home dashboard. So we're going to be setting up that space here in this lesson. All right. First things first is on the left hand side you're going to see this huge like navigation bar. You can favorite certain pages so that you can see your top pages that you access all the time. You have your shared pages, which are ones that you've shared with other people. Then you also have your private pages, which is the pages that you've created for yourself. Right now. I've just created a new private page and you can do so as well. And we're going to be creating our notion home dashboard with the app you are able to hide the sidebars. I'm going to do that right now. And you can call this anything you like. We can call it home or just home Dashboard, whatever you'd like to call it. I always like to start off with an empty page again. Now remember this Home dashboard can be completely customizable to how you like to organize your life in business. I'm sure everybody's home dashboard looks a little bit different. So I always like to start off my home dashboard with a little word of the year or intention of the year, word of the year. And this is just a little reminder of what my word of the year is and how I should move about my life in business on notion. With that word of the year in mind, my word of the year is flow this year. I'm going to put that there. We can do all of the aesthetic stuff in a little bit, but we're just going to put what we can here for now. Then I actually like to add a little space here that describes my word of the year. If you click on this little plus button here, you're going to see a ton of things that you can add. These are little blocks, basic blocks as you can see, that you can add onto your notion space. Let's just go through it really quickly. What you have already seen is text, just plain text. You can add a page. This is a page itself. But you can add a page on top of a page. You can add checklist. You can add a heading. The text will be bigger, a table, which is what this looks like. You can add, let's say bulleted list and numbered lists. A toggle list is one of my favorites. Basically, you can type something in here and basically toggle out more information. If you want to hide this information, you can toggle it back in. These are one of my favorite blocks to add. Then you can also add a quote which basically just adds a little line there. You can also add a divider which adds a little line there, and so on and so forth. You can definitely add a lot more detailed things as well in complicated things like images and videos and. Databases, which we will go on to explore a little bit later in the class. But there are a ton of things that you can add for now. I'm just going to delete all of this right here. We are going to add, I think maybe a call out. I like these call outs because it adds a little bubble like shaded section here and then a little icon that you can add. This section is where I would usually do a little explainer of my word of the year. I don't know, it could be anything. This is a space to describe my word of the year, like how it applies to me. All right, We have this beginning section here. Now we want to make sure that this space is going to help us organize all of the different pages that we may create in the future for organizing our life and business. What I like to do is categorize them into little sections. For me, again, your sections can be different, but I like to separate them by an action dashboard, goals and progress and review. Then I also like a content creation section. Again, I like to organize my notion home dashboard with life and business together. Some people might like to separate them. But because my life and my business is so intertwined, it just makes sense for me. We have fun and exercise, learning and growth. Any courses that I'm taking or books I'm reading and then made on Sundays. Workspace, this is like, yeah, definitely like more work at min stuff. These are the different sections that I want to create here because there's six of them. I want to grid them out into like rows of three. What I'm going to do is I'm actually going to go to this little three dots here at the top. There's a ton of aesthetic things that you can do to make your page look a little bit different. First off, you can change out the fonts if you want. You can do this little mono font. You can make the text smaller so you can fit more in it. Or you can make it full width, which is what I want to do. We're going to make this full width, there's a little bit more space. What I'm going to do is I am going to actually make these all, oops, I'm going to make these all like a bigger font. If you click on the little six dots here, you can change this block to something else. I'm going to change it to a heading two, and I'm going to do the same for all of them so that the text is a little bit more big and bolded. Because these are going to be heading sections of my home dashboard. Then now I'm going to actually move them into that they stack together. I'm going to make sure that this is stacking on the right hand side, right here. As you can see. I'm going to drag and drop the six dots into these sections so that now we have the first row and then I'm going to make the second row. Now you can see that there's like this highlighted section, so just make sure it is over on the right hand side. Now we have these different sections. In fact, I feel like to make them more like heading headings. I'm going to color them. I'm going to click on the six dots again. I'm going to go to Color and I'm going to color them into whatever color you'd like. Now we have six really great sections that I think are solid. What we're going to do is we're now going to be able to add pages under each of these sections. For example, if you want to add a page into our Actions dashboard, you can go ahead and click on the plus and add a page. This right here, let's just say this is our agenda now. If you go back right at the very top here, you can see your navigation. So you can go back to the home dashboard. Now as you can see, this next line is your agenda. But there's a bit of a issue here because you can see if I highlight this, it goes all the way through. But I just want to under action dashboard, move this, make sure it's you see this blue line right here. If I do this, it's going to go through the whole space. But if I go right under Action Dashboard, it's going to just show under the Action dashboard. I'm going to do the same here. I'm going to add a page here. Let's see, there we go. And the most important page that we're going to be creating during this class is the course creation HQ. That is what our course is about. So I'm going to make sure I create that page right now. And I'm going to put it under Made on Sundays, Bork space. I'm going to click into this page, and now I'm going to call this creation. There we go. Now we have our home dashboard all set up. If you want to make this prettier, go ahead and do that. If you see at the very top here, you can add an icon to the section. For example, if you want a little home, you can do that. You can add a cover here. You can upload your own cover or just pick one of the ones that is available here. You just look up dais, let's say this one, that's a cute photo. Yeah, spice it up, however you like. You can also add icons to the different pages, but essentially now you have a home space where you can add different pages to the different sections. It's an easy navigation space where you can enter the different organized spaces that you need to organize in your life and business. All right, in the next lesson we are going to be setting up our course creation HQ space. 