As an expert in your field, you’re always looking for ways to leverage your expertise. That often means extending your reach, sharing your wisdom, and growing your business.
Developing digital courses and marketing them to the right audience means you can pass along your expertise efficiently. Online learning makes it much easier to reach that audience.
As long as they have an internet connection, they can purchase, participate in, and complete your courses. Similarly, membership websites make it easy to turn prospects into satisfied customers.
Thinkific is one of the very best platforms for building courses and distributing content. We use it ourselves to host offerings like this free course on creating an impactful online presentation.
However, not all Thinkific courses, websites, or landing pages are the same. Keep reading to learn more about this online course platform and to see exceptional Thinkific examples.
Understanding Thinkific: The Foundation
What is Thinkific?
From our perspective, Thinkific is the best choice for delivering online courses to your clients. We’ve had an exceptional experience with this online course platform. We also frequently hear from our readers that they’ve found success with Thinkific.
Overall, Thinkific is the best overall choice for small businesses and solo edupreneurs that want to sell online courses.
Why?
- It’s intuitive and easy to use, especially compared to traditional learning management systems
- The Thinkific platform offers relevant tools and functionality for edupreneurs
- Even its free plan option comes with an impressive variety of features that support great courses and learning outcomes
- Thinkific’s variety of paid plan options offer even more resources that align with a wide range of needs
These are the foundational reasons why Thinkific is so valuable to so many course creators.
But what is Thinkific, exactly?
Thinkific is a digital platform designed to help individual edupreneurs and businesses create and market online courses that deliver results. It’s user-friendly on the creation side and the student side. Thinkific emphasizes an interactive and dynamic learning environment. Combining its features with your expertise can lead to especially good outcomes, in terms of learning and revenue.
This platform offers the tools, resources, and guidance needed to create effective courses. It’s centered around delivering engaging and valuable content. However, that’s only part of the value. Thinkific can also help deliver and market those courses and communities as well.
The ability to create a white-label website for hosting and delivering content is also worth noting. These sites are broadly customizable and can fully align with your branding. For edupreneurs just starting out, it’s an especially useful option for establishing an online home for your content.
The company markets its solution to all kinds of experts, focusing on both the effectiveness and flexibility of the platform.
More than 25,000 course creators use Thinkific to deliver and manage learning content and specialized communities across the globe. You can find Thinkific examples for just about any type of course, from hobbies and life skills to advanced business training.
How is Thinkific Different From Other Course-Building Platforms?
The greatest strength of Thinkific is its unparalleled course creation and delivery tools.
For example, we can compare Thinkific to Podia (another popular course creation and delivery platform). Podia clearly wins out in terms of better email marketing automation. However, Thinkific has many more tools for customizing content, creating interactive learning experiences, and managing courses.
What about comparing Thinkific to Kajabi? Kajabi wins out in terms of marketing and automation. Automation can be especially valuable in the course creation process. Overall, it’s a great choice for established edupreneurs.
However, Thinkific offers a better overall experience for new edupreneurs looking to establish an e-learning business.
Who Can Create Sites, Courses, and Communities on Thinkific?
Anyone with expertise in their field and a desire to share it as a course creator can use Thinkific. The platform doesn’t limit itself to specific types of courses or learning objectives.
The option to build a course at no expense through the company’s free plan is especially valuable. You can quite literally try before you buy.
If you enjoy the process and like the results, you can sign up for a paid plan. That allows you to develop more content, communities, and courses for students. If you don’t find Thinkific to be a good fit, that’s OK too. There are plenty of other highly rated course creation options to consider.
Can You Make Money on Thinkific?
Yes! Thinkific offers a variety of options for bringing in revenue in exchange for your expertise and content. Course pre-sales, digital downloads, and other options mean there isn’t just one way to earn. You can choose the best model to attract revenue based on your business goals and knowledge of your customer base.
Does Thinkific Own the Content You Create?
Thinkific makes the answer to the important question of course and content ownership clear in its FAQ pages. “Yes, course creators have complete ownership over the content they build on our platform.”
Pricing: How Much Does it Cost to Create a Course on Thinkific?
Thinkific provides a free option for building a single course and community. The company’s pricing structure includes four other paid options. As the cost grows, features like the number of courses, administrators, and support options improve. This makes it easy to pay for what you need without over-committing.
Learning More About Thinkific
What is the Best Way to Start Selling Learning Content Online?
We said it in our comprehensive Thinkific review, and it bears repeating here. This is a platform we highly recommend. It truly is one of the best ways to develop and start selling e-learning content.
Thinkific:
- Offers an easy-to-use learning management system
- Includes Thinkific communities for more interactive learning and engagement, alongside courses
- Provides course creators with deep options for customization and white-labeling their content
If you’re just starting out as a course creator, we can’t recommend Thinkific enough. However, you should definitely review other top-rated options for building courses. Depending on your unique and specific needs, you may find a better fit for offering course content.
