Sell courses with a five-step checklist

You sell a 14-lesson sleep program through your checkout, and before the first buyer can press play you are wiring slugs, page settings and a members area by hand.

The enemy is course setup that starts with page plumbing instead of lessons.

Courses has its own entry in the sidebar, and every course opens on a checklist called Get your course ready: describe the course, add lessons, choose what unlocks it, preview it as a student, publish. Preview as student opens the course the way an enrolled student sees it, drafts included, through a one-time link that lasts 15 minutes.

A new course starts with one question: where will students take it? ElasticFunnels course pages gives you a course library, a course page and a lesson player on your domain. My own pages or app creates no course pages at all. Your members area or app reads the course with the course template functions, and the course screen lists the pages that already show it, with snippets to copy and a sample of what the functions return. You can switch later in the course settings.

A lesson can open with a video (a link, an upload or an embed code) or an audio file, or it can be a written page. The body takes inline images, numbered steps, a key details box and embeds from YouTube, Vimeo, Loom, Wistia, Bunny Stream and Miro, with files, key takeaways and comments under it.

The shared course pages sit in a Courses page folder. When one course needs its own look, Customize for this course copies its course page and lesson player into a folder named after the course and points the course at the copies. Reset to default puts it back on the shared design and keeps the copies.

A course is paid or free. Buyers of a linked product are enrolled when they pay, upsells included, and a free published course lets any signed-in visitor enroll. A refund or chargeback ends access to the courses that sale unlocked. For cancelled subscriptions you pick the rule in Settings, Courses: access lasts until the paid period ends (the default), stops right away, or stays.

The Students tab has search, progress, how each student got access, private notes, and Revoke access and Restore access. Each new student gets one welcome email, the course template you choose under Student emails, where you can also send yourself a test or duplicate it for a single course.

Try it: click Courses in the sidebar, then New course.