How to build an online course on Kajabi

What is an Online Course?

An online course is an excellent way to provide information or training to your audience. Your customers will be able to take the course wherever and whenever they wish. With a course on Kajabi, you can reach people all around the world that are interested in the content you provide. As of right now, there are over 5 billion people online and that number is growing every day!

Even if you only reach a small segment of those people, your course on Kajabi gives you the opportunity to generate income and bring information to that audience. I’m excited to show you how to get started building your course so you can create content that can stretch across the globe.

Courses can be taken in person like at a school or workplace whereas an online course allows your customer to learn from anywhere. People can take an online course on their desktop, or laptop, or even download the Kajabi mobile app to be able to take it on their tablet or phone.

A course provides transformations that your customers can see within themselves or their businesses.

Every different template helps achieve a different type of transformation. There are many different types of digital products that you can create and sell in Kajabi.

The benefits of creating a digital course are that you may only need to create it once, upload it once and start making sales FOREVER. I mean that sounds like a wonderful idea to me.

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Refining Course Content

The first step to creating your course is knowing what you are going to put in it and making sure it is something that people are actively looking for help with.

You want to make sure that what you are about to create is something people are looking for or struggling with. The process of determining the need for your product is called Product Validation.

I am going to briefly cover a few different ways you can complete product validation for your product idea.

Google & Youtube

How to navigate the grief of a loved one - You will see SO many answers and responses to this because this is something many people are actively searching for a solution for.

Facebook Groups

If you do choose Facebook groups, make sure you go in and lead with curiosity. And make sure it’s a space where you want to spend your time in.

Amazon Book Reviews

Once you have identified that your course topic is one that people are actively seeking, you can move forward with creating an outline for your course.

First Identify where your customer is starting, this will be point A. Then Identify where your customer will end at the end of the course. So in other words, what is the transformation they will receive?

Then ask yourself what are the MAIN things that your customer will need to learn to get from Point A to Point Z?

These 3 important questions will help you start to form an outline and identify what is needed in your course so your customers can see the transformation you promised. I know it is tempting to want to put your WHOLE life’s knowledge into one course but something that is important to keep in mind is, it is not what you put in the course that matters the most, it is what you leave out.

This means you want to add in content, stories, and information that will move the needle, not ALL of the content, stories, and information you’ve gathered.

You can start to compile all of your information in an outline or a script.

You’ll want to list out all of the main talking points and then if you want to take it one step further, you can organize the talking points into modules. Modules are simply a way for you to break up your content, you can think of it as a category.

You can create your outline on a piece of paper, on an app, or in right within your product on Kajabi.

Some people like to create a script for each lesson. Creating a script will help you organize your thoughts, even if you don’t decide to use it while you record your lessons. This allows you to have a great understanding of what you’re going to say and how to flow all of your thoughts together.

Something else to consider when you’re creating your lessons is you’ll also need to decide what type of media or format you’ll want to use to deliver your content to your customers. Will it be a video? Maybe it’s an audio-based lesson? Do you want to include a downloadable file? Will you want to include quizzes?

No matter what combination you are planning to utilize, you can do it all within Kajabi.

Most Common Course Templates

There are several types of courses that people create on Kajabi. We offer templates for 3 of the most common courses creators make. Let’s dive into the templates available to you within the Kajabi platform to create courses.

Online Course

Brooke is an author that has written several books and she’s now excited to create her first course showing other people how they can write their first book. Creating her first course is easy since it’s very similar to writing a book or story. She starts by creating her outline and giving each module and lesson a title in Kajabi. Next she uploads her videos into each lesson and there’s a couple of lessons with a quiz too. Since this is a standard online course, she’s going to publish each module normally so that her customers can go through the course as quickly as they’d like. Setting modules to “published” will mean that a customer can skip ahead if they’d like and view any lesson in that module at any time. Just like purchasing a book, each lesson in her course is available for access as soon as they purchase.

Drip Course

For Brooke’s next project, she would like to work a little more closely with her students. This time she wants to use cohorts or groups of students that take her course together. She’s calling it the “2-Month First Draft Writing” course. There will be content unlocked each week so to keep things simple, she’s titled each module week 1, week 2, week 3, and so on until the last week, week 8. Since Brooke wants to have everyone start at the same time, she’ll need to go to her offer and set the start date there. This will make it so that people can purchase as soon as she’s made the offer available but they won’t be able to start the course until the date that she chooses. Drip courses are also great for fitness and diet challenges. If you want to reuse this product, I would recommend that you turn comments off in each lesson so that the course looks fresh for every new cohort. In Brooke’s scenario, she has also decided to have discussions every week where students get together with her. She’ll need to decide on whether she’ll want to combine her drip course with another product, such as a community, or if she’d like to have a live webinar using a third-party live video service such as Zoom.

