Transcription
How to create an online course on Thinkific.
Hello everyone and welcome back. In today's video, I'll be showing you guys step by step on how you can create your online course using Thinkific.
Now, what is Thinkific and why is it something that you should be using? Well, Thinkific is an all-in-one platform which allows you to create, market, and promote your courses, digital products, webinars, seminars, and any other type of product such as communities, coaching, memberships, and more. So, it's a very diverse platform. But the best part about using Thinkific is that instead of having to use one course creation platform, then having to subscribe to a marketing platform, then having to subscribe to an email marketing platform, instead Thinkific combines everything in one place, so you are able to access all the tools that you will need for your course creation.
Now, I have already created an account on Thinkific and we're going to be focusing on building courses. So, let's get started. Now, for this, you're first going to sign up on Thinkific. And keep in mind that your first 14 days on Thinkific are completely free. So, you can get started right now without having to worry about any additional costs. And you can choose to upgrade to a plan, which we will be discussing at the end of this video.
Now, click on products on the left and then click on courses. Once you click on courses, you will see a few different tabs. You have courses, instructors, reorder, and archived. Now when you are building a course on Thinkific, it's going to be added by an instructor and by default it's going to be you, the person who has created the Thinkific account that you are using. However, if you are someone that wants to build a course without you being the instructor, with a third-party instructor, you can go into the instructors tab and then click on new instructor. Once you click on new instructor over here, you can add another instructor if you have multiple different people teaching on Thinkific. Now, I want this to be me, so I'm just going to let it be the default instructor. And we're going to go back into courses and click on new course.
Now, whenever you're building a course on Thinkific, it's going to have two options. Either you can get started with the AI version, which is the AI overview. In this, you write a description to generate your course outline. You're able to customize this completely later on, but if you want a general outline, this can provide a pretty nice one for you. Or you can skip and create a blank project. This really depends on your personal preference and for us, I want this to be "Introduction to Digital Marketing."
Now, this is the course I want to create and for this, I'm going to use the AI tool to provide me with a course outline based on my description. So in this, I can structure this however I want, but I'm just going to provide it with a simple description. I want a comprehensive course covering the fundamentals of digital marketing, including SEO, social media marketing, content marketing, and analytics. Now, I'm going to click on create. Once I create the outline, I'm going to customize it so it ensures that it covers all aspects of marketing that I want to do. So, we're just going to wait for a couple of seconds for our basic draft to be generated.
Now, our draft has been generated. By default, it's going to show you the landing page tab first, but we're going to go back into curriculum on the top left. Now, once I open up the curriculum, these are the chapters that have been created, and it has created five chapters: Intro, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, Analytics, and Performance Tracking. Now, these are pretty nice, but I want this to be a bit different. So, this has each individual chapter that they have created has two lessons: "What is digital marketing?" and then a Word document that includes, you know, information about whatever was taught in the video class. But I want to customize this. So I want to include a quiz after each individual chapter.
So to do that, I'm going to click on add lesson over here. Once I click on add lesson, I will have several different types of lessons that I can create. This includes video, text, PDF, quizzes, audio, and other types of file formats which we can use. Now, you might say, "Hey, I don't want to include a video content base." Well, you don't have to. You can add any type of content that you prefer. This is just a default example, and by default, most courses do have a video format. So, it's going to use video. However, if you don't like anything that is added into the template, you can just scroll down, click on delete lesson, click on yes, delete this lesson, and that particular lesson will be deleted or that chapter will be deleted. And you can add your own. But for me, I want to build a course over here. So, I'm going to click on quiz. I want to build a quiz over here. So, I'm going to build a quiz like so. Then, I'm going to enter the title of the quiz that I want to use. Let's say the title that I want to use for my quiz is going to be "Chapter 1 Quiz."
