Chapter 4:
How to Sell Online Courses from Your Own Website

That’s why most non-technical entrepreneurs choose a solution that provides both affordability and advanced feature power so they can DIY their website — without having to know how to code.

In fact, the solution I’m referring to has become such an online business standard that 30% of the entire internet now uses it… and that’s why you’re going to use it too!

So the next step in your solopreneur business journey is going to be learning how to deploy this solution to build and launch your website... not in a matter of days or weeks... but in just a few hours.

But before unraveling the solution to sell online courses from your own website — without coding — let's talk benefits...

If you’ve never heard of WordPress before, it’s an open-sourced Content Management System (CMS) that’s free to use, easy to learn and technically powerful when integrated with the right third-party tools (a.k.a. plugins).

Rest assured that it’s also a website solution that can easily scale with your online business as it grows– meaning that you can always hire a pro-developer to build custom solutions for your business down the road when necessary.

If you need proof that WordPress is a solution for websites both big and small, here’s a list of some mainstream and "big store" brands that run their sites with it:

Of course, these companies have dedicated developers that create unique online experiences for their visitors, so for now, you’ll be using a set of third-party plugins to gain the functionality you need to get started.

Get ready, because the rest of this chapter will walk you through exactly what's required to get your new website up and running in the shortest amount of time and least amount of money possible.

Well, like we told you back in Chapter 2, it’s important to host your products on a platform you own and control (a.k.a. your own website). That is to say, an online location where you can manage how you interact with your potential and existing customers as you choose — without interference.

If you use online course solutions like Udemy, Kajabi, or Teachable, you’re either forfeiting control over how you market your products and interact with your students (Udemy) or paying an arm and a leg to add courses to your website (Kajabi or Teachable). On platforms like these, your courses get lost in a sea of other products all competing at “race-to-the-bottom” prices.

That’s why quickly and cheaply building online courses on your own WordPress website is the ideal solopreneur solution since it gives you full control over your products as well as contact with your customers while also helping you stand out as an authority in your niche.

This last point is super important because great personal brand websites build trust with customers since people know they’re buying from a real expert instead of some fly-by-night course creator.

So now that you know why it’s so important to build and host your online course on your own website, let’s switch gears and discuss how to get your new WordPress website up and running right away…

So here we go… it’s time to start building your website.

Complete the following steps in the order they’re presented to get your WordPress website launched in the quickest possible time frame.

If this is your first time building a WordPress website — or any website for that matter — it may feel intimidating, but rest assured that it’s really not all that complicated… another reason to use WordPress!

And before you get started, I want you to adopt a very important mindset:

But it doesn’t really matter where you buy your domain name from because they all provide the same basic service. After creating a free account, use their domain name search function to make sure it’s available at an affordable price (usually around $10 USD) so you can pull the trigger on it.

Alternatively, you can also buy your domain name at the same time you purchase your web hosting (but more on that next). This is a great option to take advantage of so you can manage both your hosting and domain name registration in the same place.

It also makes setting up your DNS (Domain Name System) management easier, which we’ll also discuss coming up.

So now it's time for you to learn about hosting and how it works with the domain name you've chosen for yourself. On to Step 2...

Whether you’re aware of it or not, hosting is one of the most important decisions you’re going to make for your online business.

Like many of the choices you’re about to make in this chapter, there’s a ton of companies to hire to solve the job you want done, but they’re not all created equal.

If hosting performance is bad, your website can crash or load so slowly that online visitors will bounce before they even read a single word on your website.

If security is poor, your online business and customers will be vulnerable to malicious attacks.

And if customer service is bad, addressing critical problems can take forever or be next to impossible to fix.

That’s why it’s not advised to simply pick the cheapest hosting service available. Instead, you need to hire a company that’s proven themselves in all 3 of these areas. Getting your WordPress hosting right will play a crucial role in your business success down the road.

Lucky for you, we tested several WordPress specialized hosting companies and have two suggestions for you, depending on your budget.

