Email course ideas, and how to test one before writing

The five conditions an idea has to meet

A five-day course is a small container, and the whole art of choosing an idea is finding one that is the shape of the container rather than one that has to be squeezed into it. Five conditions decide that, and an idea that fails any of them is better fixed now than discovered on day three.

Run every candidate through these before writing anything:

• One promise, stated in one sentence, in the reader’s words rather than yours. If the sentence needs an “and”, you have two courses and should pick the one you can write better.
• Finished in five days. There has to be a state the reader reaches at the end, and it has to be a real end rather than the point at which you stopped. A subject with no natural finish becomes a newsletter, which is a different thing entirely.
• One action a morning, small enough to do before lunch. A course that asks for an hour on day one has a completion rate of almost nothing, however good the email asking for it was.
• The reader can tell it worked. Something visible by the last day — a photograph, a page, a decision made, a habit five days old. An idea whose payoff arrives in six months cannot be felt inside the course.
• You can write it from what you already know. If the course requires research you have not done, you will not finish it, and the version you would have written from experience was the better one anyway.

The idea is usually something you already repeat

People look for a course idea the way they look for a business idea, as though it has to be new. It does not, and new is actively unhelpful here: a course teaches something, and you can only teach what you have already explained enough times to know where people get stuck. So the search is not for a subject nobody has covered. It is for the thing you personally have said out loud most often.

Three places to look, all of them retrospective. The question you answer in every first conversation, which is the one you have already refined by repetition. The thing you re-explain because the obvious explanation does not work — that is the part where you know something the published advice does not. And the mistake you keep correcting, because a course built around one recurring mistake has a built-in structure: what people do, why it seems right, what it costs, what to do instead, and how to tell it is working.

The test for all three is whether you could deliver it without notes. If you could talk for ten minutes on the subject to somebody sitting opposite you, there is a course in it. If you would need to go and read first, there is an article in it, and writing five emails will feel like homework for exactly as long as it takes you to stop.

Ideas, by the kind of work you do

These are starting points rather than titles to copy, and the last column is the useful one. Every idea in this table has a way of going wrong, and in almost every case the wrong version is the one that puts your business at the centre and the reader’s five mornings at the edge.

Four shapes that carry an idea, and one that does not

Once you have a subject, the shape is a separate decision and it is worth making deliberately, because the shape determines what each of the five mornings contains. The walkthrough takes one thing from nothing to finished, one stage a day, and is the easiest to write because the order is given to you. The teardown examines one real example a day — a page, a photograph, a pitch, a piece of code — and works because specifics are more persuasive than principles and because you can see them.

The decision course takes one hard choice and spends five days making it: what the options are, what each one costs, what most people get wrong, how to test cheaply, and how to commit. It suits subjects where the reader is stuck rather than uninformed. And the five-mistakes course takes the errors you correct most often, one a day, which has the advantage that the reader recognises themselves on day one and the disadvantage that it needs a constructive ending or it is five days of being told off.

The shape that does not work is the survey: an overview of a field, in five parts, covering everything. It fails for a structural reason rather than a stylistic one. A survey has no state the reader reaches, so there is nothing to feel on day five; it cannot ask for an action, because the actions differ by section; and it is the shape that expands under writing, so day three arrives and there are eleven things left that all seem necessary. If an idea can only be described as “everything about X”, it is not yet an idea.

Four ideas that look good on the page and fail in the inbox

The first is the comprehensive one, which is the survey wearing a better title. It is seductive because it feels generous, and it is the single most common reason a course is abandoned halfway through writing. The fix is almost always to take the third section of the comprehensive course and make that the whole thing.

The second is the idea that needs something the reader does not have: a tool they have not bought, an audience they have not built, data they have not collected. Every day of such a course opens with a precondition, and a reader who fails the precondition on day one quietly leaves. The fix is to write the course that gets them to the precondition instead, which is usually the more valuable course anyway.

The third is the sales sequence in a teaching costume. It is recognisable by the shape of its days: each one introduces a problem and defers the answer, and the answer turns out to be a purchase. Readers identify it quickly, and the cost is not only the unsubscribes. It is that a course is the one lead magnet people voluntarily read for five consecutive days, and spending that on a pitch you could have made once is an expensive trade.

The fourth is the idea chosen because it ranks rather than because you know it. A course written from research reads like one, because the specifics that make teaching work are the ones you only have from doing the thing. The search-volume argument is also weaker than it looks here: the traffic arrives on the page, and what converts on it is the promise being unusually specific, which is easier to be about a subject you have lived.

Test the idea before you write five emails

Write day three first. Day three is where a weak idea shows: day one is easy because it is the introduction and day five is easy because it is the conclusion, and day three is the one that has to carry actual content with no scaffolding around it. If you can write day three in forty minutes without notes, the idea holds. If day three is a struggle, the course is going to be a struggle, and you have spent forty minutes finding that out instead of a fortnight.

Then say the promise to somebody out loud and watch their face. The promise is one sentence and it has to survive being spoken: “by Friday you will have X” is a test that most vague ideas fail audibly, because you will hear yourself adding qualifications to it. If you have anywhere to ask — a client, a group, ten people who already read you — ask which of two promises they would want, rather than whether they like the idea. People are agreeable about ideas and decisive about choices.

And count the mornings honestly. Write the five subject lines before writing any bodies, in order, as a list. Five subject lines that each describe a different, specific thing the reader will do that day is an idea that works. If two of them are variations of each other, or if one of them is “introduction”, the course is four days long and should be sold as four.

The idea is also the thing people are agreeing to receive

There is a legal edge to this that is worth knowing before you write the sign-up form rather than after. Under the GDPR, consent has to be specific and informed: Article 4(11) defines it as a freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the person’s wishes, and Article 7 puts the burden on you to demonstrate it. The ICO’s direct marketing guidance says the same thing in plainer language — people should be told what they are signing up for, by whom, and in enough detail to know what will arrive. The idea you choose is the content of that agreement.

This has a practical consequence that has nothing to do with regulators. A vague promise collects addresses from people who wanted something else, and people who wanted something else are where complaints come from. Google asks bulk senders to keep the spam complaint rate below 0.10 per cent and never to reach 0.30 per cent, which is three complaints per thousand delivered — a threshold a small list can cross with a handful of people who signed up for a subject they did not get. A specific idea is a smaller list and a much safer one.

The last consideration is what happens on day six. If the course exists to sell something, say so on the sign-up form rather than at the end, and be aware that the moment the primary purpose of a message is commercial advertising it is commercial email in the FTC’s sense, with the footer, the postal address and the opt-out obligations that follow. None of this narrows what you can teach. It narrows how vaguely you are allowed to describe it, which was worth doing anyway.