4. Setting Up Your Course Creation HQ: All right, in this lesson we are going to be setting up your course Creation HQ. In the last lesson, in case you skipped it because you already know how to use notion, we created a home dashboard together. If you already have a home dashboard yourself, all you need to do at this point is to create a page specific to course creation right here under my mate on Sunday's workspace. This is where I created this course creation HQ page. We're going to go into here, and now we're going to be setting up the space. Now the course creation HQ space is going to be your headquarters or your main hub for all of the different courses that you'll ever make. This is mostly for people who are creating multiple courses. I feel like if you've created one course, there's a very high chance that you might create another one or maybe even a mini course. This is a space to access all of the different courses. Also a space to jot down any ideas for future courses. What we're going to do is in this space, I'm just going to add some header sections. But before I do that, I'm just going to make this full page again because this gives us a lot more room to play with. What I like to do in my main course creation HQ space is I like to add three headers right here. My y, my business priorities, let's see, course pillars. I'm just going to again, make these into heading two because they're going to be headings. I'm going to, again, stuck them like I've done before. I'm going to pull these six dots right here. And move them right beside my Y. And then do the same thing. Pull this main course pillar right here, and move it beside my business priorities. Now I'm going to color these, just the header is a little bit more prominent. Now you can style these whatever way you like, but I'm just going to use whatever is available within notion so you don't have to like, I don't know, design a header or something somewhere else. My philosophy with using notion is to do the essentials. Yes, I love branding, I love styling and all of that. But it's more important that my notion space is usable, quick to put together, and really functional. I'm not going to be creating like extra things on Canva and then bringing it into the system like that's just a waste of time in my opinion. All right. These three sections are where I hone in on my main business vision. That all of the courses that I create in the future will align to this business vision. What I like to do in this space right under my Y is I like to talk about why I want to be a course creator. This might be my mission, and being a course creator is to be able to educate female entrepreneurs and empower them to create a more aligned life, or whatever it is, right? So this is going to be my purpose for why I create courses, this section. I'm just going to move these so that they're right under the header. Do the same for here. This section right here is your business priority. You might want to do a numbered list or something in the beginning of the year. You might do some vision planning. This is going to be helping you put all of your goals or priorities for course creation in this space. It helps you stay aligned. Then this next section is your main course pillar. For example, I don't like to just create courses about everything under the moon. I like to keep it to some specific topics. For me, I always create courses around like Canva notion and I don't know something else. Just to make sure that I am stay aligned with the main course pillars that I've set out to do. And these can change, like it doesn't obviously can expand in the future. But for now I'd just like to be very like specific. All right, the next section I'd like to create in my course creation HQ is a database. I'm going to go into the plus sign and I'm going to scroll all the way down to this. Gallery view right here, you're going to see all these different data sources. But you're just going to create a new database and we're going to actually call this my courses, or education courses, whatever you want to call it. Each of these spaces right here will become a new course that you create. Right now, there's only going to be one course. I'm just going to delete these spaces right here. But essentially, once you are ready to create a course, you can go ahead and click New here. That will create a new space for a new course that you're creating, what I like to call a course hub. In this first space right here, we can name that to whatever your next course is going to be. So I'm just going to call it course one for now. And I'm going to delete these templates there. But essentially, in the next class, Nick's lesson, we're going to be creating this space right here. All right, so this is a bird's eye view of all of the courses you are creating. Then the next section, I'd like to create another database right here. And I'm going to add this and create a table view database instead. Again, new database. And I'm going to call this Course Ideas. This is going to be my running list of different course ideas that I have for the future. Basically, you can put like the course idea topic here. Like this can be topic or name. Then I like to make these little properties here. I'm going to delete this. First property that they added right here is this plus sign. And you're going to be able to add whatever properties that you like. This is just like an Excel sheet essentially. You can add the plus button and you can explore what kind of properties you can add here. There's a lot of them. For example, you can add just a regular text, which is how an Excel sheet usually works. You can add a number, a selection, a multi select, all of these different things. The first thing I'm going to try is I'm going to do these multi select, I'm going to call this Property Pillar. Because I want to make sure that each of these topics will then lead up to one of my main course pillars. What you can do is you can actually create those pillars. I'm going to add canva notion and I don't know, I don't have a third one. I'm going to put pillar three if you want. You can change the colors of these, it doesn't really matter, but I'm going to cancel these for now. But essentially a multi select, once you've added those different selections, you can now just choose from the different content pillars that you just added. For example, if this topic is about notion four course creators like this class, then my pillar would fit under notion. The next property that I typically like to add in here is a select. Now the difference between this one, multi select and select is that you can select multiple pillars. If you want this one, you can only select one. I'm actually going to name this priority. This priority is, you can say low, medium, high, or whatever measurement you want to use. Then you can basically pick a priority. Let's just say this course notion for course creators course is a high priority for me. You can add it to high. You can add whatever properties you like. If you want to add just a regular text property just for notes or something, go ahead and add that. You can type whatever you like into the space, but essentially this is going to be your running list of course ideas. If you want to just jot down some quick notes as you're ideating these things, you can go ahead and click on this open button right here, and it actually opens up its own page. Every property, every line item will create its own page. You can essentially type in some notes here if you want to add maybe some bullet points, note one, note two, whatever it is, then you can also close it by closing it there. As you collect your course ideas, you want to see more information. You can go ahead and click open and see those nodes right there. This is your course creation HQ. Now when you're ready to create your next course, all you have to do is add a new course here. In the next lesson, we are actually going to be creating a course hub template that every time you create a new course, you can just follow that template. Click on New and it'll open the new template. 