Are you looking to monetize your expertise and experience in the form of online courses? In this Mighty Networks review, we’re going to look closely at a top-notch, all-in-one learning management, content management, and online community platform.
Whether your online business is well-established or just getting off the ground, Mighty Networks is innovating the e-learning world by combining the power of membership and community with online learning.
Let’s dive in.
What Is Mighty Networks?
As the world rapidly evolves, so does the way that we learn. As we’ve seen in just a short time, many of our traditional classrooms have morphed into digital classrooms. This sudden change has resulted in yet another trend – the social and collaborative components of e-learning are becoming more sophisticated than ever before.
A quick Google search of “online learning platforms” shows that there are endless options to choose from. However, while many of these platforms are geared towards creating online courses, they still follow a relatively hands-off learning approach. Put otherwise, they neglect to address the inherently collaborative and social aspects of teaching and learning.
Mighty Networks, however, is different. As a learning management system (LMS), it helps you cultivate a community of online learners who are eager to access your content. With Mighty Networks, you can conveniently house your company website, e-learning courses, and learning community all under one roof. By combining the social with learning, you not only maximize your audience’s learning potential, you can also effortlessly sell courses to a curated community of convertible customers!
Is Mighty Networks Right for You?
That’s probably a key question on your mind if you are reading a Mighty Networks Review, right?
If you’re on any social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram, you’ve probably noticed that there’s been a rapid influx of online “influencers” – that is, people who’re making a killing by marketing their brand to their online fans and followers. As such, many edupreneurs and course creators are riding the wave by capitalizing on this money-making model.
However, because social media platforms lack course-creation capabilities, it’s pretty much impossible to jump into the Passion Economy business by limiting yourself to them.
What is the Passion Economy? Simply put, it is a way for edupreneurs, entrepreneurs, and freelancers alike, to earn passive income and exponentially scale their businesses.
You simply:
- Choose a topic you’re passionate about;
- Create e-learning content; and
- Charge your members on a subscription basis to access it.
So if you’re looking for a unique tool that can be used to jumpstart your Passion Economy business, then Mighty Networks is right up your alley. Think of Mighty Networks as your brand’s house – contained within that house is your website, online courses, and social media connections.
Do You Need to Be a Tech Wiz?
If you’ve never hosted a website or online business, this endeavor might seem daunting. With all these sophisticated functions, where do you even begin? Fortunately, you don’t need to be tech-savvy to make the most of Mighty! Plus, if you’re familiar with social media, the transition is especially easy.
Mighty Networks requires minimal technical know-how, and as such, has an impressively shallow learning curve. That notwithstanding, it offers substantial support for new users. Simply follow the prompts, templates, and use the drop-downs as guidance to coast through the setup process.
Because it’s incredibly intuitive and easy to use, you’ll be creating beautiful e-learning courses in no time! And because its membership sites function as online communities, you’ll be able to market and sell your courses almost instantly.
As a platform that does most of the “heavy lifting”, Mighty Networks lives up to its name. Rather than fussing with the logistics of getting your site up and running, or paying for third-party marketing tools, you can focus on the fun stuff – creating quality content.
So, if you’re looking for a platform that hosts, markets, and sells digital learning without compromising on its course-creation capabilities, then read ahead…
How Does Mighty Networks Work?
Launching your Mighty Network couldn’t be easier. As a matter of fact, you can complete this entire process in less than an hour. Simply sign up for Mighty Networks using your email, Facebook, or LinkedIn credentials. Then, refer to The Mighty Checklist to guide you through the rest of the process
Diving in deeper, this Mighty Checklist helps you to:
- Setup Basic and Premium features, including:
- Branding – Add your logo, select your color scheme, and introduce yourself with a Welcome and Big Purpose article.
- Online courses – Quickly get your first course up and running by using the templates and dropdown items in your Mighty Checklist.
- Articles – Welcome new members and get them excited about what e-learning opportunities your Mighty Network has to offer.
- Polls – Set up polls to engage and build rapport with your members, gain valuable insight into their needs, as well as feedback on your products.
- Events – Mighty Networks fully integrates with Zoom to bring your members face-to-face. By hosting regular events, you can grow deeper connections both with and between members, thereby inspiring brand loyalty.
