How To Set-Up Your Own Online School on Thinkific

[Music] today's session guys i'm going to teach you how to set up your own online school your actual lms platform itself and we're showing you how easy it is to publish and launch an online course i'm going to show you how to do this whether it's an online membership program a coaching program a membership academy a mini course a lead magnet a digital book you can use these platforms to very very quickly and easily launch your own products is everyone in the right room right exciting okay now one of the first things i want to share with you guys is that there are many different platforms out there there are many different softwares out there and i don't know about you i'm one of those kinds of girls who doesn't spend my money on on clothes and shoes i spend my money on tech and software because i'm a tech addict junkie and i absolutely love it and the thing that can happen to us all going out into this online world is that we can become so distracted by which is the best tool which is the best thing we should be buying in which one of the millions of ones that are out there should i use and the truth is guys there is no at the moment one perfect software for anything and to in order to kind of know which one is the right one for us we have to pick something um and it may take a little bit of chopping and changing and moving around until you find the right one that works for you because each different platform has different pros and cons and when you compare them all together you just kind of have to go with the one that has the most pros for you your business and your particular clients in terms of online courses online coaching programs educational based products and services there are three main types of software that you can use to share them type number one is a marketplace a marketplace example that you may have all heard of is udemy udemy now pros and cons with the marketplace a marketplace is basically a supermarket for courses now the pros of this are that these platforms that you put your content onto already have audiences of users so udemy for example has over 30 million users so if you put something on udemy you know quite naturally by default somebody's going to find that course they're going to come across it in the various promotions that udemy do and you may make some sales however the cons of udemy r or any marketplace like udemy like skillshare is another one is that like any supermarket if you have bread on a supermarket shelf the customers that are walking through are not your customers they're kohl's as customers or they're woolly's customers so on udemy even though these students are rolling in your course that you've put on their shelf the fact is they're still udemy students so you do not get their email addresses and you only get a tiny percentage of the income udemy take the majority of the sale a bit like amazon does if you're selling products on there so why would you use it right now udemy can also discount those courses to the point where you only get maybe a couple of dollars tops for your course why use it the pro of a marketplace is that it has 30 million students right so what i tend to recommend to experts and course creators is that you use these platforms for the purposes of exposure and self-promotion in a way that still gives value right there's no point just selling stuff and putting rubbish up there you still need it to help people if you're putting a product can everyone just mute themselves if you're not talking guys sorry i was getting a bit of feedback from my end here um please do interrupt me though if you have a question um you if you have a a cheap or a free product or new to me obviously you're going to get found and in udemy's platform you have an instructor bio up on the corner of your students dashboard so in your videos you can say to people and if you want to follow me and see some of my other courses click on my profile button at the top and you will be able to find my website so it will actually allow you so i keep losing my thing here it will allow you to put a link to your website into your social media channels and that's how you can encourage people to move from the udemy platform and come to your own platforms where your other stuff is hosted so that takes me to product type number two type of software is a learning management system now a learning management system is basically a piece of software that has been custom created for you to be able to very easily upload your own content brand it completely as your own platform you can make it look like your own website feel like your own website you connect it to your own email marketing software you own the students you own the customers you own the database you own what goes on your platform you keep all of the money that's on it now there are heaps out there to choose from i'm a partner with pretty much all of them so i'm not making recommendations based on which one pays me affiliate commission i'm partnered with them all the ones that you most likely will have heard of that are the most talked about and kind of top of the market are thinkific kajabi learn worlds and soundcards so they're all extremely similar guys and i've given you these are all my affiliate links each of these i do have um they come with special free trials that you can't get in the public markets because i'm a partner with them i've got some free trial links so what i do tend to recommend to people is go and get the free trials on all of them and see which one you prefer to use from from the user's perspective because really the similarities between them all in terms of features and functions are very very close now in that in saying that um i am partners with all of these guys and they are all fantastic however i have been using thinkific for for a long time i do have accounts with all of them um thinkific is my recommendation in the fact that it has the most advanced features and functions or tends to stay ahead of the crowd the most um and i find the easiest to use but that purely just comes from a personal user perspective please do the free trials and see which one you like best is the only way i can recommend which one you're going to enjoy and so these links here will give you free trials and this particular one for think i think is a three month free trial on their pro plan so it's well worth jumping in to have a play with this particular one i also have a completely free of charge course um on how to set up your thinkific site so everything i'm going to cover over in speed today i'm going to actually share my screen and show you how to publish your course um this is all done in depth much slower and much more detailed in that free course there so that's sarah cornycon forward slash learn thinkific um that will take you through that