Our two recommendations are divided into an option for the cash-strapped solopreneur (with the expectation you’ll upgrade to a premium hosting company once your business gets rolling) and one for solopreneurs who want to prioritize peak performance at an affordable price from the beginning.

Both of the hosting companies we're about to recommend also allow you to buy your domain name at the same time you sign up for hosting (like we mentioned earlier).

So let’s now discuss these two recommendations in detail...

SiteGround is a hosting company that offers WordPress specialized service plans for just a few bucks a month — but only for your first invoice period (either 12, 24 or 36 months).

This is an important point to take note of because after this initial invoice period is over, SiteGround’s pricing jumps dramatically and you’ll start paying premium prices for budget hosting.

That being said, what SiteGround provides you in terms of website performance, shared server storage (i.e. multiple customers sharing the same server hardware) and customer service is good enough to get started — especially if you’re strapped for cash.

Just know that you’ll need to upgrade your hosting when your business takes off (i.e. when your online traffic begins to spike) by migrating your site to a premium provider like we discuss next.

For the same annual pricing that SiteGround charges after their introductory discount period ends, you can get premium customer service & website performance from a company called WPX Hosting.

Where SiteGround only gives you shared servers, WPX Hosting gives your business dedicated solid state hardware.

As per our own testing, page load speeds and customer service are super fast. Also, WPX Hosting’s support team is world class and handles critical services like site migration for you — free of charge.

So if you’ve got the budget for it, using a company like WPX Hosting from the outset will save you many potential headaches in the future as your online course business grows.

So now that you’ve pulled the trigger on either SiteGround's GrowBig plan or WPX Hosting's Business plan, it’s time to install WordPress so you can start building your website.

How does one do this? Well, if you’ve chosen one of our two recommended hosting providers, it’s actually super simple. Follow the tutorial links below to see how “one-click” WordPress installs happen on both SiteGround and WPX Hosting:

To install WordPress on SiteGround, follow their installation guide here.

To install WordPress on WPX Hosting, follow their installation guide here.

Congratulations… you now have a bare-bones WordPress website installed!

That means it’s time to start putting some meat on those bones so visitors have something to look at when they find your site online.

So what’s the first order of business? Installing your WordPress Theme.

Here’s a few theme options for you to get this step completed in just a few minutes.

To make getting started easy, many of these WordPress core themes actually come preloaded on your WordPress install, so you can just choose and activate the one you like best in the fewest possible clicks:

However,  if you want a WordPress theme that makes getting your entire site setup fast while giving you total design freedom at the same time... keep reading.

Here at Thrive Themes, we've developed the most powerful WordPress theme for small businesses and DIY entrepreneurs. 

Not only does it give you a step-by-step site setup wizard to get your online business up and running as fast as possible, but it also offers you complete freedom to customize every pixel of your WordPress website so it can meet the unique needs of your online brand.

This one-of-a-kind WordPress theme is called Thrive Theme Builder and currently comes with three different companion theme template options to choose from:

Here’s how easy it is to install and activate Thrive Theme Builder (plus all the plugins included in Thrive Suite) on your WordPress site in just a single click:

Like we mentioned above, WordPress plugins are the third party tools that give your website the functionality it needs to operate as an online business — without needing to know how to code.

However, WordPress plugins are a dime a dozen and can add up in cost to get the functionality you need to succeed.

That's why Thrive Suite provides you with a complete plugin toolkit that covers the majority of your online business and marketing needs — at a fraction of the cost.

Like you just saw the end of the WordPress theme install step – purchasing, installing and activating each of the plugins we’re about to showcase takes place through a simple, 1-click install Product Manager tool:

The way you custom build your own course website on WordPress — without knowing how to code — is with a visual page building plugin.

Of course, there are many WordPress page builders available for you to choose from, but again, not all tools are created equal. None offer the truly visual, front-end, drag & drop functionality that Thrive Architect does, which is why we recommend you invest in learning how to use it now:

And when it comes to building a website for the purpose of selling online courses, the other mission critical plugins you get with Thrive Suite are hands down the best solution for solopreneurs just starting out like you.

