What's the most often asked question for new course creators? Where should I host my course? In this episode, host Julie Hood explains what a course host is and how to pick the perfect one for you! (She doesn't believe in one-sized-fits-all solutions!)
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Kajabi, Thinkific, Teachable, WordPress, Click funnels, Podia, News Zindler. I'm sure if you've been in any of the Facebook groups about online courses, you've heard the selects talk about them today and see where is the best place for you to be hosting your honor, online course, Welcome to the course creators, HQ podcast, helping you navigate the latest techniques for creating and marketing online courses.
And now here's your host Julie Hood, Hello there, and I'm thrilled you're here for episode two of the course creators HQ podcast, where We believe you can change the world with your courses, and we want to make it simpler and easier for you to do just that in this episode, let's talk about the question I see asked most often in Facebook groups about online courses.
They're asking where should I host my course? And if you are a newbie course creator, I know that you will be asking this question too. So let's dig in and figure out how to handle the technology behind hosting your course. So there's lots and lots to pack into this discussion. And let me start by explaining first, what exactly is an online course host.
So when you put your course together, you're going to have a bunch of files. You'll have video files, potentially you'll have PDF files, you'll have audio files. You may have workbooks or worksheets or checklists for your students. And all of these files have to be put somewhere that is accessible to your students. And only to the students that you want to have in your course,
and the place where you put all of these files so that they're accessible online is called your course host. And so today I want to help you figure out which one you should be using because there are so many options that it can make your head spin. And especially if you're not into technology and trying to figure out what to use, this will make your life so much easier because I have some very specific questions I like for people to ask that will help them figure out where they should be playing and where they should have their course on one hand.
Yes, this is an important decision because of the fact that you don't want to push your course somewhere, get a bunch of students into it, have the system. A lot of times we'll track where they are in the lessons. So you don't want to have a bunch of students who are taking your course and it's tracking for them. And then you have to move them over to a new system because there isn't a good way to keep that tracking in place,
to know which lessons they've completed or not. So ideally you pick the tool that you're going to use for your course, and then you can stay there with it so that your students can keep up with their activity and where they are in the class. So I've put together a workbook for you. If you go to coursecreatorshq.com/host that's coursecreatorshq.com/host. You can grab this workbook and download it so that you can follow along and keep up with some of the notes and information that we're sharing. So this all came about from a post that I saw in a Facebook group, someone asked what they were using and she had 181 comments about which tool the course creators were using. So this is definitely one of those questions that people have lots of opinions on,
and lots of thoughts on, and I will tell you, I do not believe in a one size fits all solution for where you should be hosting your course, each of you are in a slightly different situation. And depending on your specific situation, that will help decide which place is the best for you to host your course. So let's start by talking about some of the vocabulary of how we want to talk about this.
There are four main parts of hosting an online course. The first one is that you need a way to be able to email the students inside your course. Secondly, it's a place to put the files. We were talking about this earlier. So they host your files. Most of the solutions will do video hosting for you. So they will display your videos.
And that's always something you want to check because there are a few that do not, and they have your user experience. So the, the videos, the files and the user experience, that's part two of a hosting system. Part three is that there's some kind of access restriction. So it's keeping students in and those paid yet keeping them out of your course.
And then part four is sort of an advanced option, but something I like to have my students thinking of early on is, does it have an option for an affiliate program? So I'll explain that a bit more later. So we've got our four different pieces, emailing your students, hosting your files and your videos and the whole user experience restricting access to just your students and then a way for you to get paid and potentially pay affiliates.
So those are the four main pieces. And then there are a couple of extra things that sometimes the course hosting services will provide. Some of them have complete websites for you. Some of them will host your blog. Some of them will do an email newsletter or even do other landing pages. So you can have people potentially opting in for your freebies and that could even be included in your system.
So depending on which tool you have, you could have some or any of those different pieces. So I've broken the different types of tools out into the information that they specifically provide. So the first type is what's called a course host, and this is something like Teachable or Thinkific, where their main goal is that they are going to host your course for you.
They restrict the access. They give you a way to get paid. They give you a way to email your students. They host your files and your videos, but they, and they do those four things really well, but that's it. They don't do any of the extra pieces for your online business. They're primarily for hosting your course. The second type is what I like to call an all-in-one type system.
So this is one of those systems that will do everything for your online business. Not only will they do everything that you need for hosting your course, they'll also have your website, your blog, your email newsletter, and your landing pages. This is things like Kajabi and Podia. They're meant to be an all-in-one tool so that you don't have to buy different pieces and try to get them to work together.
And then the third type is what I like to call a combination or a tech stack. And this is where you pull different types of tools together in order to cover all of your basis for your online business. So you may have something like convert kit that does your emails for you and emails, your students. You could have something like Vimeo that will host your videos for you.