now if you've got my starter kit i also have demos on all of these other platforms as well so don't think it's just one i'm singling out for any particular reason other than we can only cover one today now the third type of platform i mentioned there's three so you've got your marketplace which i recommend you just keep your cheap and free stuff on for exposure you've got your lms which is where i recommend you put all of your paid content because your lms is something that you own you control and is totally yours like having your own website the third place is a website plug-in and you may have heard of sites like learndash that enables you to basically turn your own website into an online course platform um great um i'm not poo pooing this with this with this comment i'm gonna make but just for you to be aware of i've mentioned it before a plug-in requires added on hosting like wistia or vimeo so you have to have separate video hosting software if you were to upload those videos directly onto your site it would slow your site down and crash it and you do have to be a little bit more techy than you need to be for an lms that has been purpose built for a great student experience so out of all those three platforms i do recommend the lms it's better for the student and it's definitely easier for you as the administrator the other thing is is these lms platforms there's tons of training videos on them there's courses like mine out there that are free that show you how to use them they have a customer service dashboard if anything goes wrong you've always got their customer service to go back to to help you if something's broken all right that's just another one of the many reasons why i just say go for this make your life easier right so this is i'm going to demonstrate just one of them today because we obviously don't have a huge amount of time this is thinkific and my top recommendation these days at the moment and this is what the back end of it looks like to you as the course creator now obviously you will have nothing on your dashboard at this stage i've been here for a while and over time built out lots and lots and lots of different courses um so this is all we're going to do guys and first of all you can ju you can just choose your your design your layout you can add your own branding you can add your own colors you can add your own logos so that just like your own website nobody knows that this is on thinkific or learn worlds or kajabi all of them allow you to completely and utterly custom it so that your students know no different you have like a courses tab or a courses button on your website and that just redirects people here and all the branding stays consistent so guys what we're going to do quite simply is press add a new course and it will give you various templates here i normally just choose a blank template and we're going to name our course how to xyz right so whatever we want to call it we can change it later press create course and it's going to take us to our course building area now if you followed any my training today or want to watch any of my training um go to cerakon.com forward starter kit and i've got a whole bunch of free videos on how to create an online course but in terms of now assuming you've filmed your videos you've created your course content this is the next stage so the first thing we're going to do is add our modules and then we're going to add our lesson titles so that we can we've got kind of the place to upload all of our content so here we're in the curriculum builder we're going to press add a chapter now chapter is just thinkifics word for modules so you might like to call this module one how to xyz or whatever theme that it is is your module so i'm gonna go in first of all and just add every single module that i've got so it said woohoo successful add a new chapter let's put in module two just for the sake of example that's as far as i'm gonna go blah blah blah blah whatever that's gonna be about and save so now we've got our modules in here now the next thing we're gonna do is add our lessons so when we click on adolescent we've got a number of different i'm going to make it's bigger so it's easy to see a number of different lesson types that we can actually create now my favorite and my most recommended is the video lesson because it is the most engaging type of lesson that you can actually create um and it really really um creates that extra level of visual um connection uh with your with your particular learners so the other reason i love video lesson is because it also allows you to add text and downloads so here's what it looks like in draft mode i'm going to make it a bit smaller again so we can see here but as you can see here we can first of all add our lesson so this lesson might be how to make a cup of tea whatever it might be and then we simply drag and drop our video there boom done now i've got a few i'm just going to add some random examples here because i've already got some uploaded so now it will pre-fill our video for us and then we can add text if we want to so we can write anything we want in this lesson we're going to cover how to xyz and how to abc and you can add in images and stuff if you want to and then we can even add downloads so let's pretend there's a worksheet that comes with this video in the video i might say okay guys now go and download the worksheet that comes with this lesson and make sure you fill out exercise one so i press drop down and i drag and drop any file i want to there that they can download now i can choose whether i want to make this video video downloadable or not downloadable so it's going to protect our content that way if we want to and i'm going to tick it as downloadable so i can show you what it looks like for a student and simply press save so this is my favorite type of lesson because you get to have that video you get to have any text you can hyperlink to other links if you want to and you have your downloadable files and in fact i will just add a random file just to show you what it looks like for the student behind the scenes so you can see there it just uploads it there we go and i'm going to press save so that saves it in there for us so i keep going through now and adding my different lessons i'm just going to give you a little look at what some of the other lessons do we've got a quiz here so if you're wanting to add a pop quiz or something in uh first we get to title the quiz so i might call this pop quiz whatever here um and what type of question is it we're going to have one correct answer and question is what is sarah's favorite food all right here we go so that's our question and we can start putting a number of different choices in here so let's add in choice number one is chips let's pretend that's the correct answer um and choice number two is wine in