In The Courses Hub

WELCOME TO THE

Courses Hub

Here you’ll find all of the best resources we have to help you create and sell online courses with WordPress and Paid Memberships Pro.

Members are the hub of your courses membership site.

Course Learning Materials

Get started by reading our ultimate guide to creating online courses for beginners. This guide gives you all of the latest information about starting a successful online course business and links to all of our course-related content and downloads.

It’s roughly a 30-minute read, but it’s worth it…especially if you’re just getting started and you need an introductory education on building a course business.

Download Now: Online Course Planning Workbook

Bringing your online course business to life might seem complicated, but you can make it a lot easier by breaking it down into parts. Here are the four main phases you’ll go through when taking your online course from an idea to reality.

Deciding What to Teach

Building Your Course

Selling Your Course Online

Marketing Your Course

Launch a Course Demo Site

You can create a temporary site on InstaWP that gives you instant access to demo a complete courses membership site with membership levels, protected content, a directory, pre-built courses, and more. Your site will be a clone of the demo at the base courses demo here.

Launch a Free Courses Demo

1. Decide What to Teach

The first and most fundamental step to creating and selling an online course is deciding what you should teach.

  • Read the What Should You Teach section of our ultimate guide.
  • In our Building Your Online Course series, course creator Curtis McHale also shares his process for deciding what to teach.
  • If you’re looking for ideas, we wrote a whole post about the state of online courses—including popular course niches, topics, platforms, and more.
  • Will your course business be built on a single course, multiple courses, or access to a library of different course content? This will help you determine how to price your membership site, structure your pricing tiers, membership levels, and more.

2. Build Your Course

You’ve already decided what to teach, but before you can start selling your online course, you’re going to need to create the content. So, what kind of content will you create?

Choose a Format

In Part 2 of Building Your Online Course, Curtis McHale talks about choosing the right delivery method, and goes over the basics of video, audio, and written course production methods. He also covers batch creating content, distributing your courses, and more.

Your online course can be as simple as a single PDF or a category of posts on your WordPress website that you lock down to members only. No matter what format your course takes, if it is hosted with WordPress, you can charge for access to it using Paid Memberships Pro. Read our post on how to lock down anything using PMPro, including courses, communities, directories, events, and custom post types.

Producing Your Content

In Part 3, Editing Your Video Course, Curtis goes over the specifics of editing a video course, including what tools and software he recommends.

Check our ultimate guide for more information on producing your online course and where to sell your course.

We also offer additional guidance on how to restrict self-hosted videos, restrict videos with YouTube and WordPress, and restrict video with Vimeo.

Software Recommendations

The core Paid Memberships Pro plugin has everything you need to set up membership levels, restrict posts and pages, and integrate your payment gateway so you can charge for access to your membership.

The Courses for Membership Add On installs new “custom post types” to organize Courses and Lessons, along with functionality for students to track their progress throughout a course.

If you are using a separate Learning Management System (LMS) like LifterLMS, LearnDash, Sensei, or Tutor LMS, you must install our Courses for Membership Add On to connect and protect courses with membership levels in Paid Memberships Pro.

Looking for a specific Add On? You can now filter Add Ons on the Memberships > Add Ons Screen in the WordPress Admin by Use Case. Start typing the term, like “Courses”, and the corresponding Add Ons will populate for you.

Should You Use an LMS?

If you’re not sure which infrastructure to use, check out this debate we had on whether you should start with a membership site or an LMS. If you go with the LMS option, LifterLMS is a great choice—plus, it integrates seamlessly with PMPro.

These are the LMS platforms that integrate with PMPro:

LifterLMS

LifterLMS

LearnDash

LearnDash

Sensei

Sensei LMS

Tutor LMS

Tutor LMS

You can get a lean online course membership business up and running with very little financial investment using Paid Memberships Pro and our Courses for Membership Add On, which allows you to create courses and lessons with progress tracking—100% free.

3. Sell Your Course Online

So, you have a finished course that you’re ready to sell. Now, what do you want to charge for it?

If you need some help figuring out how to price your online course, refer to the pricing your online course section of our online courses ultimate guide. You might also consider using tiered pricing, if you haven’t already. 

Protecting Your Course and Charging for Access

In order to actually make money from your course, you’ll need a way to restrict your content and charge people for access to it. Our initial setup guide will walk you through all essential steps to setting up things like content restrictions and recurring payments with PMPro.

4. Market Your Course

So, you’ve created your course, set up Paid Memberships Pro, and you’re ready to start connecting with students and earning recurring revenue. Now what?

Marketing your online course is crucial if you want to start bringing in sales and building a foundation of loyal students.

Read about how to market your online course in Part 4 of Building Your Online Course with Curtis McHale, or refer to the marketing your course section of our ultimate guide for more information.

Communities

You’ve built a roster of highly engaged students who’ve achieved their goals with your content. Could you leverage this audience to take your online course business to the next level?

Creating a community around your online course is one of the best ways to achieve this, for a few key reasons:

  1. A community encourages interaction, automatically boosting engagement as your students converse with each other and spend more time on your site.
  2. Students can learn from and help each other, which makes them more likely to absorb and succeed with your course content.

Engaged, successful students are more likely to:

Be great examples and success stories for you

Keep paying for your membership over time

Rave about your membership to others, which equals free word-of-mouth marketing

Check out our ultimate guide to learn more about how to create a community around your courses.

3rd Party Integrations for Communities

We offer a wide range of Add Ons and integrations to help you increase the value of your online course value with community features. This includes BuddyPress, BuddyBoss and Discord, for example.

Want to support manual communities like Slack and Facebook groups on your online course membership site? Our native app for Zapier allows you to connect with and automate these and other community tools. Check out all of the ways that Zapier integrates with Paid Memberships Pro.

Case Studies

Looking for some inspiration? Check out some of our case studies featuring course creators who run successful membership sites using Paid Memberships Pro:

Maybe you just want to jump-start your motivation, or you need guidance on what tools and processes to use to create your online course business. Learning from others who have achieved the goal you’re aiming for is one of the best ways to set yourself up for success.

Other Resources

Is there something we don’t have that you’d like to see here? Get in touch and let us know!

Click here to read our blog posts tagged with “courses”.