Hey everyone, Jason here digital marketing consultant.
And in this membership site build guide, you're going to learn how to use thrive apprentice
from thrive themes to build a membership site on your WordPress site, timestamp table of
contents in the description along with a link to a software review video that compares thrive
apprentice to some other options, if you're trying to figure out which solution is best
for you to build your membership website.
Here, we're just gonna talk about how to put together thrive apprentice using thrive themes.
There's also an affiliate link in the description if you want to learn more and actually purchase
this plug-in.
So let's go ahead and jump right in here.
The first thing I wanted to show you is what it looks like to the users when they're looking
at your courses.
So the very top here, you have something called “tags”, which I’ll get to later in this
tutorial, where you can essentially organize your content.
Then next, you'll have all of your different courses that are available.
And inside your courses, when they click learn more or enroll now or start now, you'll be
able-- they'll be able to access all of their content.
And so this is what a course homepage looks like and you can create it so there's drop-down
menus, so they can get to all of their lessons.
It's a very clean and nice layout I really like how easy it is to set this up and the
fact that this is all templated.
So if you want to change how this looks and feels, you can change it from one location
and it will update all of your courses.
So that's what these individual pages look like.
Let's go ahead and go into an actual lesson page.
So you see at the top here you can either have a video or you can have a cover image,
whichever you prefer and then underneath you can put all the content that you want.
I'll show you how you can easily edit this.
So that does it for going over what your students are going to see, when they log into your
membership site.
Now on the back end here, this is what your thrive apprentice dashboard is going to look
like.
And of course you can access this by mousing over your thrive icon and then clicking on
thrive apprentice, and this is where you'll be taken.
So here, you'll be able to preview the index page, which is what we just talked about.
Set up your course topics, some advanced settings and then of course create a new course.
So let's go ahead and go through the settings here.
So we'll click on template settings and this is where you're actually going to be able
to easily modify what your course page looks like and what your course index looks like.
So over here you can choose your fonts, you can change the color of your headlines.
Now, clicking on Advanced Settings something that I do want to point out.
And of course you want to do this before, they have a demo mode, so you don't have to
have a course published.
And you definitely want to set this up and make sure it looks good, before you dive into
making all of your courses.
So something that I actually did here coming down to course structure, you can play with
all this other stuff.
But I actually clicked collapse of modules and collapse chapters, because if you unclick
this, then it's just going to be a long laundry list.
If I go back to live, there we go.
Live version, you'll see that now all of the lessons and modules are just listed out on
one page, it makes it really, really long.
And I think not very user friendly.
So I go ahead and click on collapse chapters and menus and lessons, so that the modules
here they just have to click the little plus and then they can see all the sub modules,
and that way they can easily just click on the name of the module and then they'll get
the list of all here that way.
Especially, if you have a lot of content on your membership website, you want to make
sure that it's very user friendly.
So now, before we dive into actually creating a course, and the dimensions you need for
the images, there is a huge, huge thing that you need to do.
And that is making sure that you have all of your course content very detailed and organized
in another location.
So I'm going to walk you through a Google Doc that we've put together.
And you want to do this because software changes.
And we've learned the hard way that if you don't have everything meticulously organized
off of your platform, it can be very painful to switch.
So here's what our Google Doc looks like.
So that if for whatever reason we needed to leave thrive apprentice, we could do so in
less than a week.
You can see here we have the module, we have the name in the description of the module
and then for each lesson, we break down with the name description the type of lesson that
should be and then the either the cover image or the link to the video.
So if this was a paid course, this would be a Vimeo URL I’ll go through an example of
one of our paid courses here and then you just want to click what type of video settings
you want if you want the video to autoplay or not and then all of the course content
is actually just written out right here in this Google Doc.
And if we go back to our course and scroll down, you'll see that the exact same content
is here in the tabs.
And I’ll show you how to put together these tabs if you want to do that for your own membership
website.
Before we dive into the course, it's just really important that you have all of you--
literally all of your information in some sort of document or organized folder, so it's
very easy to switch and very easy for someone else to put it together.
