Who Uses Thinkific? [Best Ways To Create Your Own Online Courses]

These days, no matter what sector you work in, you can’t just say that you have the skills, you have to prove it. And one of the best ways to show that you’re the top in your field is by creating a sellable online course.

By teaching your own courses, you can show that you’re an expert in your industry, that you are very skilled at what you do, and that you know what is needed to break into this particular industry. 

Creating an online course is not only a great way to get your knowledge and experience out to others, but is also a great, semi-passive way to make money.

Once you create the course, you don’t really have to do much aside from answering queries from students and other simple admin work. 

So now you may be wondering how’re supposed to create an online course. Well, that’s where Thinkific comes in! Thinkific is a platform that tasks all of the hard work out of making online courses, so you can get it out into the world faster. If you want to know who is Thinkific for, and who uses Thinkific, keep reading!

Once you get started with Thinkific, you still need to set up the basic structure of the Thinkific course. To help you out, we’ve made this step-by-step guide on everything that you need to think about when creating your online course. 

This is by no means an exhaustive list of all of the things that need to be planned, prepared for, and executed to successfully create and sell an online course; however, it will help you know what to expect and what the journey will look like before you get started.

But first a little about Thinkific. 

What’s Thinkific?

Thinkific is a technology company that has developed a popular online course platform that enables individuals and companies to create online products (courses and communities) based on the knowledge that they already possess, and then deliver or sell those products to their audience from their own website, under their own brand! (Check out ‘What Is Thinkific Used For? (Service Explained)‘)

Thinkific site provides you with the tools you need for every stage of your online adventure, beginning with the course creation of your first product and continuing well after its original release.

Who Uses Thinkific? 

Thinkific is for professionals who want to develop a revenue stream through online education while also sharing their expertise online with cutting-edge solutions that encourage user interaction. 

People use Thinkific to teach themselves a wide variety of abilities, ranging from how to play the guitar to how to fly a drone to how to improve their digital marketing skills!

Industry leaders that maintain a blog or a YouTube channel, authors and lecturers, subject matter experts, and others utilize Thinkific products to scale up their offline businesses or monetize their skills. The possibilities for online education are virtually limitless when using Thinkific.

Thinkific is currently assisting over 25,000 educators in delivering education to students in 164 different countries.

Why Should You Use Thinkific? 

People that use Thinkific use online groups and courses to accomplish a wide variety of professional objectives. Thinkific courses are self-guided and participatory that support every other kind of online learning to develop a stronger and long-lasting online business. 

Online courses are ideal for training clients on a product or service and helping them gain the most value possible from it. It’s possible to develop courses and communities as stand-alone goods that may be sold or to connect them to produce a learning environment with several parts.

By moving their training to an online format, successful education business owners and independent consultants may make better use of their time. These are only a few examples of the many reasons why you should use Thinkific. (See also ‘How To Set Up An Account & Log Into Thinkific.’)

The Best Way To Create An Online Course 

1. Choose Your Topic 

Your course topic needs to be something that you’re passionate about. Your teaching will be about as interesting as a cardboard sandwich if you’re not passionate about the subject you’re teaching.

Think about the situations in life that have provided you with opportunities to develop your skills and talents. You shouldn’t feel as though you need to teach a university-level profession to offer courses to generate money. 

The variety of topics that could be covered in a course is virtually limitless, with Thinkific for example offering courses on everything from data analysis to roller skating. 

In a nutshell, to have a topic and knowledge that can be monetized, you must first love your topic, then be good at your topic, then have experience in it, and finally, it must fill a gap in the market and be interesting to people. 

2. Make Sure There’s Demand For Your Course 

Raise your hand if you want to spend the next several weeks of your life developing an online course that absolutely no one will purchase. Nope. It didn’t seem likely to me.

After you have selected the subject matter for your online class, the next step is to carry out market research to determine whether or not there’s a demand for the course. 

If during your research you find that there are already a lot of courses in your subject area, then you may think about giving up on your teaching prospects. But having some competition is never a bad thing! 

This in fact demonstrates that there’s a high probability of there being a large market demand for that course idea, and as a result, it’s well worth researching further.

Here are some of the things that you should be looking out for:

• Are people looking for it, and do they have questions about it?
• Can you offer something slightly new and different than your competitors? Have they missed something?
• Will someone be willing to pay for what your course offers?