- Decide on your membership model by offering free and paid (fixed vs subscription) plans, or some combination thereof.
- Invite new members via email (you can use the provided message or create your own!).
Each section in the checklist contains either a how-to video or a link to the help section, as well as fillable templates that’ll help even the most novice of users rival the pros!
To place this process into context, why not get started straight away? Mighty Networks conveniently offers a credit-card and commitment-free 14-day-trial.
Now let’s zoom into Mighty Network’s most valuable features, including the:
- Website builder
- Membership site
- Online courses
Mighty’s Modern Website Builder
Not very long ago, if you wanted a professional-looking website, you had to hire a website designer to do it for you. But today, there are countless web-building tools that even the most technologically-challenged among us can master. Not all are created equal, but Mighty Networks ranks high among the best (e.g., Wix and Squarespace).
As mentioned, Mighty has a very easy-to-use interface, which is great for those who are new to the web-building world. It is fully-customizable, easy on the eyes, and has a logical flow. But on the off chance you get lost, you can always refer to the Mighty Checklist. It provides a step-by-step guide for creating beautiful, custom landing pages.
As a matter of fact, creating the landing page is not only the first, but the most important step. Make it your own by adding text, photos, and videos to tell your story. You want to put your best foot forward here, as it’s the first thing a new customer sees. It’s where you showcase your brand, your purpose, and what your Network has to offer.
As such, to help you create the most visually-appealing pages, Mighty provides a wide variety of professional templates with customizable color schemes.
This is a huge plus, not only in terms of minimizing visitor bounce rates, but especially if you lack design knowledge/skills. Given the costs associated with hiring designers, Mighty saves you a substantial sum of money. Not to mention, the time associated with designing and building your landing pages from the ground up, is also “costly”.
While these investments are often worthwhile to align your business with your brand, Mighty Networks offers unparalleled flexibility and customization options, thereby eliminating bottlenecks and allowing you to keep a forward momentum.
Branding
Branding is the cornerstone to creating and growing any business. Not to mention, it costs a pretty penny. So if you’ve already invested time and money into building your brand, then you’ll naturally want all of your branding elements to remain intact when switching platforms. Fortunately, Mighty Networks has made it incredibly easy to showcase your brand.
Referring back to the Mighty Checklist, you can add branding in a straightforward series of steps. Introducing yourself and your network has never been easier!
Along with branding, the checklist also walks you through the steps for creating a Welcome Section, adding your Web Domain, and setting up Member Categories.
Speaking of Member Categories, if you’re transitioning from a different platform, you can leverage current member bases by integrating your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or marketing automation system directly into your Network.
Mighty Networks Membership Sites
No Mighty Networks review would be complete without covering how can you make the most of membership sites on the platform.
First off, they enable you to operate on a subscription-based model and generate passive income. Thus, as far as money’s concerned, Mighty’s membership sites are the point. Once that passive stream of income’s flowing, you can use it to continue developing courses, building your business brand, and/or organizing member-exclusive groups/events.
Moreover, the “exclusive” nature of memberships provides extra value by creating brand loyalty and opportunities for deeper engagement with your learners. It’s far easier to convert a “warm lead” or ongoing subscriber to another product than it is to convert a “cold lead” right off the street.
Mighty’s membership sites and subscriptions further enable you to grant members exclusive access to digital content, discounts, bundles, etc., not only upping the perceived value of your offerings, but making the customer-conversion process that much more seamless.
Think about it. Current subscribers are apt to see these offers as a token of “customer appreciation” more so than a sale/upsell. What does this mean for you? Passive income, brand loyalty, and warm leads who have a soft spot for your products.
Membership Levels
As a small business owner or edupreneur, wouldn’t it be nice to have a say in how you price your products? This might seem like a given, but as mentioned, not all platforms are created equal. For example, some only enable fixed-price plans. Mighty Networks, however, lets you offer your courses on a free, fixed-price, bundle, or subscription basis!
Let’s have a look at each membership plan in more detail.
- Paid memberships enable site visitors to join right from your landing page. It’s noteworthy that, within this plan, the sale doesn’t end there. You can still create opportunities to upsell members with Mighty’s “internal plans.”