Membership

Brooke’s Brother Diego is looking to use Kajabi and take his business online. Diego has been a strength and conditioning trainer for years now, training his clients at his private fitness gym. Now that he’s built a pretty good social media presence, he wants to take his gym membership online. Since he’ll be constantly updating the content and he’ll plan to interact with his members on a regular basis, he plans on using a subscription payment system as he uses at his gym. Some of the modules in his membership will include linear content, meaning that members will need to view the lessons in order. Other modules will include resources such as a video library, diet tips, and downloadable files. He’ll call it the Membership Plan. Later on down the road, Diego may even create different membership levels. Membership levels can include a package of products. For example, perhaps the next level includes the Black Belt Membership Plan and also his Fighting Spirit Coaching Program. A membership can take more work than a standard course but the benefit is that you can build a recurring income for years to come.

Product Creation Flow

Let’s dive into the Kajabi dashboard and click on Products. After you click on Products, you'll see every type of product you’ve created, this won't be exclusive to just courses, the all Products tab will include podcasts, coaching, and communities as well. To focus just on the courses within Products, click on Courses. A course is one of the password-protected products that you can create in Kajabi. If you’ve created a course already, then you’ll see these here, as well as a prompt to Create Course. If this is the first time you’re creating a course, then you’ll click Get Started.

What is Product Creation Flow?

In an effort to make this process as seamless as possible, you will be prompted to go through a step-by-step product creation process.

On the following page, you’ll give your course a title and add a description. The first step of the product creation flow is to choose a course. If you are here watching this lesson, I am pretty confident that selecting the course is your first step. Click on the course and then you are prompted to add a title and a description. These can always be changed later, so don’t get hung up on what to put, put something and if your vision shifts or evolves, you can simply edit it.

After you’ve added a title and description, you can now choose which template makes the most sense for you and your business

Online Course

This provides an A-Z transformation. The online course often includes many tiny transformations within one course. For example, if Diego wants to teach people at his gym how to transform their lifestyle to eat better, sleep better, move more often and provide mini transformations within one course, then the online course would be the best option

Blank Course

This is a great option if you want to bring a course over from another platform or if you know exactly how you want your course to be laid out, this is the template for you. Let’s say Carla, who makes cookies, knows exactly how she wants her course laid out and doesn’t need any template to follow, then this would be the clear choice for Carla.

Drip Course

This is if you want your content to be dripped over a specific number of days, so they do not get access to the content all at once.

Membership

This is a product where you provide a predetermined release of deliverables to your customers. If you want to learn more about a membership, enroll in our membership course below.

The next stage of the flow is where you are going to Upload an image, you can choose to skip this step if you don't have an image prepared, but even if you do upload an image and change your mind, you can always choose a different image later on. This image will be the product thumbnail and will show within the library. Oftentimes Kajabi Heroes create this thumbnail with an image and some text with the name of the course. Here are some examples of what Diego and Brooke have used for their courses.

After the image upload, where you select the pricing structure you wish for your course to have, You can choose to have a free course or a paid course. In Kajabi there are three different pricing structures you can choose from. Your offer can be a One-time Payment, Multiple Payments, which can also be thought of as a payment plan, and a Subscription. If you are unsure what to choose, you can select free, and change it after you have decided on a payment structure that works for your business model, or you can simply click skip for now.

Before you click skip, let’s talk about how you make money on Kajabi. Well, Kajabi integrates directly with Stripe and Paypal. These are the two payment processors that you can connect to your Kajabi account, so you can accept payments and purchases for your courses, coaching, and more. As the Kajabi platform continues to evolve, so does the ease of use. Connecting these two payment processors has never been easier. In just a few clicks and some quick information adds, you are ready to start collecting money.

Once you have gone through the steps to create your course utilizing Kajabi’s product creation wizard, Kajabi will build out your outline for the template you have selected.

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Customizing Your Outline

Every course product within Kajabi is comprised of key components that you can add content to and move as you see fit.

1. The first key component is a Module. 

A module is an organizational tool to contain your lessons under a similar heading. These modules have different release functions such as published, draft, drip, and lock.

Published, means everyone with access to the course can see the content

Draft, means only you can see it, which is great if you are adding additional content to a live course

Drip is where you can set the specific number of days a customer waits to get access to specific content after they purchased the product

Lock is a feature that will release content after a particular lesson has been completed, this is great if you are looking to create a self-paced course, but don’t want all of the content available upfront.

2. The Second key component is a Lesson. 

A Lesson is where you can input videos, audio lessons, and assessments as well as text and other downloads that support that particular piece of content. The lesson structure is designed to keep the course creation process simple. Upload and press save and move on to the next lesson. No matter what type, of course, you choose to create, you will be getting very familiar with the lesson tool.

3. The Third key component is a Quiz.

A quiz will test and assess your customer's knowledge and understanding through this engaging training tool. A quiz can act as a knowledge check, a recap, or simply just a way for your customers to feel engaged with the content.

Customizing The Look And Feel of Your Course

The way your course looks and the experience you create for your customers is important.

Oftentimes, this step is overlooked, but in this lesson, I want to share with you five steps to take your course from drab to fab that are SIMPLE and don’t require a lot of effort.

Before we dive into customizing your course, let’s first talk about the different course templates available to you. The two most customizable and popular templates that I am going to mention in this training are Premier and Momentum.