How Do You Market a Course on Thinkific?
Thinkific more than a traditional learning management system. It’s specifically designed to help course creators reach their desired audience and market their content.
The website design section makes it easy to set up a checkout. It also helps you create an easy course sign-up process for students. You can group related courses together into categories to help customers find more relevant content. The ability to mark certain sections of courses as free and gate the rest behind a paywall is especially valuable.
There’s another key feature to consider in terms of marketing and sales. You can set the prices and type of access for each course. Options include:
- Free
- One-time payment (with or without a course duration limit)
- Subscription or membership access
- Monthly payments to distribute the cost of the course and make it more accessible for students
Additionally, Thinkific gives you the power to generate coupons. Similarly, you can create HTML code to link to courses on your other websites and set up affiliate marketing options. Finally, Thinkific offers an App Store that’s full of integration options to support marketing and sales.
How Do I Create a Sales Page on Thinkific?
Thinkific’s Site Builder tool is your one-stop shop for building a sales page for your courses and communities. This intuitive system helps you build, brand, and market your course content. It’s far from pure coding — you don’t need to be a website developer to make it work.
It’s important to note that these pages are not 100% fully customizable. You can’t do whatever you want with them, i.e. creating and using your own cascading style sheets (CSS).
However, the available level of customization is deep. You’re not limited to certain fonts, images, or color schemes. You can build a unique page on a foundation that makes it easy to do exactly that.
Inspiring Thinkific Examples
How do successful edupreneurs and creator-educators use Thinkific? Let’s review some landing pages, sites, and course packages.
Seeing Thinkific course examples and Thinkific example sites for yourself can help you better understand this online course platform. Let’s review a few examples that Thinkific itself often showcase as successful and well-designed.
Thinkific Website Examples: Courses and Landing Pages
Sundown Lines
Sundown Lines offers both textured art workshops and art business workshops, tapping into two related but distinct groups of potential students.
This is a great example of course creation that effectively draws on an edupreneur’s resources. Owner Ellen Daly is both an artist and a business owner, and she’s sharing as well as monetizing her experience.
The course listing pages make the cost, structure, subject matter, and course format clear. Highlighting the on-demand nature of the course and the ongoing access provided to students answers a common question. At the same time, it calls attention to the value provided.
The strongly positive reviews shared at the bottom of the page are also a powerful sales tool. They help potential students understand what to expect from satisfied customers.
Psych/Armor
The nonprofit Psych/Armor offers courses for veterans themselves. It also provides a wealth of e-learning content for the individuals, service groups, caregivers, employers, and others that interact with veterans.
One thing you may notice when reviewing this exceptional Thinkific landing page example is that individual courses are free. Instead of mandating a fee for access, this nonprofit suggests a donation. If you want to take a similar approach, it’s nice to know Thinkific supports donations along with traditional paid courses.
In the bigger picture, the landing page offers plenty of information and a simple design, along with efficient categorization. Psych/Armor works with many types of groups and individuals. Making it easy for an individual to find relevant courses is, therefore, crucial. A search bar at the top of the page supports this effort.
My Modern Met
My Modern Met is an online membership community that highlights creativity in all forms. Part of their community-building efforts include offering courses in creative disciplines like illustration, painting, and photography.
With a video and concise copy that describes the learning experience, it’s a well-crafted page. My Modern Met makes course value clear to potential students.
It’s easy to sort by course category, check prices, learn about the instructors, and much more. Individual course landing pages, like this course on pressed flower art, make it easy to learn more before signing up.
Potential students can check on the suggested skill level, price, specific course modules, and answers to FAQs. The opening video and customer reviews also help to convert prospects into paying students.
More Thinkific Examples: Courses and Case Studies
Thinkific shares a variety of inspiring stories about successful edupreneurs who use this online course platform.
If you want to learn more about the experts behind successful courses, this is a great way to do so. However, these stories also go in depth on the specific actions that led to success. They cover topics like keeping course creation simple and building student engagement. That can help guide similar efforts for your own course development efforts.
Thinkific’s case studies focus on a specific outcome for course creators who have successfully leveraged the platform. They can provide similar guidance on building not just good courses, but attracting students and building a community.
Want to see what Thinkific course example in action? I offer a free course, hosted on Thinkific, on creating presentations that lead to meaningful results. Presenting for Impact is a great opportunity to not only enhance your skills in this area, but to see a Thinkific example of a completed course.
Already know you want to design a course with Thinkific? Get started by signing up.
Not sure which platform is best for your needs? Check out our guide to the best online course platforms.
ABOUT YOUR HOST
Learning Revolution founder Jeff Cobb is an expert in online education and the business of adult lifelong learning. Over the past 20+ years he has built a thriving career based on that expertise – as an entrepreneur, a consultant, an author, and a speaker. Learning Revolution is a place where Jeff curates tips, insights, and resources to help you build a thriving expertise-based business.
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