How to Use AI to Create and Sell Online Courses

Okay so I've been sitting on this post for a while because I wanted to actually do the thing before I wrote about it. And I did. I built and launched a small online course in four days, used AI for almost every single part of the process, and I'm genuinely kind of shocked at how much faster it went than I expected.

Let me walk you through what I did, step by step, because I think the way most people think about using AI for course creation is honestly backwards.

Start with the outline, not the content

Here's what I see people do wrong: they open Claude or ChatGPT and say "write me a course about email marketing" and then complain that it sounds generic. Of course it sounds generic. You gave it nothing to work with.

What actually works is this: before you ask AI to write anything, you need to do a brain dump of everything you actually know about the topic. Open a doc. Type for twenty minutes. What are the things beginners always get wrong? What's the shortcut you wish someone had told you? What's the one concept that unlocks everything else?

Then you paste that into Claude and you say: based on this, what would a 6-module course look like? And the outline it gives you will be genuinely good because it's built on your actual knowledge, not a generic version of the topic from the internet.

I did this for a course on using Notion for freelancers, and the outline I got back was way better than anything I would have come up with on my own. It organized my scattered knowledge into something that actually had a learning arc.

Writing the actual lessons

This is where AI becomes your best friend. For each module, I had a rough set of bullet points, things I wanted to cover, examples I wanted to use, mistakes I wanted to warn people about. Then I'd paste those into Claude and ask it to write a lesson draft in a conversational teaching voice.

The first draft is never perfect. I'm not going to pretend it is. But it's a really solid starting point that I'd then rewrite in my own voice. The ratio I landed on was about 60% AI-generated structure and 40% me making it actually sound like me and adding real specifics.

One thing that made a huge difference: I asked Claude to also generate the "common mistakes" section and the "quick recap" for each module separately. Those two things used to take me forever to write because I'd overthink them. AI bangs them out in seconds and they're genuinely useful.

The stuff nobody talks about: workbooks and resources

I'm not going to lie, this was the part that surprised me most. I asked Claude to create a workbook for my course, like the fill-in-the-blank companion doc that students use as they go through the lessons. It gave me something really solid in about fifteen minutes.

Templates, checklists, reference sheets. All of it. I spent maybe two hours total formatting and personalizing everything, versus what would have easily been a full day of work before.

I also used AI to write the FAQ section for my sales page. I just described my course and asked: what are the ten questions potential buyers are most likely to have? The answers it drafted were so good I barely changed them.

Recording and production

Okay I will be honest. I don't think AI helps that much with the actual recording part. You still have to sit down, look at a camera (or screen), and talk. That part is still on you.

But AI does help with the scripts. I took my lesson drafts and reformatted them into speaking scripts using Claude, which would shorten and restructure them so they work better out loud versus on the page. That's a real time saver.

For thumbnails and course graphics, I used image generation. Nothing groundbreaking, just clean, consistent visuals that make the course look professional. I'm not a designer and I never will be, but my course looked like I had a designer. That matters for sales.

Selling the thing

Sales page copy is where I feel like AI is genuinely underrated. I described my ideal student, what they were struggling with, what the course would help them do, and the transformation they'd feel. Claude wrote a full sales page draft that I then edited.

The thing it got right that I always mess up: the structure. Opening hook, problem section, solution, what's inside, who it's for, FAQ, price and CTA. Every good sales page has this structure and I always scramble the order when I write from scratch. AI keeps it in the right order.

I also used AI to write my email launch sequence. Three emails over five days: the "it's here" email, the "here's what's inside" email, and the "last chance" email. Drafted in about an hour. I've written launch sequences before that took me two full days.

What it can't do

It can't make the course good if you don't actually know your topic. I want to be really clear about that. AI amplifies what you already have. If you have real knowledge and experience, it can help you package and communicate it way faster. If you don't, it's just going to produce generic stuff that won't help anyone and won't sell.

It also can't replace the energy you bring when you teach something you're genuinely into. Students can tell when a course was phoned in. The AI can draft the words but you have to show up with actual enthusiasm for what you're teaching.

My actual result

I launched the course at $97 and sold 23 copies in the first two weeks, mostly to my existing email list of a few hundred people. Not life-changing money, but for a course I built in four days? I'll take it. And the main thing I spent time on was actually knowing the material and recording the lessons. The AI handled almost everything else.

If you've been sitting on a course idea because it feels like too much work to produce, honestly, run this process. The production work is so much lighter than it used to be.