fact we're gonna change that to not be the correct answer and wine is definitely gonna be the correct answer so we can also add an explanation in there if we want to now i want to add another question so question number two let's scroll here's question number two we've got one correct answer the question is what is sarah's favorite thing to do all right so this is where we can just pop in whatever we like eat chips or drink wine all right so let's just pop that in let's put that as the correct answer and as you can see we can keep adding as many questions as we want but i'm just going to save it like that for now um let me just check it's not on draft it is on draft if it's on draft the students can't see it let's go through the other different types of lessons here we've got a multimedia lesson so what's that a multimedia lesson allows you to add any url for anything that shows up right inside the course platform so one way i love to use this is if i want to collect student questions for example so let me see here i'm going to type in my concept to course student questions sheet so basically what i did is i went and created a google sheet um inside google drive great good google sheet and it says here this is the course here are your questions for the next live call so this allows the students to put their questions in and then i answer all the questions and then there's this record where people can find all the answers so what i do is i grab the url for that google sheet i go back to my course area and i paste the link to that google sheet in this multimedia lesson here and i might call this lesson please put your questions for sarah here and i'm going to show you what this looks like for the students by the way behind the scenes i'm going to press save so now i've got a multimedia lesson there now this would also work let's pretend you guys have a calendly right so people can book coaching calls with you this is a really clever way to get more bookings so if i've got my calendly link over here this is where people can come and book paid calls with me i can grab that url go back here press add a lesson add a multimedia lesson and i can call it book oopsy book a call with sarah and i can slot my calendly link in there and press save so now people can literally book their appointment from within their course area other types of lessons you've got audio lessons where you can drag and drop audio files you can have just purely download lessons if there's downloadable documents text lessons you can even do live zoom lessons directly inside the course platform as well so as you can see there we would just keep on going through and adding our different lessons as we go um through it all so i'm just going to go below that for now just for the sake of putting the examples in and check in another video press save and now i'm going to show you what this looks like from the students perspective i mean as you can agree that wasn't too difficult to do i mean does anyone feel like that's impossible it's all pretty easy to do so we're going to go over here and press preview as a student and see what it looks like from the student's perspective so implementing boom so you see here now we've got our module 1 and we've got our module 2 and when they drop down boom there's the video there is the text that we made and there's the downloadable document so they just boom click that and their document will download here's the quiz so what's sarah's favorite food unknown chips confirm uh-uh incorrect the answer is wine next what's sarah's favorite thing to do drink wine confirm congratulations next and then it will tell me what my score and everything is now you can actually set behind the scenes whether they have to get 100 before they can move on or you just might like to make it something fun that they don't have to pass it just gives them something interactive to do now uh please put your questions for sarah here so remember i had my google sheet they've not left their lesson but they can still go and type on this sheet directly inside their course so you're not making them leave or have other documents have multiple versions anywhere and now when it comes to the live call for this coaching program you're doing you've got all your questions in one place and you know what questions you can go and answer for your students which is amazing the next thing we put in was book a call with sarah so the students gone to the next lesson boom they can go in and actually book their session right here because this is a multimedia lesson from inside the course module 2 we just put another video in there and you'll just see boom it pops up a whole video there as well so that's what it looks like for the student that was easy right very very easy so what else do we need to do behind the scenes well the next thing we kind of want to do is um set up our course pricing so we might choose to we're going over to the pricing area here um is it free or is it a one-off payment so let's say this course is going to be my flagship course i'm going to make this 197 right let's let's say that this is what i'm pricing mine at um you might have it lifetime access maybe they only get 12 months access i don't know whatever it is that you put their duration at whatever duration access you put in here they will be automatically unenrolled at that day so you don't even have the admin of having to go and remember to unenroll people or pull them out if you're only giving them set access time so that's very cool now let's say we want to give people a choice so let's say we could do a payment plan maybe this is more expensive maybe this is 1997 course so we can go add a price and add a payment plan and this will be payment plan maybe the choice the price title giving them and we're going to let them pay 10 over 19 months all right making it up there we go so um again you can put in the duration and the button and press save it's probably not going to let me do that it is so now we've got an additional pricing option i might add another one i might do a subscription and say well actually this is a membership and it is going to be i know 27 membership um 27 every one month you can even choose that the first i know the first seven days is free so that can be a really good sales pitch you can do okay come on guys come and join my memberships only 27 a month you get a life coaching call with me every month and the first seven days is free for you to give it a test run so they have to put in their credit card details when you have a free trial and on the seventh day it will charge them basically so this is another really cool game that you can play to make it give lots of people all different options that they might want to have and of course make it more accessible to your students you also have an upsell option so let's say you have