Transcription
In this video, I'll show you how to create your first course in Thinkific step by step from sign up all the way through to publishing your curriculum. First, I'll show you how to build your course curriculum using chapters and lessons to structure your course content, and then, second, I'll show you everything else that you need to complete before you can sell your course: important settings, establishing your price, and preparing your course landing page for publishing. By the end of the video, you'll understand all of the basics of the Thinkific platform needed to create your course, and if you stick around until the end, I'll cover a few more advanced settings.
Thinkific has a 14-day free trial, but if you use our affiliate link listed into the description below, that will extend your free trial to 30 days. It doesn't cost you anything extra, and we appreciate it when you use this link as it helps us bring you great free tutorials like this one.
I'm going to enter my email, and then start my 30-day trial. My name is Dan by the way, and I'll also fill out some basic personal information on this first screen. Then you do need to enter a credit card for the trial, but it won't be charged, then Claim Offer. I'm going to skip personalization for now, and just get right to creating my course.
When you first sign up, Thinkific is going to highlight a few places within the application. They have sort of a guided workflow to get you going here. And we're going to create our first digital product. You can see the different types of products that you can create within Thinkific, but we'll create a course. Now I personally like to learn the basics first, then see if I can trust AI to streamline things for me. So for now, let's click Skip, Create Blank Product.
And here we have our course creation dashboard, and we can see our course is titled "New Course", and we can see that it is in draught mode. If we had used the AI-assisted setup, we would've seen a different title here by default. To change it, we can skip ahead to the Settings, and then, right at the top, we can change this to our new course name. For me, it's going to be "YouTube Ranking Academy". The action buttons are often going to be in blue to help you navigate, and we'll click Save Settings here. Let's go back to our curriculum, and then we'll refresh the page to see our new name take effect.
Thinkific has a nice clean UI that really helps guide us through the process. Let's click Add Chapter. Let's call it "The Basics". We'll select Set New Lessons To Draught By Default. When we think about the curriculum hierarchy, each chapter that we create can have one or more lessons. Checking this box ensures that we won't have any lessons go live accidentally. Click Save. We'll use the top navigation to proceed through our course setup. If we go back to the Curriculum tab, we can add our second chapter using this button along the bottom. Let's call this one "Setting Up Your Channel". And one more, "Creating Your First Video". (mouse clicking) So now we have three chapters, a skeleton of our course. We can simply drag and drop chapters to rearrange if needed. And if we click these chapter titles, we can go back and edit the names. So in this case, perhaps I wanna label each chapter with a number. (mouse clicking)
Now, under Chapter 1, we can add a lesson to see the different lesson types. I'll choose Video for this first lesson, but take note that if exam functionality is crucial for you, you'll need a Grow or a Plus plan to be able to access that. Let's click Video. For my lesson title, I'll paste in "How The Algorithm Works". Once you have videos uploaded, you can select them from this dropdown, or, because we don't, we can upload a brand new one first. Take note that the maximum video size is two gigabytes. If you have videos larger, Thinkific suggests compressing your videos using HandBreak. I've used this before, and it's a very reputable tool. Let's browse our files, and we'll select our first lesson video file. The video preview here is going to take a little bit of time to process after that upload is complete. This is going to take some time to upload, process, and encode. In the meantime, we can see this message, thumbnails, closed captions, and settings are gonna be found in the video library. We're gonna take a look at that as soon as we save this first lesson.
If you want, you can add some text to the video. I'll paste in my pre-written summary from when I was preparing my course, and you have all the normal tools that you would expect for formatting here. We could bold algorithm, for example, and add some bullets. And I'm not going to here, but you could also add downloadable content here. And this could be helpful if you wanted to add a PDF, or a file for any lesson where your students need to follow along. In the Lesson Settings, you could make this a free preview lesson. I'm not going to do that for now. You can make it a prerequisite, so students will be required to complete this before any lessons after. You could enable discussions for this lesson, I'll do that, and you can make this video downloadable if you wanted. We also could change the icon here. There are a small selection of options, and this label if we wanted to, but I'll keep these the same, and save this lesson.
