Thinkific Update (April 2018): Create a perfect website, YouTube video, community, & more!
This April at Thinkific we’re showering you with some game-changing features and product launches, just in time for spring! We may have told you about some big updates before, but let me tell you right now: April was a big month.
We’ve made one of the most significant updates to how course creators can build their websites, create their courses, and craft student experiences. One launch, in particular, our highly-anticipated Site Builder, is going further than any online course platform has gone before.
We’ve got a lot to cover this month, so let’s hop to it!
New Free Training and Resources
How to hire your first employee
If you’re teaching online, you have a brand (whether you know it or not). A brand is what distinguishes you from your competitors and sets the stage for trust-building with your audience. A personal brand is different from a regular brand in that it directly incorporates you as a person and your expert story.
Making sure your brand works for your business is incredibly important, and can be quite challenging. That’s why we put together a personal branding guide to help you make your expert story work for your online education business.
Build a community with Facebook Groups
Past the sale and the content, your customers need to find continuous value in your brand. Communities continuously produce value in the form of timely support, advice, and recommendations.
Starting up a lively customer community is hard, especially when your platform requires high levels of commitment from students. If you want an easy, low-barrier, and effective community platform, try Facebook Groups — and our newly updated guide will get you started.
Create the perfect YouTube video
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world! Your audience is using it to find entertainment, education, escape, and advice, so it’s crucial for online educators as a source of website traffic.
As a part of our talks for VidTalks 2018 here in Vancouver, we put together our learnings from running our Thinkific’s YouTube channel into a free online course designed to help you produce the perfect YouTube video.
What’s new to Thinkific?
Create the perfect website for your online courses
With the release of Site Builder, Thinkific course creators can now quickly create beautiful websites, purpose-built for education businesses.
Each new Site Builder theme has been built from the ground up using best practices to maximize course sales by helping your potential students see the value of your offering quickly. Plus, all themes are crafted and refined to look great with many different types of content — It’s like having your own designer on staff.
Customize the look and feel to match your brand. Set site-level defaults like the logo, color palette, and fonts, then customize each page to match the needs of your specific audience.
Use different sections like a Curriculum, Video, Checklist, or Countdown timer depending on the page and what best meets your potential students’ needs. Your students always see the most up-to-date information using Smart Sections that update automatically when your course and site changes.
Want to build your own course website with Site Builder?
Control your student’s learning path with prerequisites
If you’re looking for a more linear learning path, look no further than our new prerequisite lesson option. You can now select lessons to act as prerequisites for content in another chapter.
If a student doesn’t successfully complete your selected prerequisite lessons they can’t move onto the next chapter until they do.
Prerequisite lesson options set for Quiz lessons are a powerful summative assessment tool, especially when they unlock completion certificates upon the student achieving a passing grade.
Integrate Thinkific with ActiveCampaign
Use ActiveCampaign with Thinkific to create and update contacts based on visitor and student activity on your course website.
You can update contacts in your ActiveCampaign list when they sign up, purchase, enroll in and complete courses, including free trials! That makes it easy to funnel customers at different stages to the content and offers you want.
Install the Thinkific WordPress plugin
If you have a WordPress website alongside your Thinkific course website, you can install our official plugin via the Plugins page in your WordPress menu.
Using the plugin, you can easily import pages and posts on your WordPress website into your courses as text lessons in any chapter. You can even set them to be a part of a free trial and as a draft lesson while you import.
You can even generate direct links to your Thinkific checkout for specific courses or bundles right in your page or post editor. After installing the plugin, edit a page or post to find the button above the WYSIWYG toolbar.
If you’re building your sales pages or find good opportunities to mention your Thinkific post, this link generator will be very handy.
What’s Happening at Thinkific HQ?
We’re going to need a shelf soon…
Our culture team works hard to put the happiness and health of the Thinkific family first. We were honored to receive bronze at the Canadian Cancer Society’s Extra Mile Awards which recognized their hard work and dedication in achieving that goal.
Congratulations Smiles and Swirls!
A big congrats to Wendy Meades from Smiles & Swirls. Wendy won our Instagram contest and scored herself, some strategy calls, swag, and 6 months free on Thinkific and Meet Edgar! Follow us on Instagram for your next chance to win like Wendy!
That’s it for April!
Thanks for reading! We’ll be back next month for another round-up of the best Thinkific has to offer.
If you’re interested in learning more about how we develop features, resources, or what we’ve been up to, don’t hesitate to drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you!