5. Course Hub Fundamentals: All right, so in the next couple of classes we are going to be creating your course Hub template. Now this is going to be the space where you're going to be able to brainstorm, plan, organize, and basically create everything regarding your course. Now by creating a template, you'll be able to easily duplicate it as a really great starting point for every course that you're going to be making. Moving forward this lesson though, we're going to be focusing on the fundamental layout of your course hub template. So let's get started. All right, first things first is we are right now on our course creation HQ, where all of our courses are stored. What we're going to do is we're going to click on this first course right here. And it's going to open up the page that's associated to it. Now instead of just clicking on here to open up an empty page, we're actually going to go and click Create a template Right here. We're going to click on that. And right now as you can see, you're editing a template in my courses. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to make this full page so I can see everything. Make sure that it says you're editing a template. That's what we're going to be creating for basically the rest of this class. All right, so what we're going to do is we're going to call this the course hub template. Everything you create here will duplicate on its own once you click on this course hub template in the future. All right, again, make sure you are editing the template. First up, we're going to click on the three dots at the top. And we're going to make this a full page width again so that we have more space. And we're going to close this back up. First things first is create your course name. You're going to put your course name right here. And I'm going to make this into the biggest heading here. If you want, you can make this look prettier. Change the color of it. I don't know, underline it, whatever you want. Your course name is going to go right at the very top. The next space you're going to create here is like a small navigation section at the top of your course. Up template, I'm going to add course description, course mission or y. Same thing, then we have your course goals, we're going to also have quick links and dates. These are all the different sections that I like to create at the top of my course hub. Again, I'm going to stack these. I'm going to put, let's see what I want to do here. I definitely, I'm going to move these together if I can. And move them to the right of course, description. That didn't work right here. I'm going to move this under. Okay, Something like that. Okay, yeah, perfect. I'm going to put some underlines on these. I feel like these need to be bigger two, so I'm going to make them heading three. And this is just how I like to organize it, but again, this is just a base for you. If you'd like to change up how it looks, go ahead and play around with that. I'm going to put some underlines on these as well. Essentially, this will become your heading navigation for your class. What you'd like to type in here is a quick course description. Then right under here is your course mission. Why are you creating this course? You want to just keep that goal in mind. Then if you have any course goals, you can also add them just so that you always have that first thing in mind when you are accessing this course hub. Then right here is where you can add some quick links, For example, what I'd like to include here is your class potform link, your course access link. These are very basically up to what your course is like, it might be different for payment page, I'd like to just add those links in here. It's easy access. Whenever I need to check out my class platform, I can just click on it right here. All you have to do is like copy and paste the link right into here and it'll be linked. Then these are the dates that I like to include. Published date and launch date or if you have any other dates you'd like to include in here, you can also do that. Next we're going to create different sections for the different stages of course creation. There's four main stages in course creation, in my opinion. The first stage is ideas and planning. Second stage is the course content, actually creating the content. The third stage is course launch and marketing. And then the last stage is course tracking. It's not necessarily like 1234, it's more so the different sections of course creation as opposed to like you can always do your course launch and marketing before you even finish your course. That's very much possible, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to stack them side by side again. I'm going to make this into heading three. I'm going to color coordinate this and make this blue and then maybe pink. Okay, these are my four main sections. Later on, we are going to be creating the different pages that are associated with each section. But for now, we're going to move on to the next section here. The next section is going to be your task manager, your main to do list for the whole course. What I'm going to do is I'm going to click on the ad sign. I'm going to add a table view database, a new database. And I'm going to call this my, our master task manager. All right, again, we're going to be creating some different properties in this section and I always like to delete the first one, but basically this is going to be your main to do list. Okay. What I like to do is I actually like this to do list to be grouped together by the different stages of course creation. How you're going to do that? We're going to create some examples here so that we can put them into the different groups easily. For example, one really big task you need to brainstorm for your class. I'm just going to add like one task from each section. In course content, I need to maybe write scripts for lessons. Then for the launch and marketing, we might have a task to, let's say, complete co branding. Then for the last section, we might have a task to log all testimonials from launch week or something like that. We're going to be creating the different properties here. Now we're going to add our first property, which I like to do, a Select, I'm going to call this stage. Click on that. This stage, this is our different stages that we've identified here. We're going to type in all the stages here, ideas and