Wordpress vs Teachable/Thinkific - Which one is better to host online courses?

hosting and selling courses using wordpress in this video i'm going to show you all the elements that are necessary to run your own online course hosting operation using WordPress and then we're going to compare it with popular online course hosting platforms like link if you can disable to see the advantages and disadvantages of using one or the other let's do it to sell online courses on WordPress you need six elements for sure and four elements that are optional the first element is you need to get a domain name this is the name of your school your school comm or dot CA something you get that at a company like Namecheap or GoDaddy then that domain needs to point to your web host this is something like Bluehost or a host gator where you are going to install WordPress because a lot of people think that WordPress it's just all you need and it's free and it's awesome but that is just one of the many elements WordPress is just a content management system typically to create websites and originally was just a blogging platform but now over the years has become a very robust content management system to build ecommerce websites websites blogs about 37% of all the websites in the world that is billions of websites run on WordPress so that's why it's so popular now WordPress by itself is not enough to host online courses you need what is called a learning management system which is just a plugin on WordPress you can easily install plugins from within WordPress you just search for the plug-in and then you can install it or you can upload it and install it why not the most popular learning management system is called learn - there's another one called sensei and there's many out there but without this plug-in you cannot host online courses the plugin allows you to take student registrations to create chapters and lessons to create quizzes and assignments basically everything that you need to run your online school now another thing a lot of people don't know is that just having wordpress on your web host with a learning management system is not enough because you cannot host your videos that web host typically you need to host your videos on a third-party platform that is specific to video hosting and the reason why is because most web hosts don't allow you or are not optimized to deliver video so three options are to be call our YouTube Vimeo and Wistia YouTube is a free but there's an issue with YouTube which is is not designed to host online courses it's designed to host public videos or tutorials or cat videos but you can use YouTube using this little hack which is there are three modalities when you're publishing your YouTube video you can either make it public which means is searchable by the entire world then you can make it private which means it's only available to you or to anybody that is signed with your account or you can make it unlisted and that is the trick you make it unlisted and that means it's not searchable but anybody that has the link the direct link to your YouTube videos could potentially watch your videos for free now this is unlikely to happen and if you don't have the budget to pay for a video hosting company then YouTube is your best bet but then if you have some money for video hosting it's highly recommended that you choose something like Vimeo or Wistia because they allow you to protect your video links so if somebody were to use try to access that link from other sites other than your site you can protect it so they cannot see it or download that video of course you have to pay for that feature but this is how most people do that so once you upload your video lectures onto the video hosting company then you have to embed it inside your lectures inside their learning management system all right so as you can see things get a little bit complex it's not as easy as installing WordPress and uploading about your videos and then selling it and making millions no now another thing a lot of people forget is that the learning management system is not enough you need a way to collect money and for that you need to create an account on either paper or stripe the most typical payment processing systems out there and then you have to integrate with your learning management system now with these six elements you could start hosting and selling online courses using WordPress right and there's four other elements that are optional but helpful and a lot of people we use as well which is email automation they will integrate with either converted MailChimp or active campaigner Infusionsoft to be able to send marketing emails to your students to build your email list to be able to promote courses I mean it's likely that before you even install WordPress or chose a web hosting platform you should have been building an email list so you have somebody to promote your course and as you already have a huge audience on social media or something like that you need a way to promote a course and usually email marketing software is the way to do that and you want to integrate that with your learning management system but it's not 100% required then on top of that you can integrate your hosting operation with many other tools that typical one would be something like google analytics so you can see how your webpages and your landing pages are performing in terms of where the traffic is coming from what's happening with that traffic was the behavior of the users visiting your website and specifically how well your pages are converting your landing pages because if you're sending people from your email list so if your final looks like okay do free videos on YouTube or I do paid advertising and then I send it to my email list I'm from them I promote my course on WordPress