Teachable is an online platform that allows individuals and businesses to create and sell courses and memberships.
Its platform is very user-friendly and provides a range of features and tools to help course creators design and deliver effective online learning experiences.
Since it was introduced to the world in 2014, Teachable has grown in popularity with every passing year.
As of 2022, there are over 10,000 creators taking advantage of the platform, producing courses on all kinds of topics.
Of course, you need to have a particular skill, or at least some knowledge in a field before creating your first course and selling it to students and businesses. (Check out ‘Teachable Prices: How Much Does It Cost To Publish A Course Online?‘)
Before anyone starts work on a Teachable course, however, most have one question in common, “how much money do you make on Teachable?”
Well, in truth, Teachable can be extremely profitable for course creators, but many factors come into play to become successful at selling courses on the platform.
If you’re like us, you’re probably curious about how to make selling online courses profitable on Teachable.
Well, we wanted to find out too, so we have done our own research so you don’t have to.
Today, we are going to take a look at what Teachable is, how it works, and, of course, how much money you can make off the platform.
By the end of this article, you should have a clearer view of whether you want to start setting up and selling online courses on Teachable or not risk the workload and little reward.
Let’s delve into Teachable.
What is Teachable?
Teachable is an online platform where businesses and individuals create online courses and then sell them for profit. This also included memberships.
There are a wide range of features and tools to help course creators design and deliver effective online learning experiences.
So, even if you have little to no experience in creating courses, Teachable has the resources to help you get started.
With Teachable, course creators can easily design and publish their courses, and students can access the courses through the platform. (See also ‘How To Get Paid On Teachable [Payment Gateways Explained]‘)
Some examples of the features and tools used to help course creators design and deliver their courses, include video hosting, course landing pages, customizable sales pages, email marketing tools, integrations with payment gateways, student tracking, progress tracking, and more.
It also allows course creators to offer their courses as memberships at different fees, which enables students to access a range of courses and other learning resources for a single, set fee.
Overall, Teachable is a popular platform for individuals and businesses looking to create and sell online courses, as it provides a range of features and tools to help them deliver high-quality learning experiences to their students.
Teachable Key Features
Teachable boasts a large selection of features and tools which course creators and students can take advantage of.
Some of the key features of Teachable include the following:
Course Creation Tools
Teachable provides a variety of user-friendly tools and resources to help course creators design, build, and publish their courses.
This includes features such as video hosting, course landing pages, and customizable sales pages.
Membership Options
Teachable allows course creators to offer their courses as memberships, which enables students to access a range of courses and other learning resources for a single fee.
These membership fees can differ depending on what the student wants out of the course and directly dictate how much a course creator may earn. We will go into earning money selling online courses in further detail below.. (See also ‘What Percentage Does Teachable Take? [Things You Need To Consider]‘)
Marketing and Sales Tools
Teachable provides a range of marketing and sales tools to help course creators promote and sell their courses, including email marketing tools, integrations with payment gateways, and coupon and discount options.
Therefore, creators can advertise and share their courses all over the internet in the hope of attracting new customers and unlimited students.
Student Management
Teachable offers a range of tools to help course creators manage their students and their progress through the course, including student tracking and progress tracking.
Who Uses Teachable?
There is an ever-growing demand for Teachable, made evident by the 10,000 plus, and growing, course creators using the platform today. And, with the chance to earn an income from the site, it is no surprise that more and more people are looking to get a slice of the action, too.
The platform is perfect for all kinds of individuals and businesses, in particular entrepreneurs, small online course business owners, or founders who want to turn the most profitable online courses into lucrative business ventures.
Even large enterprises, such as Shopify and The New York Times have courses on Teachable, so it really is open to everyone, everywhere.
Since it began in 2014, over 100,000 creators have set up and sold courses on Teachable.
In that time, over $1 billion worth of courses have been generated and sold, helping many creators’ financial dreams come true and millions of students have been coached successfully worldwide.
Let’s explore some of the very best features that we like about Teachable below.
Ease of Use
As we mentioned above, teachability is easy to use.
Rather than being a headache to navigate, like some competitors are, Teachability guides you every step of the way to creating the perfect course.
Teachability is renowned for its simplicity and ease of use. Therefore, novices and people who have never created a course before can build one with relative ease.
Once registered, the first thing a user comes across is the dashboard. Here, headers are found marked:
- Websites
- Users
- Emails
- Sales
- Classes
As you can imagine, this is pretty straightforward and self-explanatory.