planning, course content, course launch and marketing. Then our last stage is course tracking. We're going to color coordinate these. We're going to make sure that these are color coordinated to what I've already done. Blue and pink perfect. Now we can set these to the different stages, but let's add the other properties first. The next property that I like to add is status. This can be not started in progress and done, it's already done for you. Then the next property I like to add here is calendar date. This is going to be my due date. I specifically spell it as DO due because this is when I'm going to be doing it. And then we also add another one, which is the actual due date. If you have one, this is when it's actually due. The two dates can be different and I like to have two different sections for it. All right. If you'd like to add more properties here, go ahead and add them. But these are the main properties that I have. Then everything else, I like to write them within the different pages. All right, we are going to assign these to the different stages. Now this one was for course launch and marketing. This one was course tracking. These are the different tasks and these are associated with these different stages. Now what we're going to do, it's like magic. You're going to go to the three buttons right here, and I'm going to press on Group right here. This is going to allow me to group it by stages, just like that. We have now different databases grouped by the different stages, which I love. The last thing that I like to do is I like to create different views of this same database. This is totally optional, but I'm going to rename this layout to be the master. Actually I'm just called Task manager which is like the normal to do list look. I'm going to add another view. It's going to use the same data but create a different view of it. And I'd like to create a calendar version of this right now. If you create this calendar, it's going to create the calendar date of the first calendar data point here. Just as an example, if I'm going to do this on January 30, it's going to show up on January 30. That is super helpful. Once you assign due dates for these, you can then see them appear on the calendar as well. Then the last view I like to do is the Kanban boards. This is, again, totally optional, but I'm going to rename this to, I'm going to also rename this Due Dates. Then this will basically associated, let's see, with the status. Let's just say you are working on this one, this one is already done. If you go into Ban, you'll see all of the tasks that have not been started yet and then all of the tasks that are in progress. If you'd like to organize your to do list this way, you can basically say this is not started yet, so we're going to move this into in progress when you start the project and then when you're done, you can move this over to done. It's really up to you what's your favorite way to organize your to do list? But this is what I like to do and have different options of how I like to view it. Essentially, this is your course hub template, just the general layout of it. In the next few classes, we are going to be then adding different pages for these specific stages. All right. 6. Ideas & Planning: All right, in this lesson we are going to be creating the pages under the ideas and planning section. Remember that we are still editing the template right now. Make sure that it says you're editing a template in my courses so that this is going to be part of your template. All right, Under ideas and planning, we're going to create three different pages. The first page right here is going to be called Course Brainstorm. This is going to be your first page. I'm going to go back and I'm going to add your next page. This page is going to be called Course Outline. Then we're going to create the third page. This page is going to be called Course platform. All right, these are the three different pages and I feel like there needs to be some more space right here. All your first page is brainstorm. This page is super easy. I actually like to keep this page plane just like this. For the template itself, all I'd like to add is a little bubble here. If you want, you can add icon colors, for example, for this one you might want to add a little thinking bubble or something like that. We can add those later on. But essentially this page is super easy. This page is done. The course brainstorm section is basically just an empty space for you to write down all of your initial notes, thoughts, whatever you like to get your brain going, especially in the initial ideation stages. You want to just be able to access this page right away. If an idea comes up, you can just dump it into this area. What I also like to do is I also like to use notion AI to help me with brainstorming as well. If you are on a paid version of notion, you can add on the notion I feature, which I do and I love if you have the AI feature, all you have to do is click on the Space Bar. You can ask notion to brainstorm. Oh my gosh, I can't smell a storm. Ideas for a course about anything. Dogs, it will brainstorm all of these different topics for you if you like. Some of them you can ask it to go deeper. Maybe give me more information about what this puppy care one oh one would be all about. It's amazing way to get your juices going. I love notion AI for that. All right. I'm going to delete that for now for the actual template. We're going to keep this play like that. The next section is course Outline. Again, I'd like to add a little icon here in green. And I'm going to use something like this for the course outline. The course outline, I do like to write a lot in this section. For the template, I'm going to make this a full page. Let's create the different section. This course outline will be your initial outline of your course. Obviously, it's a course outline. I like to add these headings here. Key takeaways clearly can't type. Today I'd like to add ideal students, course name, course description, pricing, competitors, keywords, equipment rough lesson. Those are the main sections that I like to include in my course outline, what I'm going to do, I'm really hoping I can change these all at the same time. Let's see if I can do that. I can. Okay, we're going to turn these into heading two then. Now we can write under these. Unfortunately, actually I'm just going to delete these because it's annoying that they are all heading to including the spaces. Now for the key takeaway section, I like to add bullet points here or a numbered list. It's up to you. This is basically what your major key takeaways will be for your students. You can add a numbered list here, Nick is your ideal student. Now, this part is super, super important. What I like to actually add here is age range, industry or occupation. Location. What do they care about their struggles? This is all about your ideal student struggles. How do you spell struggles? Okay, Their needs or solutions that you provide. All right. I like to bold all of these. Yeah, that's it. What do they care about their struggles? These might be like a point form right here. How you style this is very optional to how you like to do it, but this is how I like to do it and the solutions you provide can also add bullet points there if you like. All right, these are the main things I'd like to make sure I outline about my ideal