I’ve been selling courses online for years, so I was delighted to have found Teachable – this is the best way to sell courses.
How do I know this? I’ve done it the wrong way. In fact, I do everything wrong the first time. I call this “learning”. I lose money or I lose time. Usually both.
I’ve lost a great deal of money and time by selling courses on my site using WordPress plugins. There’s so much wrong with this approach. You are responsible for the video storage, the video delivery, collecting the payments, the security of the payment procedure, etc.
Selling courses through a WordPress site makes you responsible for so much that you hardly have time to create the courses in the first place. When you sell your courses with Teachable they do all the work.
Before, I was using a poorly supported WordPress plugin that was targeted by hackers – it was an accident waiting to happen. I was hacked. I love that I use my WordPress site for what it was originally intended for … blogging.
The above video about how to sell courses through your own site might sound like a Teachable advert. I don’t apologise for this. Let’s go through all the things I like about Teachable and why I think it’s a great solution for selling courses on your own site.
It looks like your selling courses from your site but you’re not
As I alluded to above, your domain is mapped onto the Teachable servers. So visitors to your site have a seamless experience passing from your blog to your school.
See for yourself: here’s my blog and here’s my school. Phil Ebiner achieves this much better than I do, here’s his Teachable school, and here’s his blog.
It’s so easy and simple
I first started selling courses on Udemy. Why? Because it was easy. Selling courses from your own site was so difficult before Teachable (or, in the early days, “UseFedora”) came along.
On Udemy, you upload the videos and addition resources, drag them into the right order, set a price, and baaam!, hit Publish.
It’s exactly the same with Teachable.
Bulk upload from Drive or Dropbox
I’ve published multiple courses on multiple platforms and to do that I utilized the cloud. Uploading videos takes time if you have bad internet (especially when you work from tropical islands as much as I do – lol).
So it’s best to upload everything to the cloud and then you, hopefully, don’t have to upload it all again. Now Teachable (and Udemy) have a direct from Drive and Dropbox feature. That means you can upload all your videos for one course (a gigabyte, at least, usually) with one click – instantaneously. Cool, ha?
Coupons, coupons, coupons
Where would we be without coupons, everybody? I mean, if it wasn’t for coupons, would Udemy actually make any sales at all?
The point of coupons is to offer your audience, or a section of your audience, a course at a reduced price for a limited amount of time. This fatal combination of both scarcity and price reduction is too much to resist for some customers.
Booom! This means sales.
So, say you have a course priced at $99. You offer it to your email subscribers for $25 and tell them the offer is only available for 24 hours – and sit back back and watch the money come in. That’s the power of coupons.
Teachable allows you to make unlimited coupons easily.
Bundles
Another way to sell courses is to combine them with other courses and sell them at a different price. For example, I could put all my WordPress courses into a bundle and sell them at a different price. I could add a coupon to that bundle and sell the bundle at a reduced price for a limited period of time. You get the idea.
I’ve set up a total access bundle of all of my courses which you can have access to for as little as $19/month. You will see this offer as an upsell if you buy any of my courses.
… all this is easy to do on Teachable.
Teachable works with all email platforms
I must have said this many times before: email marketing is the most effective form of marketing in my online business. Teachable works with all the major emailing platforms like Aweber, Mailchimp, etc.
I use ActiveCampaign (not the most helpful company in the world) and we have to use Zapier to make sure the Teachable users get added to a list. However, now that it’s set up, it works beautifully.
The best way to sell online courses is to offer people free courses and hit them with an auto-responder series cram full of helpful advice and links to premium courses. Teachable makes this easy.
And, once you have their email addresses you can offer them new courses at special launch prices!
Above is the income I received in the week after I launched my self publishing course. The spikes in the graph occur on days I emailed my lists with the launch offer. I’m just about to do another of these launches with my new Merch By Amazon course. Wish me luck!
Affiliates
So, I think you can onboard affiliates on Teachable but I have yet to test it out. However, I know how to do it and it seems possible.
What I would improve about Teachable
I don’t want this to sound like a Teachable ad so here are some suggestions for improvements they could make.
- People often complain about Teachable’s support and I have been frustrated with them, not least because the support form forces you to choose a subject from a dropdown with a few options that never match your query. Their Facebook group the Teachable Tribe is a good place to go with questions.
- Although we can accept PayPal and credit card, we can’t accept Bitcoin for purchases.
Their schools are insecure! You do not get the SSL secure green padlock icon when visiting my Teachable site which is beginning to look really bad. Google penalizes sites without the SSL secure green padlock. Update 27 October 2017: pleased to say Teachable have now fixed this.- There are other limitations to the UI of the backend, for example you can’t get an adequate visual breakdown of what courses have sold when or how many sign ups you have on each course. You can get this information, it’s just not as easy as it could be.
