If you want to make money blogging keep reading because in this Teachable review we will talk about all the ways Teachable can help you create and sell your online courses.
Believe me, I was in the same spot as you not long ago. If you want to make money blogging you need to concentrate on two aspects: affiliate marketing and online course creation.
Even if you are a new blogger you need to create your online course right now.
We, at Blogging for New Bloggers, make a big percentage of our income through our own products.
However, using the right tools to host and sell your product can, and will, make a big difference to your income. So, I decided to write this Teachable review to show you how this platform can help you reach your income goals and let you live the life you want.
Let’s dive in and explore Teachable’s features.
This post may contain affiliate links, which means we may receive a commission, at no cost to you, if you make a purchase through a link. Please see our full disclosure for further information. If not otherwise stated, all prices are intended in US$.
Teachable offers a free plan
Yes, first pro, you can start with Teachable for free.
However, with this plan, you have a high commission applied to you when you sell your courses. In fact, you do pay $1 plus a 10% transaction fee whenever you sell a course and you can have a maximum of 10 students.
Teachable has different plans for different needs and if you pay annually you get a great discount.
My advice is to visit their site to compare all the different plans that they offer.
Teachable U
Once you become a member of Teachable, you get access to a great number of resources that will educate you on how to create and sell your courses at no additional cost.
Through Teachable’s platform, you can access Teachable U where you can find courses created by Teachable to walk you through the creation and the marketing of your first course
But this is not all!
Every week or so they have a webinar and workshop!
Being part of the Teachable family doesn’t only offer you a great place to host your course but keeps you in the loop of education. After all there is nothing better than learning if you want to become a successful blogger.
Creating an online course with Teachable is easy
Most of Teachable’s functionality is intuitive, so making a good looking course is seamless.
Your course will consist of sections (for example each module of your course will be a section) and lectures (inside each section you will create the related lectures).
Lectures can consist of text and multimedia files (video, audio, PDF, etc).
You can even create quizzes in Teachable to help your students better understand what they have learned in each lecture or section.
Plus you can add codes in your lecture. This functionality can be helpful if, for example, you want to add a ConverKit form or a webinar.
Teachable lets you publish lectures over a period of time based on the number of days after your students enroll.
In Teachable you can create authors, so if you have a guest lecture in your course the author of that lecture can earn a revenue share from sales of the courses where their lecture is hosted.
Finally, you have the capacity of creating certificates to give to your students upon completion of the course.
So, creating a course in Teachable is pretty straightforward and the result is attractive and professional.
Branding your school
Branding is a big part of marketing and Teachable knows it.
It lets you personalise all your courses and school.
You can add your own logo, uploading background images or choose among a variety of images provided by Teachable. You can change the fonts and colours of your courses/school to make them more in line with your brand.
Plus, you can also insert CCS in the code area to make your school just as you want it.
A great feature is the option of creating your own custom domain.
By default, your school address is a sub-domain of Teachable but you can easily modify that and create the domain that better represents your brand.
Plus you can turn off Teachable branding which otherwise will show “powered by Teachable”
Connecting with your students
Through Teachable you can check out your student’s progress easily. In fact, you can check out enrolment, progress and the quiz score. This can also give you feedback on how your course is working and if your students are actually interested in it, and what results they are getting from it.
The best part is that Teachable shows you how your video lessons are performing. For each video in your courses, Teachable indicates which parts of a video have been watched (in green), rewatched (in yellow), rewatched multiple times (in orange), or skipped (in white).
Teachable gives you the possibility to communicate with your students in two ways:
Comments under the lectures:
you can enable the comments option in the lectures and you also have the possibility to moderate them. If you want every time there is a new comment on one of your courses Teachable will send you a notification so that you can promptly answer your student’s questions.
Sending emails to your students:
You can manually send emails (which you can personalise with your own branding) to your students. You can send an email to a single student, to all the people enrolled in your school or just to people enrolled in a specific course.
Teachable integration
Another really useful Teachable feature is its integration with ConvertKit. You can easily connect the two. Thus when someone purchases one of your products they are transferred onto a welcome sequence in Convertkit.
