How To Build An Online Course in Wix | Part 1
- Michael Strauch (MPS)
- Jun 4, 2020
- 11 min read
What's going on Wix Nation, MPS here from Wix Training Academy and wow, we are living through a very wild time right now. In fact, last night I was just informed that the rest of our semester for college is online and we have to be moved out by this weekend. So that's what I'll be doing for the remainder of the week here.
I hope you're staying healthy, hope you're staying safe. But with this actually brings some opportunity. So for those of you that have physical businesses right now, I'm sure you are probably feeling some level of hurt from this whole Corona virus pandemic. However, the opportunity lies right here. And what I'm going to introduce you to today, is a three-part mini-series on How to Build an Online Course Website in Wix. And we're going to go through each part. Each part will be released on a different day.
So part one will be tomorrow, which is Wednesday. Then Friday and then Monday. And we're going to go through this three part mini-series and I'm going to break it down step by step and show you how to build an online course in Wix. And why is that an opportunity? Well, it's opportunity because taking your business online right now is where people are going to be.
People are going to be online, they have more time because we're supposed to be quarantined, social distancing and playing our part. And because of that, they'll be looking to hopefully advance their business or they will even be looking for new opportunities to either grow in their skillset or just new opportunities online to start businesses. So you, with your knowledge can take that, package it and turn it into an online course and then obviously build your website for it.
So let's dive into this first part. But obviously before we do, make sure you click that subscribe button in the bottom right of this video and turn those bell notifications on because you're going to want to stay tuned here over the next few weeks, especially because we've got a lot of great content coming to show you how to tackle this whole Covid-19 Corona virus pandemic. Maximizing your online business and you'll instantly join 33,000 almost 34,000 plus other like minded entrepreneurs. Let's jump in.
Utilizing Wix Paid Plans

Okay, so in part one of this mini-series. What we're going to do, is we're actually going to utilize the Wix Paid Plans app. Now, some of you may have seen this before, some of you may even actively be using it or have utilized it in the past. But I got a lot of questions on my video when I first made that, when Wix Paid Plans initially came out and the good news is, Wix has adjusted some of the data in which paid to make it a little more user friendly. More importantly, we're able to use Corvid tools, not Covid but Corvid tools by Wix to actually maximize the back end of the which paid plans app so we can get a little bit more sophisticated.
So what we're going to do is we first have to add our Wix Paid Plan app. To do that, we're going to go to add apps on the Wix app marketplace. And then we're going to type in ‘Paid Plans’ and it's now called ‘Pricing and Plans’ by Wix. And we're going to click that and we're going to click add.
Pricing and Plans

Now what we're going to do here is this is going to be the starting framework for the online course. Now typically, how you'll build an online course is you'll either build it as a one-time single payment or you'll charge people, you know, on-going subscriptions to access the content in your online course or even membership website and this can be used for both. Another solution for your online course is using Wix video, if you're doing just video. And I actually created a video for that right here in the card up above. Now if you want to go with that route, that's totally fine. Quite frankly, it's an easier, less work intensive route. However, that's not the route we're going to take in this video.
We're going to take the route, assuming that you've got some sort of on-going subscription or if not just even a one-time payment. And I'm going to show you how to build that out. And it starts with the paid plans app because this is what's going to actually enable people to purchase that subscription or that one-time. And then this will give them permission based on their membership level to certain pages on your site or your course in particular.
So with that said, we've now added Wix paid plans or pricing and plans and we can first click on settings. When we go to settings, we're going to see a couple of things. Manage paid plans. This is where we're going to really live for today's tutorial. But you have settings here as well. So you have the ability to choose what information you'd like to show in this whole design.
Settings

Over here, you get to show what plan you'd like to highlight as well. So you always see that when people are choosing plans for things, you see one like, best value or best option and you have the ability to choose which of these you'd like to highlight. As you can see which gives you three pre-made, which are beginner Pro and VIP. And then you can show the ribbon on there too, which is at best value ribbon. If you'd like, you can add a disclaimer as well.
Now for layout, this is just very basic. You're just choosing the spacing and text. This is a little bit more creative. This is where you can choose if you want this header up at the top, what you'd like that to say, what you'd like the button to say. Maybe you'd like it to be more of a call to action type. You can see button with free trial and start free trial. So you have to determine what you want these texts to be. And then you can choose what that says up top as well. And then lastly, the design of it. This is where you come through. You can design every piece of it, the background of this, the colors, the fonts, the text, all that good stuff. That's the technicalities.
Now I'm going to show you how to actually create and manage paid plans. So we're going to manage paid plans here. It's going to open up in our Wix dashboard actually because everything we create in the editor in terms of Wix apps such as Wix stores, Wix bookings, Wix blog, Wix pricing and plans can all be accessed from our dashboard. We're going to go ahead and press get started and once you get started you can see a couple of things.
Manage Paid Plans

Number one, you see the paid plans over here. On the left hand side, you see managed plans and you see purchase plans. We're going to start on managed plans. So what we're going to do is we're going to create our first plan. So we're going to create a plan and then we're going to tag it and type it. So here's what I want you to look at before we even title our plan pricing and duration.
You can see you have a few options in terms of how you price your plans. You can make it a free plan, which basically give someone free membership access cause you'll assign them a user role. You can make it a one-time payment. So if you're building a course and you want one single payment, one upfront fee, you can choose a one time payment or you can do reoccurring payments and you can choose both the frequency, either weekly, monthly, yearly, and also the price.
Pricing and Duration