something you want to upsell people to afterwards you've created multiple courses you go to the after purchase option meaning what happens after they've pressed purchase i might want to upsell one of my other programs so i can press upsell and i want to upsell them to i know a special url and that url might be my coaching program right so sarahcordner.com forward slash c2c i think you have to go https there we go so now what will happen now i've done that boom funnel created so now they opt in this might be a free course so let's pretend this is your freebie that you're giving away in thinkific they actually have to put in their email address in order to get into the program which is great because now you're growing your list the second they've pressed submit to get the free thing now they're automatically being up sold this paid link that i put in here how great is that you're already now building a business that's going to keep up selling people and making you money now the next thing you're going to be able to add copy to that so that it's it's got you know it's got your tone of voice and everything else because that's the thing that i found you can't actually have emails in here yes so you can have student notifications and it directly connects to your email marketing software and i'm going to show you how to build the landing page just now okay cool so you're going to press publish and then press save so we now got a published course it's done and we're now going to go and build the landing page behind the scenes um and this is guys just like any other late page builder it's all kind of drag and drop and click and fill in so by default it will automatically bring over your modules here in your in your little course curriculum and it will just be blank at this particular stage so the first thing we want to do is edit this area here so i'm going to click on the image i'm going to go to image and it will tell you the size that you need to have here so i normally just go on to um canva to do that so i'm just going to upload something for now but um you just go into canva find an image i'm just going to upload something some flowers here we go let's upload our little flower picture over here press upload obviously i would upload something that's appropriate to the course that we're creating and you'll see that it pops up there and you can change the darkness a little bit so that your text stands out a little bit more there we go and then we can also add buttons which are these these buttons here so i'm just going to press save and just go back and show you all the different types of sections that you can add to this now so we can add a section here and we can add for instance uh text so i'm gonna type in text and media let's see where this goes you can drag it and move it up to the top because it will always immediately come underneath so you can see here now i can edit this area and what do i want my heading to be at the moment it says text media i might say something like what you get in this course and put a subheading in if you want to blah blah blah here's what you get and then here you can actually type in as much text as you want to add um over here whatever you like you can add in images you can add in videos like pop an image in here just for the sake of it um here's an here's an image and you'll see that it pre-fills it there so it's very very simple to just add all of these different elements in so obviously i make these images in canva myself there we go press save and we can keep on going in and now if i just go back to the next section here here's all these sections that you can add in so you can add in checklists for instance and by the way if you don't like any of these sections you can easily delete them but i just want to show you just how easy it is here we can change the heading to be uh you know change your life today whatever it might be i'm not worrying about my spellings because it's just pretend um our checklist items we can change the icons at the moment we've got a tick box there we we've hundreds of icons that we can pick from um you know like boom change it to a little different icon and you can change the text that comes with that icon by clicking on each of these here as well so press save so as you can see and you can go through and keep adding all of these different elements as you go through to build your landing page out and you can even view what it looks like over here in the mobile version as you go through and build it you can change the background colors you can change the font and all of that fun stuff so i could just keep adding and adding and adding and just play guys you can't break this um you can just literally go through you can add in your instructor bios all of you there's our pricing options there by the way so remember we made different pricing options if i go back to desktop view scroll down to the bottom and we've got our different pricing options that um we will automatically pre-fill if i press publish on those and what else have we got we can add um calls to action these are our buttons where we have there you go buy now this is your last chance what are the payment gateways it uses it uses stripe and paypal thank you yeah click on call to action um and you can see here we can change the text we can change which place the button goes to so we want it to go to the checkout page for whichever course we created i can't know why i called this now how to xyz deny how to xyz there's the course so now it will go to that place and what do we want the default price to be and 27 a month and instead of get started now we can change that to whatever we want join now press save and so there we go i can also change the landing page sit then in thinkific or can you actually then add it to your own website so it sits on thinkific but what you can do is create um a link on your website so this is so what i actually do on mine if i go to sarah coordinate.com all i simply do oh and then it's gone to my starter kit thing here so let's just get started in your menu items simply just have each course name in your menu and it redirect to that page so i like sending people to my website um and when they click on oh my gosh my internet's slow when they click on courses it drops down with all of the different course options that they have wow this is fun and i'll just show you how to do that in just a second let me just actually get that way this is sarah can you leave enough time to talk about where you then how you integrate uh your education learning platform and community yes okay i can absolutely show you that definitely um wow my internet is just clocked out on me right now let's see if i can get rid of something here it is going very very slow is not playing come on there we go cough cough moths coming out doing that one um quick question