>> AARON MORIN: Hey there my name is Aaron Morin and I'm the
lead educator here thinkific. Today, i'm going to show you how
you can use Thinkific’s online course platform to grow your
business with education, just like tens of thousands of
independent experts, creators,
entrepreneurs, authors,
speakers, trainers,
coaches, nonprofits,
technology companies, small and big businesses,
and educators already do. Woo! With Thinkific you can build
your own training website where you can create,
market, sell, and deliver online courses
to your audience. Thinkific’s suite of tools
as designed at every step to help you deliver tangible
results to your students so, that you can create a
sustainable business. If they succeed you succeed.
Now before we begin. Keep in mind that you can speed up
or slow down the video skip around on the play bar and read
Closed Captions here. If you have questions about
Thinkific as we go, please don't hesitate to reach
out to support@thinkifc.com.
We'd love to chat. Okay let's get started with a good example.
This is an example of a Thinkific website starting
at the home page. Keep in mind you can completely customize
your Thinkific website to match your own branding.
You've got total control here. From here we can learn more
about the course Web site, navigate via links back to an
external website, or other pages, and click on buttons
and cards that will take me further down the sales funnel.
Here's a course landing page, sales page, squeeze page,
or whatever you'd like to call it. The purpose of this page is
to convince your visitor to buy the course. When the lead
is ready to begin purchasing you can link them to a checkout
right on your Thinkific Web site, or an external checkout if
you'd like. They'll need to sign up once for a student account
that they can use to enroll in any courses you enable them
to and to track their own progress and purchases.
In this onsite checkout powered by stripe or PayPal.
The course is paid for and the student is sent
along to a thank you Page. The process was simple here
but remember this whole path is customizable.
When students start a Thinkific online course they enter the
course player. A distraction free learning zone complete
with everything you need to create rich student experiences.
Students can watch, read, listen to,
download, (if you wish) and interact with your course
content. Students who progressed through lessons will have their
progress tracked individually and they can review the work
they've done so far in their achievements and progress tab.
You can even include a discussion forum for students
to communicate with you and each other about the course.
There's even a handy search bar for lessons and your students
can leave reviews that you can add to your sales pages later.
Students can track their own progress and get back to lessons
easily from their own student dashboard.
And they can change their profile details.
Like their password, access any certifications
they've earned, manage their credit card info, and see past
orders to get receipts all on their own. Pretty great right?
Now let's take a peek behind the curtain and explore
what a course creator can do with Thinkific. When you sign up
for a Thinkific Web site you'll find a few things to do right
away, like create a new course, get started building a website,
or attending our next training sessions or webinars.
You can get started however you want but in this video will
start with how quick and easy it is to create an online course
with Thinkific. Let's head over to courses to get started.
We need to make a new course, and when we do that we'll be
able to create one using a course template. We put these
together to take the guesswork out of instructional design.
You don't have to use one but if you do it'll include
a curriculum skeleton and some helpful starter content and
instructions. For now I'll just use the blank template.
Now let's name this course something really original.
Don't worry you can change anything after creating saving
or publishing in Thinkific, because you know we all make
mistakes and bad jokes. Right?
You'll notice we've entered a different part of the
Thinkific back end here. This is the course builder and
you can use it to design and develop your online courses
before publishing them. We're in the curriculum tab
right now but we'll come back here later. For now let's make
things quick and easy. I'm going to bulk import my
course content that's already ready to go. Let's see here.
Where did I put it all. Ah I've got a video. A PDF and
an audio file. I'll drag and drop them right
into the bulk importer and just like that Thinkific
has processed these files into lessons for Chapter 1 of my
online course. Let's add another chapter and drop in more
content. Each of these chapters contains as many lessons as you
need, and you can change the order of the lessons
or chapters by dragging and dropping them. Piece of cake.
Let's head back to the curriculum tab. You can see that
when I click on one of these lessons I have some more options
for the lesson. I can make this lesson part of a free trial
for my course, unpublished by setting it to
draft, or make it downloadable or audio play in the course
player. I can also make a prerequisite lesson
which means students will need to complete it before moving
onto the next chapter of lessons. Most of these options
exist for each lesson type in Thinkific. As you can see.
Video PDF and audio lessons are the only ways to teach.
You can teach your students with video,
audio, text,
PDF, narrated slideshows, and multimedia. You can also
engage students with quizzes, exams,
surveys, discussions, and downloads.
All right so let's add a quick pop quiz to help reinforce my
students learning. Then I'll add a question, an easy one
that helps a student reinforce their learning, and then add a
few multiple choice answers. I can add an explanation at the
end here. But you know why this answers right. Right?
I could also make this quiz graded,
or if I had a bunch of questions, import them all
and only have the quiz show a few questions from a question
bank, each time it loads, so that each assessment is
unique. We've already discussed prerequisites but there
is another way to pace out your content in Thinkific.
You'll find you can setup a release schedule for your
lessons based on either the student's enrollment date or
the course launch date.
Drip schedules are a great way to make sure that your cohort
of students are working at the same pace, to run a time based
challenge, or to space out all your content so it isn't so
overwhelming to the student. Under settings you can find all
the options Thinkific gives you to customize how students engage
with your course. You can control enrollments with private
courses,
hide courses from public visitors to your course site,
offer completion certificates to incentivize and reward 100
percent course completions, and much more. I'll let
you explore more of this toolbox on your own. The only thing we
have to do now now that we're done with our curriculum is
price our course. You can always leave your courses to be free
which is a great way to help you build your e-mail list by
the way, but when you integrate with a supported payment
processor like stripe or paypal, you can price your course a
number of ways. And with our Stripe integration you can set
your course site to charge in most currencies as well.