- Internal plans pertain to paid members. They grant access to subgroups and additional course materials. With this plan, you can also offer the option to join your Mighty Network for free by creating a Hidden External Free Plan. Simply share a special link with specific members to give them free access.
- The Freemium Network allows members to join your community for free. Once inside, they’ll have the ability to purchase any of your paid content, such as online courses or groups. This greatly expands your reach, as free equals risk-free to new customers. Not only do you get to showcase your value, you can also leverage their email addresses for marketing campaigns.
While offering memberships for free seems counterintuitive at first glance, this incentivization strategy is invaluable for new businesses who need to attract new (and tentative) customers. Once they’re “in”, so to speak, Mighty paves the way for effective sales strategies, such as offering free members “exclusive” discounts to paid courses, or member-only course previews/trials.
Pricing Capabilities
Mighty Networks offers a wide range of pre-set prices in the drop-down menu, starting at $0.99 and capping out at $999.99. Of course, if you’re dealing with monthly subscriptions, you likely won’t be charging more than $1000 monthly, but this is still somewhat trickier for fixed-price business models. If you need to price your content higher than the upper limit, you will need to use Zapier or link to an external system.
Earlier, we touched on Hidden Plans (as related to internal plans for paid members). To elaborate, the Hidden Plans feature is a great strategy to incentivize new members. If you’d like learners to preview one of your modules, or have subscribers delve into the next level of a course, then hidden plans enables you to create extra exclusivity within an already exclusive paid membership. As such, whenever you send out these special links, you give your learners VIP treatment, making them more inclined to bite.
This Hidden Plan feature is yet another novel facet of Mighty’s platform.
Payment Gateways and Currencies
When it comes to payment gateways and accepted currencies, Mighty Networks, like many platforms, falls short. Though Mighty Networks uses Stripe as their payment vendor, it is currently only accepted in 34 countries (with another 10 to be added soon). Mighty doesn’t accept other payment partners, like PayPal.
On the one hand, there are definitely some benefits to using Stripe, like direct payments without having to worry about storing or processing credit card information. Moreover, credit, debit, and prepaid cards are all accepted. But on the other hand, if your aim is to reach an international audience, this payment and currency inflexibility might lead to frustration and lost opportunities.
That said, word on the street is that PayPal might soon be accepted, which would open your Mighty Network up to a much wider international audience. But until then, it’s worth double-checking to see which countries Stripe support
Analytics
Analytics are integral in any e-learning business. On the sales side, they provide invaluable insight that guides your decision-making process, especially when it comes to streamlining your business or refining your sales strategies. For example, you can analyze your sales funnel for problem points in the customer conversion process.
On the e-learning or admin side of your business, analytics provide invaluable insight into trainee activity and results, thereby enabling you to diagnose and effectively address problem areas or knowledge gaps in your courses.
Mighty’s Business Plan unlocks the analytics feature. So if you’re looking to monetize your courses and continuously grow, look no further. You can integrate your existing Google Analytics Pixel to track your Facebook Ad spending, and access detailed analytics on member activity.
Your Host Analytics Dashboard provides either a simple overview of, or lets you deep dive into member retention, growth, and activity rates.
The post activity and member activity tabs give insight into who your most active members are, and which content they’re engaging with most. This information is incredibly telling when determining what to focus on or fix in the midst of calibrating and creating new content.
Create online courses as social as face-to-face
Though Mighty Networks is an e-learning platform, its strong focus on housing your social networks and online courses all under one roof – giving it strong learning community capabilities – is what makes it stand out from the crowd.
If you thought setting up your Mighty Network was easy, wait until you start building courses with it.
The Course Creation feature enables unlimited courses for an unlimited number of members. Simply fill out the fields and add your content to the guided sections.
First thing’s first. Select from the drop-down menus under Manage Courses and follow the prompts to set up your Modules, Lesson, and Sections.
Next, fill in the course title, a course description with your learning goals, and then flesh it out with your developed materials. Mighty Networks supports a wide range of multimedia, including text, images, videos, PDFs, and externally-embedded content.
Once you’ve input all your course details and materials, the next step is setting up the Learning Path by creating a hierarchy of sections. For example, you can designate one section as a module, thereby adding lessons within that section. You can further embed sections within each lesson. Again, the Mighty Checklist will hold your hand through this process.