student before I move forward Again, I'm going to add colors to the, just so I can see the header a bit better. The course name. This section is where you can brainstorm course ideas or course name ideas. I always like to have a little toggle here because this is the list of ideas that I have. I'd like to add a bullet point. Then once I have that list down, I like to hide it because the actual will be here come official course name, whatever you want to call it. You can put that in this space right here, but this will be your running list of ideas. The next section is course description. This is pretty self explanatory, you can just type in your course description there. Then the next section is pricing. I like to usually add a little grid here. I'm going to turn into, I'm going to actually put the plus sign and add a little table. What I like to do is just list out all the possible prices. You might have a different price for your waiting list. You might have a different price for introduction week, your regular price, regular paid in full. Or you might even have different pricing plans. You can also add columns here by clicking on the Add button. Maybe the two payment plan or the three payment plan, then you can list out those prices here. It's really up to you how you want to organize this, but this is a good starting point. Next section is competitors. You can go ahead and list out all of your competitors here. And then we have your keywords. I like to list out all of the keywords that are associated with my course. When I'm creating my landing page, I remember to keep these keywords in mind. Then we have our equipment. These are a checklist of all the equipment you might need. For example, you need your camera, your mic, or whatever it is you need for creating the course. The last section is going to be your rough lesson outline. Now for you might be very different, but for example, you might have modules. Let's say you have module one and then you have lessons under each module, Lesson 1.1 less. Then you might have some bullet points, we'll add that in a sec 1.2 and so on and so forth. It's really up to you how you want to organize this, but for example, you can label these and just make it a little bit easier to see. You can add some bullet points here. I like to just do this little rough draft for all of my lessons so that I know it all works out and it has all of the lessons that I need included within the course. You can use this. I think this right here is probably good enough if you want to type out the rest of them. So it's easier. That's fine too. But essentially that's where I leave it at because every course is slightly different and might not have modules, maybe it just has lessons. Yeah, remember this is a template only. Put what is actually helpful as a template. All right, this is your course outline completed. The page we're creating is the platform. I am going to use, this little hang here for this page. It is so different depending on which class platform you're actually going to be using. I'm just going to make this super brief. I'm going to make this course platform, the name of it and then the platform link, then the rest. I'm going to keep it blank just because depending on which platform you're using, it's going to be so different how you want to organize this or what information you need here. You might not even need this page at all. But let's just say there's a lot of organization or tinkering that you have to do with your class platform. Then this is where you can write down all of your notes or whatever it is you need help with planning. That's it, we have all of our ideas and planning pages created. In the next lesson, we're going to move on to your course content pages. 7. Course Content: All right, in this lesson we are going to be creating the pages under the course content stage. All right, let me just minimize this and be sure that you are still editing in the template of your courses. So make sure that says you're editing a template at the very top. All right, We're going to be creating two pages under course content. The first page is going to be called course modules, the second page is going to be called. I'm going to add one right here. It's going to be called Course Resources. Now, you can definitely add more pages to this, but this is what I typically notice most courses have. If you need to add other things, be sure to add that here. Everything under course content will be the actual content of your course. Like the actual script and organization of all the actual content within the course. We're going to hop onto course modules first, we are going to be adding a little icon, actually we'll add the icon later. I'm going to make this a full page though, so that you can have more space. The first thing that we like to add into your course modules is we're actually going to link the same database, the task manager database, from your hub. What we're going to do is we're going to scroll all the way down to linked view database. We're going to ask link that task manager database from right here. We're going to click on this one. Do you remember this one? This is the task manager that we created in our course hub. What I like to do is I actually like to filter this only show course content this way everything regarding course content tasks will show up here. This way we can easily add tasks to this list from your course modules page. Then it just makes it a lot easier that the two databases or to do lists are linked. All right, The next section we're going to create here is another database. We're going to be creating a table view database. And this is going to be a brand new one. I'm going to call this course Modules. Basically, this is going to be your lesson planning. I'm going to rename the name called lesson name. Then I'm going to add some properties. Again, the properties that I like to add here are basically ones to help me complete the actual module. This will be the first thing that I like to add is the select one. I'm going to basically create the different module. Like if your course has modules, then you can add this. If it doesn't have modules, you can totally scrap this idea or scrap this property. If your course has modules, you might want to separate it by the modules. I'm going to rename this two modules, and then later we can group them by modules. Again, I'm going to do that. Then the next property that I'd like to add here is a check box right here. These are going to be the different stages of completing the module. Basically, for my process, I typically need to write the script, I'm going to add another check box. Then my next stage is then I need to create the slides. If there are slides for it, I make these a little bit shorter. Then the next property that I'm going to add, the next stage, is usually to actually film the class, film the lesson. Then the next one is I need to edit it. Then the last stage is I usually need to upload the class to the class platform that I've chosen. These are all the different stages of what I need to do to complete these modules. I also like to add the link here, the video. Usually my classes are hosted separately on a video platform. I would include the link of that video into here as well just for easy access. Again, if your class is not split up by modules, then you can go ahead and delete this property. But if it is, you can