While online education has been popular for years in the online marketing space, it has suddenly boomed in the author world along with other craft and hobby niches.

In today's show, I discuss this shift and how you can easily build your own online courses with Ankur Nagpal from Teachable.com.

In the intro, I mention how I'm getting along with dictation (fantastically well!), the news that Penguin Random House sold Author Solutions, and that I booked my flights to Austin, Texas for the Smarter Artist Summit in March. I also talk about this great podcast documentary about ecommerce in India from BBC World, which makes it clear that we're only in the very early days of online shopping in India, so exciting times ahead!

Plus, if you want to write and publish a bestselling non-fiction book in the next 90 days, check out this free video series from Chandler Bolt at Self-Publishing School.

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

Ankur Nagpal is the founder and CEO of Teachable, a site for creating and selling online courses.

You can listen above or on iTunes or Stitcher or watch the video here, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Why online courses have exploded in the last year to 18 months

What non-fiction and fiction authors can offer courses on, and how to know if a course will sell.

The steps to take to create a course, including the beginning steps to take and the tools you'll need.

On the different types of experience you can create - audio, audio and video, slides, screen shots etc.

What makes a successful sales page for a course, including the importance of the right type of copy and images.

The differences between Teachable and sites like Udemy

What Ankur sees as the future of online education.

You can check out Teachable here.

Transcription of the interview with Ankur Nagpal
Joanna: Hi everyone I'm Joanna Penn from thecreativepenn.com and today I'm here was Ankur Nagpal. Hi Ankur.

Ankur: Hi Joanna it's great to be here.

Joanna: Yes, it's great to have you on the show. A very brief introduction. Ankur is the founder and CEO of teachable.com. A site for creating and selling online courses. Which is super exciting.
Give us a little bit more background about you Ankur. What's your entrepreneurial background?
Ankur: I am in the very fortunate position to have never held a real job in my life!

I started out building Facebook applications my freshman summer, summer of 2007 did that through most of my college years and the year after. And built a pretty successful business just building and selling Facebook Applications that were very successful but added negligibly little value in the world. Things like personality quizzes, friend quizzes, send your friends a gift. I did that for a few years.

It was good because it exposed me to the world of entrepreneurship and after that I was like "I can't get a job now. I can't have a boss. Can't deal with that stuff." And then I reached a point where right after that I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do. Moved to New York and I started doing a little bit of online teaching. On Udemy I was doing a bit of teaching in person and general assembly. I started to believe in the world of online courses. But the solutions out there at the time just didn't really resonate with me.

As a teacher I wanted something better and that's how we built teachable. It started out as a side project. Just something I built for my own courses, for my buddy Conrad's courses, and before we knew it we started working with other people and this became what it is today.

Joanna: I wanted to ask you because many of us, including myself, we've been doing online courses for years.