Premier is a more visual template, which is great if your customers prefer to have each lesson as its own clickable image. Or if you are planning on having a course with no more than 15-20 lessons, that is the perfect scrollable length for premier. So if any of that sounds like you, then this is your template.

Momentum is a minimalistic product template that lends itself to courses with a lot of content. This sleek design is based primarily on colors and easy navigation so your customers can see within a glance their starred content and their product progress. So, if your customers mean business then, momentum might just be the perfect template for you.

Once you have decided which template makes the most sense for your content and customers, within the customize screen, select the theme you wish to have and then click on the three dots and select activate from the menu. This will set the theme to the default theme. Once you have activated your preferred template, hover over the course image and click Customize. This will bring you a space where you can edit the view that your customers see when they access your course.

Now, this product page is not to be confused with your website. This product page will live behind a login wall and can only be accessed by entering a valid username and password.

Instructor’s Information

The first step is to edit the instructor's information. You are so much more than a John doe, so I like to check off the list first.

How you edit one thing in Kajabi is essentially how you edit everything. First, you hover, then you click, then you edit. So that is what we are going to do when we see the text, John Doe.

Hover over it, click on the box, and look to the left where you are prompted to edit. Add in your title, name, a short bio, and a headshot. When finished, press save.

Hero Image

The second step is the hero image.

If you aren’t sure where to find an image, you can look on sites like Unsplash or Canva for images that can help you tell your brand story. Once you have looked for, selected, and uploaded a photo, press save. That save part is very important!

Color Scheme

The third step is the color scheme, you will be surprised what a little change of color can do to a course to make it feel customized and cohesive to your brand.

This can be edited by clicking into the settings tab, and then clicking on the color scheme. Once in that setting, you will be able to choose a Primary color, Offset color, or Dark and Darker color. However, if you are wanting to keep it really simple, just click into the circle of the primary and change it to a color that matches your brand, or this product in particular. Once you have selected your new primary color, press save.

Footer

The fourth step is customizing the footer.

This dark gray footer can impact the whole look and feel of your course, and we want to make sure that the entire experience feels intentional, so, again how we edit everything in Kajabi is three simple steps: hover, click edit. If you scroll down the footer sidebar you will see the footer appearance and in that section change the background color of the footer to match the rest of the overall look. Once completed, press save.

Lessons

The fifth step is actually going to be completed on the Post (lesson view) level. 

When we click on the post level, this allows you to customize the view of how your students experience every lesson. This is where you are going to change the color of the player color and player color background. Changing these two colors will transform your customer's experience and make it feel custom to you. Simply hover over the player, click and look to the side where you are prompted to edit the colors, once you are done, press save.

Lastly, In this post level, you are going to want to edit the instructor information, just as you did previously on the product level.

And just like that your product is branded to your business and visually engaging for your customers.

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Going Through Your Course As A Customer

User experience is the secret ingredient to a successful online course. If your content is easy to navigate and access, your customers will keep coming back.

Together we are going to go through Caty’s Site. Caty is a life coach and helps mom’s step into their full potential, so they can feel their best for their babies. Caty’s site is called Cultivating Happiness. Cultivating Happiness is the name of her site. Together we will be going through as a customer and cover all of the points you should look for when you are going through your own course to test the user experience.

The first step is to grant ourselves a product within Caty’s site. Granting access is a fancy way of saying, FREE. When we grant a product to ourselves or someone close to us to test out our site and we don’t want them to pay, this means we will receive an email with the login credentials, no payment required.

This can be done within the contacts tab. Let’s navigate to contacts - click add contact - add single contact - import your own information here and act as if you were a customer. Before you click save, check the Grant Offer box, and select an offer. Then go ahead and press save.

This will trigger an email to be sent to my inbox with login credentials, just like customers will receive when they purchase your product.

Let’s go ahead and navigate to my inbox where we will find the instructions on how to log into Caty’s site and access her course, baking with Kids. You’ll see in the email your email and password as well as the link to click on to log in-

This step ensures that your log-in page is customized and feels like an extension of your brand. This means an image and colors that your customers would see from you on social media, in emails and if you meet in real life, well in real life too!

When we log into Caty’s site, Cultivating Happiness we are then brought to the library where we will see the one course we have purchased. The library is another step that helps build brand credibility, and where your customers can see all they have purchased, and navigate to their desired product. The library has a few more ways to be customized than the library page, so make sure you look to make sure your logo is added, new images are uploaded, any text is adjusted, and you feel like it is a clear representation of your brand.

Baking With Kids is the course we get to dive into, to access this course, click the button “Start Learning.” That Caty, who is savvy, customized her button text to align with the way she speaks, taking this customization one step further.

Once we click “Start Learning”, we are now inside the Baking with Kids course. Now I am going to scroll and click and make sure that everything is functioning properly and everything looks as it should. Watch the videos and make sure that they are the correct videos, click the downloads and make sure that the downloads are correct. Take your time and click, click, click!

Right now, I am experiencing this course as Caty’s customer would. This is the best way to ensure that your customer has the easiest, best experience possible.