then go to, actually go to the three dots and we're going to group this by modules. Now this is going to be split up by modules. I'm just going to add some lessons here. Let's just say lesson one. Less, Two, lesson three. These are just examples. I just want to show you what they will look like when assigned to the different modules. Now these are essentially grouped by modules. You have your module 1234 and then as you go through each process of the lesson, let's say lesson one, you can take off like I've completed the script, I've completed the slides. And you can see an overview of what you have completed and not completed. One thing I also like to create is I'm going to go into here and I'm going to also create a template here. I'm going to create a template for each lesson. I also like to create a template. This will help me write out all the actual ideas for the lesson. This is a lesson template. The sections that I like to create here are really simple. There's the lesson takeaways, Shots needed, less slides then less video script and less resources. These are the different sections that I usually like to create just for some organization's sake. I'm going to color these that it's easy to see the different sections. You can also bold it or underline it to make it even more prominent, whatever you like. Essentially, this section I would add like bullet points. I would write down all the key takeaways for the specific lesson, the shots needed. Again, this can also be a checklist or a bullet point list, but essentially these can be like Talking Head or whatever it might be. Then this section will be the slide. If you want, you can add or embed the slide into here. What you can do is you can add a document, a file. Basically you can upload those files into this section. Then for the video script, I typically like to do a little toggle just because it can get que long. I'm actually going to do that again and I'm going to maybe just add a toggle and then name it as video script or lesson script. Yeah, perfect. I'm going to add a little space there. This is where I would write my script. I can also change the color of this. This is also where you can add your resources, depending on what kind of resources you'd like to add to this section. Let's say it's a Canva or DFL. You can drag that into the space or whatever it is associated with this lesson. You can add into this resources section, the template is complete. I'm going to go back every time I create a new lesson. I can just create on lesson template here. And this will help me outline like a really good starting point for each lesson as I go through each module. I'm going to open this session here. And I'm going to open this lesson template. And then I'm going to write my script out here. And then once I've written this, I can then check, don't know why this is in this format, but let's see, Let's reject this should be script slides, film, edit, upload, and then model there. Once you go through each step, you can just go ahead and check those boxes. And then when you come back here, you can see what has been completed and what has not been completed. This is your course modules page. And then the last page in this section is your course resources. I like to keep this section open like this because depending on your course, maybe you don't even have resources. Each course is so different. I'm just going to keep this page like empty, like this, for however you want to add your courses or resources into that section, you can do that. Just going to add some icons real quick to make sure it's color coordinated. I'm going to put my course modules here. Then I'm going to add resources there. Okay, our course content sections are complete. Now in the next lesson, we're going to be creating the pages for the course launch and marketing. 8. Course Launch & Marketing: All right, in this lesson we are going to be creating the pages under the course launch and marketing stage. We are going to be creating two pages here. The first one is going to be called the Course Branding. This is where you're going to be storing all of your branding for your course. Then the other page is going to be called your Launch Plan. This can be your Launch or your Evergreen launch, or your whole marketing plan. If you want to split those up, you can go ahead and create two separate pages for like Launch and Evergreen if you want. But we're going to start off with the co branding for course branding. I am a brand designer. I love creating sub brands for each course. If you'd like to do so. This would be the section for you. I'm going to first off make this into a full page so that we have a little bit more space. Then I'm going to first off start with our Moodboard and Inspiration section. In this section, you can definitely add in some different images that you find on Pinterest, or if you created a mood board on Canva or on Adobe, you can go ahead and add those in here. If you're just dragging images like multiple images in, you can go ahead and just like create these different sections and they'll be really easy for you to drag in those images. I'm going to add another image here. All you have to do is basically download the image and then you can drag it into these sections here. The next section that we're going to be doing going to make this into a header two first next section we're going to be doing is your brand colors. You can organize this in all different ways. If you want to make it super fancy, you can make this into a database, but if not, you can literally just write the color codes in to make it as simple as possible. But what you can do is you can create a little brand colors database here. Essentially each page will be one color. You can call this like let's say the blue you can create. I'm just going to delete this property here, but you can create a property color code. This will be your hex code that you paste in right here. Once you have this hex code here, that's really all you need. You can also change the color of the cover. You can change this to the blue that you're doing it, that you're using if you wanted to show up here. You can also go to the three dots here. You can go to Layout here, and then go to Preview. And then you can change it to card cover. Whatever color you change this cover into, it will show here. That's really cool way to show all of your colors. Just as an example, you can add a cover here and then you can upload your color. Let's say you create a little image of the color that you're using and then you can put it into this space. Let's say it's red. I put the red color code here. And then it'll be easy access for me to grab those color codes when I need it. The next section that I like to create here is course logos. This section, once you've created your logos, you can then add it into this space. You might have primary logos here, secondary logo and then icon. Then again, you can add these little images into this space. I'm just copy and pasting the images and then you can put it into these sections here. I'm just going to actually copy this and duplicate it into these sections here as well. All right, the next section here will be your course typography, the font set you'll be using. I'm going to make this into a title. Again, this space you can list out what your header font will be, your sub heter font, your body font or paragraph fonts, and then your