Thinkific 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Launching Your First Online Course

thinkific-101-a-beginners-guide-to-launching-your-first-online-course

Thinkific is a powerful platform that allows you to create, market, and sell online courses quickly and easily. With Thinkific’s suite of tools, you can customize your course with videos, quizzes, downloadable files, and more to engage your students and help them achieve their learning goals. 

I’m an expert in Thinkific, with years of experience creating online courses and helping others do the same. This article will provide a comprehensive guide to launching your first course on the platform. 

This article will provide an overview of starting with Thinkific, including setting up your account, adding content to your course, and promoting it to potential students. I’ll also share some tips for ensuring that your course stands out from the crowd to maximize sales! 

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What is Thinkific?

Thinkific is a comprehensive online course platform that enables you to create, market, and sell your courses. It’s an all-in-one solution that covers everything from hosting your content to collecting student payments. 

What sets Thinkific apart from other course platforms is its range of features that make it easy for anyone to launch a successful online course, regardless of their technical skills. 

These features include: 

  • A drag-and-drop course builder with customizable templates for creating engaging content quickly and easily; 
  • Comprehensive marketing tools, including automated emails, coupon codes, and affiliate programs; 
  • Integrated payment processing with support for multiple currencies; 
  • Access to detailed analytics to track student progress and sales data in real-time; and more!

Setting up a Thinkific account

The first step is creating a new account. This process is simple – enter your name, email address, and password, and you’re ready! 

Once you’ve created your account, you can choose from one of three pricing plans: Free, Basic, Start, or Grow. Each plan comes with its own set of features that are tailored to different levels of course creators. 

  • The Free plan offers basic functionality, such as creating courses with up to 10 lessons and a community for unlimited students.
  • The Basic plan includes all the features offered in the free plan plus additional features such as custom domains, coupons and discounts, and affiliate selling.
  • The Start plan unlocks even more features, including creating assignments, bundles and memberships, live lessons, and advanced website- and course-building. 
  • The Grow plan is the most complete Thinkific plan yet, as it offers users the chance to remove all Thinkific branding, bulk enroll students, and access its API tool.

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Creating a Course

Creating a course on Thinkific is straightforward. All you need to do is sign up for an account, choose a course type, customize your content and settings, and launch! 

Three Course Types You Will Encounter

The first step when creating a course is to decide which course you want to create. Thinkific offers three main types of courses: 

  • Self-paced courses where students work through the material at their own pace; 
  • Scheduled courses with weekly or monthly classes; and 
  • Subscription courses that allow students to access new content regularly. 

Once you’ve chosen the right type of course for your needs, it’s time to start customizing it with engaging content such as videos, quizzes, assignments, and other materials. You can also add branding elements like logos, fonts, and colors to give your course its unique look. 

Marketing and Selling your Course

Thinkific’s Marketing Tools

Once you’ve created your course, the next step is to market and sell it. Thinkific offers a suite of powerful marketing tools that make it easy to reach potential students and promote your course. 

These tools include: 

  • Automated emails to send messages to students or potential customers
  • Integration with popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
  • Coupon codes for discounts on courses
  • Affiliate programs so you can leverage other people’s networks to reach more students

Setting up a sales page is an important part of selling your course. With Thinkific, you can easily customize your sales page with videos, images, text, and other elements to make it appealing to prospective buyers. Customizing this way will help you stand out and maximize sales. 

Thinkific also provides various pricing models for selling courses. You can offer one-time payment options or subscription-based models. This allows you to create plans that fit different customers’ budget needs while still generating revenue for yourself.

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Managing Your Course and Students

Once you’ve launched your course, it’s important to manage it and keep your students engaged. Thinkific provides a range of tools that make this easy. 

Managing Your Course

Thinkific makes it easy to manage your course content with its intuitive drag-and-drop course builder. You can easily add new lessons, quizzes, and other content types without any required technical skills. 

You can also use the platform’s built-in analytics to track student progress and engagement in real-time. These can help you quickly identify potential problem areas in your course so you can adjust accordingly. 

Managing Students 

Thinkific also offers powerful tools for managing your students. You can send automated emails at different points during the student journey, such as when they join or complete a course. You can also set up coupon codes for special promotions or discounts and even run an affiliate program to help spread the word about your course! 

Handling Student Questions & Feedback 

Finally, Thinkific makes it easy to keep up with student questions and feedback by providing a dedicated support portal where they can submit their queries or leave reviews on your courses directly from their dashboard. In addition, you can use the platform’s messaging feature to communicate one-on-one with students if needed!

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Integrations with Thinkific

Thinkific makes it easy to integrate third-party tools and services with your course. The platform allows you to access various features and functionality, such as email marketing automation, payment processors, and more. 

Integrations are simple to set up: you just need to log in to the Thinkific dashboard and click on Integrations & API in the left sidebar. From there, you’ll be able to connect with any number of third-party tools or services that can enhance your course offering. 

For example, you can use Stripe or PayPal as payment gateways if you want to take student payments worldwide. Or, if you want to send automated emails when someone signs up for your course, you can integrate with an email marketing tool like MailChimp or AWeber

These integrations will save time and make running your course easier!

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Thinkific 101: Conclusion

In this article, we’ve explored the basics of launching an online course using Thinkific. We discussed what makes it stand out from other course platforms and how to set up your account, add content to your course, and promote it to potential students. 

Thinkific is a powerful platform that makes creating and selling online courses incredibly easy. With its drag-and-drop builder, marketing tools, integrated payment processing, and third-party integrations, you can quickly create a professional-looking course to engage your students and help them achieve their learning goals. 

With Thinkific’s suite of features and my expertise in the platform, you can launch your first online course in no time!

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