Now let's go back, and take a quick look at the video library settings now under Manage Video Settings. That will open up the video library in a new tab. We could click anywhere on this row, this is the video that we just uploaded for lesson one, or we have a menu here, and we can click Edit. At the top, we have our video preview, and right underneath is the thumbnail. This one has been selected by default. Similar to other video players, Thinkific recommends a 1920x1080 pixel image, and a 16:9 aspect ratio. We can upload here. Let's select our file. Pretty simple, but we could design anything more in depth if we wanted.
If you're transcribing your video lessons, you can typically download the .SRT files, so I've done that for my first lesson. Let's find that. (mouse clicking) I'll select English here, and then, once you save, you then can choose to enable Auto-show Captions if you'd like. If we come back up here, we can see these captions are displayed in the bottom third. And then we can also change the appearance of the player by always showing the play bar if we'd like. And we can change the player colour. So if we toggle this, you can see that bar disappears on the bottom. I like to leave that on. And then we could change this to something a little bit more neutral, maybe just like black to match our thumbnails. And then, finally, if you wanna see any summary statistics for your videos, that can be found in the video library as well.
Now that we've updated this video in the video library, we can go back to our previous tab, and we can save our lesson. And then we can always preview in the top right here. This will open it in a new tab, and we can get a sense of how our lesson looks, and how our chapters and lessons are laid out on the left-hand pane. Let's close this for now.
As we work left to right along the top, I wanna show you the content uploader. This is really helpful if you already have the bulk of your course ready to upload all at once, and you have mainly PDF video or audio lessons. Let's click Upload Content under our second chapter, and here I'll select three more videos that I already have prepared. I'll open and I'll upload these three files. You can see the count. Thinkific shows us that multiple files are currently uploading at once. In the Content Uploader tab, we still have the ability to rename these lessons, so I could clean these up a little bit, and then we can move lessons across existing chapters, so we don't ever need to worry too, too much about whether or not we've uploaded everything in the right spot to begin with. We can rename this one, again.
If you want to replicate anything from a prior lesson, we can also copy a lesson. So in the destination chapter, let's say I wanna copy a lesson to Chapter 3. We can open the menu, and select Copy Lesson From, and we could copy 2A, for example, and that will slot in as a copy in Chapter 3. And if we need to delete any given lesson, we can use the trash icon from the Content Uploader tab, or, if we open the lesson and we scroll down, we can see the Delete Lesson button here as well with one final confirmation.
Now that we have the basics down for course creation, I wanna show you the settings that you have for customization. We won't go too in depth on these, but I do wanna show you what's possible to change, and where you would do so. Here's the course name that we changed from earlier. If you had multiple instructors set up, you could select a new one here. Access settings of Private and Hidden will give you more options over how students can enrol. Private courses remain public, but students must request access, and hidden courses don't appear at all, and you need the direct link to enrol. If you have a text-heavy course, and you think much of the value is in the text itself, you might consider disabling text copying. In my opinion, that might be an annoyance to students, so I leave the text copyable. And if you need to remove the course at any time after publishing, or even in the draught state that we are in right now, this is where you would do so.
You should prepare a course image and course product description. We can click Upload here, and add a short description. You have some control over how your course player appears. To illustrate, I've opened up the course player preview. We can see this is how it looks. Let's change it to Dark Theme. We could add a new primary colour, and we could change the font if we wanted. If we save, come to the course player preview and refresh, you can see how those changes will take effect. I'm going to revert, save again, and stick with that Light Theme that we had. And I'm not sure that I would use this, but we could add a course player logo if we wanted as well. If we save, refresh our preview once more, you can see that's how the logo will show.
Progress and completion are important for keeping some students engaged. You can have videos autoplay. I like to require 100% video completion, but I don't want to necessarily overwhelm my students with chapter completion messages and certificates. I'll disable this. If you did wanna add a completion certificate, you can select one from this dropdown if you have one existing, or, if you don't, I'll open this in a new tab, and it will bring you to Users and Certificates in the left-hand navigation menu, so you can always get back to this screen if you need to. From here, to get back to where we were, you could select Products, Courses, and you could then re-edit the course that we had created, and now you're back to Settings under Progress And Completion.
Skipping over Drip Schedule for the moment, Admins, Revenue, Partners, And Affiliates are all areas that you might wanna be aware of if your courses or offerings are growing in scale. But as a single instructor with no team, you likely won't need to worry about these.
