219: Thinkific; the most powerful software to run your online music course!

Consider this podcast a ringing endorsement for Thinkific. It’s 2022 and the platform has grown in functionality and versatility since the last time we discussed Thinkific at length here. Thinkific is the only tool that I recommend for online course delivery. Thinkific is essentially a website that you can use to deliver an online course. There's so much more to it though and now the team over there has made it easier than ever to deliver your online course. This episode is not discussing your course content but rather the mechanism for actually delivering that course content to your students. The course builder. The course builder allows you to build your courses with a variety of different types of lessons: Video lessons Audio lessons Downloads Text Images Quizzes Surveys Multimedia lessons (where you're embedding something from another website.) For the most part video lessons, downloads, text-based lessons and maybe an audio lesson or two are going to help you build out your course content. Inside the course builder, you have drag-n-drop functionality which makes it easy to move things around and reorganize your content once it's up there. You can always add more lessons even if your course is already published. And it reflects for your students in real time as you add or change things. Also inside the course builder, we are able to set pricing. Pricing options include free, flat rate, subscription and split pay. And there is also the ability of doing more than one pricing option, such as pay in full or split pay. And course content can be set to drip on a certain schedule, based on calendar date or days since enrollment. Site Builder / Page Builder This area of Thinkific was called site builder for a while and now it's called page builder and I tend to use them interchangeably. This is where you get to build the sales page for your course. We can build a really dynamic and beautiful sales pages which flow right into the purchase and enrollment all on the same platform. There are fewer widgets and whathaveyous this way. Just like in the course builder, site builder or page builder has drag-n-drop functionality and it has a lot of modules that will make it easy for you to build an attractive and highly converting sales page. This is super important as you scale your course offers… when the website/sales page is able to sell the course for you, then you have fewer steps to the sales process and ultimately have more students enrolling. Also, just like in the course builder, anything that you do in the site builder or page builder will reflect immediately when you hit publish right onto your site. Game Changers The real power of Thinkific and the reason why I decided to talk about it today on the podcast is two things: Thinkific Payments Thinkific App Store First Thinkific Payments The Thinkific Payments are built upon Stripe and allows for a streamlined checkout. The checkout process is simple and elegant which, as you know, is super important! We want to make the process of someone paying for our course as easy as possible. In addition to making the buying process easier, we can now add upsells after the purchase… like coaching or a getting started call or a bonus course… the sky is the limit. And we can also process refunds right inside of the admin portal rather than having to go over to stripe to process those refunds. Second Thinkific App Store This is a storefront where you can install add-on components to enhance your Thinkific school. There are integration type apps, like for ConvertKit, Hello Audio and Zapier. And there are functionality tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel. But the real gem of the Thinkific App Store is the 3rd party apps which enhance the student experience. I’m going to call out two of them – Peerboard and SuperPowerUps. Peerboard creates a community experience (think Facebook Group) right inside your Thinkific school. Beautifully integrated. SuperPowerUps take your student experience up ten notches (at least). With these, the student journey through your course has limitless potential! If you’re thinking about creating a course soon, be sure to jump on the wait list for the Online Music Course Accelerator program that I run with Brocha. You can get on the waitlist here → https://onlinemusiccourseaccelerator.com And let’s connect on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/jaimeslutzky/ or via zoom → https://callwithjaime.com It's time! Round 3 of the Online Music Course Accelerator is open for application. Click here for details.