In addition to that, you can select the length of the plan. So is it a three months, six months, two years until canceled or is it a custom plan? Are you going to choose, maybe it's a three week plan, maybe it's a five or six week plan. You get to choose that if you choose the custom. And then you can also enable free trials. So if you're building some type of membership website, you can enable free trial and allow people to try it out before they officially commit and get charged. Just like you would traditionally do if you're online. So once you have that figured out and the reason I wanted to highlight those first is because that'll determine obviously what the name of your plan is.
So it's not going to be a membership if it's a one-time payment. Maybe it is, but in this case we're just going to say ‘Single Pay Investment’ and well we're going to spell investment the right way. Number one investment and that is going to be for the course and we ran out of characters there, so we'll just call it ‘Single Pay’ and then tagline ‘One-time Course Payment' and there we go. That's our tagline. So it's a single pay and it's a one-time course payment. So they'll single pay, they'll pay one time for the course and then they get access to the course and then you can actually choose what your plan includes here.
So what are the benefits as you saw on that drop down under each little tear there, it showed what they get access to. You get to come up with these. This is your creative piece. Obviously when you're thinking about benefits, think about what people really want. What are the benefits they're going to receive, not just features, benefits, because benefits is what's going to actually sell somebody on moving into that direction. And then what you're going to do is you're going to come down here, you create your plan, and then you have planned policies.
So you can choose if it's a one purchase per person or if not, keep that on check. And then if you have policies such as a refund, renewal, cancellation, trials, all of that good legal jargon, you're going to want to make sure you put it down here in plan policy texts and make sure you do put it there. Because I promise you there will be people along the time in your course at either want to refund, want a free update on their trial, don't want to renew, or they do want to cancel. So make sure you have policy texts to indicate that. And then you would click Save. Now I obviously have to pick this, I'm choosing a one-time payment. We're going to say it's a just under $2,000 course and this one-time payment is custom choose period a yearly and how many years?
One, it's a one-time payment for that year. That's what it is. And then we're going to click Save and then what it's going to do is it's going to save that plant and you would replicate this entire process for however many payment options you want to give your visitors for your course. And once you do that, you've got plans. Now if you decide you want to cancel a plan, you can edit it or you can archive it. If you archive it, it'll go straight to your archived plans here and that will show your old plans.
But this is an active plan. So once you have this, you now have one payment option. Now you're probably asking, okay, so what happens? How does this work? So they're going to come to your site, they're going to go ahead, that you have a sales page or a landing page for your course and then you've got the plans at the bottom. Or maybe it's just one single plan, which is your one-time payment option like we have right here, and then what they'll do is they'll click it to get started. It'll take them through the payment process. You do have to have an upgraded Wix account on the business and e-commerce hosting plans in order to accomplish this. Why?
Because you're taking payments over your website, and Wix requires that. Wix does not take a commission. But you do need that hosting plan, one of the business and e-commerce plans in order to accept payments on your website and then what happens is, it'll take them through the payment process and then it'll have them create an account to log in because what's going to happen next is you have to assign user roles and permissions and essentially what that means, is this single pay person, the person that just paid for a course, what do they have access to on your website, and we're going to build the back end infrastructure in part two and three but that's what this, how this process works.
Once they go through and purchase this plan, they'll then be redirected back to create their account. So that way they can log in and get access to all of the pages you assign.

So to see how many people purchase your plan, you can go right here to purchase plan. Obviously we have zero purchasers right now, but this is where you'll see all of the data and you'll see who purchased it, the payment status, the plan status, where everyone stands. And you can even add new purchases up here based off of the contacts in your Wix CRM. If you have a conversation with someone they commit, maybe it's over the phone, a sales conversation, you can click it and you can add them as a new purchase, straight through your Wix CRM, which is through Wix ascend.
And that's how you actually go ahead and create your first plan. And that's how you manage the plan as well. And then as I just mentioned, what'll happen is they'll go through that process, select a plan, and I'll walk through that part right now.
Okay, so now we've got a plan. We've got the single pay. I'm going to click preview and then I'd press select. Now you can see you check out on your published site. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to publish it for right now, so that way you can see it. But I need to create some navigation to that plans and pricing page. So I'm going to go ahead and add a button. And we're just going to go ahead and link it to that page. Now I'm going to publish it so that way when we go to the homepage, we can access it.
So we'll go to the homepage. Let's just pretend this is a landing page for your course. Someone will go ahead and click this button to purchase or to learn more. They'll go ahead and click that and then it'll take them to the plans and pricing that they have available to them. They say, okay, yup, I'm ready to buy this as a course I want. They'll see all the benefits. Obviously I didn't list any benefits. They'll press select and then it'll have them create a membership log in.
So they'll sign up for your actual website so that way they can access the course and then it'll take them through this process. And I'll just go ahead and test and then test one, two, three, four, five and then I'll sign up. And then you can see it shows an order summary and we're not able to accept online payments at the moment and that's because I don't have an upgraded Wix Plan, but you'll see what'll happen is they'll buy and then there'll be redirected back to your site to log in to access their course.
And that's how that part of the process works.
Conclusion
If this video helped you guys out, I would kindly ask that you drop a like down below, comment if you've got any questions about this process. And remember we'll be covering step two and three in our next parts of the mini-series. And lastly, don't forget to make sure you hit that button and turn those bell notifications on so you instantly joined 34,000 like-minded entrepreneurs looking to do exactly what you're looking to do.
Let's band together during this time of Covid-19 the corona virus pandemic. And let's actually expand, not contract during this wild economic and social time. So let's do it together.
I appreciate you guys watching this one. I'll catch you on our next one.
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