With such a simple layout, it becomes easier to do just about anything, such as reviewing analytics, uploading course documents, communicating with students, and issuing refunds (though you hope the last will not be needed).
Analytic Capabilities, Student Tracking Tools, and Marketing
Once your course has been created and uploaded to Teachable, you will need to keep track of how well it is doing and with students. One of the main factors you’ll want to look into is how many course sales there have been.
Fortunately, all the essential and necessary tools for this are available on the platform to keep track of analytics and sales. You can also study how well your classes have performed during different periods of the year.
Of course, you can access more features with higher plans.
One such example is accessing advanced sales features, like bundles and one-click upsells. This allows you to offer your students discounts if they want to purchase another one of your courses.
You can also track how your students are faring with your course. You can examine student engagement and enrollment, as well as receive reports on how much your students actually interact with your classes.
And you can check how many students complete the course and where students regularly get stuck, so you can work on improving the course going forward.
Instead of you taking the time out to deal with promotions and technology, Teachable does it for you. Thanks to the platform’s in-depth dashboard, you can track a student and their progress and sales insights without having to figure it out for yourself.
Customization
You can incorporate a great range of tools into Teachable thanks to its many partners. These tools allow you to do such things as create multimedia lectures, a homepage, videos, and loading pages via the easy-to-use power editor.
There is a large range of topics to choose from when creating your course’s landing page. All you need to do is upload text, logos, images, and choose one of the numerous color schemes that you like.
For advanced users, it is possible to insert custom HTML or CSS into Teachable’s code snippet section, too.
Options for Payment
Refunds are available on the site via Teachable Payments. Thanks to this, there is no need to use a third party for any payment processing, making it easier and more reliable.
Payment can be made with a variety of options from stripe to PayPal, and even more advanced payment methods, such as Visa and Mastercard. Students can pay using a credit card, debit card, Apple Pay, PayPal, or Google Play.
You have a range of choices when it comes to choosing your payment money and it is also possible to create coupons and discount codes for students. There are also affiliate codes and Teachable will manage any affiliate payments automatically.
You can charge for your class as a one-time purchase fee or choose a monthly payment or subscription.
Teachable Plans
When you first sign up for Teachable, it is made clear that getting started is completely free. However, whilst this is a great way of getting people to sign up, you’ll soon realize that you can’t get much done on the site without purchasing a subscription.
Here, you will need to consider the three pricing plans available:
- Basic Plan – $39 a month/ $29 a month for annual billing
- Pro – $119 a month/ $99 a month for annual billing
- Business – $299 a month/ $249 a month for annual billing
Basic Package
The basic package includes all the base features for $39 a month or $29 a month when choosing to pay annually. When choosing this package, Teachable charges a 5% transaction fee.
The site also provides any monthly payouts that are due, an unlimited supply of courses, students, videos, hosting, quizzes, and there are no fees for the free courses.
As you can imagine, all of these benefits are available with the large plans, too, with a whole lot more to boot! But, overall, for $39 a month, 5% is exceptional.
Pro Package
The Pro package is $119 a month or $99 a month if you choose annual billing. This includes all the base features of the basic package but with more features, including advanced support, product support, five admin-level users, completion course certificates, and an unbranded site.
There are also no transaction fees.
This plan also allows you to use your own domain, so you can choose something to look professional and unique for your course. Or, you can simply use a Teachable.com domain.
Business Package
As you can probably guess, this package includes all the Base and Pro package features and, of course, even more! But, you’ll need to fork out a lot more for this plan at $299 a month or $249 a month for an annual subscription.
Features include access to 20 admin-level users, manual pupil imports, bulk student enrollments, theme customization, group coaching calls, custom user roles, and much more.
Your Course Pricing Plans For Students
When it comes to pricing your courses, you may struggle to decide what the best price plan is. However, Teachable has a good deal of options available. For instance, you can offer your courses:
- For free
- As a subscription
- For a one-time fee
Of course, what you price your course at will determine how much you may be able to earn, and how many students purchase the course.
Once your course is set up, you can edit, restore, delete, or close your course whenever you like. A great option is to add bonuses for your students regularly as this gives you a great opportunity to email your students and interact with them. Also, who doesn’t like new offers?
When deciding what price your courses should be, it’s advisable to check out other similar courses and what creators are charging for those. We did a little digging and found one course teaching students on how to become a VR developer for $297.