then you want to know how these visitors are behaving and whether they're converting into paid customers or not and you can do that through analytics like Google Analytics or Mixpanel there are many different analytics tools you can integrate them using something like say peer or automate sometimes you can integrate them directly into your learning management system but with a tool example you can integrate with thousands of third-party tools as well it's something that other people do in order to increase their sales or to be able to reach a bigger audience is working with affiliates and you can either work inside affiliate marketplace like Pat Mart or Clickbank or commish Junction there are many different market places you have to be except you have to go through an approval process as well and if you don't qualify you still could run your own affiliate program you have to pay a monthly fee to do that and to like that affiliate could help you distribute affiliate links to your affiliates and then they could help you promote your courses and then they keep a commission they could track the Commission with this tool but literally the first six elements are the ones that you need now as you can see it gets a little bit more complex than Brad you thought at the beginning and you are maybe wondering how does this compare to now popular options like teachable think if ik we searched this companies specifically dedicated to self hosting online courses so I did a comparison for you I crunched some numbers and you can make a decision which it's gonna be pretty obvious once you see the numbers as to whether it makes sense to you go with WordPress or think if ik or teachable or some of these platforms so if we look at all the different elements that are required to run your own school online then you can see that third-party tool I think it's called teachable basically do everything almost everything for you so they provide you with that domain for free now is this is a domain that is branded with their URL it's gonna say they're thinking comma or teachable dot-com or something like that so if you do want a custom domain name then you have to buy it and then if you upgrade to one other pay plans you could use your own domain but by default you don't have to even worry about how to get a domain because they provide you with one now they act as combination of a web host and video host content management system and learning management system all-in-one so you don't have to think about all these different parts because you can upload the videos directly to these platforms you don't have to pay for a third-party platform to host your videos which is really nice then in terms of payments it depends what tool are you using sometimes they collect the payments on your behalf so you don't have to worry about creating an account with PayPal or or stripe but I mean some if you decide to get paid by paper you still need a PayPal account anyways sometimes you can enter your bank details and answers they'll just do it directly pass it every day or week or month depending on what you select in the case think if ik you can integrate with a stripe or a paper but that means you have to create those account separately and then go through the integration process which is very simple now a lot of these tools also run their own affiliate programs so you don't have to pay for a third-party affiliate program in the case of think if dick is very easy you can make any of your students and convert them into an affiliate with a few clicks and then you can generate generates automatically as many affiliate links as you want to for each course that you have and then you can just send them those links and then they could login into there I think if you can count and see if they made any sales analytics they provide some analytics as well you can see and specifically you can see how our students are going through the lessons who are in who is engaged or not and in terms of more in-depth analytics like web traffic and all of that they integrate with tools like Mixpanel and Google Analytics as well in terms of email automation it's limited it's not comparable to what you would get with a third-party tool like convertkit or MailChimp but they will send automatic emails when somebody registers for your school they will send an automatic welcome email message they'll also send reminders to make sure people finish their courses and lessons and they probably have a congratulatory message at the end saying you completed your course good job but if you want to do more in depth in marketing efforts then you can integrate within these tools with third-party tools like convertkit or MailChimp and then they also have other integrations with other analytic tools with other payment gateways etc and also with our own automation tools like zapier automate or IO which allow you to integrate with absolutely everything that you want but as you can see out of all these elements out of all these ten elements they take care of most of them where's when you go with WordPress boom you have to do everything yourself and of course this is a lot more work and I mean we're gonna compare costs to see if it makes sense from a financial point of view to run your own WordPress operation so if we calculate all the costs of running all these tools you get about a 960 dollars a year and these are average costs for an average installation with one or two courses and not it's email list so basically what you would expect to spend if you have an email list of about a thousand people and a couple of courses with a few hundred people so the biggest cost is going to be well the in depends on it depends on what web hosts do you get but Hostgator is pretty cheap you can get a pretty good server for $50.00 a year domain