Teachable is a great platform for selling online courses or memberships. With online learning hitting an all-time high these days, it seems like everyone is creating an online course. And Teachable is the 2nd most popular e-Learning platform, according to this article at Skill Scouter.
That's because it makes it easy to get your course or membership up and going quickly. The tools are simple and easy to use, perfect for the beginner or non-techy person.
Who is it for?
If you want to start selling online courses or memberships using a simple platform, Teachable is a good option for a non-technical person. Memberships are where you share information with your members but in a less structured or guided way than a course.
Who is it not for?
Teachable offers very basic website building tools. Their version of “building a website” is a simple sales page for your courses or memberships. If you want a more advanced website, you may want to build your website on a different platform and link to Teachable for your courses.
Also, while Teachable offers a blog, the features are limited. If you want to have advanced blogging features, it may work better to blog on another platform and link to Teachable for courses.
While you can offer memberships on Teachable, if you want to build communities where your students can discuss things with each other, Teachable is not the place.
Features
Teachable offers custom domains. This means that your online course or membership and sales page are available at the domain you registered, like www.yourdomain.com. Teachable hosts all your course materials (including unlimited video) so that you just have to upload your files. Your course files might include video, audio, pdf documents, or image files.
And the platform offers a course builder so that you can organize your information into sections and lectures to guide your students through your course.
There are a few software tools that Teachable allows you to integrate directly with your Teachable website and course. Some of these are Circle, for building communities for your students to discuss and interact, and Mailchimp and ConvertKit for email marketing.
Teachable also integrates with Zapier, a tool that allows you to connect software tools. For example, every time you add a student on Teachable, you may want to add that student to a list in a Google Sheet. Zapier lets you create those automations.
Other features include adding team members to help you develop or manage your course, offering completion certificates to your students when they finish your course, and using quizzes to check students’ knowledge.
Teachable helps you offer 1:1 coaching as well. You can schedule these 1:1 sessions with your students and integrate with the appointment booking tool Calendly.
There is an administration dashboard where you can see your students, which courses they are enrolled in, their progress in those courses, and other course information.
Finally, Teachable offers flexible pricing options so that you can set your prices how you want.
Plans and cost
Teachable plans range from $29 to $299. The price point depends on your plan level as well as whether you pay annually or monthly.
The plans differ by transaction fees, the number of admin user accounts, reporting on your courses and students, and theme customization. Higher-level plans also offer drip-content for providing content on a delayed schedule, graded quizzes, and course completion certificates. Finally, on the higher-level plans, you can require the course to be completed in order.
Positives
Teachable makes it easy for people to create and share their knowledge via courses and memberships without having technical skills. Having unlimited hosting for your course media files is a fantastic feature.
Watch out for
Teachable’s website design options are minimal. While you have a few options for customizing your sales page, you might get frustrated if you are used to other, more flexible systems.
Teachable is valuable for e-courses but is not suitable for other advanced website features. Some of these features include advanced blogs, e-commerce for products, or building online communities where your students or members can communicate with each other.
The Teachable platform doesn’t include customer management, email marketing, online product funnels (product sequences leading from smaller to larger purchases), or lead management (communicating with contacts using automated email or text messaging or email campaigns) except through integrations with other platforms.
Summary
For someone who is a beginner to online courses, Teachable makes it easy to get started with building courses. They offer an easy course builder and host all of your media and files for you.
Teachable specializes in online courses and memberships and does it well.
Here’s the link to the Teachable platform, if you’d like to explore it.
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