All-in-One Online Course Building Services vs. eLearning Marketplaces
Online learning is growing its wings and now it is covering a wide range of different areas no matter the domain. Day-by-day, eLearning becomes even more popular and it is one of the hot topics right now. Since the COVID-19 pandemic just won’t go away, people still get stuck at homes being more isolated from social life as ever before. For that reason, online e-learning got a significant boost in the race with the other educational formats. Therefore, the importance of e-learning has been magnified significantly in the past couple of years or so.
Today, the demand for teachers who can guide students through the learning process online just keeps growing. And even though the process of creating a well-selling online course is not easy, it’s a lot easier now with terrific course-building software that provides effective technical tools. Now almost every course builder can create an engaging online course and launch it on the web without a headache.
Read this blog post, if you’ve been thinking about building a best-selling online course. Also, this article will point out to you where to find effective promo tools that will cost you absolutely nothing! In addition, you’ll find some great hints on how to use these tools for your course promotions. So, go ahead and explore the opportunities that course-building services and e-learning marketplaces have to offer today to course creators.
Some multi-device authoring tools that can shape your idea into an e-learning course
Once you enter the world of eLearning, the very first thing you will wonder about is exactly what your course content should look like. So, don’t be baffled by it and find an effective authoring tool that will suit your needs. Use it as your great aid in creating digital content for your future online course.
Authoring tool is software that allows course creators to work with information and shape it into digital content. Once you shape your content in a digital format, you will be able to share it out with online users/learners via e-learning management systems, e-learning marketplaces, websites, eLearning apps, etc.
Do some research and think about the following questions, because it will be very important for finding the right platform/service to host your online course in the future:
- Are you (your team) skilled enough in terms of handling production tools? (this will determine the quality and type of your future course – whether it will be fully textual, video, or audio. But we can say from experience that mixed courses that provide all the elements are most successful).
- Does your course need to be SCORM compliant? (SCORM tells programmers how to write their code so that it can “play well” with other e-learning software. The SCORM standard makes sure that all e-learning content and LMSs can work with each other, just like the DVD standard makes sure that all DVDs will play in all DVD players. If LMS is SCORM conformant, it can play any content that is SCORM conformant. And any SCORM conformant content can play in any SCORM conformant LMS. But keep in mind that not all eLearning marketplaces allow SCORM!)
- How will you offer the resulting course(s): via LMS or eLearning marketplace?
These questions should help you guess and figure out what course building services will be most helpful to you, your needs, and your capabilities.
Some of the helpful online software that can help to convert your notes into digital presentations or record learning videos:
Adobe Captivate – you can create cool eLearning and VR content with it. It works on both macOS and Windows OS. It will let you control every element of your lesson.
Elucidat – a powerful Cloud-based content authoring tool packed with multi-user features that allows multiple users to work on the same project. A big bonus is lots of pre-build projects in its library to get you started quickly. It has a built-in eLearning portal that lets you share courses with the learners instantly. To track learners’ performance, it has an analytics dashboard too.
Articulate 360 – allows building advanced interactive lessons with quizzes for students. Also, provides a large library of resources containing characters and scenery images for building realistic presentations.
Rise 360 – a Cloud-based eLearning authoring tool with lots of quick and easy-to-use helpful features. It doesn’t allow customization of layout but it shouldn’t be a big problem. You’ll be able to add images, text, and video in different blocks with it. Since it’s a part of the Articulate 360 package, you will be able to use any of its features as per need.
iSpring Suite – an extension of Powerpoint. So, if you’ve already used PowerPoint, you should be able to get everything done right “out of the box”. Also, this tool allows screen and video recording. And it provides basic video editing features. However, you most likely will have to buy an MS Office subscription with iSpring Suite. So, keep this in mind.
Camtasia – created for creating video tutorials and presentations directly via screencast, or via a direct recording plug-in to Microsoft PowerPoint. The screen area to be recorded can be chosen freely, and audio or other multimedia recordings may be recorded at the same time or added separately from any other source and integrated with the Camtasia component of the product. It consists of two major components:
Camtasia recorder – a separate tool for capturing screen audio and video;
Camtasia editor – a multimedia authoring tool with the industry standard “timeline” interface for managing multiple clips in a stacked track form.
Are you all done with converting your ideas into digital content, putting everything together, and building a structure for your future course? If yes, take a step forward and find a place where you can upload your online course online to make it available to learners. Need more info? Keep on reading!
Now, let’s talk about what platforms/services are out there that you can use to host your online course for future sales and what these services can offer to online course creators.
Standalone all-in-one eLearning platforms and opportunities they provide to course authors
Today, developing courses for a customized e-learning platform can easily be one man’s job. There are many tech-savvy platforms like Thinkific, Kajabi, Teachable, etc., out there that provide course-building capabilities to anybody who wants to create online courses. We’d outline the 7 best platforms that are awesome for creating and selling online courses to the rest of the world:
- Kajabi
- Podia
- Teachable
- LearnDash
- LearnWorlds
- Samcart
- Thinkific
One of the most awesome features these services provide is an integration with Content Management Systems (CMS) like LearnDash or Opigno (also free and open-source). These systems are very handy for those who need to develop just a small-sized e-learning platform with either WordPress or Joomla.