name if it's not a premium domain name it's going to be about ten dollars a year some pretty affordable and then the plugin the learning management system it depends but they are usually about a hundred to two hundred dollars a year you can get a something that is a one-time payment fee if you go to a market places that have plugins that allow you to run on online courses but they're they're very limited in the capabilities if you really want to be serious about hosting your courses on WordPress I would suggest that you go with something like learned us or sensei now it's gonna cost you about a hundred and fifty dollars a year to do so then PayPal and stripe are free but they do charge you about three percent transaction fee which they do the same thing if you were doing this on a third party platform like thing cubic or teachable then if you run in your own affiliate program that it really depends if you're going to be mark I think the marketplace then they don't charge you but you have to be accepted by it and if you run your own affiliate program in like a top affiliate that could be fifty one hundred dollars a month but I'm gonna say just free because when you started you probably not gonna go with that the Google I need to suck free but if you go with me expand it's gonna cost your money and one of the biggest expenses which I say it's optional but not really if you are doing your own marketing is getting email marketing software which can be quite expensive the bigger your email list now a lot of these tools allow you to start for free and up to like a thousand or two thousand subscribers they won't charge you but that you'll have limited capabilities as well but after you have a few thousand subscribers your your costs are going to be between 50 to 100 dollars a month I mean I'm just put a five hundred dollars in a year just as a round number is a peer if you want to do more automation and integrations with other tools it's gonna be like another hundred dollars a year so then there's another number there you can see 16 hours 10 hours 10 hours 10 hours this is something a lot of people don't take into account when they're making a choice as to where they want to host their courses is that is the labor that it takes to learn how to use the tool to install it and to maintain the tool and this is a recurrent thing that happens so while learning well maybe if there's a learning curve at the beginning but then there is a recurring maintenance labor that if you're not outsourcing it it means you have to do it yourself and typically I'm saying about less than an hour per tool per month so in total about 90 hours to 100 hours of your own labor to install and maintain all of these tools now if you paint yourself a fee if you have an hourly rate which you should have if you have any kind of job and let's say it's just you know in the long way in $20 an hour that means that when we add all of these together your labor is gonna be almost two thousand dollars of labor plus nine hundred dollars of software fees you get about twenty seven hundred dollars a year to run your own WordPress operation right or 228 dollars a month not bad I mean if you're making a few cells let's say if your flagship course is two hundred ninety seven dollars or or a couple hundred dollars then you only really need to make a couple of sales to pay for your whole operation so it's not like you're gonna break the bank as long as you're making sales of course now if you were to go through a third party platform like Tinky record teachable then they cost money obviously and and they have different tiers and it the the paid plans are anywhere from like 30 bucks to 100 100 dollars or something like that so let's say that you're spending about $50 a month on one of these these tools so that's gonna about a be $600 a year and then about again if you use email automation still gonna be my friend 500 dollars I use if you have a couple of thousand of subscribers so let's say boom you're spending about eleven hundred dollars a year on the software on the course hosting platform and on labor it's gonna be less and this is what it makes a huge difference because you don't have to deal with all this moving part it's gonna be a lot cheaper so then you're gonna spend about almost a thousand dollars less if less if you count your labor than if you were to try to do everything yourself or 145 dollars a month so which one would you choose and this is a question I get asked all the time you can why we're prism do you think it can save money if I do it on myself and I'm like yeah you know there is the answer is no I mean there is advantages on think if you can teachable is it's going to be a lot easier for you it's gonna eventually really cost you less if you think into account the amount of labour that's gonna cost you and yes maybe you can argue that you have less control maybe less control over the look of your website but I would argue not so much because on tools like think istic now the building tool that they give you to design your landing pages are very very good you can create a very optimized high converting landing pages with these third party platforms so there you go this is in a nutshell everything that you need in order to sell courses on WordPress is completely doable but not highly recommendable if you want to see more videos like this on course creation teaching online and becoming an great and amazing online teacher make sure to like this video and subscribe to this channel thank you and bye bye [Music]

Channel: Grumo Media

Views: 13,991

Keywords: teachable vs wordpress, how to sell online courses with wordpress, sell online courses with Wordpress, thinkific vs wordpress, host courses on Wordpress

Id: cgS6f17yzR8

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2020