And then after that, we have one option which is to create with AI. Now, for this, first, you're going to have to add some content. But I'll explain this to you and then I'm going to demonstrate this to you later on as well. In the "Create with AI" tab, what this does is that this analyzes all the existing PDFs you've uploaded, the text that you've uploaded, and if your videos have transcriptions, then it's going to analyze all of that data. And based upon all the information that is provided in those file formats, it's going to build a quiz off of those. So, this is really great, especially if you are someone that does not want to build quizzes by themselves. You want a creative quiz and you want something that is unexpected by your students or your members, then this is great. So, first I'm going to add some content and later on I'm going to discard these changes and I'm going to go into this tab over here and I'm going to add some content here.
Now, I have added some content into these two lessons. These are both text-based lessons that I've added some content into. And once I have done that, I'm going to proceed by clicking on add lesson and then click on quiz. Now I'm going to click on over here and then click on the "Create with AI" and I want to generate just two questions. And now I'm going to click on generate questions and it's going to generate two suggested questions based upon the content that is present within our PDF, within our text or video files. The question: "What is the primary benefit of SEO?" Then question two: "Which of the following is the best practice for social media marketing?" If you like these questions, you're simply going to click on accept and add to quiz. If you want to make the options a bit more confusing, you can add more options or you can also alter some of the options so they sound a bit more alike to make your quizzes more difficult. I like these questions. So, I'm just going to click on accept and add to quiz. And just like that, I can click on save lesson. And I have two questions for my quiz that is added to every chapter. So, you don't have to add everything manually. This can make it really easy for you to save time. And I can make this a prerequisite. And you guys can see we have a bunch of different options including the icons and the way that we want this to be displayed as well. And I have to add a quiz name, which is "Chapter 1 Quiz." And then I'm going to click on save lesson. And now my lesson is on the left like so. And this way we can add more chapters and add more lessons. And there are unlimited content blocks you can create. So on the basic version of using Thinkific, you're able to create unlimited courses as well as add as many lessons as you want and there's no cap for that. Additionally, you can also copy lessons from some of your other courses if you are teaching similar items. For example, if I have a separate course on SEO optimization, let's say a lesson for that is a very general lesson which I can include in my marketing course. I can directly click on this tab here, click on copy lesson from, and copy the lesson from that other course. This makes it really easy for you to save and track everything.
Now, once we have our chapters ready, we can move towards our content uploader. Now, whenever you're adding your lessons and you have video content, for a lot of my personal courses, I have a lot of video content that needs to be added, which can be very, very difficult to navigate. So instead of having to open up every lesson manually, then clicking on browse file, finding the one file that I have attached to this one and then selecting that, the easier way to do all of this without the hassle is going into the content uploader. When you go into your content uploader, it shows you each chapter and it's going to allow you to upload content directly into the chapter as a lesson. So instead of having to go ahead and manually create a lesson and then select video options, this does it all for you. It's an automated process and you don't have to waste so much time in doing everything manually.
Now moving on, we have our settings for our courses on Thinkific. So by default, we are the instructor and these settings are really important to navigate. We have "Digital Marketing Essentials." Now you have two options for access: private and hidden courses. Private courses mean that a course is going to remain public, but a student has to request access before they can enroll. This is done often for free courses. So, if you're only accepting a limited number of members, even if the course is free. A hidden course is a course which is not displayed on your website, it's not going to be marketed. It's only going to have one landing page, and unless a person has a direct link to the landing page, they would not be able to access it. And then we also have security, which allows us to disable text copying from our courses, which reduces the number of people that are copying and reduces the number of people that are stealing, basically. And this is a really large issue with course creators. Their videos get recorded and then uploaded for free. So you can disable text copying. Below that, you have your course image and course description. So you can click on upload here to display an image for your course, as well as choose the course player appearance and primary styles and fonts. So for us, I want to use this turquoise color and then the font I'm going to change as well. Then I also have my course player logo, which I can alter, as well as our video lesson progress. Now, this is really important to toggle. Often times members or students are not going to watch videos completely and they move or skip towards the next video and they skip a lot of important content. For that reason, you have this "Video Completion Required" tab, which allows us to navigate or which allows us to set a certain amount of video that people need to complete before they can skip to the next. So I like to set this at like 80 or 70%, which means that the person has covered most of the content from the video and then they're skipping to the next, if they don't find certain elements necessary for them to learn over and over again. Then we also have the disabled chapter completion message. I like this message, so I'm going to keep it. And then we have completion certificates. So if you want to provide certificates for completion for your members or students, you can choose to select this option. Once you do that, it's going to ask you to select a certificate, which you can create later on. You can also set a Thinkific certificate expiration. So after a period of 300 days, the certificate expires, or after a certain number of years, the certificate expires, and then you can just click on create certificate to create your free certificate. Then you can also set up social sharing, as well as manage your admins and revenue partners.
