If you have an area of expertise that you want to share with others, one of the best online business models right now is to offer your own online course. Until fairly recently, it was complicated to set up your digital courses. Now, however, several platforms make this far simpler. One of the most popular of these (and the subject of our review) is Teachable, an innovative platform that makes it simple to create beautiful and professional-looking courses on almost any topic. There are currently more than 20,000 courses on Teachable, and many students and instructors are signing up every day.
Latest Updates: Teachable was acquired for 250 million dollars by Hotmart, a global leader in the online courses field, and shortly after had updated its prices: The Basic Plan price remained the same. The Pro Plan price has gone up to $119/m or $1,188/year (instead of $99/m and $948/year). The Business Plan price went down to $299/m or $2,988/year (instead of $499/m and $4,788/year), and the Free Plan has been discontinued. So, the Professional Plan is 20% more expensive, and the Business plan is 40% cheaper. Using the above promotions will offset the price rise. At the same time, Teachable also introduced a default 14-days free trial for the Pro plan. You need to enter your email and hit “Get Started” on this page to receive the offer. Use our buttons above to receive a free trial on any other Teachable plan.
Benefits of Teaching Online Courses
Teaching online courses is a relatively new business model, at least for individuals and small businesses. In the past, it wasn’t practical to set up your own courses unless you had access to advanced technology. Teachable is one of the platforms that has made it possible for anyone to start teaching courses online.
When you teach in person, you’re limited by geography, and you can only reach so many students at one time. The internet lets you reach people anywhere in the world. Of course, you could always set up a course on your own from your own website. However, selling it from Teachable has some distinct advantages, such as access to a highly polished and professional-looking interface, secure hosting, and built-in options for marketing and accepting payments. All of this simplifies the process and gives you instant credibility.
Key Features of Teachable
With Teachable, you only need expertise in the subject you’re teaching. The platform provides all of the tools and features you need.
Create Multimedia Lectures on Any Subject – Whatever your area of expertise, you can create a course with lectures using many media types, including text, images, videos, audio, and PDF files. You can import files from Google Drive, Dropbox, and other sources.
Build a Professional Website – A good website is one of your best marketing tools, no matter what you’re promoting online. If you already have or know how to build a website, you can use your own. Otherwise, Teachable has a simple website builder that lets you build a professional website to explain your course to prospective students. You can use your own domain or use Teachable’s domain.
Secure Hosting – Teachable hosts your course, and all the data is backed up. Your data and that of your students are secured with an advanced SSL certificate and secure payment providers. Students can sign up for your course, knowing that their information is safe.
Create Compelling Sales Pages – Teachable has a page editor that makes it easy to create powerful sales pages. You can make these landing pages on your website, send them out as emails, use them on your Facebook page, or use them as online or print media ads.
Course Content is Fully Responsive – Students can access your courses on computers, smartphones, and tablets.
Add Interactive Features to Your Course – You can enhance your course material with interactive features such as a blog, discussion forum, quizzes, Google forms, and other tools. This gives you many choices for engaging with your students on many levels.
Provide High-Level Support – Teachable integrates with Zapier so you can provide advanced support services such as Zendesk, Olark, and Intercom.
Pricing Options – You have many choices for pricing your courses. You can charge a one-time fee, create weekly or monthly subscriptions, set up payment plans, bundle multiple courses, and create other customized payment options. You can accept payments in many global currencies and accept credit cards and PayPal.
Promotional Tools – It’s easy to create coupons and promotions that offer discounts with expiration dates. Teachable also works with various marketing platforms such as AWeber, Infusionsoft, MailChimp, and many others. Create segmented student lists so you can email them about your future course offerings. You can even set up an affiliate program to motivate people to sell the course on your behalf.
Advanced Analytics – There are many tools to provide you with detailed data about your students and marketing efforts. Track important data about students, lecture completion rates, monthly revenue, first and last touch attribution (where students found you and which campaign persuaded them to sign up), and more.
One-on-one coaching – This newly launched feature allows you to offer or upsell one-on-one sessions with your students directly within a course.
These are just some of the features that Teachable provides. Putting all of this together yourself would be quite time-consuming or, if you outsourced it, costly. One of the benefits of using Teachable is that you can focus on your course and have everything else done for you.
Pricing Options for Teachable
Teachable offers three plans for instructors, Basic, Professional, and Business. For each of these plans, you can choose between monthly and annual billing.
Basic Plan, at $39/month or $29/month billed annually (that’s a 26% discount); Lets two owners or authors teach courses. Features include payment processing, forums, and discussion forums, monthly payouts, 5% transaction fees, coupon codes, integrated email marketing, many third-party integrations, drip course content, and more.
Professional Plan – at $119/month or $99/month billed annually (17% discount); Includes all Basic features in addition to instant payouts, unbranded websites, up to 5 owners or authors, no transaction fees, graded quizzes, priority support, and advanced themes.
Business Plan– $299/month or $249/month billed annually (17% discount); Provides support for 20 owners, bulk student enrollments, and concierge onboarding. This is for larger organizations that sell many courses.
Teachable Discounts and Coupons
Occasionally Teachable will offer a seasonal promo offer, which is usually limited to just a few days. At the moment, the available Teachable promotional discounts available are; The first one here; First-time customers receive three bonus courses (five if you go Pro) that will help you professionally launch your course. These include course creation workshops, live coaching calls, and 1-on-1 calls with an onboarding specialist.
You can find another lucrative Teachable promotion here; Sign up for the Pro plan and receive TeachableU for free. TeachableU includes a full year of training workshops ($1764 value), access to the Teachable Masters program ($888 value), private masterclass training on how to use upsells ($149 value), and eight weeks of Q&A group training ($300 value).
If you’re not interested in the above courses and bonuses, you can attend a 40-minute Teachable quickstart workshop, and receive $20 off the monthly Pro plan for a whole year. Register here.
If you’ve ever considered teaching a course but were held back by practical and technological limitations, Teachable is an option worth considering. This platform makes it possible for anyone to quickly set up a professional course while greatly simplifying all technical tasks such as organizing coursework, creating a professional website and sales pages, accepting payments, marketing, analytics, and more.
Of course, to succeed with Teachable, you do need one thing – a quality course. No platform can create that for you. On the other hand, if your primary specialty is marketing, you could always partner with an instructor to set up a course. Or you could teach a course on marketing! The way Teachable is structured, you can easily start with one modest course and, as you get more familiar with the process, add more later.
One of the benefits of online teaching is that it’s not nearly as time-intensive as live teaching. Most of the coursework can be created once and then uploaded for students to access. You have to provide a certain amount of support for students, but this isn’t as time-consuming as live lectures. Teachable is a powerful resource for anyone interested in online teaching as a part-time or a full-time endeavor.
