Hey, it's Anastasia here. If you're trying to launch your online course
and want to streamline the process, this video will guide you step by step!
Instead of wasting days or even months piecing together different platforms like Teachable,
ConvertKit, ClickFunnels, Typeform, and Calendar,
you can try using High-Level Memberships who kindly sponsored today's video.
This tool allows you to host your courses and memberships but it also
gives you all the features you need to market your business, all in one place!
Now, if you're not familiar with High-Level, you can set up every single business automation you
can imagine, from email marketing and text messages to landing pages, funnel pages,
and even pop-ups and a chat widget to instantly reply to your potential clients!
You can try and test Highlevel for 14 days,
just use the link in the description below to start your free trial!
Step #1 Create a Membership or Course
Let's dive into the Memberships and courses hosting features inside High-Level.
First of all, if this is your first time using this platform,
you need to create a Sub-account. Here is how you can do it. I am using
an empty account so that things look similar on your side when you are getting started.
Initially you will be in the Agency dashboard that's the default view but
you need to create a Sub-account related to your business to move to the next step.
So click on Sub-accoutns,
then on the right side click on this green button to add a new sub-account.
You will see here lots of what they call snapshots for different niches. Essentially,
they are just templates but you can simply click to start a Blank Snapshot and first
you'll see this map, I suggest that you don't even try to find your address there.
Instead, click on the button Add account
manually and you'll be able to simply submit all your business information there.
A business name is a required field but if you are a solopreneur and haven't registered a company
yet, I think you can simply add your personal name as you act as a business in this case.
Once you are in a particular sub-account,
you need to click on Sites and that's where you will find Memberships.
First, if we look here in the submenu under the Memberships,
you will notice here two links - Products and Offers. I think it's
important to explain you the difference between them so you don't get confused.
An Offer is what your clients are buying on HighLevel. An offer can include one
product or several products together. This can be called bundles of courses.
Or you could take advantage of this by creating smaller
products and then including them into several different offers, or bundles.
Step #2. Choose the Course Type
Now when we open the Products tab, we can click here on Create a new product and
you'll see that we have 4 different types of courses to choose from.
First off, we have the Sprint course, which is exactly what it sounds like - a fast-paced
course that usually has four or five videos. It's perfect if you just want to get things
done quickly and move on to the next step. Next up is the Marathon course, which is
probably the one you'll be interested in. This is the course that I will build with you and it will
be broken up into different sections that you have to go through one by one until you reach
the end. It's a bit more in-depth than the sprint course, with about 20 to 30 videos on average.
If you're interested in building a monthly subscription where the content is always
changing and adapting, then you might want to check out the Membership course.
Finally, there's the build-your-own course option, but honestly, most of the courses
you need are already available, so there's no need to create your own.
Anyway, for now, I think the Marathon course is probably the best option for most of the people.
Step #3. Build a Marathon Course
So I picked the Marathon Course to create and I'll show you all the set-up click by click.
See here I added this title to my course about Social Media Marketing.
Then in the description field, you can give a lot more details about the course.
Here you need to add a thumbnail for your course the recommended size is 1280x720 pixels.
You can ask a graphic designer to make this for you but I think it's quite easy to be
honest to create a thumbnail like this in Canva. It's a free online graphic design
tool. Check my link in the description below to start your forever-free Canva account.
Once you are there, you just need to click on Custom size, submit the size that we need
1280x720 and Canva will show you on the left side plenty of templates of this specific image size.
You can pick something that works well for your brand colors or your niche and just
insert your course title there and maybe change the background photo if necessary.
I downloaded the image from Canva and now I will go back
to HighLevel to upload this newly created thumbnail for my course.
We can then check in Customization the fields for information about the Instructor and for
the profile photo. So I will add all of this info and upload my photo. Don't forget to go
back to the top of the page and click on the Save button when you add any changes to these settings.
If you click here on the Customize button you will get 3 course layout
options to choose from. I recommend you to just click on all 3 of them first to
see which layout you like more - this is how the course will appear on the student's side.
Now, I'll pick the first option because I like this layout the most and you can see here if
you click on Customize button, you will be able to change a lot of things on this page. For example,
this horizontal photo in the header - you can create another one in Canva,
the size that's required here is 1600 by 350, so I made an image that's more light and so it will
be easier to read the text on this new background. As usual, don't forget to click Save Theme if you
want to see any of these changes applied. You can also have a look at all the other
settings like font color and size and so on. Once you think your page looks good enough,
you can click on Apply theme to make sure your new settings are used for the course layout.
If you go inside the course Outline, you'll see that each lesson can have
a title and a description where you can include any additional instructions, links and any text
you want to add as a learning material. You can upload here additional PDF files if necessary.
