How Amy Michael Harrison and Michael Harrison Added Online Courses for an off-line business

  We at, take immense delight to shine the spotlight on the creators of online courses who are achieving success through the help the platform. This article was sent to us by Amy & Michael Harrison, an inspiring couple that has recently included online learning as a component to their therapy business. Here is the story they are willing to share with us. Amy's thoughts:

18 months ago, we were before our group comprising 30 participants at the end of The Soul Adventure, our guided meditation class, when someone asked us "Can you please record the meditations we practiced for us so that we could continue to practice these?" Everyone else agreed.

Michael and I had already talked about it because there are many clients who are working on shifts, or had children or other commitments that prevent them from having the ability to be at classes simultaneously each week . We wanted them to do our course but weren't able to make it. We even had to organize baby-sitting for our own kids in order to teach the class. So I said to them "Yeah yes, we'll give you three months and we'll get these meditations recorded , and then online for you".

After all how hard can it get? We've already got this amazing course that people love and would like to take. A few of those who were at the table that evening were in present for the third time consecutively. In my mind we just required to find a way to capture these meditations, and it could be as simple as uploading the recordings "online" and it would be this amazing "online" place that the classes and meditations could be available to all of our customers could listen to them from.

Oh my.

It's true. We're really good at what we do, we've been in the business for since the beginning of time, and have helped thousands of people through our clinic. Our expertise is not in technological issues. We came home and started searching "how to make an online class". I wasn't even sure if what I was reading was written in English. All I heard was about plug-ins and coding and WordPress which made my stomach was sunk in a tidal wave of "I am not sure I can accomplish it".

However, we resigned ourselves to the idea that the process could take less than three months but we'd get there. We read and researched and did courses in creating electronic courses. We eventually discovered that we needed assistance and began talking with web developers to create an online membership website for us.

Finally we thought we had made progress!

We did not get the price back. $12,000. It's a shame we don't have that. We've got four kids, two of whom we're supporting to go to uni in different cities. There's a mortgage for the house that's been renovated half-way and numerous other costs trying to manage our money.

My heart sunk into that despondent place and I was back there. It felt as if were on either side of the chasm with our amazing vision for our route, and a full sight on the other, but with absolutely no way to build the bridge that would allow us to get there.

It was buried in the heavy basket for a couple of months, and one day I decided to Google once more and, for the first timeever, I found . It was as if I had found the rainbow which spanned over that chasm to reach the personal gold pot, our online course, to the opposite end. It was the enchanted "online" space I had in mind for the course I was planning to create in the year before as we stood in front of our class.

All of a sudden we were able to see the way to go about it , and do the entire thing ourselves with no massive start up costs, there was no need to rely on others to take care of any of it for us. And there was nothing that required the use of coding or plugging into! We'd learnt by this stage all of the functionality we needed to have to be able to operate, market, and market our courses effectively.

We wanted to be able to drip feed content, with multiple ways for delivering content, choices to download content, the possibility to connect with an email scheduling tool and the capability to offer different packages and courses, personalize our branding and also manage affiliates. Every feature we wanted was available. Every. Single. One. I actually wept with relief.

Then we set to creating and recording our course.

We hadn't finished recording the entire module but it wasn't necessary to. If you're going to drip feed information out, you need to be ahead of the first enrollments and we'd recorded the first four weeks of twelve.

There was a website I'd been working on that was to be our sales page which would include all information regarding our course and ways to register (you could do this on your own the course, but we chose to make separate websites). We'd done our branding colours and logo with the help of one of our customers.

Already had clients - we've got all our clients and past participants in our live workshop. We have all their emails stored in our database that at that time had 696 email addresses. They are the people who have known us personally and appreciate the work we do and want more from us.

It was awe-inspiring realizing that we actually ready to go live. After the long wait, everything was so simple once we found . So we clicked publish on our course, connected our sales page and emailed our database to let them know that The Soul Adventure in it's digital version was ready for purchase.

We had 78 enrolments during the initial week. In the process, we have repaid all of the money that we'd put into the equipment, training classes and subscriptions to that point and more. That was absolutely the incentive that we needed to complete recording the remaining modules too. We were also able to use the feedback we got and use it to check that future modules exactly reflected what users wanted.

Now that we've got a no-cost introductory course to guided meditation, which will help introduce people to us and the work we do, we're developing other free offerings and also other paid courses that will be a variation of our previous live classes.

It's great seeing people who are people we have known for a long time but would never cross paths while working with them one-on-one at clinics, and being in a position to communicate with one another in our online community. We can also reach everyone in the world via our work, and not just the small part of the globe in which we reside in the northern part of the tropical north of Australia.

We can't wait to see what we can accomplish from here.

Amy as well as Michael Harrison are therapists who assist people in making their lives easier. Amy is a kinesiologist , and Michael is a hypnotherapist and they focus on helping individuals discover their unconscious minds and clear the sabotage habits they have created as well as identify and alter their limiting beliefs. You can find out more about them and their work at www.amyandmichaelharrison.com and their online guided meditation course, The Soul Adventure, can be found at www.thesouladventure.com