At this point I should mention Thinkific which is a direct competitor to Teachable. I’ve never used it but I’ve spoken to the founder on Skype and I’ve heard good things about it. It has the same benefits as Teachable (the schools are hosted on their servers) so I would recommended it as an alternative to Teachable. I could also mention Kajabi but that’s at a higher price point.
You can do it!
However, the most important thing is … action! Get out there and create content. Help people. Start making videos and listen to the feedback. In no time at all you can sell courses on your own site and start making passive income.
Hi Rob,
Congrats on the success you’re having with your online courses. I eventually plan on creating some courses as well. I first have to focus on growing my email list, right now it’s too small.
Oh and good luck with your new course Merch By Amazon course. I’ve seen so many people using the Teachable course as well as the Thinkific.
When the time comes for me to create my first course at least I’ll have a better understanding of which one to use. It’s nice to know that it works with all email responder services.
Thanks for sharing this with us. You’ve definitely helped me understand why Teachable could be a great platform for my courses.
Have a great day 🙂
Susan
Hey Susan, thank you so much. Please let me know if you have any questions about growing an email list or selling courses. 🙂
Good to hear that email marketing is still the number one way to convert your traffic.
I have seen pro bloggers recommending to start building email list from day 1 🙂
Awesome write up, keep posting…
Thank you, Navneet. Yes, the email list is of primary importance!
Nice quick intro to teachable – thanks!
My pleasure, Bibhash
Rob that is great congrats! im so happy for you. I’ve purchased you courses in the past abnd they have helped a great deal.
Currently using Teachable and their facebook group is soo supportive! So easy to use and highly recommended.
Glad you found it useful, Rosemary. Thank you so much for getting some of my courses. 🙂
Thanks for the detailed explanation Rob, whar would be the apprx time frame when we building video sessions. I am planning to create lessons for Digital Marketing. Suppose I teach about on page SEO how much it can last in one video.
Hello Ajesh, very difficult to answer this question. It depends how long you want the course or the sessions to be?
Hi Rob
Just stumbled on your site and this is awesome. So much great info.
I have been thinking about creating a course on Udemy but before I spend a heap of time doing that I have been researching into how profitable/successful it is. Seems from another one of your articles I just read Udemy is less appealing now due to the changed pricing structure? Is this still the case?
If so, and you would recommend teachable now over it, I was wondering what the best way to drive traffic to your course is? Can you still get organic traffic thru teachable or?
Apologies if you have already covered the above questions.
Thanks
Jared
Hi Jared, Udemy is less appealing now, not because of that change of price structure (they reversed that decision) but because of increased competition and saturation in the market.
I wouldn’t say, however, that you should do one or the other – Udemy or Teachable. I would definitely do both, in fact, well, that’s what I do.
Hope this helps. Glad you found my site useful.
Thanks Rob. Great info! Have you tried pricing your Teachable courses higher, or do you find that these price points work the best?
Hello Josh, good question. A lot of people price higher than me. Part of the reason I price fairly low is that a significant proportion of my audience also follow me on Udemy where they can get the courses for $10. I do offer longer, better value courses on my Teachable site but I still find that they sell better at these low prices. Other people do have other opinions and experiences. I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any more questions.
great article Rob. I came to you for advice on this as I appreciate your style of writing.
With Teachable, I am looking at the 2 plans that appeal to me- the Professional and the Basic.
Did you have one that you favor more that works best?
thanks Rob.
It’s up to you. I’m on the Professional because I wanted to take credit card payments as well as PayPal. But you can migrate between plans at any time so it doesn’t really matter. Best of luck, Lisa.
Hey Rob, great content as usul. I am having problems with payment gateway. I cannot use paypal nor stripe. So teachable or thinkific is not useful for me. I can only use payoneer. That leaves me to udemy, which I am reluctant. Because 30 days of free refund could be exploited in my country. WP hosting is not a good option as you mentioned.
So what would you recommend in this position?
Hello Max, thank you for your comment. I’m not really sure what you can do. If you can only use Payoneer then, yes, Udemy is an option for you. Definitely, Teachable does not pay out to Payoneer. I asked them recently about this. Sorry!
Hi Rob,
I do not have an email list and my facebook group has under ten followers so how can I go about marketing? how do I build followers/list without spending money on adverts.
Hello David, the best way to build a following is to regularly create great, free content.
Congrats Rob,
You have the life I dream to have, you inspire me.
I have difficulties to create the course even if I learned a lot and could say I have enough knowledge to share. What could you recommend to do to have my first course online soon?
Hello Claude, I’m really glad I’ve inspired you. Unfortunately I can’t tell you what to do. Only to make sure you enjoy it!
Hey Rob, I was researching and I found an interesting alternative. What do you think about embedding videos to vimeo and then doing a wordpress site instead of all this? Especially when I cannot use paypal or stripe?
That’s what I used to do and it was a nightmare, Hakan. I wouldn’t recommend a WordPress plugin to sell online courses, that’s why I use Teachable.