If you want to make money selling online courses, then Teachable should be your go to platform. Here is my 2019 Teachable Platform Review.
Creating an online course is a great way to make passive income. If done right, you can automate a lot of the processes to make money like:
- Customer acquisition
- Email marketing
- Traffic (organic through Google SEO)
My online courses make a decent amount of money every month and help fund my travels around the world.
And best of all? I don’t spend too much time managing this business. The hardest part is creating your courses.
Now, when it comes to online courses, an important decision is to choose which platform you will launch your course on.
Will you launch in a marketplace like Udemy or Skillshare?
Will you self host?
Or maybe you’ll choose an online course platform like Udemy.
Well in my humble opinion, Teachable is by far the best online course platform to reach other people and get those sales that you want.
Udemy vs. Teachable
The first online course I ever made was an accounting course (I know, I’m boring as fuck haha).
Anyways, I decided to upload that course to Udemy because I really didn’t have an audience. As much bad rap as I give Udemy, it is a great place to sell online courses if you are just starting out and do not have an audience.
They are able to drive a lot of traffic to your courses, which is great. This allows you to focus more on content creation instead of marketing.
However, I didn’t like the big cut that Udemy was taking. They would regularly take 50%+ of my sales.
That’s when I had enough. I didn’t spend weeks to build a course just to earn 50% of my sales price!
I wanted to create my own course on my own site. And that’s when I stumbled onto Teachable.
Teachable was born out of instructors who were tired of Udemy’s stringent policies that often limited contact with students, pricing options, and functionality.
Overview of Teachable Platform
Teachable is basically an online course builder platform.
If you’re thinking about selling an online course, they provide a one-stop shop to create everything you need, including:
- a content management system for your videos and other content
- a sales page that allow for one-click upsells and easy credit card forms
- payment gateways (to receive payment from students)
- blog pages
- a messaging system to contact students
If you didn’t have Teachable, you would need:
- Website/blog hosting (could easily cost $15+ a month)
- Credit card processing
- Video hosting
- Course or membership software
- an email service provider (easily $15+ per month)
Once you create an account on their site, you can create your course. They have done a good job providing you with easy, simple to use tools to build your website.
All you have to do is create your content (videos, text, PDFs, etc.) and upload them into your site to create lectures.
After your content is uploaded, you’ll need to create a sales page and set a price for your course. After that, you’re good to go to start enrolling students and making sales!
Now there are a lot of great benefits of using Teachable (in addition to the ones I already talked about), including:
- Unlimited students
- A fully optimized web and mobile site (really important for SEO)
- Built-in marketing tools
- ….and much more!
Teachable Pricing
Teachable has a free option and three paid options.
The free option allows you to host your course and take orders from customers. The functionality and analytics are limited, but it’s a starting point to launch your course.
I think the free option is great if you want to test an online course without shelling out a ton of money.
These days, I almost always use the basic or professional plans for my online schools.
Here’s a quick overview of the three paid options:
Basic Plan
$39 per month billed monthly or $29 per month billed annually
Basic Plan: Click Here To Sign Up Now!
The basic plan is great if you are testing out a course. It gives you access to many of Teachable’s great features such as creating coupon codes, setting up your affiliate program, and integrated email marketing.
Professional Plan
$99 per month billed monthly or $79 per month billed annually
Pro Plan: Click Here To Sign Up Now!
This plan is for the serious course creators who want to hit the ground running now and have access to all features and all the bonuses.
Business Plan
$499 per month billed monthly or $399 per month billed annually
High Volume Plan: Click Here To Sign Up Now!
This plan typically for big businesses who need a lot of admins and sales analytics.
Benefits of Teachable
Full disclosure: I use Teachable and I LOVE it
It’s one of the best online platforms I have ever used.
And even if you have a paid plan, it practically pays for itself as you don’t have to self host a website, pay for email marketing, and you can build a fully optimized site within hours.
Here are all of the benefits of using Teachable:
1. Easy To Use
My favorite thing about Teachable is that it’s so easy to use. You can literally create your course in a matter of hours with their tools.
First of all, it is easy to create modules within your course and then break them down into lectures.
And you can choose to teach through a variety of methods, including text, video lectures, and more.
In each of your lectures, you can upload links, text, and even PDFs or Word documents.
And most importantly of all, you can customize so many things about your course, including the sales page and checkout page.
I LOVE the flexibility of designing your course the way you want it. The creators of Teachable really thought about everything and they give you so many tools to make your school a success.
And Teachable is always updating their site with more tools. In the beginning, you couldn’t include drip content in your course. But you can today!
2. Coupons To Drive Sales
Now I’m not the biggest fan of coupons, but they have their uses. I typically only have a few sales a year for my courses.
The ability to create coupons is part of Teachable’s paid subscription plans. Basically, you can create coupons based on a % or specific $ dollar amount off the course.