about the lesson pages can you add youtube videos into lesson pages if you wanting to refer to somebody else's youtube clip for example yeah absolutely so i'm that's where i would use the text section of the videos so using the text section you can go here's some resources i recommend and in fact one of the things i normally do in my courses is i create a lesson called extra resources so over here in the curriculum area you can simply go add a lesson add a text lesson and you might go extra resources or external resources another thing i i say external resources and here you can go in here is a great video on x and then you simply put in the youtube video link and make sure you hyperlink it with the link button there and so your students can then click on it and go and view those other those other files yeah you can out of thinkific into youtube sorry that'll take them out of thinkific out onto youtube unfortunately youtube doesn't allow um the um what's it called um iframing so yeah unfortunately you just have to have a link if it's a youtube video but then all you need to do is go onto your youtube channel and download those videos and just upload it directly into your platform if it's your video that is yeah if you've already got videos on youtube what i would be doing is simply going into manage videos and again not a lot of people realize they've done this if you've done live streams or you've uploaded stuff in the past and you can't find it anymore one of the great things that you can do is um go and go on over to your videos and inside your your um studio is click on the three dots and you can press download and you can actually download your video from there and just go and re-upload it into your platform so sarah can you actually upload digital products to thinkific or it's really only courses so for example if you had recorded webinars that you wanted to sell so did other digital products can you put it on thinkific i found that that you can then yes so i actually sell all of my ebooks on thinkific as well um so how do you do that so all you simply do is go add a new course add a blank course and i literally call my book and then the title of the book press create course and then you simply have one lesson in there and the lesson is a pdf lesson so um over in this builder area here is you would go add a chapter the title of the chapter is the title of the book and you can sell it you can add a price to it yeah so select the editorial add a lesson you go um add a pdf you drag and drop the ebook file there you go to pricing and you go to one-time payment and let's say in the next 25 publish boom you're selling your ebook on your platform as well if you've got workshop recordings you might like to create like a a resources vault where you just upload all of your recordings so i certainly have done that in my academy vault so i called this my academy vault here and this actually includes all recordings of any workshops i do so that my members get all those recordings in there so you can see here here's all of the live cool dates and times um here's all the recordings from 2021 here's the recordings from 2020. see they just so if they're a member they'd get access to that so they've paid for that absolutely or you could sell that as a separate product absolutely yeah any kind of digital product at all can be sold on this platform which is really cool can you also keep things secret so i've got um my online group training is confidential so only the people who have listened to that recording can access that yes so what you can do here is go to settings um and either it's public but only people who have paid can access it um or you can simply make this a hidden course meaning that only people who have the link or enrolled can actually see it on the public dashboard okay thank you that's good so in terms of how do you kind of put these links to your course so let's say now we've we've made this course here's our little curriculum we've just uh published we've uploaded all of our stuff we've done our little landing page over here we've pressed publish on here and now what we want to do is connect this somehow to our site it's really easy to do in your settings section here you've got the the thinkific url that's basically auto generated so you're going to copy that url go to your website now this is being done on a a wordpress site but most of them are the same you're going to go over to appearance and menus appearance menus and this is going to affect the menus that's on the top menu bar of your website over here and so you can see here these are all my main menu items and here are my drop downs so when someone goes to my sarahcorn.com website it's got the courses option and when you click on courses it drops down with all of these different options so if i wanted to add another one of these i simply go add to menu and i want to add a custom link the link is that thinkific course url and the text is xyz course whatever i decide to call it press add to menu and boom it's now come up there xyz course i'm going to drag and drop that under my menu that i want it to be under in courses and i'm simply going to press save menu which is on the bottom right here save menu and now if i go over to sarah.com live it should be showing there oh no i'm just trying to log into my login area now excuse me let's press serial.com if my internet for some reason my site seems to be very slow right now and my menu isn't showing i mean you don't have to create a separate landing page in wordpress you create it in thinkific and you just link it into wordpress and it looks like it's part of the website but it's not correct so here's my live site here there's my courses tab and there's the xyz course we just created if i click on that boom it takes them straight there and that's exactly where they can log in and enroll again it's also taking them off your website and it's also taking them to the learning area correct so the whole learning management system is that's your learning area your learning portal so yeah they've gone you've you've marketed your website you said go to mywebsite.comcourses and then boom it's going to take them to each individual course landing page which is your learning portal so that's that bit so now let me show you um what we would do next so we've um we've put in our lessons in our modules we've built our landing page we've set our pricing we've pressed publish what we want to do now is make sure our students get a welcome email so that they know where to log back in so on our main dashboard here we're going to click on support your students and notifications and so on our notification section we can make sure that we've automatically set up a welcome email for our students um and even progress weekly check-in progress emails as well so we can turn on our welcome to our