If you are planning to create and sell a Thrive Apprentice course, all while drip-feeding your course content to your students over a period of time, then keep on reading this article.
Let’s say you are planning to sell your first course, that will be systematically dripped over a 4 weeks period of time and only to a certain group of students. You will have to create the course, set up the correct Drip template, add it to a product and also configure the access restriction options.
We’ve broken down the process into 7 easy steps, detailed below:
1. Set up Thrive Apprentice Course
First of all, you need to set up and publish your Thrive Apprentice course:
Any drip campaign you would want to use here will not work if you have not published all your course content.
2. Create a Product
In your course dashboard, swipe over to the “Access restrictions” tab. Here, create a new product based on this course:
The course will be added by default to your product content. Feel free to add additional courses or other content from your website if you want, and then click on “Done”:
This will take you directly to the “Products” tab of your Thrive Apprentice, but you can easily go back to editing your course from here:
If you are not familiar yet with the new products digital layer, then make sure to check out this article:
3. Set up your Drip Campaign
Back in the course editing dashboard, click on the “Drip” tab:
This is where you can set up your drip campaign:
Choose the template you would like to use from the next lightbox that shows up on your screen:
I will be using the “Evergreen repeating” for this example, as I want to unlock content at consistent time intervals for each student.
Here you can read more about the different types of campaigns you can use:
So, with your campaign template selected, click on “Continue” and you will next get to tweak the settings for this campaign:
The campaign template already comes with the necessary settings, but you can make adjustments if you want. Also, don’t forget to name your campaign, before moving on to the next step:
What you can also do here is to expand the “Advanced settings” section:
This is where you can activate two options – one for forcing the users to complete the course content in order, and one for displaying the locked content in the lesson list.
My campaign, as it’s currently set, will start dripping content when the user purchases the product. After the purchase, it will unlock content systematically every week, for the next 4 weeks.
The campaign schedule will be available for you to view and edit whenever you access the Drip tab of your course:
Here’s another useful article if you want to learn more about setting up additional unlock conditions for your course:
Now you can move on to the settings that are set up at Product level. Everything you configure there will only be applicable to the selected product.
4. Access the Products Tab
In order to start setting up the necessary permissions, head over to the Products tab of your Thrive Apprentice:
And here you should be able to find the product that you’ve just created:
Click on it in order to open the corresponding set of options:
In the Product content tab you are able to edit the content that is currently added to your product. If you don’t want to do that you can move directly to the next tab, in which you can start setting up the access restrictions for your product.
5. Configure the Access Requirements
This tab will allow you to set up the purchase process for your product:
I will be selling my course as a SendOwl product, but there are numerous other ways in which you can sell it:
The article from our knowledge base that you might find useful here is linked below:
This will help you decide if you want to use a checkout tool or a membership plugin when selling your online courses.
In case you are planning to use SendOwl as your checkout tool then make sure to read these articles first:
- Should I Use SendOwl with Thrive Apprentice?
- How to Sell Your Thrive Apprentice Course with SendOwl in 7 Steps
So, after you expand the SendOwl Product section, simply go ahead and select the course from the list and then save your selection:
This is how your protected product will show up in the dashboard:
6. Apply a Drip Schedule to the Product
With the access requirements set, you can proceed to the next step, which is applying a drip schedule to your product.
Up to this point you’ve configured your drip campaign directly in your course dashboard, but in order to actually start dripping content, it also has to be applied to the product to which that course is tied.
Access the Drip tab of your left sidebar:
Here, you will see that no drip schedule is applied at the moment:
You simply have to open the drop-down list and select the drip campaign schedule that you’ve just set up:
7. Configure the Access Restriction Rules
In the Access restriction rules tab is where you can decide what content to show to the users who do not have the right permissions to access your course.
For example, it might be due to the fact that they are not logged in yet, or because they have not purchased the course:
Here as well we have a dedicated article that might come in handy, if you want to learn more about each situation:
What you need to do is simply open the corresponding set of options for each case, and set up the content that should be shown for the users who find themselves in that situation.
When you are done with this last tab of your Thrive Apprentice navigation bar, you should have a course that can now be bought through SendOwl and whose content will be dripped systematically to the students, over a period of time.
Don’t forget to check out our knowledge base if there are other features or options you might want to learn about.