decorative fonts. You might not have all these different types of typography for your brand, but it's there if you would like to. Then the next section I'd like to include in here is elements. These are any like icons or not logos, icons, or graphic elements that you like to include in the space. I'm just going to again, add these image sections in here. Then the last space that I'd like to include here are any images. If you took photography for this course, then you can add those images in here. And it's really easy access because all you have to do is click on the three dots and you can download them in high resolution and it'll be ready for you to use. All right, that is corresponding page. The next page that we're going to be creating is your launch plan. All right, so for your launch plan, again, this can be so different depending on how you decide to launch your course. But again, this is a starting point for you. If you'd like to do it some other way, this will give you some ideas. But if you'd like to change it, go ahead. But basically, I like to have my published date here, right at the top. And then you might have a pre launch start date and a launch week date or something like that. All of the main dates will be listed at the top here, so it's easy to access. Then I like to actually split up my launch plan by the different phases. Usually for my launches, I'll have a pre launch, the actual launch, and then I'll have an Evergreen plan. That's how I typically launch my courses. What I'm going to change all of these to header two or something, and then I'm going to stack them so that I can create different pages under each one. And I'm going to color coat them as well. Okay. Under each section. Again, the type of platform that you're going to be using for your marketing purposes could be super different. This really just use it as an outline or starting point. But basically I would, I would typically like to add a page for the different channels of marketing that I have. For example, I'll have my weight list page so that my actual website launch page for the class, there's that one. And then I would usually have my e mail campaign. I need to plan that out. Usually the marketing platform of choice is usually Instagram. For my wait less page, this could also be the same as your actual launch page. But essentially, I would like to usually add the link here and then the wait less period, then I would actually write out my landing page. Write on right here on notion. I would write out my landing page typically with the help of notion I. Yeah, that will be that. Then for my e mail campaign I usually label my e mails by like numeral numbers. E mail number one. And then I'll give it a name. Then basically I'll like to jot down the send date, the main call to action hoops. Then I'll also write down the actual copy for the e mail here as well. It's going to duplicate this and call this e mail number two. Keep it simple then for Instagram, obviously, keep this like super simple as well. We have our Instagram post, then I'll probably do the same format where I did my e mail post number one, then I can write the call to action there, then post number two. Very easy. Then Instagram reels, I can do the same thing. I'm not going to put too much emphasis on this again, it just really depends on how you like to organize your stuff. Like you might not even need these sections in notion. Maybe you just want to write these on your Instagram scheduler or you like to write them directly on Instagram, then you don't even need these pages at all. I would copy these and I would add them to my Launch plan and my Evergreen plan as well. Oops, I would copy e mail over here. Copy Instagram, put it over here. I would do the same thing on my Evergreen plan. If you want, you can also add like little emojis for it. Keep it simple for your launch plan. And it'll just be like a great space for you to write down your copy ideas or even the actual final copy in here before you bring it into your different marketing platforms. All right, this is course launch and marketing section. The only thing you're missing now is your icons. So I'm going to paint here and then this little guy right here. All right, all of the different sections for course launch and marketing is complete. Again, if you'd like to add anything to your template, feel free to do that right now. But in the next lesson, we are going to be doing the last stage, which is our course tracking sections. 9. Course Tracking: All right, in this lesson we are going to be creating the pages for the course tracking section. All right. We're going to be creating three pages in the course tracking section. Let's create those first. The first page is going to be called the testimonial. This is any like testimonials that you get from your students. The next section will be called improvement log. This is any feedback you get from students or things that you even come up with to make the course better. The last page will be course tracking. Everything under this section will be regarding tracking and just making sure that you know the status of your course and how it's doing. The first page right here is testimonials. This page is really simple. What we're going to do is we're going to make this full page. All we're going to do is we're going to add a database here. This database is going to be a new database and we're going to call this student testimonials, essentially. We're going to add some properties. I'm going to again, delete this initial property here. This is going to be your student name, whoever is leaving the testimonial for you. Then I'd like to add a property and I'm going to call this testimonial. If the testimonial is shorter and manageable, I would just type it into the space. But let's just say it's really, really long. You can just maybe type an excerpt in here and then put the full testimonial in the actual opened page. The next property that I like to add is select. I would change this to stars, for example. If we have star, we can have a star system right here. I'm going to do that again. I'm going to do two stars. I'm going to copy this and paste it. Then we'll have three stars, however many stars that you're allowing people to give you. Then the next property that I'd like to add is a photo. If you ask, let's say for a headshot, then you can add that photo in here as well. Then I'd like to add a date. This would be like when the testimonial was given, for example. Then last but not least, this is totally optional. But this would be a link, like let's say it's a Google review or something. Then you can add the link to the Google review or something. It's really up to you if you want to add some more properties there. But this is essentially where you'd be going in and you can just add a new testimonial. Again, if you have more than the information is listed here, you can go ahead and go into the page and basically write out whatever extra notes you need for each student testimonial. All right, Nick is the improvement. Okay, Improvement log is very similar. Again, we're going to make this full width. All we're going to do is we're going to add a property. A property, we're going to add a database. At this point, you should be a pro at adding databases. I'm going to go through this really quickly, Change this into improvement log. I'm going to delete this initial property and I'm going