Creating your own online course can be a great way to make money online. It’s also a great way to build authority in your niche. According to Podia, the e-learning market is expected to reach a value of 325 billion by 2025. In 2017 online courses made $46 billion.
What do these numbers mean for you? It means that online courses are in high demand. When a product is in high demand, they’re a lot easier to sell. It means that the online course industry isn’t going away anytime soon.
But most online course platforms like Podia only have a free 14-day trial. Whereas with Teachable you can create your own online course for free.
Keep reading to find out how you can create your online course for free with Teachable.
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. This means I may earn a commission should you choose to sign up for a program or make a purchase using my link.
How much can you make selling online courses?
How much you make depends on how much your course is, and how many people purchase it. For example, if your course is $29 and 10 people buy it then you make $290. If 20 people buy it then you’ll make $580. However, if you sell a $99 course and 10-11 buy it, then you’ll make $1000.
How to Create an Online Course for Free
With Teachable you can create your own online course for free. They have a free plan that allows you to do this. You can create a course, have unlimited students, unlimited hosting, and not pay a monthly fee.
You get unlimited bandwidth too. However, there is a transaction fee that they will take out from your course sales. To find out more about this visit their pricing page.
How Does Teachable work?
How it works is that Teachable hosts your course for you. You won’t have to host it in a Facebook group. You can create a video-based course, text-based course, etc. Teachable doesn’t host your videos for you though. You would have to host them on Vimeo, Youtube, or something similar.
Then you add the embed code to Teachable. You can upload PDF files and other text documents for your courses. After that, you can arrange your lessons or modules how you want.
Then once you’re happy with your course you can publish it and start selling it. The free plan does come with an integrated payment processor.
If you still aren’t sure how to create and sell an online course Teachable has a free webinar you can sign up for. It’s evergreen too. You can watch it on your time.
Teachable’s Pricing Plan
First, let’s talk about the features you get on the free plan. What I like is that you can host unlimited courses and have unlimited students on Teachable’s free plan. That’s pretty good. I also like that email support, course templates, and lecture comments are included with the free plan.
But there are quite a bit of advanced features that are not available.
- Custom domains
- Coupon codes
- Drip content
- Email integration
- Third party integration
- Zapier actions
- Integrated affiliate program
- Course completion certificates
If you are on the free plan, you cannot offer potential students a discount on your courses. You cannot have an affiliate program of your courses either through Teachable. Drip content means your lessons would drip out over time. You wouldn’t get access to this feature either.
Another feature that you don’t get access to is having your own custom domain. However, when you are creating your first online course a lot of these features aren’t needed. All you really need is to be able to have unlimited students, a payment processor, and a place to host it.
You can do the basics on their free plan. Once your course actually sells then you can upgrade to a paid plan later. When it comes to discount codes there is a way around it. You can offer your course at a cheaper price at launch. Then raise the price once your launch is over.
The Other Fees
There are other fees that you will have to pay. All of these fees have to do with Paypal. The fees are all the same no matter what plan you choose.
The chargeback fee is when someone wants a refund, and you refuse to give it. If the person says that never bought it just so they can get their money back, Paypal will charge you $15. Basically, Paypal is charging you for having to give this person their money back.
But you will have to pay a $1+10% transaction fee for every sale of your course. This transaction fee is reduced to 5% when you upgrade to the $39 per month plan.
Check out their pricing plan here.
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Conclusion
While you might not get access to all of Teachable’s features on the free plan, you get access to the features that matter. Most online course platforms only give you a 14-day trial.
Whereas with Teachable you can create your online course, and sell it. You can do it on their free plan. Not too many give you the freedom to create your online course for free. That’s one big barrier out of the way!