Your idea for a course has the potential to become a best-seller if you answered “yes” to all the questions above.

There are many different things you may do to ensure that there’s market potential for your online course, including:

Pre-selling The Course 

Pre-selling your course is an excellent strategy for avoiding the terrible outcome of developing a program that nobody ends up purchasing. It’s not uncommon for people to purchase courses before they have even been developed.

When it comes to kicking off an online class, this is one of the most effective strategies. 

Keyword Research 

You may find out how many people are looking for courses similar to yours on Google by using the Keyword Planner tool offered by the platform. Pay attention to the “bid cost,” as products that are more likely to result in a profit typically have a higher cost per click.

Check The Competition 

Rival businesses that offer online training programs that are similar to your own are not necessarily a reason to give up your teaching dreams about course business success. This actually indicates that there’s a potential source of income that you can capitalize on. 

In addition to being a useful place to get a rapid overview of the available options, online course marketplaces can be an effective marketing tool when used along with your primary online course website.

Talk To The Target Audience 

If you’re not actively interacting with your audience, you’re passing up a lot of opportunities to gain new perspectives. Ask about the difficulties they face and whether or not they would be willing to pay for a class to help them overcome those difficulties.

3. Create Learning Outcomes 

People often overlook learning outcomes when creating a course, but their importance cannot be overstated.

If you don’t do this for your online courses, you could be putting your reputation and your financial line at serious risk, not to mention making the process of creating your courses a difficult and frustrating one.

Your students can transition from where they are in their lives now to where they want to be in the future with the help of the online courses you offer.

Would you give someone your money for a thing that you don’t fully understand and have no concept of what the product can achieve for you? Of course not.

Even while you’re aware of the benefits that your class will provide to your students during their entire student journey, this doesn’t guarantee that they’ll also be aware of these benefits. It’s doubtful that your students will sign up for your course if they are uncertain about the contents or how the course will benefit them. 

The learning outcomes for your course should make all of this crystal clear to potential students. They need to know what they’ll learn, what skills they will gain, and how your course will benefit them in the long run. 

4. Create And Gather Course Content 

At this stage, many people fall victim to procrastination, because this is typically the longest and most tedious part of the course-creating journey. 

The sheer quantity of information that we either have in our heads or that is all about us (in books, on our hard drives, in our notepads, and so on) is typically the primary factor that causes us to become stressed and overwhelmed in this situation. 

At this point, the challenge is not simply determining which topics should be covered in our curriculum; rather, it’s working out what to leave out. 

This is the point in the process where the research you will have completed throughout the market testing phase as well as the learning outcomes now became very helpful.

Throw out anything that doesn’t directly relate to the accomplishment of a learning outcome as you’re sorting through the stacks of content you have collected.

Next, check to see that all of the learning outcomes do, in fact, have content that is connected to them. Include only content that provides solutions to the most pressing problems faced by your audience or addresses unmet needs that haven’t been addressed by your rivals.

Another option is to find out what your most popular content is and bundle it into a more structured learning path if you already have content and an existing audience, such as from a Facebook group, a blog, or a YouTube channel. 

5. Structure Your Course And Modules 

When you have finished reviewing all of your content, the next step is to begin organizing it into modules based on topics, suggestions, and ideas. 

After that, you will need to arrange the lectures contained within those modules progressively and logically so they make sense when watched by a student. 

Make A Course Outline 

An outline of a course acts like a roadmap, outlining the steps that will be taken to get students from point A to point B in the course.

It will help you in delivering knowledge to your students in a planned and organized manner, piling skills one on top of the other until they feel like experts by the time they finish your course.

6. Find The Best Way To Teach Your Course

Now you have to decide how you want to deliver and teach this course. On Thinkific there are many different options to choose from. 

If you want your training to be as interesting and engaging for participants as possible, you need to be familiar with the various principles of adult learning, their individual learning preferences, and the many different ways in which you can offer your training.

Here are some things to think about: 

• Will there be audio content, videos, reading stuff, and activities?
• What kinds of images will you use?
• Are you going to provide community learning spaces?
• How do you plan to make the class interesting while also keeping it fun?
• How do you plan to assist students who have varying approaches to learning?

You need to make sure that you have a balance of visual, audio, and practical methods so everyone is engaged and you can deliver the most beneficial learning experience possible. 

How Long Should Your Course Be? 