site but let's go and welcome here's our xy get said course it will automatically pull them over how to xyz that's the course we just created we're going to now edit the welcome email to be whatever we want so this will pre-fill with your site name it will pre-fill the student's first name and it will automatically print the course name and then we can write anything we want you know welcome of course blah blah blah blah we can um put in come and join my facebook group we can put um you know come and have a coaching call with me and that will allow you to put in anything you like so they get their welcome user information there press save and now that student's going to get all of that information now the other thing you can do in notifications is turn on weekly reminders and this will automatically send your students you've got your course welcome email and you can also turn on if i scroll all the way down sorry i've got so many things in here um your oh where's your progress reminders if they move that it's not showing so the progress come on can you actually time them so that when they finish each module they get an email at what do you know i didn't think that they were time sensitive um not within your um uh directly from thinkific you can just do they've moved they seem to have moved the weekly reminders for some reason oh there it is sorry it's their weekly reminder so this will send them weekly emails however if you want to do a much more customed email sequence this is where you would want to connect your email marketing software and create an automation in your email marketing software think if it directly connects with pretty much all of them so you're not on track sorry but not on support or i think it might be in the new app store pretty sure they've recently connected that via an api connection and so you go to their apps and you click on app store and this is where it shows you all the different stuff that connects it to it and where's our search box report let's have a look and see what comes up i didn't have to write the whole word in or not and you're correct um so yeah you're right it's actually not showing but you can use zapier problem so i would definitely use zapier for that um which is what i used to use with active campaign actually before it had an automatic connection so zapier will definitely have a connection to thinkific for that so those of you who don't know what zapier is it's basically a piece of software that acts like a bridge where it connects any two pieces of software to each other so um i am just going to oh is it gonna make me sign in here we go let's log in here so if i wanted to connect thinkific and ontraport together or indeed any software anywhere i would go ontra port boom and think um boom there we go and what we want to do we want to create a new contact when somebody um or hang on the other way around um enroll a user so it can go the other way around as well so when someone signs up to thinkific they are made a new user an entrepreneur if someone's on entreport we can add them or enroll them in a course automatically boom zapier will do that for you no problem at all okay cool um so look there are a lot of other elements to setting this up i'm just fairly conscious of the time that we've got at the moment um but this the three the free think of it course they have sarah confort slash learn think of it does take you through the actual setting up the site how to brand it all and how to create your your membership academies and all that kind of stuff but before we do finish i do like to go around and ask any questions cases things on people's minds um do i have any questions at the moment community how you how you connect that with community like do you then do all your stuff on facebook thank you i completely forgot to answer that question sorry about that susie um so there are two different ways of adding a community to your courses if you're targeting the public market public love facebook it's the most engaged area so if you're using facebook i simply make a lesson inside the course so just to give you an idea inside my concept of course this is my 30-day group coaching program for course creation um inside one of the first lessons i say please make sure you join the secret group i will be in there every day i'll be in there answering questions i'll be in there live streaming for you and so you'll see um in that this first area is the pre-preparation module so i don't call it module one i call it pre-preparation module module one module two module three all right so in the pre-preparation module i've got in here welcome to your program and how it works so it gives them all of their information about what they need to do how to use it all and i've got bonuses in there um and then i've got joined the secret facebook group right here so that's just a text lesson um i've got a screenshot of the group there's the link to the group and then i tell them to go in and say hi and do a live stream and everything so if you're using a facebook group creating a text lesson called join the group is probably the best way to do it but thinkific also has an actual communities function built in so what i can do over here is go to support your students on the main dashboard and go to communities click on communities and you can create your own community that looks and feels just like a facebook group accept is a lot more beneficial or appropriate rather for a corporate client or your more business type clients that perhaps don't want to be on facebook in the workplace it's also much better and safer if you're working with children and if you are working with kids i'd highly recommend you don't send them to a social media platform um because obviously a there's so many more distractions there but also you can't control any of the other stuff that they see when they're on that platform so if you've got children or corporates or professionals you might want to have your own community so call this whatever you want um you know the xyz course community over here create description um who can access it every single person in your whole entire school or just students who are enrolled in the xyz course all right so this is just for these people so i'm gonna press yes that's the one i want them in press apply um or only me you can then choose the color of color and branding of that community you can change the font of that community you can upload a cover image for your community and press save and then it will give you a share link right so grab that share link go back to the course that you created now you can actually share that link anywhere so if i was to go into the chat box here like i could email all my students and go hey guys here's the community and pop it in the chat box or send it out in an email but i actually want that to be in my how to