One of the primary reasons we recommend Thrive Architect as your page building solution is because it has hundreds of professionally designed and conversion-focused landing page templates that allow you to load them up, change a few colors, swap out the demo images with your own and then modify the step-by-step instructional copy to get your content published as fast as possible.

Click here to see our gallery of 300+ landing page templates currently on offer:

Investing up front in Thrive Suite — which includes the premium Thrive Architect page builder — will end up saving you both time and money when it comes to the other mission critical tasks of running your online business – like building your courses, email list and then marketing your products — as you’ll now see.

If you can’t code (like most of us!), not only do you need a visual page building plugin to create a gorgeous website, but you'll also need a tool to visually build opt-in forms to start growing an email audience.

We’ll cover more about building your audience in the next chapter, but for now, know that you’ll need to strategically place opt-in forms across your site with the goal of growing a healthy email list.

In fact, without a powerful lead generation tool, it’s near impossible to cultivate an audience you can communicate directly with. And without that email list being engaged and eager to hear from you, it will be an uphill struggle for a profitable online course creation experience.

To solve this problem, you’ll use a plugin called Thrive Leads:

Thrive Leads uses the same visual building interface as the Thrive Architect page builder, which eliminates you having to learn a whole new tool to build your opt-in forms.

And now that you have your page builder and lead generation plugins installed, what else will you need to activate on your site?

Thrive Apprentice — surprise, surprise — also uses the same front-end visual building interface for your individual online course lessons that Thrive Architect and Thrive Leads provide.

However, you'll build and manage your online course module-chapter-lesson structure from the WordPress backend:

We’ll get into the specifics of how to go about building your first online course in just a moment, but Thrive Apprentice is by far the simplest WordPress LMS (Learning Management System) plugin when it comes to crafting professional and engaging courses for your online students.

And when you take the final step of integrating Thrive Apprentice with a checkout tool like WooCommerce, ThriveCart or SendOwl, you’ll also gain the ability to limit your course access to paying customers only (more on this coming right up).

There are a few more basic plugins you should consider installing on your infant website to boost its performance and security.

Without sidetracking too much, here’s 3 freebies you should install, activate and set up alongside your page builder (Thrive Architect), your lead generation tool (Thrive Leads) and your online course building plugin (Thrive Apprentice):

Akismet is a spam filter plugin built and maintained by the creators of WordPress.

For just a few dollars a year (you get to decide how much you pay for it), you can purchase a basic license to prevent your new site from being blasted by unwanted spam comments.

SEOPress is a comprehensive Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugin for WordPress you can use to:

And if you're willing to go with the paid versions of SEOPress, you can even...

Because SEO can give you a competitive advantage when it comes to bringing potential students to your website, SEOPress is an important plugin to help ensure your website looks good in the eyes of search engines.

Like we mentioned before in the hosting section, the speed at which your website's pages load is critical to the success of your website.

One plugin that can help you make those load times even faster is W3 Total Cache. Activate and set up this free caching plugin on your WordPress website to give your load times a boost.

Side Note: In another small plug for one of our recommended hosting plans, W3 Total Cache comes pre-loaded on all WPX Hosting Wordpress installs by default!

Ultimately, this will help you engage more visitors and achieve higher conversion rates since less people will bounce from your site due to slow loading pages. If you're interested to learn more about how to optimize your site's load times, check out this in-depth post all about it.

Thrive Theme Builder also makes optimizing your caching plugin settings easy with it's native Site Speed Wizard:

Now that you have all your essential plugins installed, it’s time to start creating content for your new website!

What content will you need and where should you get started?

And to get each of these mission critical pieces of content done fast, you’re going to use some pro-designed landing page templates. Remember that you're aiming for “good enough” to get your website up and running.

This is another reason why choosing Thrive Theme Builder as your WordPress theme and Thrive Architect as your landing page builder can help launch your website faster… the combo offers you hundreds of smart landing pages and content templates to choose from!