You can have something like wishlist and learn dash on a WordPress site to host your website and to host the course files, to have the course files, but then you would still need something like Vimeo in order to have a place for the video files to be displayed. And then you may need a few other tools to make all of this work. So that's,
what's called a type three or a combination tech stack. So of those three different types, then the next sort of question that you need to be asking yourself is what kind of budget do I have? And one of the things that's included in that workbook at coursecreatorshq.com/host. When you get a copy of that, there is a page that talks about some of the price comparison for something like Kajabi,
which is an all-in-one tool, as opposed to all of the individual tools that you would have to purchase in order to do everything that Kajabi will do for you. And I'll just give you some of the numbers here, cause it, it really sort of made my mouth fall open. Honestly, when I thought about this is Kajabi can be $149 a month to get you started all of the different tools that they listed $865 a month,
including $400 worth of video hosting. So that's why earlier, when I was talking about one piece of your course platform, is that you need to really think about the video hosting because that can get expensive, especially as you get a lot more students. So one of the advantages to some of the tools is that they give you unlimited video hosting. So for your specific situation,
let's start by asking a few questions and then I'll go through some different scenarios to, to help you think about it first off, are you using any kind of email newsletter yet? Because if you have started that you do want to pick a tool that will work well with your current email newsletter software, some of them integrate easier and work better together than others.
So here's a scenario for you let's suppose someone has MailChimp, they've got 350 subscribers, but they don't have a website yet. And they're wondering which of the types of online course tools they should use. And my recommendation would be to consider moving over to one of the, all in one tools because of the fact that they don't have a website yet, then you can put your website hosting and your course hosting together on the all in one tool.
And then you want to look at specifically how the online tools work together with MailChimp or whatever, whatever email newsletter software you're working with. And then let's do another scenario. Let's suppose somebody has convert kit, they've got 10,000 subscribers. They do have a WordPress website and a blog already. They're using lead pages for their landing pages. And they are wondering what course platform they should be using to host their course.
So in this instance, I would recommend either using just a course host like Teachable or Thinkific, or potentially having the combination of tech stack, where they add in the course hosting and the video hosting. So it really depends in that situation on how much tech support the person has, because when you decide to do something where you've got a tech stack and you're trying to get things to work together,
I will tell you you'll have a lot more headaches. This is one of the things that I do. I have a lot of my courses on Kajabi, but I have separate things that I had set up previously before I started with Kajabi. So I'm trying to get all of them to work together and there have been some technical headaches along the way, making all that work.
So if you're going to go that route, it can sometimes be less expensive to have a tech stack, but you'll pay on the other end of having to hire a technical people to help you get it set up and make sure everything's working. So those are just a few of the questions that you can ask yourself and think about as you're trying to figure out which of these tools should I be using?
One of the things I like to do is try to use some of them as a student because sometimes some of them will have a better experience for the student than others. I know I really liked the way Kajabi is, is laid out for a student. It's very clear and very easy to follow. Some of the other tools aren't quite as easy and the user experience isn't quite as good.
So just really depends on what you want to have for your students and for your courses. Now, I mentioned earlier talking about an affiliate program. So let me finish that and explain, this is a slightly more advanced concept, but it is something that you want to have thought about when you're picking your host for your course. And here's why an affiliate program lets you have affiliates or partners that will promote your course for you.
And then you agree to pay them basically as sales men for you, salespeople for you and you pay them based on when they actually get sales. So it's a great way to build your, your students and find more students because you don't have to pay for anything until the students actually purchase. And you want a tool that will track all that for you because there isn't a good way to do it manually,
especially as you start trying to scale. So you need one of the systems that has affiliate tracking. That's usually what it's called built in and then it will help you track as you partner with folks and people sign up, it will track that. And then you can pay a percentage of the cost of your course to your partners, to your affiliates. So typically it's 30 to 40% generally of the cost of your course that you pay to your affiliates as they are acting as salespeople for you.
So it's a great way to build your course business without having to pay for Facebook ads or pay for a salesman ahead of time. You only pay after the sale has happened and after the refund period is open. So when you're picking your tools, just find out if the affiliate system is included and whether there's an extra charge for it, that way you can have that figured out ahead of time.
And you're not trying to add it in later. So make sure you grab that workbook because I've got a bunch of links in there for you that take you directly to these different tools. And that was at course creators, hq.com/host in order to grab that workbook. So I hope this gives you some thoughts to put in the back of your mind about where exactly am I going to put my course and how am I going to pick the best place for me.
It really, really varies depending on the situation that you have. So I hope this has been helpful for you. I have one last request. If you could please hit that subscribe button. And if you learned anything valuable from this episode, I would really appreciate a five-star review. The reviews have me doing a little happy dance, and I really appreciate your help because the podcast apps use those reviews and the subscribers to determine how popular a podcast is and whether they will share it with the rest of the audience that they think would be interested.
So I appreciate that you guys are the best. Thank you for listening. Thank you for subscribing and thank you for reviewing the podcast. I can't wait to connect with you next time when we're going to start talking all about marketing your course. So let's figure out how we are going to sell these courses and reach more students so you can spread the message That you are here to share and Improve the world with.
Have A great week. Thanks for listening and I will talk to you soon.