We also found art courses from as little as $67 and cooking courses priced from around $25 to $150.
As you can see, pricing plans vary widely between courses and creators. People charge varying amounts for their courses depending on what the course is and how much material is available. The more comprehensive the course, the more expensive it will tend to be.
What many teachers offer is one or two free courses to entice students and give them a flavor of what the course has to offer before they put their money down.
This is a great idea if you want to garner more attention to your courses and it allows students to see if they like the course or not.
One strategy that often works well is to offer your course for a certain fee, such as $95. Then, you can set a timeline where the course fee will increase, eventually up to $195. This price increase acts as an incentive for students to join sooner to get a better price.
To add value for future price increases, you can then offer additional bonus material for students and discounts now and again.
How Much Can You Earn From Teachable?
Depending on certain factors, it is possible to earn quite a chunk of money on Teachable. Some of the top Teachable creators even generate up to six figures a year!
However, this isn’t to say you will hit those dizzy heights just because you create an intensive, fun, informative course on a certain topic.
The key is to get web traffic to your course. Without this, you will not make much money and, therefore, your courses will not be a profitable side hustle. The only issue is that generating web traffic to visit your school is a challenge in itself.
Yes, you can pay money to promote your site online, but even this won’t guarantee traffic. But, this is probably the best way to get started to try and get your course to reach a wider audience. You will usually get some students from this, but don’t expect six figures right away!
The most successful Teachable creators are those that know how to market themselves best. This includes making connections on social media and/or finding suitable affiliates.
The more connections you have, the greater chances there are of building a successful Teachable course.
If you have no affiliates to start with, you can still find them. This promotional strategy is somewhat different from simply recommending a course to someone or online.
This entails you finding individuals, brands, and/or businesses who would like to make money by promoting you and your services. This is one of the most viable methods to make an income via Teachable.
These affiliates will do all the heavy lifting work for you, but you will then have to pay them 50%. But, 50% of something is better than 100% of nothing!
Do this and you have a great chance of earning a passive income!
There are literally thousands of online affiliate retailers, including Amazon, various retailers, tech companies, and many more.
In general, when creators go down the route of affiliate selling, they make a few hundred dollars a month. Nevertheless, this can vary depending on the creator, the partner, the online course platforms, and the course.
The more popular the course topic is, like “becoming a watercolor artist,” the higher chance of getting more students, but you may also have more competition in the field.
If it is a niche course, such as, “Cookie decorator in a day,” then you may not have as much interest.
But, if you join certain programs and follow strict strategies, you may end up earning several thousand dollars of passive income!
When joining an affiliate marketing program, always remember to do your homework beforehand. Lots of affiliate programs pay creators with store credit or gift cards, which might be great for some, but you prefer another form of payment.
Overall, however, affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money online, particularly for beginners.
Drawbacks of Using Teachable as a Side Hustle
Whilst there are many possible lucrative outcomes from using Teachable, there are some drawbacks. It’s not a simple side hustle that you can work on when you have some spare time. Remember, you will be charged a monthly fee to use the platform.
Therefore, you’ll need to go full out with your course or courses, or just leave it altogether. There is no middle ground.
If you want to make Teachable work for you, you MUST be able to drive traffic to your online school.
You will also need to offer knowledge to potential students and businesses who would then be willing to pay you for what you have to teach.
Before all of that, though, you will need to build the course from scratch, which will take time and effort. This involves finding the correct course materials, designing your page so it is user-friendly, and then creating incentives for people who would want to sign up for your course.
At first, you’ll probably need to make some free courses to create interest in your site, too.
There’s no doubt about it, Teachable could be the jackpot for the right sort of person. For those who want to use Teachable as more of a passive stream of income, then organic traffic to the site would need to be generated to receive new leads every month.
If you just leave your online course on the site and just wait for people to sign up, then you will not make any money. You will just be dishing out a monthly subscription fee with nothing in return.
Do you have a large social media following? Maybe you have an audience who would be interested in your courses already? If so, Teachable may be ideal for you! If not, however, you will need to work very hard to make your Teachable courses a success.
No, it is not impossible to generate a steady stream of income without a large following beforehand, but it would be a challenge. Work hard, and who knows what could happen? Worth a shot!
In Summary
There are many factors that will determine how much money you can generate using Teachable. From the course topic itself to how many students you have and how you market the course to the pricing plans you choose, there are many elements to consider.
But, when done right, Teachable can be a great source of income for many course creators.
