The online course industry is growing at a rapid pace. According to Inc magazine, this market reached $57 billion in 2014 and was worth $107 billion in 2015.
There are various online platforms you can use to deliver your online courses, for example, Kajabi and Udemy which are all in one platforms.
If you want to manage the process on your own website then WordPress has some handy themes and plugins that will help you. But this is not advisable for beginners as this involves a lot of work from choosing the right theme, installing the right plugins, building landing pages, collecting payments and capturing email addresses and maintaining them.
Key Considerations
When creating a WordPress site, there are many plugins you can choose from and you can customize your course site any way you like. Take a look at a few online course sites to see how they are structured. But after the initial setup, you might want to use a CDN – a content delivery network for loading your site’s content fast. Some caching plugins might also help in speeding up your content delivery.
Collecting payment and managing the payment process is also a big nightmare when you want your own site. This alone can drive online course creators to jump onboard a complete course management system or platform.
Why Choosing a Course Management Platform is a Better Choice
If you take Kajabi as an example, you don’t have to worry about themes, plugins, how fast the website loads and so on. You can simply ignore everything else and focus on the course content alone which should be your bread and butter and the core of your business.
Here are some more reasons why Kajabi is a better option than building your own site using WordPress:
- Create online courses and membership sites within a fraction of the time it takes to build a website from scratch
- Create well laid out and optimized landing pages with a click of a few buttons
- Easy use of themes and styles
- Marketing emails for automation
- Easy to use video hosting
- Payments made simple no custom integration required
- Integration with popular CRM and CMS systems such as SalesForce and WordPress
- Provides a built in blog
- Powerful analytics and data including Google Analytics
- 24 by 7 support team and a community
- Access to Kajabi University to learn how to sell your course
- Sales tools to increase profit
- 14 day free trial option
- Flexible monthly plans to suit your budget
- Savings on annual plans
WordPress is for Advanced Users
WordPress is great for many online websites and this includes online course delivery and learning management systems. Of course, there are many off the shelf tools that allow you to do this that are easy and convenient to use. But if you need the added flexibility and control then WordPress is the way to go. With WordPress, once you have a host and installed WordPress all you need is a theme and plugins to manage the course delivery components. Plan your course well and have a good marketing strategy to get it off the ground.
Conclusion and Takeaway
If you are starting off or don’t want the hassle of managing everything on your own then going for a professional course management system is your best bet. You can keep things simple and focus on teaching what you are good at. What is even better, you can also earn while you are doing this. You can leave all the hassles of payments, integrations, slow website speed for more advanced and established players who can fork out extra money on their own support team. Put most of your time and effort into the course design part as that’s where you will either make or break the course and that’s exactly what an all in one system can provide.