xyz course so what i might do is go back to the xyz course i'm going to go to add a lesson i'm going to add a multimedia lesson and call it the xyz community i'm going to pop that link in that i've just been given and press save and i'm going to actually drag it right to the top so it's the first lesson that they see now if i go to view the course preview the course as an enrolled student you'll see now what the community looks like over here now at the moment we haven't got anyone in there so it's going to look a bit empty right now but as people start chatting in here give it a second my gosh my internet is shocking today let's close some of these bits over here come on there we go so now we can create a new post and it's just like facebook blah blah blah i can add images i can add videos i can add files in exactly the same way students will get notified if their comments are replied to and everyone in here can communicate with each other and share their stuff so this is a great function to use if you want to create that community that you don't want to be on the facebook platform if you are using public market facebook works really really well sarah i've got a question about grade center um by the way this seems to be a heck of a lot better than blackboard or moodle so thanks for showing us that uh great senator does it have a great center so that it can link up to the records crm system or that sort of thing as well yeah absolutely so a couple of features that i didn't actually show you in the lesson types over here is you can actually create assignments you can also connect brilliant which is an exam based software that allows you to then collect and score students for accredited training so those people who are delivering accredited training and actually recognizing its competency qualifications or collecting points for cpd purposes you may want to connect the brilliant app with this which allows you to collect legally and formally um the evidence of assessment and grade people's work and but in terms of assignment i'm going to show you something sort of less formal but works in the same kind of way and if i add an assignment i can put the title of the assignment let's just call it assignment over here and we can type in all the instructions we can also add a video here if we want to just add some video instructions for the assignment this is where we can we can add any downloadable templates we can also choose the size or the maximum size limit of the submitted assignment by the student as well so you know maybe i want to give them a maximum download what's the confirmation message this may say you can type in here congratulations for submitting your assignment it has been received you will hear back from us soon and so i'm going to press save just for the sake of demonstration show you what this looks like from the student's end and this actually gives the students a box to drag and drop their work so maybe they've got to do a video and drag and drop that um them doing some kind of demonstration for something um maybe they've got a piece of work that they have to write and you'll see here and that they're given the assignment there's the instructions that we wrote we could have added a video here if we wanted to as well but they can actually drag and drop their items from dropbox google or straight from their computer drop it there when they drop it there and i think we just got the default stuff i'll just randomly dump something there for a second let's just pull oops let's just pull that over so they've got something press upload so that's my assignment i've just submitted as the student and it'll go whatever the default text was we didn't change it um cool submit my assignment and now it says under review over here so now as the instructor if i go over to my main dashboard um you've got support your students and you've got assignments so you click on there now as the site owner or the instructor if you've got co-instructors you may have made somebody else the instructor you can have as many other instructors as you want it will actually say sarah cordon has submitted an assignment now you see here there it is sarah cordoner and she's got her a file that she's uploaded there it's got the date that she submitted it for the sake of those records now i can actually go in and view that assignment so if i was to go in and click on it over here it will open up the document i can actually just click into it over here oopsie i can send sarah and oh gosh my internet is just not going fun today um i can actually go in and approve it i can leave a message i can reject it and so on and underneath our reporting this is where we can also get reports on the student engagement how many videos they're watching what percent of the videos they watched how far into it they got so you can do progress reports all kinds of reporting is available on here um in terms of what they watched and how far they went really good for if you're tracking the cpd for corporates or academic students as well thank you thank you sarah can i just ask with the um thinkific when people go from your website to the thinkific page what's the url like does that url contain your name or your company name or yes how does that so you can just keep it as thinkific can i do mine because um i send people to my site which then redirects them to that platform so for me i don't really care that it's got thinkific in it it's just my learning portal i promote my website um but yes you actually can go straight to your dns host to your website host and create a subdomain that then becomes your thinkific site so you actually can make it your website dot com forward slash courses so nobody knows that it's on thinkific at all um yeah that's very very simple to do you just phone up crazy domains or whoever you're with and they do it over the phone with you in a couple of clicks they just say click here put in your thinkific url and boom it becomes a sub domain of your site fantastic thank you pleasure sarah with recording all of your videos are you using i've seen you a couple of times now you stand in your office with a camera in front of you and a whiteboard or a butcher's paper do you use powerpoint at all i use i generally use google slides i use the google suite for most things because it's impossible to leave stuff and so yeah i generally do um it and you know it only has to be like this i use um a platform called camtasia um so oh i forgot to share my screen there let me just share my screen a second um so i use camtasia um camtasia's software that you buy once and this is the reason why i like it and it's about 300 which obviously is an investment but you don't have yearly membership fees or subscription fees you literally buy it once and you have it forever so i literally bought this seven years ago and never had to