And you can upload and host on the platform unlimited videos which is
a great benefit because it's quite costly to host your videos on a third-party platform.
If we click here on Preview to check how our lesson looks like so far,
this is what we get. We have our video and the text here, the PDF file, the video has
already been processed on the platform so we can start playing it. Everything looks nice!
Step #4. Create an Offer
Now we'll go to the Offer tab under Memberships to create the first offer.
As I mentioned, an offer can include just one course or several products.
You just need to click on this button on the right side to Create an Offer, then
you will be able to pick one of the products you already created. If you want to add more products
to the offer, you can do it on the next step. You can setup the price of the product but this
option will be only available to you if you have previously connected your sub-account to Stripe.
By the way about the price, once you created the offer on the right side you will see this button
to Edit price and you'll find more options. You have here ​​the One-time payment when Members will
be charged once immediately after checkout. And recurring subscription when members will
be charged on a regular interval. The first payment will be processed immediately after
checkout or after the trial period has ended. You also have an option to create a free
product if you want to make a free course as a lead magnet, you can do that too.
As I mentioned, you can include several product in one offer, I already have two
here and can click here to add more courses in this offer and I could call it a bundle.
By the way, HighLevel Has a great feature that allows you to add Upsells to your offers.
If you're thinking about making multiple courses that lead from one to another and
you want to add an upsell, I think this feature is super valuable.
You can add an upsell course right after your client purchased the first one!
Now, some of you might be wondering about using your own domain for courses with this platform.
You can totally do it, just go to the Membership Settings,
click on Cusom Domain and you can follow these instructions
to point your domain name to HighLevel. If you do this, all your courses will be
found under the same domain and will be branded by your unique brand name.
But this step is optional and you can use the default URL for your courses as well.
Step #5 Email Settings for an Onboarding Email
It's a common practice to send all your members a welcome email. What you can use it for is to
provide students with important information about the course, such as the course objectives, and
where they can find additional resources or links. You can also encourage students in the
welcome email to engage with the course content and each other.
To set this up, you need to go back to Settings under Memberships then click on Email Settings,
and here under Welcome email you'll find a default welcome email template,
or you can create your own template like I did here for my Social Media Marketing Course.
To create your email template, you will need to go to another tab called Marketing,
from there click on Emails and choose Templates.
When you click Create New it will give you an option to either create
from scratch using a blank template or you can pick something from the Email Marketing
templates that are already here available for you. Remember I told you it's an all-in-one platform,
so, of course, you will have here email marketing tools and then you can create
flows and automations right here. But for now we just need a Welcome email.
You will find here they have lots of templates for different niches and categories.
But I would suggest to click on System templates because that's
where you will find the default Membership email.
You can use it as a template and edit or add your own text there. What I like here
they included in this template custom fields that will automatically insert
users important details about their login and the link to the product they enrolled into.
What Do you Get with HighLevel?
I'll give you here a brief overview of Highlevel and why I think it's one of the best all-in-one
platforms to run your online business. All-in-one marketing solution - so
you can build your courses, build your website, email marketing all that stuff.
Online Course Builder with several layout templates, and a lot of customization
options. Each course lesson can contain a video, a body text and any number of files to download.
You get unlimited file hosting so you can upload all your video lessons right here
without any extra fee and without having to use any third-party video hosting solutions.
Scheduler & Appointment Booking - this can be helpful if you are not only selling a
pre-recorded course but want to also offer some 1:1 consultations to your
members. So this will replace platforms like Calendly and save you money as well.
Advanced Funnel & Site Building so that you can build here your entire funnel to
sell the courses and don't need to build a separate website for this.
Advanced Emails, Text & Automations - again it will save you a lot of
money because all these email marketing tools are very costly.
And also it saves you the headache of integrating lots of different tools,
here you are sure that all the stuff will be in one place and working together perfectly fine!
I think it's important for you to know that the platform has
several channels you can get help from!
There is an extensive Help Center and video course tutorials available.
And you can open a ticket via a live chat or call their 24/7 support line and talk to a real person!
If you look at the pricing on HighLevel you get these two options.
To be honest, I think most people should be fine with the $97/mo because the second
level is geared towards agencies. But the $97/mo is a VERY competitive compared to
other all-in-one platforms in the industry. Again make sure you use the link in the
description below and start your 14-day trial to test and see if the platform works for you!
Now you know how to build your online course, but the main problem I see beginners have is getting
leads and free traffic to their offers. Check out my video up there to learn how I get over
80k/mo visitors to my website from Pinterest, for free! I'll see you in the next video!