How Do I Set Up A Blog On Teachable

How would you go about selling your own courses? Create a website and market it? Teachable is a platform making it easier to create and sell your own courses.

Are you an expert at something? You can easily create your own course through Teachable and they will help you sell it. Their goal is to flatten the curve in creating online courses. At the same time it can monetize your knowledge and expertise. From fitness studios to consultants, and even employee training online with Teachable. It can take as little as 10 seconds to setup a payment method. They turn creating a course into an easy process. 30k instructors earning over $500 million. Even Seth Godin is on the platform.

Creating Your School

When you start with Teachable, each page is considered a teachable school. When you create your own "School" your page consists of info pages, checkout pages, and even a thank you page, all created within the Teachable platform. When creating your actual course, the main part of the it is the actual curriculum. You can decide how you want to manage it and they give you the tools to decide how it will be dispersed.

Managing that curriculum is actually quite easy. You can drip release content depending on when the student signed up. Additional selling features are already built in such as the ability to do an up sell to help sell more courses. You can even install your own affiliate program or share your earnings with a co-author. Want to run something live? They integrate with Zoom for live workshops.

When it comes down to it, Teachable is serious about the impact it can have with no gimmicks, and try to be as clear and upfront as possible. Even if you aren't sure its for you, they do provide a free Webinar. (They give a special signup offer for watching.)

Beta Mode: Discover By Teachable – Now you can be discovered right on the Teachable website as well. While this service is still in beta, they are starting to curate some of their best content. So while there is no guarantee you will be featured, it does seem they are rolling this out and could eventually be viable option for a lot of creators to get discovered.

Calls to Acquisition On the Teachable Website

This being a blog (skeba.info) more focused on marketing strategy, I did a quick look into how, at least from a front page perspective, Teachable is acquiring leads. Basically, they use various call to action buttons / value propositions within the site uses to collect email addresses and help in the discovery stage of the buying process.

Some of their offerings include:

eBook Offer – They offer a free download of theory "7-Steps to Launch Your Own Profitable Online Course" Cheatsheet!" for entering your email.
Pop Up – They have a message that pops up that lets you download their "Course Creation Book."
Top Bar – They let you register for their Quickstart webinar to see a full demo and get a special offer.
Call to Action – They have an area on the site where you can sign up to "Get Free Resources – Teachable's Easy Checklist for Creating a Mini Course"

Further Activation Points

Affiliate Program – 30% Lifetime Commissions On Your Referrals.
Overall this is a great incentive program that will surely get their link / message shared. 30% is pretty high, especially from a referral point of view, especially since its lifetime. This incentivizes the sharing of the Teachable website which a) is a high enough incentive to encourage sharing Teachable b) Teachable doesn't need to pay anything out unless a sale is made. Whether they will continue the 30% rate we'll see. Amazon has already dropped a lot of its commissions.
Email Messaging – Receive free access to a valuable time-sensitive bonus, The Teachable 2020 Summit Replay and 8 weeks of Group Coaching.
This is meant to engage users / potential users once their email their email has been acquired. The main thing that Teachable is looking to do once you've signed up is get you creating. Once you've used the platform, maybe uploaded the start of a course it is more like that you'll engage the platform than if you don't interact at all.

The Creation Process

So in order to get you to become a customer / acquire a potential user, they have to get your information. The less friction there is, the less barrier to entry their is that exists.

Initial Sign up form – From what we noticed, this was a frictionless experience and required only basic information. They ask for name, email, password. Thats it! They can get further information later. The most important thing is that you signup and become a user.

Entering into the Platform as an Unpaid User – Even before you've decided to upgrade at all, they are pretty generous with their offering. You can create a school and sign up to 10 students. They've eliminated the barrier and gives you an easy way to judge whether this is for you.

Getting to the Creation Stage – Once I decide to start creating, the biggest barrier for me was the question, "what topics would I create for my school?" Does Teachable eliminate that problem? I was about to say otherwise, but before I knew it, I had an offer for their own course on how to build courses! They've really though of the process for a user standpoint and put effort into alleviating the pains at each stage in becoming a creator.

Improving the Creator Process

Some questions I need to further delve into and understand:

Video Creation – As a basic user I was concerned about recording video. Are there any resources to record and add my own videos? While I've seen courses on this aspect in Teachable, I wonder how much this would help me feel comfortable in my video skills?

Creating Content – What kind of content should I create and how would I lay it out? One ease of this point point that Teachable provides is their free workshop templates at: https://teachable.com/get/get-the-teachable-worksheet-templates. I do wonder if offering graphics, or a partnership with another platform would be useful?

YouTube Connecting – Even I have personally created YouTube videos and I wonder if there could be a good connection point there to move platforms or offer a great value proposition to those top performers. Maybe Teachable already does this?

Competitors

I spent some time looking at two different competitors to get a sense at what they are doing in the teaching space and how their value proposition different from that of Teachable's.

Kajabi

Kajabi allows you to create a full website, including a blog, that is full of customizable options. You can tweak your website and lessons to design theexact course you have in mind.

This is great for those who have experience in course creation; but, if this is your first time, the complex features can be overwhelming.

Thinkific

From my initial research, this company comes up often. They seem to almost be the main competitor to Teachable. However, compared to Thinkific, Teachable offers more options to customize your website easily. Still, from a design perspective, Thinkific 's design features are pretty easy to use and even a beginner with minimal technical expertise can use the platform.

Comparably as well, Teachable offers a longer list of marketing tools that you can leverage to run highly optimized and personalized marketing campaigns. Its marketing suite is capable of managing more complex marketing with more ease and clarity.

How Should Teachable Advertise?

Doing a quick search as to what ads come up, the advertising space is competitive. But of courses to run a success PPC campaign you need to make sure you are bidding competitively for the right keywords. Surprisingly, in my search, Vimeo was the top bidder on Google.

Going with the longer tailed search, I see the competitor Thinkable is on top.

While I'm not doing a full analysis on all the keywords they could advertise with or should target, they definitely have a lot of opportunity in several niches and offer a lot of value if they can connect with those users that may already have a good user base.

If we look at Teachable from an organic standpoint, they seem to be well optimized. While Thinkific was both organically listed and biding, for the keyword "create a guitar school online" we still find, at least in my search, Teachable at the top of the search results.

Conclusion

Teachable has a great future ahead of them. With new futures being added and Hotmart behind them, I see them gaining market share in the teaching industry. With a smart paid advertising campaign and acquisition strategy they offer enough value to tempt creators onto the platform and even creating their own courses if they haven't done so yet.