You can present your knowledge in an organized format and get the chance to monetize it. It can be about anything, whether you want to share your cooking tips, experience with corporate life, work-life balance, technical content, etc. You’d be surprised to know that millions of learners opt for an online course instead of heading to campuses/institutions for professional degrees, specializations, or to expand their knowledge. It is one of the biggest industries connected to every other industry.
Is it Profitable to Create a Course Online and Monetize?
It takes effort to craft a course that you can share or sell to an audience. Not just the quality of content you produce, you also need to look for the right platform to share it with the world. Some people use social media platforms, while some still prefer using good-old newsletters to reach out to users interested in online courses. So, there are various factors to consider when trying to monetize your:
Platform to share the course.Knowing the demand for your course.Plan a unique course structure.Using different forms of content in the course to keep things engaging.Marketing your course.Connect with your learners.
Once you figure out all the above points, you can continue your journey toward a successful online course. Technically, these sound like the basic building blocks of making an online course. But how do you do that? You can manually work/research on all the aspects that help you create an outstanding online course—but that takes time. If you would rather not waste extra efforts on the basics of creating an online, platforms like Thinkific can help.
How Thinkific Makes Creating Online Course Easy?
Thinkific helps you overcome all the challenges involved in creating an online course. In other words, it acts like a one-stop solution to ease the process of building a successful course. So, you get to focus on showcasing your expertise and engaging with your learners instead of worrying about building the course, creating interactive content, and marketing it.
What You Get With Thinkific
Thinkific provides all the essentials to boost the process of creating a remarkable course. Let me highlight some crucial offerings of Thinkific.
Course Creation Tools
Thinkific makes it easy to create courses using its course builder. You will find available templates, which you can drag-n-drop to edit. No technical expertise is necessary to use it. You can use videos, interactive files, and third-party content to enhance the courses to create an engaging learning experience. You can schedule your courses to work like live classes or offer them as self-paced learning courses.
Website Builder
In 2022, and for the foreseeable future (until Web 3.0 kicks in), everyone needs a website to market their products, be it online courses or anything else. You get ready-made templates with the option to customize them through Thinkific. So, you do not need to create an account on another service to build your website; it is right here.
Selling Tools
To facilitate subscriptions/purchases of your courses, you require e-commerce features. You can separately opt for e-commerce platforms to sell your online course. But, you need to invest more time in it. So, with Thinkific, you are already ready to sell and promote your learning products from the get-go. Thinkific provides an integrated payment processor to handle payments/refunds quickly. Furthermore, you can offer learners additional complimentary products when they purchase one of your courses. Currently, it does not let you manage taxes or present bookkeeping tools, but they say that it is a feature coming soon to their platform.
Community Feature
It won’t matter whether the course is good if you do not engage with the community of your learners. The online learners want your insights and personal suggestions in their journey to learn from you. With good community engagement, you can retain learners who buy new courses that you put out. Furthermore, a positive interaction experience will prompt learners to recommend your courses to their friends and colleagues. Thinkific allows you to connect with learners by hosting discussions, sharing important updates, allowing them to leave comments, and hosting live classes.
Scaling Your Product
What if your online course gets massively popular among learners? With Thinkific, you get the opportunity to utilize APIs, add admins to help you manage, and allow you to sell multiple seats in a course effortlessly. The platform lets you handle an overwhelming number of learners for your course when needed.
Analytics Apps Supported by Thinkific
While you get to get a lot of things, collecting data about your students/learners is essential to provide them with a personalized experience and evaluate the performance of your course. Thinkific makes this easy by letting you use analytics applications to collect and analyze your customer data. You can connect apps like:
Google AnalyticsFacebook PixelSumoMixpanelSegmentWizebank
Every analytics platform provides a range of insights. To collect all the tiny bits of information, you can try Mixpanel. And Google Analytics should be a good starting point for anyone who wants to utilize Google’s advertising and publishing platforms.
Pricing Plans for Thinkific
If all of that sounds good, you might want to consider trying Thinkific. It is free to get started and needs a premium subscription to unlock more features and tools to scale up your journey in building valuable courses. The free plan is limited to a few courses but with no cap on the number of students. You get access to the course builder as well. The basic subscription starts at $39, where you can add unlimited courses, get an admin account, custom domain, coupon functionality, one-to-one student email interaction,, and more. It will cost you more if you want to provide certifications and get priority support. Head to its pricing page to learn more.
Thinkific Support and Community
With all the paid plans of Thinkific, you get technical support and assistance ensuring everything works as you would expect. However, Thinkific also provides a “Plus” plan to empower you with advanced support where you can educate your employees, optimize your leads, and get advanced security features. If you are a popular course author with a team working with you, Thinkific’s advanced support options can help you. In addition, Thinkific also has a Facebook group to connect the community of creators. It is a private group, so you will have to request to join it before you can start interacting with other creators using Thinkific. It should be a great place to know more about how other creators succeed in utilizing the platform.
Alternative Platforms to Thinkific
Of course, there are many other platforms like Thinkific that you can try. Some of the suggested alternatives include:
EdisonOS
EdisonOS is a reasonably new platform offering various solutions, including designing/selling courses and building learning apps. It focuses on providing automated services to ease the business operations related to your EdTech brand. Unlike Thinkific, you do not get any free plan. So, you can opt for its free trial and evaluate if you require it.
FreshLearn
FreshLearn provides an all-in-one platform for various use cases. You can sell your courses, digital products, memberships to your newsletters, and more. It comes with various tools that help you enhance branding, sell coupons, engage with your community, and allow your customers to access things from a mobile app. This will be a good option if you want to explore different opportunities from a single platform. It is also free to get started.
Teachable
Teachable is a platform similar to Thinkific (in terms of features) to help you sell online courses. You can get started free or opt for its premium plans to get more out of it. The user experience looks pretty refreshing with Teachable; you can explore more to find out.
Wrapping Up
Whether it is Thinkific or another platform, everything is meant to make things easy to create and sell online courses. You must evaluate the requirements and growth opportunities you get with every platform. And then start focusing on what matters the most – building a masterclass course everyone loves.
