Teaching is a craft that requires a host of skills to pull off but never rewarded accordingly.
Not anymore!
Renowned market research firm Global Industry Analysts projects that the online education industry will bring in gross revenue of $325 billion by 2025!
The market is ripe for digital content, and tapping into the online training industry by sharing your expertise is the perfect contemporary scheme for garnering an audience and growing a business.
In this post, we will be reviewing Teachable, which is one of the most popular platforms that help users host courses online.
We will be analyzing all of its offerings to find out if it is worth your time and money.
What is Teachable?
Teachable is a cloud-based Learning Management System (LMS) that integrates marketing elements to help you put together and sell courses.
Although it may sound a little complex, it really isn’t. Think of Teachable like Netflix, except it’s a catalog for your expertise and not movies!
It’s a lot more advanced when compared to Udemy, because in addition to hosting your course, Teachable also markets it and sells it for you without you needing to create a separate landing page or configure your own payment platform.
The platform provides you with an end-to-end solution, but you must remember that you will need to come up with content and create materials to deliver it on your own.
Teachable was founded in 2014, and has since grown to become one of the biggest online learning platforms, having helped over 124,000 instructors generate over 657 million dollars!
Instead of having to create a course and pay different parties or platforms to build a website and a landing page for your course, and market the course separately, you can cut down on expenses and time by getting a Teachable subscription.
All you need is a camera, a computer, and a subscription to earn money by helping students around the globe learn new skills!
What Features Does Teachable Offer
Creating an account and getting started is super simple. You just enter your email and set a password, and you’re ready to go!
You’re greeted with a Welcome Screen that asks you about the current stage of your business and your niche.
The answers you provide will help Teachable cater to your needs better. After you fill the form, you’ll be redirected to the dashboard.
The dashboard is tidy, and you won’t have trouble finding the right tools. Let’s begin our Teachable review by seeing how customizable the platform is.
Fully Customizable Platform
Building an online learning business may seem simple, but it is a lot more complicated than just developing online training courses and hosting them online.
You also need to watch over your students and control how your platform operates and looks.
The dashboard makes all of this super easy to do.
Going to the settings enables you to alter your School’s name, change the heading of your homepage, edit its description, add a captcha to prevent spam, and even prevent payment plan cancellations.
If you use different personal and work emails, you can change your “Reply-To Email,” and also the “Email From” name. All of these customizations make the experience more personalized – not just for you but also for your students.
You can also set videos to auto-play when the student enters the lecture, sync users’ course completion percentages and auto-mark lectures as “Completed” when the user finishes playing them.
The Comment options allow you to deliver the optimal community experience, and you can also switch your School’s status if you’re making big changes!
Teachable customization options also give you the option to enable or disable integrations that can help you track your Teachable School’s growth, and make changes if you don’t see enough of it.
The software also enables you to alter the notification settings and choose to be notified only when you think it’s important!
Handling your plans and billing options is made simple with the controls integrated right into the dashboard.
Setting roles for your team, using Webhooks for convenience, and enrolling in the beta program is all made easy and accessible from the dashboard settings.
But we’re just getting started!
End to End Solution
In our analysis of Teachable, we found that it is an end-to-end solution!
The first step to creating an online learning business is creating the content that you will use.
Although Teachable cannot help you put together content and editing videos, it will help you structure and host your course!
But that comes later. Let us first see how you can create a website for your course using Teachable.
Creating a Website
Teachable has a dedicated section for designing websites!
You can customize your website’s logo and the favicon with the Theme menu. You can also customize the background image by uploading your own or choosing from Teachable’s collection.
Teachable also gives you the option to make your site’s theme dark or semi-dark!
Changing the font family is as easy as picking the right one, and the Theme menu also enables you to edit the colors of individual elements, including the navbar, the footer background, and even the links in the navbar!
Using these basic tools, you can create an attractive site, but if you’re an advanced user, you can also write and insert custom CSS in the “Code Snippets” area!
However, regardless of your level of technical skill, you can use the pre-loaded navigation links and stock webpages to create your site. These are customizable, and all you will need to do is enter the relevant details to create your website!
Creating a Sales Page
Teachable makes creating and customizing sales pages quick and easy. You can get started by going to the Courses tab and navigating to the Pages tab. Here you will find all of your pages.
The block editor makes editing exceedingly simple, and you don’t need any technical knowledge to create your very own sales page.
You can customize most things on the sample page to make it your own, including the header, the coupon banner, the closing letter, and the bundle section.
You can also remove any blocks you don’t need, and add your own custom/pre-made Rich Text, HTML, Testimonial, Featured Courses, Background Image, or Embedded Video blocks.