Now coming back to the Drip Schedule. The Drip Schedule is something that's important to know if you don't want all of your lessons to be available at once. In that case, you can drip them out. Enabling Drip will create a new navigation menu tab. Let's save and open that. Up here is the Drip Schedule tab, we've already saved, so let's continue, Create A Drip Schedule. You have the flexibility to choose a different drip type, and then if you click on each chapter over here, you can enter the drip schedule for each lesson based on the drip type you've selected. Let's add one and two, Save. Now if you wanna rework this, the easy way to do so is to go back to Drip Type. If you select another drip type, and Save, you'll get this notification that doing so will clear out your courses schedule. And if that's what you want to be able to redo and rework this, that's the easy way to clear those out. Finally, to remove the drip schedule and make your course lessons available all at once, click Delete on Drip Type, again, Thinkific will prompt you. Let's select Okay. Then go back to Settings, Drip Schedule, and then we can toggle Enable Drip Schedule. And if we save, we should watch this tab disappear.
At this point, we've got our course in good shape, so we need to price and package it for publishing. Thinkific has fairly flexible pricing options, but I'm going to price this course as a one-time payment. This is fitting for my type of audience, and it's also more fitting given the fact that I'll launch my lessons all at once when the course goes live, but the functionality does exist to charge a subscription, to charge a monthly payment, and even to set up additional payment plans. I'm going to charge $99, and I'll let my students have lifetime access, so I'll leave Enrollment Duration blank. Let's save primary pricing, and here Thinkific has flagged that products can't be purchased if payments set up isn't complete. That's because we need a method to receive payment when our students enrol. Let's set up our payments now. That's going to open in a new tab.
In another helpful message, Thinkific states, "Your email must be verified to enable a card processor." If you go to the email that you signed up with, you'll see a welcome email likely, and you have a verification email that they would've sent you first, and if you confirm, that will bring you back to your dashboard. Let's close this new tab and my email inbox, and if we refresh on our original tab, Thinkific has recognised that we've verified our account. Thinkific payments are powered by Stripe. So I'm going to set up Thinkific payments here, and that will start to walk you through your Stripe setup if you don't have an account already. Now I've hidden my personal details here, but Stripe setup will ask for your legal name, your email address, your date of birth, your home address, your phone number, and at least in the United States, your Social Security number. Click Continue.
On the review page, you might wanna change a few things under Professional Details. It's going to show your Thinkific site URL by default, but you could change that to a personal website, and embed your Thinkific offering in that if you'd like. You also might want to edit your public details. For instance, the descriptor shown on customer statements defaults, in my case, to DANS SITE, and that's not super helpful for people. I might change that to something a bit more descriptive, yet still broad, in case I sell other courses or offerings in the future. The email that you signed up with is also going to pre-populate as the customer support email. So you could change that if you need it as well. I'll cancel this. Finally, I'll agree and submit. Now that Stripe is set up, you would want to add your bank account details, so that you can actually be paid in the future. Once we close that tab, we're back in our original workflow. We're on the Pricing page. If we refresh, our primary price of 99 is saved, and there's no more message asking us to add payments.
Next we're gonna modify the landing page for our course. The page people will see when they share our course URL, and when they're deciding whether or not to buy or enrol. When you first navigate to the Landing Page tab, Thinkific will prompt you to see if you wanna start with a style preset. You can scroll through these if you'd like, but, like usual, I'm gonna start with a blank canvas. At the top, we can modify the slug of the course URL. We can call this youtube-ranking-academy, and save. Then after we select the Edit Page button, the landing page becomes much more like a classic website builder with AI assist. If we hover, we can see each section outlined in a blue highlight. We have the banner, the highlights with images, title and paragraph, text and media, and each of the different sections has an editable layout. So for the banner, I might not like this full-page image. I can select something like this, and Apply. For the highlights, I might actually just want these little thumbnails, or if I don't have images in a pinch, I could start with just the names of the highlights, and apply that.