pay for it since so this is where you simply press record the screen so whether i've got a powerpoint on my screen or whether i'm demonstrating stuff like this all i did then was press record the screen um and wherever it's gone now um that will now allow me to record my camera webcam on and my screen at the same time here we go it's just taking a while to pop up just push it over you see this button here so all you gotta do is turn the camera on it'll be a green tick and you'll see this green dots around my screen here that's the screen that's being recorded so all i would then do is press record and then simply switch my screen to either this slide so i tend to use google slides over here so i was presenting this right now i just whack that in present mode webcams on and i'm just going teach teach teach next slide teach teach cheeks next slide when i finish you just press turn off record and then it'll allow you to simply go back into your camtasia here and you can add in um i know let's add in some annotations this is where you can drop in drag and drop all of your text in here um and you can start doing these little pop-ups adding your little code here and that's how you do the editing you simply press export and save it as an mp4 file boom done i actually usually just upload straight to youtube is that a pumped up version of snagit yes absolutely yeah exactly now if you've got like if you've got a mac you've got imovie um if you've got windows you've got movie maker now none of them have quite the advanced features that something like camtasia or screencast-o-matic have but they certainly do if you're just doing information videos i think sometimes people can get really hung up on the production and think that it has to have like you know wiz wizzy bangy poppy flashy words and stuff in it my only recommendation is that you just put your url on the bottom because you know ultimately you're going to be sharing some of the course videos up on youtube and stuff like that to like give people those daily counter tasters um but i just say to people that you're talking to other humans keep it relaxed use your phone use your webcam and just answer the questions casually even when i make mistakes when i'm filming my videos i don't edit it out if i was teaching face to face and i you know not not just talking directly to yourself michael just forever for everyone else's purposes um yeah when i if i'm talking away and i'm like oh what was i saying oh yes that's it it's a blah blah i don't it's real yeah i never cut that stuff out ever um especially since covered kobe has been the course creator's best friend because people got so used to reality now i've got videos you know my professional videos that people are paying for literally have the cat's bum go across the screen and i'm like sorry about him anyway what i was saying was purple uh that blah blah blah i uni and i never cut that out people love it they're like oh you're sorry you're actually normal you know it's rather than these hollywood productions that just make you feel so far away from your audience that it just becomes actually um a distancer rather than a connector makes makes you more relatable absolutely yeah fantastic thank you pleasure we got we've got some more time for more questions any anything else anyone wants to ask how many courses can you upload until you think of vegas unlimited students and unlimited courses on the pay plan obviously so if you're on the free plan you can only upload three courses um if you're on the pay plan which starts from 49 a month um you and you can just keep going friends which is great and kajabi equally as good sarah i know you've got a preference but equally as good oh yeah look and i you know i only have preference for my personal user experience but kajabi is fantastic as well now there is a slight difference with kajabi in that kajabi um really promotes itself as being an all-in-one platform so kajabi you don't have to add an external email marketing software to it it actually is also an email marketing software now this is a massive pro for some people and those who you know particularly who are particularly over tech overwhelmed or you know just want everything in one place um it can be a really positive massive pro i'm not talking it down because i love it i'm a partner with kajabi and i absolutely adore their product but i just want to give you something to think about i'm not saying don't use it or this is a bad thing just make consideration if you have all your eggs in one basket and something goes wrong with that platform you've lost everything so i personally prefer to have my learning management system my learning portal my website and my email software separate and this is because i've learned the hard way if your learning portal goes down your email software is still live you can email everyone and say hey guys here's another way to access your content and direct them to a google drive folder or something if your website goes down you can still promote and talk to everyone through your portal and through your email marketing software if you have all of that stuff in one place and that one place goes down you're asked and that happened to me before so i'm not saying don't use it i'm not saying it's bad but for everyone there just consider the pros and cons of these these things um as you're thinking about your particular business and your own risk management yeah fantastic thank you very very helpful so what email system would you recommend this one i absolutely definitely have a favorite for um and i like active campaign um active campaign is not just an email marketing software it's um a sales management system um and it just does loads and loads of other things i do have a whole course on it and i've just put a link in the comments there sarah comfort active that will give you a free trial on active campaign but inside my academy for 47 i've got an entire active campaign course 47 bucks in there which shows you how to set it up how to do automations i've given you copies of all of my imported automations that i've built for you for checking in with students on courses for welcome nurture sequences upsell sequences for courses and coaching programs too you

Channel: Sarah Cordiner

Views: 2,046

Keywords: thinkific, thinkific tutorial, thinkific setup, how to use thinkific, thinkific guide, teach online, online course creation tools, online school, online course creation, sarah cordiner, create online courses, make money online, make online courses, course creation template, thinkific demo, host online courses, online course software, how to create a landing page, sales page, design a sales page, how to create an online course that sells, course creation tips

Id: dby7UUyCryk

Length: 53min 37sec (3217 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 18 2022