Teachable gives you everything you will need to set up a beautiful sales page that converts visitors instantly!
Hosting
The address for your Teachable School will be automatically set to a sub-domain of Teachable.com.
However, you have the option to add a custom domain, and you can also remove the Teachable branding from your site if you have the right plan.
Certificates
The suite gives you the ability to create a certificate that you can award to your students after they complete any of your courses.
You can choose from the three pre-made certificate templates, or create a custom certificate with HTML or the Liquid coding language.
However, the existing templates are customizable, and you can insert your logo, change the colors, add a signature, and change the text. With so many customization options, you likely won’t need to create a fully custom certificate from scratch.
Quizzes
You can add as many multiple-choice quizzes in your course as you see fit. A question may have any number of options, and there may be multiple correct answers!
Creating graded quizzes is also possible, and you will be able to track and help low-scoring students understand the material better.
Analytics
The tracking and reporting features are lackluster – it doesn’t offer anything new when compared to competing LMSs.
You can track the number of student enrollments, their progress, and quiz scores.
You also get access to the Video Heatmap, helping you see what parts of your course are watched, re-watched, and skipped.
This feature can help you understand what parts of your course seem a little too complicated to students, and which parts of your course students find dull.
These insights make improving your course a lot easier!
Marketing Support
The tracking features mentioned above only scratch the surface of Teachable capabilities.
While reviewing Teachable, we found that it has tons of other sales and marketing-oriented features.
Teachable gives you the ability to set multiple prices for a course, and there are various types of pricing plans.
You can give students a course free of charge, provide it on a subscription basis, allow one-time purchases, or enable payment plans to enable students to pay for the course over time.
You can also bundle multiple courses and sell them in a single transaction!
Furthermore, you can also create custom checkout pages that have testimonials, value proposition bullets, and guarantees. These fortify the visitors’ confidence and nudge them into making a purchase.
The Thank You page can be an excellent onboarding page. It enables you to build a personal connection with your new student!
You can integrate a video with a personalized “Thank You” or any other message from you on the page. You can also use the page to upsell other relevant courses!
Coupons and Affiliate Support
Changing your pricing often is not a good idea from a sales perspective, but you can use coupons and offer discounts.
Coupons make targeting your courses to specific audiences easy!
Additionally, you can also assign affiliates who earn commissions selling your courses. Affiliates use a range of marketing tactics to drive your products to high-intent audiences, in-turn boosting sales.
Teachable also gives you the tools to communicate with your affiliates and track their sales and your profits.
If you need help managing the accounting of your Affiliates, you can opt into Teachable’s Back Office program. For a 2% fee per transaction, you’re freed from the hassle of handling the payouts yourself!
You Can Even Create A Blog!
The blog feature is one of Teachable’s standout features – no competitor offers it!
With it, you can blog on your School site!
Unless you’re already blogging on another platform, this feature can be very helpful in driving sales and garnering larger audiences.
Teachable blogs are some of the most valuable assets an educator can have!
You can activate your blog by going to the Settings > General > Blog.
What Kind of Courses Can You Sell with Teachable?
Anything you can learn, you can teach with Teachable! The categories of courses available on Teachable range from something as technical as computer programming, to something as casual as home and garden management.
Teachable is all for monetizing your expertise, and in our experience with Teachable, we’ve learned that you can build a successful online learning business regardless of what niche or industry you’re an expert in.
Teachable Analysis: Why Automated LMS Is Better
Curating the right content and creating the right material seems like the biggest hurdle of building an online learning business.
However, many often forget that creating a website for the course and marketing it adequately can be equally challenging.
With an automated LMS like Teachable, you get your hands on pre-configured and ready-to-use tools that make creating websites faster and easier.
On the other hand, while you could use tools like WordPress and couple it with a beautiful theme, pulling off a design personalized enough for both you and the visitor can be a lengthy and complicated task.
In our analysis of Teachable, we find that their dedicated team of developers is much better at keeping websites secure when compared to individuals with independently-managed websites.
In addition to keeping your site upgraded with the latest security measures, Teachable saves you from the hassle of setting up a payment processing portal. You don’t need to find plugins or integrate code to make anything work.
Hosting is another hurdle you dodge in its entirety. With Teachable’s CDN, you don’t ever have to worry about performance.
All in all, unless you’re working with a team of skilled individuals, Teachable is right for you. It enables you to focus on teaching and creating – managing the platform upkeeping security measures is not required!
Who Can Use Teachable?
If you can create content in any form, Teachable is right for you!
If you can write stories or produce music, direct movies or animate cartoons, or are skilled at any art, monetizing your expertise using Teachable should be very easy.