Now after that, we have our drip scheduler. First, we're going to save these settings. I'm not going to offer a course certificate.
Now after that, we have our drip schedule. Drip schedules are really important and we have three types of drip schedules we can create. Drip schedules mean either the course content is released when a student enrolls in the class, based upon their enrollment date, when they start their course, or on a specific date. Now, what this means is that, for example, if I go into my calendar, my course was launched on the 2nd and someone enrolled on the 5th. Would they have access to all of the chapters and all of the lessons on the 5th as soon as they access, or would it be slowly revealed to them? I like the slow reveal. I don't make it too slow. I only give a couple of days of gaps, which allows the people to access, read through, and go through all of the initial chapters first before they unlock the next chapter. So based upon a personally, I like it when the student start date is the drip type. So, usually I like to manage how many days after the student starts opening the courses would the next chapter be revealed. You can also put this on a specific date. I just like to go with the second option. Click on save. Click on okay.
Now, once you do that, you're going to go ahead and set up your course schedule. So, you're going to select each chapter from the left and you're going to choose how many days after the start date. So, this I like to set up at 0 days, which is the first chapter. Then for the second chapter, I'm going to set this up as 2 days. The third chapter, I'm going to set this up as double then two. So that means four. That means 2 days after the SEO chapter is unlocked, they're going to be able to unlock the social media marketing one. Then after that, it's going to go to six and then it's going to go to 8. So I have a 2-day gap between all of the chapters that are revealed to my members or to my viewers.
Now after that, you have pricing. So you have four basic pricing plans. Either it can be free with unlimited access, you can choose to charge students a one-time payment, or you can choose to build a subscription or membership subscription or monthly plan. Now, these two are different. Memberships are recurring payments that are going to happen every month for access to course content until they want access. They're going to pay the membership and be able to access the course. As soon as they decide not to pay the membership fee, then they're not going to have access to the course. Monthly payment plans means that it has a set price. So let's say it's $500, which can be divided across five months as a $100 every month. And after the 5 months, they would again still have access to the course. It would not expire just because they stopped paying. They paid the full price. So these are all the pricing options which you can choose and you can choose whichever one suits you the most.
Now going into our final page, which is our landing page. Landing page customization is really easy. You can click on edit page. By default, it's going to take some of your course content and build a content section for you. And you just have to alter the images, which you can do by clicking on the image and then clicking on upload or expanding to fill. And you can fill out with any image that you want.
Now, after this, we have our final section, which is to upload our course. So, we're going to go back and we're going to go over everything. If everything looks fine, you can go into publish and then click on published. And once you do that, your course is ready.
Now, this is how you can create an amazing course on Thinkific. And if we take a look at the pricing of Thinkific, it's only $49 per month to sell unlimited courses on their basic plan. Their most popular plan is their Start plan at $99, which allows you to create unlimited digital downloads and coaching and webinars, as well as live sessions and memberships as well. And their Grow plan starts at $199 with unlimited courses, communities, and much more. I hope you guys enjoyed this video and if you did, make sure to leave a like and subscribe.