Beyond your blog 4: tips for cooking up courses

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You probably launched your food blog with a few goals in mind. Maybe you simply wanted to share your thoughts, your stories, and your very best recipes. Perhaps you’re slightly more ambitious and had dreams of being the next Julia Childs – an educator on all things edible.

If you’ve amassed followers by telling your story and delivering on your promise of the best recipes, then it’s time to consider the latter goal as a distinct possibility. While “developing a curriculum” might sound too daunting to become a part of any passive income strategy, it is possible to scale back on the education jargon and create courses that excite your followers without exhausting you.

Do your research

Scour your messages and emails as well as social media accounts and even Q&A sites like Quora to identify the number one problems your followers (and look-alike audiences) encounter in the kitchen. Most of us could use some instruction in how to keep pasta from clumping together and what to do about dull knives, and these are perfect topics for quick forays into the world of online culinary courses.

Keep online lessons short and sweet

Rather than providing a lengthy video tutorial that covers the preparation of an entire meal, break topics up into their smaller portions. Not only does this make sitting down to watch a video more manageable for viewers, but it allows them to mix and match your videos to best meet their own needs. That Thanksgiving special might be broken down into a few short videos that cover the following topics:

How to prep for a large meal
Stuffing versus Dressing: what’s the difference?
How to pick the right bird for your Turkey Day dinner
Turkey alternatives for vegetarian Thanksgiving celebrations
How to snap beans the old-fashioned way

Take advantage of every teachable moment

Breaking lessons down into micro-tutorials also makes it possible for you to inexpensively and easily fill your food blog with multimedia elements. You can pop those little lessons into blog posts throughout your site to get the most use of them, and you can also gather them together onto one page to showcase your library of learning.

Try a variety of teaching tools

If you’re going big, you may want to look into online learning communities like Skillshare and Craftsy, which streamline off-blog courses. They provide most of the tools that you’ll need to develop a robust educational platform for your blog.

If you’re simply wanting to integrate educational elements into your food blog, plenty of stand-alone tools are available to turn your blog into its own education platform. You can create digital workbooks, textbooks, and quizzes with the tools we showed you in previous posts as well as helpful videos using media you’re probably already familiar with like YouTube and Vimeo.

The possibilities for using your food blog as an online school under your careful tutelage are endless. Get started today to build your course list and to win new converts to your blog.