If you want to build a more complex platform, you can still use CMS. The trick is that you can integrate those plugins that are meant for LMS (Learning Management System). With the help of such plugins, it becomes easier, for example, to customize the text and make it look just the way you want. However, developing a more complex e-learning platform via CMS and LMS plugins might require more advanced technical knowledge. So, be sure that you have enough technical skills before you actually do anything.
In fact, course building services are very handy and easy to use for creating online courses. But it is also a kind of “do-it-all-yourself” space for authors. For example, one of the most important aspects to keep in mind is that such services will not market/promote your courses for you. Yes, they’ll let you run announcements, simple automation campaigns, email lists, and so on. But you’re pretty much on your own here in terms of promotions and will have to fuel all your marketing campaigns with money from your own pocket.
Another aspect – a monthly fee that you’ll need to pay for hosting courses, using software, or doing anything on such platforms. Or even if you sell nothing, there is always a fee. Indeed, that’s how these services make their money. And it’s only fair and normal that they do it that way.
Let’s compare the two hand in hand: all-in-one eLearning platforms and eLearning marketplaces
In the table below, let’s draw a comparison between all-in-one eLearning platforms vs. eLearning marketplaces. We’ll use Grinfer to showcase the advantages/disadvantages of e-learning marketplaces.
| Course Building Services | Grinfer eLearning Marketplace |
|---|---|
| Course building services are created for individual experts who want to create and set up their own course (or a series of courses) online for further online promotions and sales. | Grinfer doesn’t have any strict requirements for showing proof of certificates, licenses, or diplomas that justify your expertise. If you’ve got valuable knowledge in anything and are willing to share what you know with others, you’re more than welcome to create a course! Please note: Grinfer has no legal rights for owning or further distribution of any uploaded content. All copyrights belong to authors and course creators only! Every single course goes through the moderation process for further approval before it gets uploaded on the platform. So, make sure your online courses(s) has met all requirements stated in the Grinfer policies and guidelines before submission. |
| General Overview Kajabi | General Overview Grinfer |
| Course building services provide “all-in-one” web-based solutions for creating, hosting, marketing, and selling digital products like online courses. The term “all-in-one” implies that it provides the full set of tools and special online features for: - Creating a professional-looking website fast and easy; - Building a whole range of digital products, such as eLearning courses, memberships, coaching programs, etc.; - Designing landing pages, sales pages, sales funnels for optimizing online promotions and marketing; - Launching and managing e-mail campaigns to attract more users to landing pages and sales funnels | Grinfer is a comprehensive eLearning platform created for not only building courses for free but also for enlightening the learning experience with 1-1 online consultations. Grinfer supports both newbies, as well as experienced tutors. Even if you’ve never tried online teaching before, you get a great chance to become one of the best tutors who teach online. What are the benefits? The Grinfer platform provides a FREE self-service system to all registered course creators. This service is perfect for creating online courses fast and easy, as well as for uploading all the necessary files in any format. In addition to selling courses, you have an option to make even more money with 1-1 consultations (at your rates and from your own place). The number of course topics is not limited (pick any topic that you have valuable experience at and create a course). Flexible course pricing strategies. Promo tools and marketing features available on Grinfer are provided to course authors for free. Grinfer brings thousands of precisely targeted people to the platform to grow your sales, optimize, and scale your course-selling business. Moderation takes less than 24 hours and then you’ll be provided feedback on how you can make your course even better. The support team is pretty fast in responding to your questions or navigating you through any technical issues! Grinfer is like your well-organized working space: balancing upcoming events, booking requests, analytics, and more! Everything you possibly need for effective work. |
| Course pricing strategy Kajabi | Course pricing strategy Grinfer |
| Provide authors with an opportunity to set up any price that they want. Or put even a higher price on their courses’ price tag to sell them as high-ticket courses. | You can either include courses in the subscription plan and make money out of the total watch time that users spend on your page. Or you can set your course(s) to a separately sold price option and sell for any price that YOU want. It will be totally up to you what price you’re going to list in the price tag for your courses because you’ll be in full control over your course price. |
| Course building solutions Kajabi | Course building solutions Grinfer |
| You’re the one who is totally in charge of your course brand. These services provide course creators with plenty of ready-made templates, authoring tools, and other useful features that make the course building process fast and easy. You are the one who picks everything for your course brand including pricing, length of courses, quality of the course content, etc. Keep in mind extra charges that might apply to you along the way: you’ll have to pay a monthly fee for hosting your courses or getting access to some course-building tools. | Offer plenty of ready-made solutions to course creators to create courses with. These solutions are handy for building, editing, or adding online courses much faster compared to doing everything from scratch. Once you register and set up your personal profile, you can start drafting your upcoming course on the marketplace step-by-step. Grinfer’s team works hard to keep the Course Builder up-to-date and easy to use. Grinfer’s team has developed an awesome system for the platform that will let you continually add, modify, edit, change the sequence of lessons in your course draft. And once you’re all done and ready to publish, just simply hit the Publish button and your course is good to go! Another great ready-made solution that you’ll find on the platform is a Bulk Uploader. It is a great tool to make the uploading of your courses much easier. It saves you time and effort as you can upload multiple files all at once and one by one. Yes, you get access to any course building features at no cost. There are no extra charges involved in using this system along the way. |