For the individual elements within a section, Thinkific is going to give you the recommended dimensions, so that you can make this look as nice as possible. And we can change the background colours of these sections as well. We could use an image if we wanted, or here's the colour selector. I like the white, so let's cancel. We can add sections as well. So one thing we might wanna add is a video testimonial. We could come down here, scroll through the different types of sections to add, and I could click Video. If we select this, I don't have my course trailer uploaded unlisted on YouTube quite yet, but this is where you would paste that URL, and you could upload a cover image, (mouse clicking) and we could apply. This curriculum section doesn't show here in preview, but I will show you what this looks like after we publish. And then, if we scroll back up here in the top right, we can toggle between the mobile preview anytime that we want. This is how our landing page looks on mobile. We can come back to desktop.
In Page Settings, we can enable a header and footer if we wanted, so you can see what that looks like when this header and this footer are added. I kind of like that, so we can leave them. If we come back to Settings, we can also access SEO settings for this page, and Thinkific has pre-populated this for us. We could change it. We could also add some keywords here. I like to put something here, so that I'm not actively hurting myself from an SEO standpoint, but it's good to expect your main traffic will come from your existing network, your existing audience, or perhaps from your mailing list. I'll go ahead and save. And then under Brand Styles, this is where you can change fonts, colours, and corners. So we have our whole font families, and control over font weights. We can change these primary text and background colours. So you can see this is when choosing a theme, how some of these might pre-populate, and you can also round your corners if you'd like. I don't really like rounded buttons. I kind of like that crisp, clean look on some of these elements. So we'll save unrounded corners. After changing the style, this image is obviously not a great fit, so I might upload something a little different, and apply that.
Finally, I find the built-in AI helpful for filling out the copy on the course landing page. For just about any text on the page, you can click it, and click this AI button, then you can give the AI text generator a tone of voice, and some context if you like. I want this page to be friendly, and say, "This is a course to teach my students how to rank videos on YouTube". And we can generate a text. Once we've regenerated, the AI text generator will then spit out a few options, and, obviously, some of these will be easier to create ourselves than others, but if you're not a copywriter, and I'm not, this might be helpful. It can let you quickly get to a decent starting point if you don't have much copywriting experience. Once you're happy with the copy on your landing page, let's click Save in the top right. We can exit here.
The final tab is Publish up top, and we're finally ready to publish. Now, if we select Publish, we should be prompted that our lessons are still in draught. That's what it's displaying here. So if we go back to Curriculum, and we open a lesson, we can uncheck Draught. Let's do that on these other few. If we come back to Publish, that message has gone away, and we can save. After refreshing, we can see this draught status is now set to Published.
From our dashboard, we can get the link to our course by going to Courses, hovering over the published course until we see that Share link, clicking Share Your Course, and then we can copy that link here. Now that we've opened this in a new tab, our last thing is to give it a run through, and see if we wanna change anything. So already I know that I probably wanna slightly tweak this graphic. I wanna swap this one out for a genuine picture of myself. And here's how the curriculum looks once we are published. So it will show each individual lesson. And here, I probably wanna clean up this lesson name. It's always good to give this one final walkthrough before sharing with your audience for just this reason. You want it to look as professional as possible. From the course page, we could click Edit, and we could go ahead and make those changes. And if we refresh our course page, that image is looking a little bit better. I've replaced the instructor image with an image of myself, and our lesson titles are nicely adjusted. This is looking ready to share with our audience.
But first, as promised, there are a few advanced features that might help you in selling your course that I wanna show you. And those can be found under Sales, Order Bumps. If you have two products, maybe that's two courses that go together, you can offer a second course at the time of checkout for a discounted price. Here you would select your order bump product. This would be the product that you want shown on the checkout page of your course. In our case, this might be an ebook about YouTube. I would wanna create that digital download before setting up this order bump. Then we would select our course, "YouTube Ranking Academy", as the product that we want the order bump to display alongside. We would then price our order bump, that would be the ebook, and we could add some details. So order bumps are a good way to offer your audience more value and increase your revenue.
And if we go to Sales, Coupons, that's another way to entice your existing audience. Especially, for example, if you wanted to offer your course with an introductory discount. So we could set up a coupon called Launch10 with no expiry date. Thinkific will walk you through the steps here. We'll take $10 off our "YouTube Ranking Academy", click Continue, and then this code will be Launch10, and we'll allow the first 10 people that take advantage of this coupon to get this discount. And we can save. And here we see our Launch10 coupon created.
Best of luck creating and selling your course, and thanks for watching.