But this is not all.
If you’re a professional in any field – web design, business, marketing, finance, or even sales, Teachable can help you create a brand and business that fetches returns in months!
After reviewing Teachable’s features, we think it’s perfect for niche specialists that are also passionate about teaching.
Some Interesting Example of Teachable Being Used
When it comes to teaching art, you don’t need to worry about the end-goal or the practicality of sharing your expertise.
People love to learn, and if you have beautiful art, sharing it, and teaching your skill will always bring you recognition and profits – no exceptions!
Take a look at some of the most popular art courses powered by Teachable:
You could apply the same ideology to any and all skills – as long as you think there’s some real value to be offered, going through the trouble of building a business using sharing your expertise is worth it.
There’s already a massive market for programming and business courses, and courses teaching niche skills are rare and in high demand.
There’s no longer a need to test the waters – you can create a course targeting any niche and industry and expect students from around the world to pay for it and enjoy it.
Teachable Vs. Other LMSs
Our experience with Teachable has been exceptional, and we think this is because Teachable is an end-to-end solution.
Unlike other platforms like Udemy and Lynda, Teachable fills the void between niche experts and learning platforms, that is, the void of technicalities.
You no longer have to fiddle with multiple tools only to get your business online – getting the ball rolling is often a long shot!
You can get started in a few minutes, and Teachable does not require you to have any technical knowledge. To set up your site or build your course, all you will need to do is find the right settings and configure them to your liking.
Teachable gives you everything you will need to sell, track, analyze, and distribute your courses.
Teachable Vs. Udemy
There’s a fundamental difference between the two.
Teachable is an online platform that enables you to build a website and a landing page, and integrate payment portals into them in addition to giving you the features needed to manage your course.
On the other hand, Udemy is an online marketplace that lets you list as well as sell your course.
Teachable Vs. Skillshare
Skillshare is very similar to Udemy, but it has some key differences.
Teachable gives you your own website, and there is no catalog of courses from other creators – meaning self-promotion and aggressive marketing are absolutely integral when using Teachable.
Skillshare, on the other hand, does have a catalog of courses, but you don’t get to control the pricing of your course like you would with Teachable.
The platform works on a membership model, and you are paid according to the number of premium users you attract to your course.
Also, Skillshare does not give you access to your student’s emails, but you are allowed to post announcements that can be forwarded to your student’s inboxes.
Teachable Advantages
Bulk Management of Courses Is Easy
Reordering, duplicating, and deleting your courses is made easy and can be done from the Courses tab on the dashboard.
You can also apply bulk actions on students, authors, and affiliates, enabling you to email users, set commissions, or delete multiple users in one go.
You Can Upload Content from Google Drive, Dropbox, and Other Platforms
If you’re collaborating or already have your course on a cloud, you won’t need to upload it separately.
You can upload content directly from the cloud, saving you a lot of internet bandwidth!
Teachable Pitfalls
30-Day Payouts
Unless you integrate your own payment method, you will need to wait for 30 days to get paid regardless of how many sales you make.
In other words, if you make a sale in January, you will receive its payment in March.
High Transaction Fee on Free Plan
If you’re just starting out, using their free plan may seem lucrative. However, Teachable takes a huge chunk (10% + $1) from every course you sell.
The transaction fees compound quickly and impact your total payout significantly.
Not 100% White Label
Regardless of what plan you get, you will never be able to rid your websites of the Teachable branding completely
Average Quiz Features
You can only create multiple-choice questions. Teachable does not allow you to create drag-drop sort questions or practice tests like some of its competitors do.
Teachable Alternatives
Thinkific
Thinkific is another powerful LMS that is just as capable as Teachable. Much like Teachable, it enables you to organize your content, design your course site, market it, and sell it.
Udemy
Udemy is perfect for the experienced content creator. Someone who knows their way around building sites and marketing courses can take full advantage of the Udemy marketplace.
Skillshare
Skillshare is right for beginners looking to play it safe. There’s no investment, and all you need to do is upload 30 minutes of content to start earning money.
LearnDash
If you’re familiar with WordPress, using LearnDash can be an effective way to monetize your expertise by sharing your skills in the form of courses.
Teachable is a full-fledged suite that anyone can use to build an online learning business.
Our experience with Teachable has been positive, but the high transaction fees make it unsuitable for beginners on a budget.
However, if you’re looking for a feature-loaded LMS that handles the technicalities for you, you will love Teachable.
3 replies to "Teachable Review: A Perfect Platform to Host Your Training Content"
Thank you. Very helpful and motivating; the cogs in my head are spinning!
Thanks!
What about Knorish ?