Promotions are great if you have a big email following.
For my most successful course, I typically get a dozen sales or so when I send an email about a coupon promotion I’m offering.
Now don’t get carried away with promotions and coupons because you’ll condition people to only buy when your stuff is on sale.
3. Daily Payment Option
Honestly, this has got to be one of my favorite benefits of Teachable over a lot of other platforms.
Teachable recently introduced a daily payout option. Basically, whenever you sell a course, you’ll get paid out within 1 – 2 business days.
Now they do hold on to 10% of the sales as protection for chargebacks or returns, but that money is returned to you in 30 days.
The ability to get paid DAILY is really cool! In fact, I’m not aware of many big teaching platforms like this that give out daily payments.
It’s really cool and is helpful to keep you motivated when you see money hitting your bank every day.
4. Lots of Support
Unlike a lot of other similar teaching platforms, Teachable actually does invest a lot of time and money to create guides and other content to ensure you are successful.
They have many free courses and guides that teach you how to create an awesome course. And they even have a few paid options to get one-on-one coaching.
While I never utilized many of these resources, I know it will definitely be helpful for many of you.
5. Great Tech Support
Outside of Amazon, I think Teachable has one of the best support teams I have ever experienced.
Whenever I have an issue with my course, I email them and almost get a response within 1 or 2 hours.
You really don’t get that kind of treatment elsewhere to be honest.
Usually when I contact the tech support team, I’m able to resolve my problems within 3 or four emails.
Their support team is available 7 days a week to help you with any issue.
Just the other day, I had a problem where one of my students couldn’t log into her course because she lost access to that email.
I contacted teachable and they were able to get a work-around solution very quick.
This is one of the best tech support operations I have ever encountered. Most other platforms may leave you high and dry for days at a time, but not Teachable!
6. Flexibility in Pricing Options
When you are about to launch your online course, one of the most important things is to get the pricing right.
Luckily for us, Teachable offers a lot of different ways to price your course.
You can set up a one-time payment, a payment plan (i.e. 3 payments of $100), or even a subscription setting.
I like the wide diversity of pricing options for my students. Typically, I use the on time payment option and the payment plan option for my students to select.
7. Instant SEO Visibility
One really big (and instant) benefit of using Teachable that is rarely discussed is the SEO visibility.
If you publish on Teachable, you can take advantage of their SEO visibility.
The Teachable website gets tens of thousands of hits a day. And if your school is hosted onto their platform, you already have a SEO boost over someone that created a course over WordPress or other platforms.
If you search dividend investing course, one on Google, one of my schools pops up on the first page of the search results (even though I haven’t done a lot to promote this course)
I couldn’t have gotten there so fast if I had just hosted it on Clickbank or on my WordPress blog.
8. Integrations
One really cool thing about Teachable is all of the third party integrations they have.
You can integrate Google Analytics to track the nitty gritty details about your site.
You can integrate your mailing list via MailChimp or Convertkit.
I find all of the integrations to be simple to connect and get up and running.
And with most other platforms you can do that at all, so this gets a big plus from me.
Cons Of Teachable Platform
Now Teachable is great and all I’ll bat for them all day, but there are a few things I don’t like:
1. Refund Policy
One thing I really dislike about Teachable’s is it’s 30 day refund policy.
Now I’m not against refunding students by any means. If someone took my course and didn’t learn anything, then I will always refund the money.
However, there have been a few scammers who sign up for the course and then decided “it wasn’t for them” for some inexplicable reason.
Or you have some sketchy people who just want to learn the contents of your course and then return it like some used shoe.
If you use Teachable’s own payment gateway, you are subject to the 30 day refund policy.
2. No Marketing Support
Okay this one isn’t really teachable’s fault, but I just wanted to throw it out there so you are aware.
But Teachable really doesn’t provide any marketing or advertising support for your course.
You have to drive traffic to your site yourself.
Unlike other platforms such like Udemy, Teachable will not spend advertising dollars to drive traffic to your course.
You’re on your own when it comes to traffic.
That’s why you need to have a built-in audience to make money with Teachable.
3. Transaction Fees
Teachable isn’t a free platform. They have to make money too after all!
And one of the ways they make money is through transaction fees. If you’re on a free or basic payment plan, they will take up to 10% of your sales as a transaction cost.
Also if you’re using Teachable Payments (to receive daily payments), you have some added transaction fees.
Here’s the current fee structure:
2019 Teachable Platform Review: Final Thoughts
Overall, I think Teachable is a great platform.
It is truly a one-stop shop to create your online course from scratch and sell them within a few hours.
With Teachable, even idiots like me can build a course from nothing and make a few thousand a month selling content.
I have been using Teachable for over two years now and I have no big complaints. They are totally worth the money and are a pleasure to work with.
So if you’re interested in making passive income every month with your Teachable course, click here to sign up and create your first course!