Are you finding a way to create an online selling course website? Then you come to the right place, right article! Even, if you’re not a tech-savy guy, this article will guide you through very basic steps, from choosing a good theme, online course plugin and even setting up the Affiliate system for your online marketing strategy.
Can you make money selling course online?
The answer is yes, if you have a valuable content to share with your learners. Valuable content I mean the content that people can apply in reality, the content that can help them to solve their problems or make benefits. And of course, it can’t be lack of a nice-user friendly website and a good marketing strategy as well.
What do you need to start create an online selling course website?
Well, you’ll need a small investment for the followings:
- A domain name which costs about $12-$15/year. You can get one at Godaddy.com
- A shared hosting which costs about $50-$80/year. Normally, I always recommend my customers to get a VPS (virtual private server) instead of a shared hosting, due to the performance and security. However, not many people can afford for a vps therefore in this article I’m just starting with a shared hosting. My recommended hosting providers are stablehost or hawkhost. Please keep in mind that you should choose the location of your hosting package closest to your customers’ location. This will help your site load faster.
- A premium WordPress theme ($50-$60). Of course, you can get a free theme, but if you want to nice-looking WordPress theme with useful features, you should go with a premium one. It’s worth to pay. I’ll show you why later in the article.
- Online Course WordPress plugin and I recommend LearnDash WordPress plugin which cost $199/year for a basic package. At the time I”m writing this article, you can get the sale price of $159/year for the basic package.
Now, Imagine you’ve already purchased a domain and hosting, and LearnDash plugin. Next step, we’re going to get a WordPress theme and setting up the WordPress site.
1. How to setup a WordPress Website/Blog
2. Choose a LearnDash WordPress theme.
A LearnDash WordPress theme is a theme is designed to integrate with LearnDash plugin. This will give you a nice-looking layout of the course along with compatible features. Of course, as I mentioned above you could use a free theme but the free theme might not give you a nice-layout as you expect and sometimes it might conflict with LearnDash plugin.
In the case of my customer who provides online trading courses, I’ve choosen Talemy – LMS Education WordPress Theme which costs $51/life time. I’m not going to list all of features that the theme support but the most interesting thing that impressed me was the layout of the course (image below)
The theme is very easy to customize by using Elementor Page Builder, even you know nothing about WordPress. It will take you 1-2 hours to check and get used to using the theme. You can buy the theme here
3. How to install Talemy – LMS Education WordPress Theme
After making purchasement, you should download the file to your computer. (see photo below)
Now, you need to extract the .zip file just downloaded. You’ll see the following files and folders
There will be 2 zip files after extracting, the first one is “talemy”, the parent theme and the second one is “talemy-child”, the child theme. For detail instruction, you should check the “documatation” file.
Now, let’s install the theme!!!
In your WordPress dashboard, go to “Appearance” – “Themes” and click “Add New”
And do the same for “Talemy-Child.zip”. This is optional, but if you want to keep the customization when update the new version of theme. Otherwise, the customization will be lost and you’ll need to do it again.
Now, you will see a notification which asks you to install the required plugins for the theme. All you need to do is to click “begin installing plugins“
Sometimes, the installation progress might stop at the 6 or 7 plugins, then you need to go back to the “required plugins” and do the same for other plugins again.
There still be one more plugin that you need to install, it’s “LearnDash WordPress plugin” which you need to purchase separately from Learndash.com
4. How to install LearnDash – LMS WordPress plugin?
In your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugin – Add new and upload the file you just downloaded from LearnDash
In order to use free addons and get automatically update from LearnDash, you will need to activate your license. To validate your license, you just need to find LearnDash LMS – Setting and fill in your email and license key you got from LearnDash
Now, all required plugins have been installed and activated. There still be a few more steps that we need to do before installing theme demo.
In your WordPress Dashboard, find the Talemy – Status, check the WordPress Environment and Server Environment. You need to make sure all requirements are in green color like my photos. Otherwise you might get problem with demo installation and incompatible features.
5. Install Talemy – LMS WordPress Theme Demos
The Talemy – LMS WordPress Theme comes with several of nice looking demos and in just one click, you can install one of them on your site.
To install the demo, in your WordPress Dashboard go to Talemy – Demos. Here you will find 8 demos, all you need to do is to click the install button
Important notice: After installing the demo, I got an issue with assigning lessons and topics to courses. When creating or editing a course, I tried to assign lessons to the course and clicked save but it didn’t save my assigning. I’ve tried on 3 different hostings and got the same results. Finally, I decided to remove the course from demo installation (see photo below)
Wait for a few minutes to finish the demo installation
If you remove the courses from demo installation, you will need to add it manually (copy & paste). I’ll show you how to do it in the following video
6. How to customize Talemy – LMS WordPress theme
This section is quite hard to write in text, therefore I made a video of how to customize Talemy – LMS WordPress theme.
7. Affiliate marketing system for your online selling course website
This step is optional, you can skip this step if you don’t want to combine affiliate marketing to your online marketing strategy. But I do recommend you to try this and if you do it right, you’ll see how effective it is.
The plugin I’m using for the online selling course website demo is Affiliate WP which costs you $$99/year/site for basic and $249/year/unlimited domains with full of features and addons.
How to install Affiliate WP plugin?
Installing the Affiliate WP plugin is the same as LearnDash plugin, so I recommend you to check the steps above for how to install the LearnDash plugin.
In order to get updates automatically, you’ll need to activate the license key. In your wordpress dashboard go to AffiliateWP – Setting
Now scroll down and setup the affiliate pages
In order to integrate Affiliate WP for Learndash, you first need to go back to LearnDash and install the Woocommerce Addon. In your WordPress dashboard, go to LearnDash LMS – Addons
Click Install Now and Activate the addon.
Now, you need to create a product and link it to your course. For instruction how to create product with woocommerce, please check this article
When creating a product, find the product data section – General and choose the course for the product (image below)
The price of the course will be the price of product, so make sure you set the price for the course in the regular price. And don’t forget to save when you done. For more information how to use woocommerce plugin, please check the woo-commerce documentation.
And now, you have an online selling course website with affiliate system!!!
If you have any problem with setting-up, please just leave a comment below and I’ll try to help.
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