So I'm just scrolling here so you can see there's 31 pages of content in here, but this
is our entire free aspire notebook membership course content, so that it's very easy for
us to switch should anything go wrong.
So let's go ahead and go back to the apprentice dashboard and actually create our course.
Now, before-- I realize let me jump back one real quick course topics you can create topics
and this is how all of your courses are going to be organized.
I highly recommend doing no more than seven to ten, because you just don't want it to
be overwhelming these topics should be really broad not specific, not like tags for the
type of content that you have.
So let's go ahead and click on add new.
So when you click on add new, you come straight to the course details and you'll be able to
give your course a name and a description., and if you have a video that previews your
course content this is where you would drop in that video information.
So if we go back to the live course here, and I go all the way back up to the Aspire
notebook level.
You'll see that there's a video right here that pops up that's an intro to the entire
course, that's what we're looking at adding here.
Now, if you go down to advanced settings, you'll be able to choose your topic you're
going to choose whether or not you want comments.
I typically leave comments off and then difficulty level is also an optional thing I personally
don't normally use it and then of course your bio if you don't want your WordPress bio being
pulled in or you don't even know what your WordPress bio is, then you just go ahead and
click on custom bio and you can easily put in your about you right here and remove the
image or change the image.
So your bio is actually what's going to show up all the way at the bottom right here.
And this will show up on every page on your membership site.
And of course, you probably want to restrict your access if you're doing a paid membership,
so you can go ahead and click on this and then whatever membership plug-in you're using
to handle your payments and membership levels, should show up right here and you'll be able
to click on whichever level it applies to.
And of course if you're not seeing what you need, then you need to go over to whatever
membership plug-in software-- protection software that you're using to set up those.
So I typically recommend trying something like member press or member Mouse to manage
your actual payments and restriction of the content.
Thrive apprentice is great for organizing all your content, but it falls pretty much
flat on the space if you're trying to protect and collect payments for your products.
And once you've filled all this out, you can go ahead and click Save.
So I'm going to go back to the dashboard to go through a actual example of one that's
already made to save us some time.
You can always click on course details here to get the exact same menu, and restrict access
if you need to change anything.
This is free, so there's no restrict access on this one.
Now, with the modules, it's very easy to add and subtract content with thrive apprentice.
So what's really nice is when we went through putting together your template, once you have
that template, it will apply to everything that you put together.
So you're not going to have 30 new pages show up inside of your WordPress dashboard, when
you click on pages.
These are all going to be inside of thrive apprentice, but you still can use something
called “thrive architect”, which is drag and drop page builder to modify the pages
individually if you want.
So if you want to be more custom, you can.
If you just want to get it done as quickly as possible, you can also do it that way.
So now that we have our module, let's go ahead and add a new lesson.
So we'll go ahead and give our lesson a name and a description, and then we'll click on
the type of lesson it is, if it's a text audio or video.
In this particular instance it's a video and we're using a YouTube video.
So I’ll go ahead and drop in that YouTube URL and click on save.
So of course, it's not actually published yet, that's why it's in red.
And then we can go ahead and edit with thrive architect or we can publish the lesson or
if we click on here, we can click on the three little dots and click Edit content to get
back to this page.
So I’ll go ahead and hit save again.
And before we publish the lesson, let's go ahead and edit it using the drag-and-drop
thrive architect builder.
So this is going to allow you to modify all of the content that comes below the video.
So you can see here we have the video that we chose in the lesson settings.
We have our headline.
And now, we can actually modify all of this blank space.
So to do that, we'll come over here to this plus button to add an element and the first
thing we're going to do is just add a little text box.
Click and drag it over and drop it in and now, we have all of the space in the world
to just type some random stuff.
Now something that I really like doing is tabs, so I’ll click and drag these tabs
over and put it above the box.
And I like using this element, because it's a really easy way to organize a lot of content
without having the page super, super long.
So I’ll just have like an overview, a place for there downloads, some additional resources,
and then recommended software or recommended tools if you want to integrate some affiliate
links.