How Teachable helps you selling your course
The best part of Teachable, in my view, is that it is geared towards marketing and selling courses.
Teachable is not only a platform where you can host your course but it is also the platform through which you will sell it and it has a lot of features that will help you do so.
Firstly, as I have already said, it has lots of resources for you to learn how to market your own courses.
Having a platform created to sell courses can help you in many ways.
Pricing your courses
Teachable gives you the possibility of choosing among multiple pricing plans
- Free: you can actually host a free course on Teachable as we do with our Legally Blogs
- Subscription: your student can pay a fee each month so that they can gain access to your content
- One time purchase: this is the most used method of payment for online courses. Your students purchase your course and they gain access to it.
- Payment plan: your students can access your course and pay for it with multiple payments over time. This option is really good for your marketing as it gives the possibility to enroll in your course. It is also to for people who haven’t allocated room in their budget for the full price.
Methods of payment
Your students have the possibility of paying through credit card or PayPal and they are now even implementing apple pay!
Log-in
If someone that wants to buy your course already has a Teachable log in they don’t need to create a new profile. This means that they can make the purchase with just a couple of clicks and this will definitely increase your sales. The easier it is to buy the higher is the possibility that someone will.
30 days guarantee
This is probably one of the features that will help you the most with your sales.
Through Teachable you can offer a 30 days guarantee no questions asked. In this case, if one of your students is not happy with their purchase they can easily ask for a refund.
Knowing that there is this possibility will make people that are on the verge more likely to buy.
Bundling
In Teachable you can bundle up a number of courses and sell them all together.
This is what we have done with Lucrezia’s legal templates. You can purchase them individually but if you need all of them you can purchase the bundle for a discounted price
Coupons
You can create coupons to offer a discount only to certain people. For example, our newsletter readers have a 15% off on all our courses and templates.
You can create coupons for a certain amount or a certain percentage off.
The coupons can be valid for a limited time only. For example, we offer one of these coupons to those who enroll in my Pinterest course for free. This gives people the possibility to buy the premium version of the same course for a whopping 75% off but only for a limited time.
Sales page
Teachables gives you all the tools you need to create the perfect sales page.
You can customize your sales page in all its elements and of course, branding it with your logo and your brand colours.
In your sales page, you can put testimonials which will help you gain authority, a description of your course, the bio of the author and even the complete curriculum of your course. So this way people know exactly what they are buying.
Plus you will be able to customize and place the enroll button where you think it is more appropriate. This can make a big difference in the number of sales.
Checkout page
The check out page is the last step in your customer’s purchase journey. If you think that once people are on your check out page and you have made the sale, think again. It happens often that people go all the way to the checkout page and then change their mind.
So it is very important to have some elements on your checkout page that can help to close the sale.
Teachable lets you display on your checkout page three items that can make the difference in closing the sale.
You can add testimonials, list in bullet point the best features of your course and remind your buyers about the 30 days guarantee.
Thank-you page
The thank-you page is another aspect of the user experience that you have to take into account.
With Teachable you can upload a personalised video to say thank you and give your welcome to your new students.
But another great way to use your thank you page to boost your sales is to include an upsell in this page.
Teachable gives you the possibility of including links to related courses making the chance of another purchase much higher.
Affiliate program
With Teachable you can create your own affiliate program within the platform.
Having an affiliate network can be really important for your marketing. With Teachable having affiliates promoting your courses is pretty easy. In fact, you can let Teachable manage all the payouts to your affiliates.
You can easily communicate with your affiliates by emails and your affiliates are able to see all their sales.
You can personalise the percentage that your affiliate will earn and the duration of the cookie tracking.
Teachable educates you
As I’ve already said, if you use Teachable for hosting and selling your courses you gain access to Teachable U where you can learn a lot about creating and marketing your course.
But this is not all Teachable has different ways of educating you. For example, in summer 2019 it has hosted its first challenge for course creators where it helped people creating and selling online courses step by step.
They always find a way to educate people at no cost.