So let’s get your new website off the ground by rapidly implementing your Homepage — right now.

Get started by selecting one of the many homepage templates the Thrive Theme Builder companion themes offer you. Shapeshift, Ommi and Kwik all give you several different homepage templates to choose from depending on what kind of business you have (personal brand, service business, local business, content/affiliate business):

Just select one of the homepage templates available from either the Thrive Theme Builder dashboard or Thrive Architect Landing Page Cloud, and once your selection loads, replace all the images and modify the copy (as per the tutorialized copy instructions seen on the page).

Since Thrive Theme Builder templates are crafted with Thrive's smart landing page technology, the homepage template you choose will automatically inherit the smart brand color you set inside the Thrive Theme Builder site setup wizard!

Watch the following quick start tutorial to see how easy it is to get both your WordPress site and homepage published with Thrive Theme Builder in a matter of minutes:

When building a brand new website, content creation can be a big challenge.

What sort of posts should you create to start growing your organic search engine traffic and building an audience most efficiently?

Well, when it comes to strategic blog content, there’s 3 articles that we recommend you start with. Think about this content as a mini marketing funnel that uses high value blog articles instead of landing pages.

If you’re interested in pursuing this strategy to start your blog off strong, read this post on what (and how) to write your first 3 blog articles about.

Although most About pages look simple, they somehow become monsters for people to create in real life.

That’s why getting a little help to create a great About page will help you publish it before you can psych yourself out about it.

To create an About page for your new website that adds value and helps visitors understand what your business is all about, take our quick free Thrive University course on How To Build a Powerful About Page now.

Remember that “sales page first” draft you created in the last chapter? It’s time to bring it to life on your new website.

And even though that still feels super intimidating, I’m going to give you a cheat that’ll make it super simple.

Instead of having to hack your new sales page together from scratch, you can use a brilliant Thrive Architect sales page template that was designed especially to sell online courses from your own website.

It’s called the ‘Online Course Sales Page’ template and it’s the one you’ll be using to get your “sales page first” draft built with Thrive Architect in the shortest time possible. And don’t worry, it looks amazing!

Follow along with this tutorial video to get your online course “sales page first” draft done and published on your WordPress website fast:

Congratulations! You’ve arrived…

It’s finally time to start building your online course.

To do this fast, affordably and with the fewest number of tech hurdles blocking your way, we’re going to explain how to build your online course with Thrive Apprentice integrated with a payment gateway and a free WordPress checkout tool called WooCommerce.

Of course, there are other online course checkout tools and plugins out there you can choose to use for your online business instead, but this recommendation IS NOT made lightly.

Although this might not be the online course solution that gives you the most bells and whistles, IT IS professional looking, simple to set up and insanely affordable for a bootstrapped solopreneur.

Too many entrepreneurs underestimate the cost of complexity when starting their business and we guarantee you that other online course setups out there are cashing in on that fact. They‘ll keep you busy trying to duct tape complex and expensive tools together when what you really need is to get the tech stuff done quickly so you can actually start building your online course.

That’s why, by the end of this section, you’re going to have an online course setup on your WordPress website that not only delivers a pro-learning experience, but can accept payments and restrict course access to paying customers only.

Assuming you already installed Thrive Apprentice through the Thrive Product Manager plugin discussed above, now take the following free online course to learn just how easy it is to build online courses and sell them using the free WooCommerce checkout tool.

Once you've completed this course, you’ll be able to start selling premium online courses on your WordPress website:

In order to sell a high-value online course on your website, you’ll need to make your online course video-based. That’s because video courses have a higher perceived value by customers, which makes it easier for you to deliver a course in the $200+ price range.

However, it’s not practical to host your course videos directly from your website. If you do, you’ll quickly burn through your hosting service’s monthly bandwidth limits and crash your site.

To get around this problem, you’ll need to subscribe to a video hosting service.

The video hosting service we recommend starting out is Vimeo Plus because it’s the easiest to use, highest quality video delivery solution at the lowest price.

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