So it's a really great way to organize a bunch of content and have it readily available to
people while they're watching the video up top and they can just click through the tabs
as opposed to scrolling down a really long page.
And of course you can change all of the colors and the settings and the formatting of these
tabs.
So once we're done, we'll go ahead and click save and exit.
And we'll be able to preview what we've put together.
So here's a preview, they can just click and the YouTube video will start playing.
I'll go ahead and pause that there and then they have tabs that they can go through to
get all of their content.
Now, let's go ahead and go through an actual live one so you can see what this looks like
all put together.
So inside of the Aspire notebook, I’ll scroll down and click on team.
And I’ll get to the cover images in a second here.
And scrolling down here will click on the first lesson under the team module.
And you'll see here we have our YouTube video, we have tabs that are full of the content
and a handling little link down here that users can click to go on to the next lesson
and get their content.
So you can see, the difference between using tabs and then just having a bunch of text,
we just did a bunch of text here, because we hardly had any content.
But I do like especially for paid courses having tabs, because you can see this doesn't
look as put together as professional as those tabs.
Now, the final part of putting together your course is creating some nice-looking cover
images for not only the course, but also your modules and then if you're doing text lessons,
you're going to want a image that shows up where the videos were showing up.
And you can use a free tool called “Canva” to do this.
So the dimensions you need for your cover image, inside of thrive appearances is 1170
x 400.
So if we jump on over to Canva, you can see a couple of examples here of what cover images
look like for the actual courses and then for the module.
So you can see here this is the team cover we put together for the aspire notebook.
So if we go over to the aspire notebook team, you'll see this is where the image shows up.
And of course you'll have to play a little bit with the spacing, because you don't want
to actually put things directly in the middle it's like three or four key-- arrow keys up,
but I’ll let you play with that, because it can be frustrating.
But once you get it down, you'll have the template and will be very easy to use.
So let's go through actually adding one of these to a current course that I already have
on the site.
So if I go back to the course index here, you can see here the authority builder course
doesn't have a cover image, so let's go ahead and fix that and go back to the Thrive apprentice
dashboard.
So I’ll go to the authority builder course, and go to course details, and you'll see right
here I can click to upload a cover image.
So we'll go back over to Canva, and this is the cover image we just put together.
So I’ll go ahead and download it.
And just like that we have our cover image, so let's go back to the dashboard here and
click to upload.
We have a new file, so we'll just go ahead and click and drag.
Should probably rename this, so that it's easier to find in the future, but we'll just
kind of go fast here, and we'll click on use the image we just uploaded.
We'll click Save.
And now we'll go preview our course.
And of course, index so we can see the cover image.
And now you can see the cover images here.
And you can see that it's a little cut off.
So it probably spent another 30 to 40 minutes playing with it, so that it gets just enough
so you can actually see the whole screen, but if we go ahead and click on start now,
you'll be able to see that now the cover image shows up at the top of the course as well.
And something that's different about this course is if we click on the first module
here, you'll see that we actually created a cover just a cover image for each module
and part, because there were a lot of videos.
So if you scroll down, we just embedded the videos right here on the page instead of having
just one video at the top, because there was a lot of content.
So that's another thing that you can do.
And inside the authority builder settings, just want to show you under restricted access
here, if we scroll down you see Authority builder has been clicked.
And so that is telling member press that only people who purchase authority builder will
have access to this course.
And so that's all there is to it to building your course using thrive apprentice.
So if you have any questions putting together your membership website, make sure you drop
them in the comment section below.
And if you have any feedback on using thrive apprentice, go and drop it in the comment
section below, because your comments and questions are going to help other people figure out
how to put together their membership website.
And of course remember that putting together all of your course content and organizing
it inside of a word doc, spreadsheet, Google Doc, folder, whatever it may be to ensure
that it's very easy for you to switch platforms in the future is going to save you a lot of
time and headaches.
So go and hit that like button and subscribe for more in depth tutorials just like this
one over on the channel.
I'm documenting the entire process of what it takes to build successful online course
sales funnels, and of course choosing the platform to host your online course is just
one small piece of the bigger picture.
So until the next video, keep building the business you love.