How to create a course on Thinkific (Full Tutorial)

in this tutorial I'm going to teach you how to create an online course on think if ik to follow along download the step-by-step checklist at Grimaud calm /go think if ik let's do it so the way think if it works is that you first set up your online school where you're going to upload your courses three courses maximum on the basic plan then on your courses you're going to upload your chapters and lessons so the lessons mostly are going to be video lessons this tutorial is divided in three sections the first one we're going to deal with how to set up your school customize the design of your school and set up integration specifically payments okay you want to get paid for your amazing work on the second section we're gonna talk about uploading your course setting up your course settings like your thumbnail on description and instructors by and all of that finally customizing the landing page for your course so you can get a lot of people to end up buying your course when joining your class whether it is free or paid and find out we're gonna talk a little bit about promoting your course section one create your online school first step create your free think giving account at I think if it calm so you go to there and you click get started for free and pretty straightforward enter your first name last name email password follow the instructions verify your report and click create account once you've created your account go to settings to edit your school name under settings site details you can change your site names here next you want to customize your own in school URL so we click on site URL and you click in this little button and you say edit URL and you'll be able to edit this part of the URL if you want to have a custom URL that doesn't say think easy calm you will have to upgrade next if you have a paid account you could upload your custom logo and you would do that here under branding logo next you will pick a theme under design your site theme library so we got our theme library you can pick from several themes the default one in this case is Empire which has four different styles which basically different color modes of the same style then you can customize your theme under the site builder here SiteBuilder is a very powerful customization tool I would start by changing your main banner image on your school and their homepage banner so we go to homepage and then we go to banner we can edit the hero image and if you want free stock pictures you can go to pixels calm or pixabay.com and you can type something like laptop and you have lots of office like pictures that you can use as your banner so in our case we could just change this by uploading a new image and we would select a file to upload and that would change our banner we could upload it select the cropping and there we go looks very nice click Save every time you make any changes and now we have our new banner you can also change all titles and descriptions if you go to headings that could be my school and here a little description of your school click Save you can create as many custom pages as you want to it the bigger one would be an about page to do that you would go back to pages then to custom pages add custom page give it a title click Add now you can change the banner and add a section there are many different section types you could have something like text with a CTA and you would edit this as well by clicking on text and you can change the title here to about click Save and then put a description of your school in this section there is a lot you can do with the site builder so I recommend you get familiar with some of the advanced design features like sections more theme settings page visibility etc for example if you go to add any section you'll see that there are many different section types you can add additional products banners categories a countdown timer frequently asked questions images social proof like reviews logos testimonials which will be very handy specifically when you're creating landing pages for your courses that takes care of the basic design of your online school next we're going to complete your instructor profile under manage learning content instructors we go to - learning content click on instructors and then you will edit your profile here where you can change your name your email a little description of your experience and a picture next we're going to connect stripe or papers you can collect payments we do that at market sell integrations and then you would connect your stripe account by clicking this button or enter these details for your PayPal account once you've entered your details you'll be able to start collecting money yeah to complete setting up your school you would connect your email marketing which is a paid only feature but it would be useful if you already have a tool like MailChimp or Constant Contact or convertkit which is the one I use that way every time a student signs up you could put them on an email sequence to check up on their progress and make sure that they're happy with what they're learning and to increase the engagement of your students section to create your first course now the moment of truth we're going to create our first course on think afaik so we go to man's learning content click on courses click on new course and you have a bunch of different options blank preset mini course flagship course women a replay membership resource library and if you want to start with a kind of a template for a typical course you could use the flagship course which is going to pre populate your course with some chapter and lessons in draft mode and then you could edit them but let's go with the blank option give it a name click create course great our first course is created so we named it now we're going to create the chapters so let's say that we're gonna have three chapters chapter oh one save let's add a second chapter chapter to save and a third chapter chapter 3 save now you could adolescence manually one by one inside each chapter but if you've already created your course you can use the bulk importer and add all your lessons at once under each chapter so that's what we're going to do and what I like to do is when I create a course is I create as many folders as chapters and I put the video lessons inside each folder and then all I have to do is I can drag all these files into the chapter that I want to like that one and now the files will be uploaded it will take a little while depending on how big each video is you can also select files if I go here to chapter two I could select those ones there and then I could do the same thing for chapter three and I could go to my course and chapter three and boom now we just wait a little bit and all our files and all our lessons will be uploaded now that all the lessons are applauded you could rename the lessons really depends on what was the original file name of each lesson my case their name properly so I don't have to do much but if you wanted to change the title you just go here type a new title and click Save next we would add a lesson descriptions this is optional but once you upload a as a lesson you can scroll down and add some text here which is great to give some context or links to other resources or whatever you want to do you can even embed more videos here if you want it's a very powerful editor the next thing is you could add downloadable materials like a PDF or worksheets so you just scroll down and you could select files and go to downloads and then in with app load a PDF file and you can upload several files if you want to and you click Save and then your students will be able to watch the video read a description and download any additional materials there is also the option to create assignments but that's only available in the paid plans however quizzes are free they're available on the free plan and the