You can add new lessons from the Lesson Settings Menu. From there, select your lesson visibility and Unlock Options. This will dictate how you deliver your lessons to your students. Mighty affords three possible options – None, Sequential, and Timed – as shown below.
Next setup your course completion options. This handy feature helps you incentivize and reward students almost like a game – whereby learners must successfully complete a lesson or objective in order to progress to the next “level”.
Finally, complete course setup by assigning an instructor, selecting whether students can comment on your content, and choosing a thumbnail image for the course (you can choose the default image or your own). You also get to choose whether you want to make your course visible to non-members.
Right after publishing your course, you’ll be able to duplicate or delete the lesson conveniently, as shown below:
How Do Members See New Courses?
When a new member logs in for the first time, the Welcome Section will be pinned to the top of their activity feeds and will be the first thing they see. The Featured Section works the same way, but for returning members. Within these sections, all courses are prominently and beautifully displayed, making them easy to find and purchase.
Interactions and Integrations
If you’ve ever developed e-learning using industry-standard authoring tools like Adobe Captivate or Articulate Storyline, then you’ll be disappointed to know that SCORM and xAPI, the two most widely-used technical standards in e-learning, aren’t supported by Mighty’s LMS. As such, you’re limited in terms of sophisticated interactivity and will need to follow a relatively passive teaching approach.
Thus, from a seasoned veteran’s perspective, Mighty’s native course creation tools might seem simplistic and limiting. But if you’re like most of Mighty’s users, you’ll find it to be more than adequate. Regardless, its powerful social networking and collaboration features pick up the slack by fostering unparalleled social engagement.
Moreover, Mighty integrates with over 2000 apps, including Zapier (which is great for automating tasks), as well as many communication, collaboration, and social tools such as Mailchimp, Gmail, Google Docs, Hubspot, Youtube, Slack, and Quizmaker, to name a few.
You can use Zapier to automate repetitive tasks that you’d otherwise have to do manually, such as uploading your members’ email addresses from your Gmail or Mailchimp lists. It also allows you to publish courses to an external LMS, and offers progress-based content unlocking, 1-click upsells, multiple types of quizzes, and auto-generated completion certificates.
Ultimately, the sky’s the limit with Mighty’s integrations. Assuredly, as you streamline your business strategy and course creation methods, you’re bound to make use of these integrations. The most lucrative online businesses leverage these to automate repetitive and tedious tasks, leaving their hands free for the big stuff.
Mighty Network Pricing Plans
Mighty Networks offers three different pricing plans, the Community plan, the Business plan, and the Mighty Pro Plan. Let’s take a look at each and what they will cost you.
So What Does It Cost?
The prices shown below are for annual plans. The monthly rate slightly increases if you opt for month-to-month.
- The Community Plan – This plan is $33 per month annually ($39 monthly) and is an excellent, very affordable choice if you’re just starting out. With native livestreaming and video features along with a paid membership option and other bells and whistles, this has what you need to get started with a community. However, it does lack the online course and live cohort course features as well as the ability for other integrations and analytics.
- The Business Plan costs $99 per month annually ($119 monthly) and includes all the features of the Community plan. This comes with online course and live cohort creation along with premium analytics features. And you’ll be hard-pressed to find a platform with similar richness in features for such a meager price.
- The Mighty Pro Plan – This plan is best for more established brands who are looking for branded apps. You’ll need to schedule a call with the Mighty Networks team to get pricing info but definitely worth checking out if you want to take your already-established business to new heights.
View pricing on the Mighty Networks site >>
Mighty Networks Review: The Bottom Line
Mighty Networks is changing the landscape of e-learning by taking an intuitive, easy-to-use, robust online course platform and combining it with the proven success of social media platforms and influencers.
As a one-stop-shop with the capability to build and host attractive websites, amass a strong membership base, and offer engaging online courses, Mighty Networks is a worthwhile investment for any course creator.
Considering Mighty Networks’ cutting-edge features and high potential to earn you passive income, you really can’t afford to not get started right away.
So, that wraps up this Mighty Networks review. if you’re ready to earn an income from sharing your passion, and put the Social back into Learning, then why not start your 14-day Free Trial today!
See also:
Jeff Cobb, Founder of Learning Revolution
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. Learn more about Jeff Cobb here.
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