This is the question that gets asked a lot when people are creating online courses. 

The time that it takes for students to get from point A to point B should be as short as possible in an online course. 

If you want some general estimates, based on what’s been seen at Thinkific – the most profitable course length on average is between 10 and 25 hours. Just below that, 5-10 hour courses generate approximately 75% of the same revenue.

Although this data helps present a comprehensive picture of different course lengths and how well they function, you must remember that course length is not a predictor of an increase in income. 

Many things will affect how long your course will be, as well as how profitable it is, such as how difficult the course is and whether people are getting any sort of educational credit from the course. 

7. Film And Edit Course Content 

You should have a comprehensive course plan, all of your content gathered together, and a clear understanding of how you’re going to deliver each component of your online course by this point.

Now comes the exciting part, which is getting in front of the camera, as video is now the most efficient way to distribute content.

Obviously, the way you teach others is dependent on what you’re comfortable with, what your audience reacts best to, and the type of content that you’re teaching.

One video idea is what’s known as a “talking head” video, which you film in front of a green screen. In the editing process, you are free to use any background you like when you have a green screen. It could be an animation, a movie, or just a static image behind you. 

A good idea is to use a green screen so that in the post-editing phase you can have your PowerPoint slides up behind you. This works really well for training videos that are more classroom-oriented.

Another approach is called screen recording, and it involves recording whatever is displayed on the screen of your computer. If you want, you may add a video of yourself taken with a webcam on top of this recording.

And as a final option, you can record a voiceover, which is essentially the same thing as recording a presentation’s narration.

8. Set up Online School 

At this stage, you need to know that there are three primary channels through which you can sell your online courses. These are learning management systems (LMS), online course marketplaces, and software or plugins on your website. 

The distinction between a self-hosted learning management system and an online course marketplace is quite big. Marketplaces for online courses are more of a marketing and publicity play than anything else.

The main channel through which you sell your courses shouldn’t be a marketplace because they give you little control over the branding and the user experience, and they frequently discount your courses without giving you advance notice.

An LMS is essentially your very own online academy, which you can connect to your website and completely rebrand as your very own online platform. It makes the process of creating online courses easy and simplifies the process of selling your learning items.

Thinkific is an example of one of these. 

9. Choosing The Price And Growing The Business Model 

Make sure that you have thoroughly planned out how and where each individual online course will fit into the larger revenue model for your online courses.

Will it serve as a free magnet to attract potential customers to your principal product or service? Is it going to be its own independent source of passive income in its own right?

Or are you planning on using it as your primary source of income? Are you selling access to a community or memberships in a community?

Because of each of these factors, each training program will need to be developed in a slightly different way, it will need to provide a different quantity of value, it will need to use a different set of marketing methodologies, and it will need to place your followers and students in very different kinds of funnels.

This will also have an impact on the pricing structure that you will need to implement for your online course to ensure that it adequately reflects the role that it plays within your company.

There is no “right” or “wrong” price for an online course, nor is there even a “guideline” price, because the price of an online course is very dependent on what it is that you’re delivering.

Have a look at what your competitors are charging and for what, then figure out how yours can be different and superior. However, as a starting point, we propose conducting an analysis and benchmarking of your idea in comparison to other courses currently available. 

Once you have improved upon what you have, then you should set your pricing a little bit higher. Never price yours lower than your competitors’ since doing so will give the impression that yours has less value than what they offer.

10. Launch And market The Course 

Too many people who build online courses fall into the trap of believing that once their course is finished, they will automatically have a source of revenue.

Launching your course and developing an ongoing marketing strategy to sell your course and generate leads are both necessary steps for you to take.

Here are some things to think about at launch and after:

• Are you going to offer specials for early bird discounts?
• Do you have a strategy in place for content marketing that can help sell your online courses?
• Will you run ads?
• Do you have a list of customers that you can market to?
• Are you able to collaborate with influential people?
• Will you offer a program for affiliates to join?
• What kind of use will you make of social media?

You should make sure that you have a marketing plan for your online course that covers at least 18 months, and you should keep in mind that the moment you stop promoting is the moment that you stop selling.

Summary

Now you have a “bird’s-eye view” of the most important points in the development of an online course, you can begin your online teaching journey!

The steps above should give you a general concept of what to anticipate during the process of developing and marketing online courses. Hopefully, with what you’ve learned you’ll create a very successful online course!