way you add a quiz is to just click on add a lesson and you can see you have many different options here so here you will click on quiz and then you will start creating the different choices for each question you will select the correct answer and you're done with your quiz great so now we have our course uploaded we're going to customize the settings of this courses specifically the first thing we're going to do is change the URL under manager learning content courses and settings we go there to settings under our course and we can change this URL if you wanted to to something more SEO friendly next we're going to upload a course a thumbnail we go to a course image and description we click on upload we will select an image uploaded the image has been uploaded and we click Save to make sure it's saved now we can enter cert description for the course something like this and we click Save again to make sure is saved another thing that you can do is select the player appearance and the player is the video player is going to play your lessons and to do that you would go to course player appearance you can select either a light theme or dark theme there's other settings that are available on the pro version as well but I like the dark theme why not as you're making these changes you can always preview your course to see how they're looking you can see we have the dark player and we can check different lessons and this would be the same experience as your students would go through now a very important thing is to set the pricing so we go to pricing and we can either make it free or a one-time payment and for that you have to have already connected your stripe or PayPal account to do so and if you have upgraded to a paid plan you can also set a subscription or membership or a monthly payment plan so we finished creating the course now we're going to customize the course landing page the way the theme builder works in think if ik is by sections and when you're building your landing page for your course I suggest that you add seven sections to increase conversions by default you're going to have a banner then a description of your course then the curriculum people can see the lessons and the chapters of your course then they can learn a little bit about you so you can add an instructor bio section as well then frequently asked questions testimonials a social proof and finally another call to action below default because this is going to be pretty long and eventually your potential students are going to be scrolling down you want to make sure they have several options throughout the landing page to buy your course and of course you can add more sections but I think this would be the minimum amount of sections to make sure that you have an effective landing page now let's build all these sections inside the theme builder in think--if ik the first thing we're going to do is to upload a custom banner for our course we go to design your site site builder click on courses select your course and now we can see the landing page for our course with the different sections we have a banner and curriculum sections by default click on the banner click on the hero image click upload a new image we're gonna select the course banner now upload safe now we're going to add a call to action button to our banner to do that we click the Add button under the banner section now we can click on the button and change the text to something like by now then we have to select which page the students are going to be redirected when they click on the button which in this case should be the checkout page and we have to select which product which would be our course and if we had a prices we could select the price as well here now we click Save and we have our button ready to complete our landing page we're going to add five more sections starting with the course description section so we go back to our course landing page we click add section we type text text and media and now we've added that section we're going to put it on top of curriculum and now we could edit the text and add a description here let's click Save always now we're going to add an instructor section we type instructor and we have to add an instructor bio and right now there's only one instructor so I'm going to choose me here my instructor buyer is there next we're going to add a section for frequently asked questions go back another section frequently asked questions and here we will edit these questions to suit our course click Save add a testimonials section as a social proof click Save we would also edit the testimonials here we can add pictures and the name of the person giving the testimonial and the testimonial itself finally we're going to add a call to action section click Add section call to action and then we would edit this section we would change this button to by now as well which we can do easily click on the button by now check out page select a product and we select a price if we've connected our account with stripe or paper click Save and we have pretty much our first course a landing page and we can scroll here to see it and we can rearrange the sections or add more sections if required it's in this beautiful our course is ready to go so we are going to publish it we go back to manage learning content click on courses select our course we're going to review that everything looks good and now we're going to go to the publish tab select published click Save and the course has been successfully published so we go back to design your site and we preview our site we should be able to see our first course and as you can see here is listed in our landing page we click on the course and we can see our beautiful course with all the sections that we just added now your main landing page for your school may look a little bit sparse if you only have one or two courses so you could set it up that when people go to the main URL of your school it redirects them to the landing page of any of your courses in this case this course so to do that you go to your admin panel click on site builder click on homepage click on ready rect and select one of your courses so in our case it's just going to be our first course click Save now anytime anyone goes to the main URL of our school they will be redirected to our landing page for our course and that covers everything that you need to know to create your own in school and your first course section 3 promote your course now it's time to promote your course and get some students now this topic could cover several tutorials so what I did is I put three items that you could check to start learning how to promote one is this link to think it's own course launch an article that would give you several tips on the best way to launch your course then something I always do is promote on social media Facebook Instagram YouTube Twitter etc and I also like to promote via email but for that you have to build an email list building an email list is something very important if you want to do your own marketing and I highly recommend this article by Brian Harris which is called how to build an email list a proven system for getting a thousand subscribers which is an extremely in-depth article with all the different steps you can take in order to build your email list and grow it so I recommend you take some time and read it as well because it would help you a lot on promoting your online course and we're done you just learned how to create an online course on think epic congratulations [Music]

Channel: Grumo Media

Views: 43,190

Keywords: How to create a course on Thinkific from scratch, sell courses on Thinkific, create a course on Thinkific, teach on Thinkific, how to use thinkific, thinkific tutorial 2020, thinkific landing page tutorial, thinkific full tutorial, create an online course on Thinkific

Id: mIpFn88_wHg

Length: 19min 9sec (1149 seconds)

Published: Thu May 14 2020