| Support&Promotions Kajabi | Support&Promotions Grinfer |
| Course building service will let you set up drip campaigns, send out marketing emails, host your website, create a blog, create lead magnets like a webinar, and push your online courses live. You don’t have to visit multiple websites or launch several tools to accomplish all of those tasks. You can promote your courses through email marketing tools offered by such services. These tools make it possible to set up fully automated marketing campaigns and funnels. For example, Kajabi also offers lead generation and product launch tools, webinar funnels via Blueprints to make your course selling business even more efficient. You can use built-in analytics tools for tracking your progress. Since course promotions involve a serious time investment, nobody wants to waste precious minutes learning how to code. So, authors install plugins or go by setting up merchant accounts. | In addition to everything that we listed for course building services in terms of support and promotions, Grinfer provides its authors with the following options: - provide statistics based on the data accumulated from landing page rotation and free marketing campaigns (you’ll see how many clicks your landing page got, the number of visitors, overall page success, etc.); - Grinfer’s moderation team provides free consultations supplying its authors with the most up-to-date recommendations that work well for boosting course sales, provides effective selling tips, and gives suggestions for course improvements (not meant to limit authors in any way); - Grinfer creates sales pages for the best-selling authors and promotes online for free; provides support with automated responders, system notifications, embedded chat that allows authors to reach out to students at any time and as them to either rate a course or write feedback; - event management: provides support for online events carried out by Grinfer’s authors (for example, if you teach via 1-1 consulting service on Grinfer, you can use a built-in events calendar to keep your students up-to-date); - personal profile support: you can ask any questions or get a free consultation to resolve any technical issues or anything that you might have regarding your personal account; - provides account history; - allows creating effective lead magnets like a free course/discounted offer, etc. Then you can offer these freebies to learners, registered users, or anybody in your network channels as a bonus via referral links which you can easily create in your personal account with just a few clicks; - e-commerce integration with most popular payment systems like Paypal and Stripe which provides authors with flexible options for receiving payments including one-time payments, financing plans, and subscription plans; All these options are FREE! No need for having your own website or any other network channel. You can let Grinfer do all your online promotions for you. |
| Additional income streams Kajabi | Additional income streams Grinfer |
| Most stand-alone learning platforms (like Kajabi, for instance) will let you have full control over your earnings by collecting payments selling your physical events, online courses, classes, coaching sessions, consultations, etc. Also, Kajabi will let you generate additional income streams by selling your physical products via embedded Shopify's Buy button or by integrating your preferred third-party distribution service. | Grinfer offers a number of additional opportunities to its authors that are great for scaling, optimizing their course selling business, and earning even more money (in addition to selling courses on the platform). Here is a quick list of these options: - 1-1 consultations that can bring extra profit to your account; - Referrals that can get you $15 in commission for each new customer you bring on the platform via referral links (if new users purchase any of - - Grinfer subscription plans after a free trial period); - Sell courses through both options - within a membership subscription plan and by going with a single purchase option; - Brought users to the platform via referral links and they purchase any of your separately sold courses? 96% of the sale goes to your pocket! Go to Grinfer’s blog to learn more about how to create and promote referral links easily with awesome promo tools available on the Grinfer platform! |
As for e-learning marketplaces that work under the subscription methods, here is a good chance to make your course(s) even more visible to a wide audience. You can attract people who you wouldn’t even think to promote to otherwise.
For example, learners came to the marketplace to learn programming languages. Once they get on the website, they can see your course(s) on the main page of the marketplace. Let’s say, you sell courses on creating cool knitted sweaters for the holiday season. If these folks are big fans of knitting, guess whose course they’re going to view next?
Bottom line
After all, before starting out, think and decide whether you actually trust your marketing skills or not. If you’ve been successful with personal marketing, then go with Kajabi, Thinkific, or Teachable. But the problem here is that if you don’t have much experience with online courses promotions, odds are you’ll end up with courses that “just sit there” like a big fancy car left in a garage and never driven around.
So, one of the smartest ways to go about it is to try a mix of both, course building services and e-learning platforms (like Grinfer, for example). Each service will provide you with plenty of valuable resources that will work well for you and contribute to your online course business. We suggest you not limit yourself to any particular service. Heck, you can try all of them and see what works and what doesn’t.
If you start your course-building journey with Grinfer, you’ll see that it’s a win-win situation for both you and your future learners! Why? The major reason is that most tools and support are provided for free so you won’t lose a penny from your own pocket while:
- Starting off as a complete beginner – the Grinfer platform provides a whole set of effective tools to course creators for FREE;
- The course building system provided by Grinfer is incredibly powerful and effective;
- Offers a wide range of free marketing services and promo tools for boosting course sales.
- Grinfer platform is compatible with any mobile device – the mobile app gives you the freedom to learn when and where you need it most conveniently.
So, get on this train today and start your course-building journey with Grinfer!
