Most people are under the impression that WordPress is nothing but a simple blog posting platform, but in reality, it can do a lot more. You can create an entire website and manage it using WordPress. This CMS can also be used for uploading online courses. Many people who started off by creating online courses began doing it because it was fun.
However, if you are persistent and want to turn this into a significant source of revenue for your business, you will need to upload courses in a professional manner. Many famous entrepreneurs started off by developing online courses for fun, and eventually grew their businesses and now generate millions in revenue due to proper business setup.
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There are many people who use WordPress for creating online courses, and for good reasons. Rather than developing a website all from scratch and coding your way through everything, why not use a pre-designed, well-built platform that has withstood the test of time? WordPress gives you unlimited freedom to optimize and customize your website however you like. The industry for online courses is worth more than $107bn and is still growing to this day. While it may take you a bit of time to break into the industry and establish yourself, it’s not as difficult as you might think. You just have to remain persistent and deliver quality content to your customers. Here are some essential things you should know about creating an online course using WordPress.
The Software
WordPress gives you the option of customizing the content on your website however you see fit. There are more than a million plugins, mailing list programs, and numerous other scripts you can run on your page to get the best content and maximum website customization. However, not all of these are as effective as you might think. Here are some basic plugins you should download to get the best out of your website.
Restricted Content Pro
This is one of the most suitable plugins you can download and install on your website. Restricted Content Pro is easily one of the best plugins available in the market. It is effortless to set up and use. All you have to do is install the plugin, and then determine your payment preferences. Once that is done, you can decide which pages you want to make accessible to your students. If you ‘re going to sell multiple levels of access to your students, you also have the option of deciding what type of student should be able to see which kind of content.
PayPal
Even though many people don’t like PayPal, there’s little doubt in the fact that it’s the leading online payment processors in the world. Available in almost every country, PayPal allows users to send and receive payments directly. You will notice a significant increase in your number of sales if you install PayPal and put it up as a payment option for your courses.
MailChimp
You will need a mailing list to keep users interested in your online courses, so using a plugin such as MailChimp is a great idea. It’s the most comfortable newsletter service currently available online and is very easy to set up. If you are looking cheaper solution, we recommend MailerLite
WPComplete
WPComplete allows your students to mark the lessons they have taken as complete so they quickly can check their progress. It makes navigation much more comfortable and leads to a smoother user experience.
Planning the Course
Once you have set up your online course, the next step is to plan the course. This requires careful insight and understanding, so you have to divide what you are going to do a series of smaller steps. Here’s how such a process should work.
Define Your Goal
Your primary goal should be the success of your students. If you merely want to maximize your earnings through the course, it’s highly unlikely that you will be able to succeed in this space. Every course should offer maximum value for your students so that they will keep coming back to you. Every decision you make for your students should be made after you think about how it will benefit the viewers.
Video Lessons
While it’s not necessary to make video lessons, having them could be a huge bonus. Video lessons could dramatically improve engagement and land you a much more significant number of viewers. However, when creating video lessons, make sure you explain everything carefully and provide detailed visual cues to your viewers so they can understand what you are teaching.
Materials and Resources
You will also need to provide your viewers with actionable materials and resources to follow up on the course. These include PDF documents and workbooks that can be used by the students to brush up on what they have learned.
Building a Community
Last but not the least, you should try and build up a community of your students so they can share feedback and hold discussions with each other, which will just help your business grow as word spreads about the courses.
Conclusion
This is a very vast topic, as you can see using WordPress seems to be a good choice for online course platform. In the next parts of this tutorial, we will take you through the process of creating and setting up course website.