First onetime fees can be set to charge your students once for
the course you can obstinately limit the enrollment period as
well. All prices course at one hundred dollars for three months
of access for example. Now I can also set a subscription price
for recurring charges for continued access to the
course contents. You can include a free trial period,
and a custom first time payment, by which you can charge an
upfront fee, and a regular rate afterwards.
I can set up a payment plan which is like a subscription
price but it will stop charging my customer after a specific
number of payments. I can even have all three payment methods
for my course available at once and all displayed on my sales
pages. Finishing up here, i'll need to publish my course
if I want anyone to be able to enroll in it. So let's do that
next. If you want you can preview how your course looks
from here or you can continue on to building your course landing
page. Before we get any farther you should know that your
Thinkific website is made up of individual pages.
There's a few standard pages like your home page and your
core sales page and you can make new ones too.
You can completely customize your website's design
and content on every page using the site builder here.
I'm editing our courses sales page here but if I wanted
to edit other sales pages I just need to back up here to find
them. Moving once more back, I can see our home page and find
any other pages including custom pages, and edit them.
The theme settings tab here will give you options to change
the look of your course site including the colors,
fonts, the favicon, and more. You can even fast track your
designs with these Style Presets. Remember to save
or discard changes you make to confirm them or revert them.
The preview here will update when you make changes
automatically but you can opt out of that if you wish.
Now you might be wondering what a theme is at this point
and that's totally understandable but I can't tell
you because it's a secret.
Okay fine I'll tell you. If you exit the site builder
you're taken to the theme library where you can get back
to site builder and explore other Thinkific themes.
Themes help you design a website quickly and each have their own
personality. They've all been designed for education
businesses so you can't really go wrong but you should decide
on a theme to stick with before editing your pages.
You'll have a default theme here or the theme you selected when
you signed up for Thinkific but you can explore others and their
presets in the theme library. Publishing a theme makes it
live. You can build out your website in a particular
unpublished theme beforehand to avoid looking like your
under-construction too. Okay let's jump back in a site
builder for active theme and get started. All right we're back to
the course landing page, the sales page that will
convince my leads to buy and enroll in my online course.
Your header and footer stays the same across all of your
pages but you can make everything in between.
Unique to the page.
The sections here make up the content on this page.
We can easily rearrange them by dragging and dropping.
We can add a new section here,
and edit sections by clicking into it. Some sections contain
blocks and these blocks can be rearranged by dragging and
dropping as well. And some page sections are smart sections,
which means they'll automatically update
when I change details elsewhere on my course site.
For example if I added more lessons to my course,
I wouldn't need to come back here and then add them in this
curriculum section, it just does it automatically. Fancy hey?
Now naturally we want to get students to start enrolling in
our course. So let's look at some of the best features
Thinkific has to help you do that. First we have a few
courses already made here so we can start to offer a package
of included courses called a bundle. Bundles are a great way
to enroll a student in multiple courses from just one
transaction. Bundles get their own landing pages and checkouts
just like courses do. You can use them to turn your individual
online courses into an all access membership deal for
example. As well promotional pricing is a great way to sell
more courses. Especially when you're launching your new
Thinkific course site. Coupons allow you to set up
codes that buyers can use at the checkout to get a sale price
or a special deal. Like the first month half offer my
membership bundle for example.
Or not. Always looking for new customers we want to sell to our
existing customers, or maybe reengage lost prospects as well.
The users page you can segment your students to find
opportunities for promotional outreach. For example
if I filter my users to show me all of my free trial leads
that haven't purchased yet I can send them all an e-mail right
from my Thinkifc web site. In this email include some
targeted messaging and a coupon code to help change their minds
about buying my course. I can even include a link directly to
the checkout with that coupon code already applied.
Now that's thinking with coupons. You can apply all kinds
of filters to this table in order to gather other
insights from your users as well. Then you can bookmark them
for later use.
And students are the only user types in Thinkifc.
You can create new users for each member of your team,
you can even run your own affiliate network right
from your Thinkific website if you're sharing revenue
with other instructors share a percentage of the revenue
from individual courses or bundles that they've
contributed to.
Course admins help you manage your courses without getting
into all of the site settings For example.
Now we know you need total control over your course site if
it's going to be crucial for your online business.
So we've made some powerful features to help you make your
Thinkific Web site your own. For example you can add your own
logo, brand colors, and fonts, and you can link anywhere to
your existing website. Like in your site header or maybe
your logo and you can link you Thinkific course site
to your own existing website by adding a custom domain
or you can use your Thinkific website as your main web
property. Even your video content uploaded to Thinkific
can also be branded. In the video library You can easily
manage your videos and brand your video player. You can add
captions to videos, custom thumbnails, and gather
insights from video viewing to help you make better content
in the future. And on top of all of that we integrate directly
with industry leading marketing analytics and e-commerce
services so that you don't have to ditch the tools you already
love. Now don't worry that excitement you're feeling
right now that's totally normal. This is a lot to take in.
I get it but there's even more to a Thinkific course site than
I've shown you here. So if you want to explore
everything I've shown you and more, start for free
by registering for your own online course web site at
Thinkific.com