TAM 057: Creating Online Courses With Thrive Themes

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Creating online courses is great for lead generation and revenue, but how do you get started?

This week's episode follows on from episode 56 where we talk about how you can create your own online courses with the Thrive Themes suite of products.

Bullet Points We Chat About:

• Thrive Apprentice feature
• How to create and organise on online course
• The features inside Thrive Themes to get you going quickly

If you want to give Thrive Themes a try, you can get it here.

If you have any questions or just need a tip from the ninjas, join us in the Automation Nation private Facebook group.

Links Mentioned In The Show

• ActiveCampaign
• Thrive Themes Bundle
• Thrive Content Builder
• Thrive Course Landing Page Set
• The Active Marketer Academy

Listening options:

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Barry: Hi, it's Barry, back with another Tactical 20 podcast.

Announcer: Welcome to The Active Marketer podcast where we talk about how to design, automate, and scale your business to the next level using sales and marketing automation. You can find out all the tips, tactics, and techniques you need to get more customers and sell more stuff over at theactivemarketer.com. Now here's your host, Barry Moore.

Barry: Hi. I'm your host Barry Moore, and this is going to be another Tactical 20 podcast. The Tactical 20 podcasts are all about giving you an actionable tip, technique, or tactic that you can take away and implement in your business in less than 20 minutes.

Welcome to Episode 57 of The Active Marketer podcast. This is going to be another Tactical 20 episode, and this is going to follow on from the last episode where we talked to you all about lead capture using the Thrive Themes suite of products. Sure enough, as soon as I hit publish on that episode, they came out with another kind of killer feature or another killer set of pages to use, and I also neglected one feature that I probably should have mentioned that's part of the Thrive suite, inside some of the themes.

In this episode, we're going to follow on. We're going to talk about how you can use Thrive Themes and Thrive Content Builder to create online courses. Online course is a popular way, obviously, of generating revenue, number one, but it's also a great way of generating leads as well. You might want to put together, say, a free course or a free mini-course that leads people up, upsells them into a paid course.

If any of you have investigated the various options in that kind of arena, you can go with anything like Udemy. Many of you have probably come to this podcast and my business through a Udemy course I've done. You can also have your own self-hosted platforms like [inaudible 00:02:07] or Teachable. Or, you can put them into your own website using membership plugins.

If it's a free course, you don't even really need the membership plugin. You just need some sort of plugin inside a WordPress that structures the course to make it easy to navigate and easy to follow along for the course participant.

You may have heard of things like Zippy Courses, for example that do that sort of thing. Thrive knows this, and one of the features I forgot to mention that's part of the suite, and I didn't mention it because it's not something you can buy separately. It's actually in several of their themes. Not all of them, but several of them. There is a feature called Thrive Apprentice. What Thrive Apprentice is, is exactly what I just said there. It's part of the theme, so it's not really a plugin because it's included as part of a theme, but it's a set of features that allow you to create and manage an online course.

It allows you to create kind of three sections deep of content. You could have, typically, in a course you'd have a number of modules or a number of topics, let's call them a number of topics, and inside each one of those topics would be a number of lessons, all right? You might have, going back to Map the Campaign course, you might have a section, a category on tagging, and then inside there there might be four different lessons in the tagging section.

That would be two levels of organisation within the course. Now you can actually have a third level of organisation as well, and so what Thrive Apprentice allows you to do is create that course outline, and then create the pages for the course, and then easily rearrange those pages into whatever the most proper order for that course happens to be, right? It's an easy way to create and organise your course, and then there are lesson template pages where you can create a text-based lesson or a video-based lesson.

Then those lessons slot into the hierarchy and you also get things like an author box at the bottom, download links, for example. You get one of those nice clean little hierarchical navigation bars in the course, so that your students in your course can jump back and forth to different sections of the course, different modules of the course without you having to manually create that course navigation as well.

If you want to look at other products that are out there, it's kind of more akin to Zippy Courses which allows you to create your course hierarchy and your course pages, your course lessons, but comes with all the associated bells and whistles like navigation and all that other kind of good stuff. The students can mark lessons complete and progress through the course, et cetera.

That's Thrive Apprentice. You can't buy it separately. You have to be using one of the Thrive Themes that supports the Apprentice feature. If you're not using the Thrive Theme, either you're going to have to switch to that particular Thrive Theme, or you're going to maybe set up a separate course website that houses all your courses on the subdomain or on a different website, and then you can use the theme and the Apprentice feature there.

The other cool thing that they just came out with to support courses is, I think it's 11 different page templates, so if you have the Thrive Content Builder plugin and you want to create, say, a minicourse for lead generation, for example, you want to get people to sign up to your list by taking your minicourse, you'd have to create all these pages.