to rename this to Improvement Needed. This is where you're going to write down all of the improvements that you want to make to your course. This can be the name of the improvement or the feature, or whatever it is, but let's add some properties. The first property will be, actually, don't need to change that, that's just status. And you can put whichever status it's at, then the next one is going to be priority. This could be low, medium, and high. You can choose one of those. Then the last property that I like to add is a date, and we're going to call this release date when you decide when you want to release that new feature or a new update, this is where you can put that date right there. All right, so that page is done. Then the last page we're going to create here is your goal tracking page. Again, we are going to make this full width and we're going to create some sections here. The first one we're going to create another database, so many databases. This is notion after all. We're going to create our course objectives here. I'm going to add another database here and I'm going to call this one. My key results. I'm going to add some properties here. What I'm doing here is course objectives are going to be those top line objectives that you have for your course. For example, like you want to have a high course completion rate or something like that. Very high level objective, key results are going to be more measurable results. I'm going to change this to key results. A key result could be like measuring your launch period enrollment. How many enrollments were there during the launch period? I'd like to add a couple of properties here. We're going to do a multi select and we're going to call this objective. So we're going to link your key results with your course objectives. Whatever your course objectives are here, let's just say, I'm just going to label this as 123 for now. And then we're going to link this to whatever those are, 12.3 right? You can type in your course objective here and just make sure that your key results are tying to your course objectives. Then the next one here, I'm just going to add some text and I'm going to make this the local. Again, this is just how I do things, but you can totally change this to how you would like to track your measurements. This will be your high goal. Then the next property would be the current value, what you actually did, and then a date here, which be your time frame. This pretty self explanatory, just type in your key result, Let's say it's launch period enrollments. Then you can pick the objective that it's linked to and then set what your low goal is, what your high goal is, and then what you actually did. And then you can even add a time frame in here. Then the next two databases that we're creating here is going to be just two more databases and we're done. We have another table view here and we're going to track all of your course expenses here. And then again another database. I think this is the last database we'll be creating, and this is your course revenue. I'm going to delete this and we're going to add a property for a number, and we're going to call this the price of what your expense is. Then we can add another property. These are all optional by the way, and we're going to call this year then the same thing with this. We're going to add a year here. And then the amount, the amount that you made. These are all very optional, like how you want to track your expenses and revenue. You have an overview of how much you're spending and making from the course, that is your goal tracking page. Last but not least, we're just going to pick our fund icons for these. We have testimonial thumbs up for your improvement log. This then for, oh, I forgot to change the color of these, but for goals you might want to do like a check box. I'm just going to then we're good to go. We have all of our different stages complete now and you are pretty much ready to start using this template. 10. Final Tips & Next Steps: You've made it to the final lesson of this class. At this point, you have created a whole new custom course creation hub on Notion. Now in this lesson, I just wanted to give you a couple of final tips on how you can now use this template to create a new course. Everything you've created so far in your template, in the last couple of lessons, have now been automatically saved as a template to access that template and to create a new course. Next time, all you have to do is go to your course creation Q that you've created where all of your courses will be hosted. Then you can just go ahead and create a new course, or start with this template. One, click on Course Up Template as an example, I'll just start a new course. All you have to do is click on Course Up template, which is the template that we've created together. It will automatically populate that whole template that we created together. It's like magic. It might just take like a minute to load because the template was quite robust with a lot of different pages on it. Just give it a second and it's going to load up everything that we've already created, which is incredible. Then if you want to make changes to the template right now, it's created a duplicate, right of the template to create your next course. If you ever wanted to make changes to the template, all you have to do is go to new. Again, where it says course hop template. There are the three dots beside it that says edit this template. All you do is press on those three dots and go to edit, and that's where you're going to be able to edit the template. As you can see here, you're editing the template in my courses. Everything you change here will not change anything about the courses that you've already made, but it'll make changes to the template that you'll be able to duplicate moving forward. And that is it. Everything you've created so far was meant to be a really great starting point for you to create your very own custom course creation hub on notion. So feel free to customize it any way you like. Make it as simple or elaborate, or as decorated as your heart desires. As you organize your next course using this template, you're probably going to realize some parts you might want to add or remove. So don't worry about getting it perfect the first time. All right, so as a bonus surprise, I've actually packaged up the whole notion template that we've created together in this course into a template that you can basically duplicate and add to your notion hub right away. Now mind you, I really recommend everybody to create their notion templates from scratch. Because not only is it the best way to learn how to use notion, it's also a really great way to learn how to customize the notion template to your exact needs. It is ready to duplicate, so if you'd like to do that, you can head to the class resources PDF. Anyways, I had such an amazing time teaching list class and I hope you enjoyed it as well. I actually have another notion class here on skill share called Client HQ. And it teaches you all about how to create a client portal on notion. So definitely check that out if you're interested in creating a client portal on notion, for your own business. I also have a ton of free content all about Notion, Canva Flow Ds and all things creative entrepreneurship waiting for you on Youtube. So find me by looking up Made on Sundays. I'll see you there. Hi.