if you've been thinking of creating an online course, I'm going to walk you through
how to do that using Thinkific. Now, we're not going to go into great detail but
you'll just see an overview of how Thinkific works so that you can look into building your own
course or maybe a mini course before you start on a big one. So, here I am. I've signed up for
Thinkific and if you want to sign up yourself then you can create your first courses for free.
Use my affiliate link. That's in the description. So, let's have a look at how you go about
creating a course. It's really an intuitive platform so we can go into new course here.
Now, one of the great things here is that you can start blank and so that means that you're just
building everything in your course from scratch. But you could also, instead of actually creating
a big course and then who knows? Is anybody going to come? What you can do is create a
pre-sell landing page that basically creates a waiting list and that way you know that when you
start building your course you know some of the people who want it, who want to hear about it.
Now, you could have your flagship course; that's your full online course but what you might do
is create a mini course first. Use a free or low-cost mini course and this is to generate leads
for your bigger course. So let's choose that one. Or a couple of others that we'll have a quick look
at which is: you can, if you've got a webinar that you've run, you can upload your webinar replay
video. And this one is if you've got your own membership then you can keep uploading things here
through your membership resource library. But let's do the mini course.
So, I'm going to give the course a name. We can always change it later. And I really recommend
that you focus it on the outcome. So, for me, I'm going to do a mini course on getting started with
Google Sheets and I'm going to go and create the course. So, as you can see, it's a really
easy-to-use interface. I do recommend following this mini course template course. It’s really
simple. First of all, we start with instructions for this course which is really just how to use
this course. “What” is the what is it that you're going to learn? So in my case I'm going to say,
well, I'm not going to teach them how to become accountants or bookkeepers. I really want to teach
them the basics of Google Sheets. That's why it's called a getting started course. So this is really
around setting your expectations. You might include some quizzes or some sort of worksheets
or templates or things like that. What I'd really recommend you do is start small, okay?
And remember, this is just a mini course and so you can start with a message from your instructor
and this might be a little bit of an introduction to you and what credentials—why is it that you are
a suitable person to be giving this course. Well you might say “Hey, I've struggled in this
particular area. I worked my way through it. I had a great mentor” or something. “And I thought it
would be really helpful to share that with others. How to use this course, especially if you've got
links to external things. If you have got some worksheets, maybe some templates. And then,
before we begin, here is what you need to have set up. You might say, “well, make sure you've
got a quiet time set aside. This much time each day.” These are all lessons in a chapter.
Then you go in and you actually can get started. “Why?”. Why should we actually be studying this?
Why should I be spending my time doing this course, even if it's free?
What is it that you're going to do? How we're going to go about it.
Is it going to be more informational or is it going to be more hands-on?
And then test your learning. And so that's where you can do things like have quizzes so when you go
into one of those lessons you can see that these lessons are all set to draft and what you do
is you have a video. So, you've hopefully created a video but once you've got a bit of a lesson
plan here, then you can create a video. You can select that video and upload it from your laptop.
Now you can also upload videos into your library and select them from there.
Another thing that you can do—and I really recommend you do this—is add some text and
so that doesn't have to be a transcript of your video but just enough to say “here are some of the
some of the highlights”. When you listen to a podcast, it's got show notes which aren't
necessarily a transcript of the whole podcast. Or on a YouTube video you'll have a description. So
having some text in there really supports the content of the video itself. Now a few other
bonuses is that you can make this a free preview lesson just to give people a bit of a sample,
a bit of a taster. Of course that's if your entire course is not already free! And then you can
enable discussions. You may or may not want to do that. And are they allowed to download this video?
There's the usual options that you'd expect. You can Save or you can Discard your changes.
And then, when you're ready, then you can go into setting up things like your prices
for your course which may be free or it might be just a one-off payment. And you can set your
course to be a draft until you're ready to publish it. Or you can make it pre-order which actually
allows people to enroll in the course which is a really, really good option. Here they're
enrolling; they're not actually going to access its content and the course card will appear in
their student dashboard with a “Coming Soon” label and then when you actually do publish the course
that's when students can purchase it, enroll in it and, of course, access the content of the course.
So there you are. There's a really quick run-through of Thinkific and you can see just how
easy it is to create the course. Of course, you've got to have the videos themselves that you want to
upload as the lessons for your course but I think it's really worth considering because you get a
digital product that you can sell. Now, there are a few reasons why building a course on
Thinkific might be a smart idea. One is that you get to pick your topic and your audience.
You think of it: the people who are coming to your course and enrolling in your course
or pre-enrolling, getting onto the waiting list, they are ones who are really clearly interested in
that topic. Also, it's evergreen content and this is really different from social media especially,
because once you post something on social media you just don't know what's going to happen to it,
but like a week or two and it's gone. Compare that with creating a course on Thinkific!
It's evergreen. It's going to be there for as long as you've got the course up there and people can
find it through your landing page. You can also update your course anytime and, of course, it's
income when...even while you're sleeping! That does actually happen! Yes, you've got to build the
course. Yes you've got to promote it but it really does make money while you sleep. That's what
happens. And now, if you're interested in creating even a draft course on Thinkific,
then click on my affiliate link below and if you're if you're interested in creating a course
on Thinkific what is holding you back? Now, a lot of people think they really should create
an online course but then they never get to do it. What is holding you back? Is it technical?
Is it more mindset? Maybe you don't want to go on camera. What is it? Let me know in the comments.