You might not want to go with the whole Thrive Apprentice-type thing. You might just want to have four or five linked pages together, lesson one on a page, lesson two on a page, et cetera. For your minicourse, and you don't need all the bells and whistles of a full course, for example. If you have Thrive Content Builder, which also creates landing pages, as we talked about in Episode 56, Thrive has just come out with a whole set. I think there's like 11 or 12 pre-done landing page templates specifically designed to allow you to create and sell a course.

Even if you don't have Thrive Apprentice, even if you're not using a Thrive Theme, and you just have the Thrive Content Builder plugin, you can get instant access to these 12, 11 course templates that give you basically every page already built out with all the features you're going to need to create a lead capture and minicourse.

Some of the pages include like a lead capture page. Hey, sign up here to take my free course, or you can turn it into a paid course if you like, and they have templates for long-form sales page, a short-form sales page. They have a course welcome page template. If you're doing double opt-in confirmations, there's a confirmation page template. There is a course overview page template. Obviously, the course lesson itself, so you just clone that page as many times as you want. If you have five lessons, you just clone the lesson page five times, link them all together.

You've got an upsell page template, so if you want, at the end of the minicourse you want to upsell them to another product, there's an upsell page template there, and it has all the stuff already in it, all the elements you'd want on a course page, all the elements you'd want on a landing page, all the elements you'd want on a sales page are all there. All you need to do is copy the template and then tweak the elements that are there, so if you don't want a pricing grid, just get rid of the pricing grid.

If you don't want an exit intent popup, which is already part of the template, get rid of the exit intent popup, for example. Hook the buy button to PayPal or Stripe or however you're going to take payment. Really amazing, right? All these templates are there. If you have the content all ready to go, if you've got the videos, or you've got the pdfs or whatever you're going to use for your course content, if you have that course content ready to go, you can get a really slick professional-looking minicourse up in a day, no question about it, and be generating leads like that.

The way you access all those is you need to have either the whole suite of products, which includes the Thrive Content Builder, or just get the Thrive Content Builder plugin itself and then start creating your pages. If you want to create a course welcome page, for example, you just go create a new WordPress page, go to your Thrive Content Builder, go to the Template Cloud and say you want the course welcome page.

It'll bring all the elements in, and then all you need to do is start clicking on the elements, changing the button colours, changing the text, et cetera, to create your course. It's just an amazingly huge time-saver. I think this is really pretty cool, and I think it's a really pretty cool idea as well. What I'm going to be doing over the next few weeks is I'm going to be building out an entire example minicourse funnel, and we'll talk about it in some of the upcoming Tactical 20 podcasts.

That's going to include the minicourse, a couple of different entry points into our minicourse, then in the follow-up email automations that we want to do as part of the course, and then the upsell sequence after the course. I'm going to use that as kind of a case study to build out some lead generation and we'll see how it goes.

If you are an active member insiders, part of the Member Insiders community, all those automations, all those templates, all that ready to go stuff will be inside the members area when it's complete, and you'll be able to take all that, put it into your own setup in a matter of minutes, and be up and running with your course template.

Funnel template from scratch, so if you don't know about The Active Marketer Insiders, I'd urge you to head over to theactivemarketer.com/membership and you'll find there a little bit more information about The Active Marketer Insiders community, which I set up to help smart business owners who want to learn how to do all this cool sales funnelling marketing automation stuff themselves. Inside you'll find shared automations, training courses, templates, checklists, framework, all that kind of stuff you need to get up and running quickly without having to put all the grunt work in yourself.

Follow in on future Tactical 20 podcasts as we talk about all the elements we need to put in place to get this minicourse funnel in place, and the results that we get along the way. If you haven't checked out the Thrive Content Builder and you haven't checked out the new course templates, the new course landing page templates, head over to theactivemarketer.com/57, and all the links will be in the show notes. See you next time, everybody.

All right, that's our Tactical 20 podcast for this week. If you have any questions or any topics you'd like to see covered on future Tactical 20 podcasts, you can always send me an email at Barry, B-A double R-Y @theactivemarketer.com and let us know what you'd like to see. Also, if you head over to the show notes for this episode and just leave a comment or leave a comment in any of the episode show notes, tell us what you'd like to see and we'll make sure we cover it on an upcoming episode.

Get out there and design, automate, and scale your business to the next level using sales and marketing automation. See you next week, everybody.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to The Active Marketer podcast. You can find the show note and all the latest marketing automation news over at theactivemarketer.com.