Teachable is an online platform that enables you to create and sell online courses. Using the platform, you can conveniently customize your online ‘school’ along with quizzes and completion certifications.
You can use Teachable to promote your courses using its built-in marketing tools like its conversion-optimized landing pages, affiliate program, and marketing integrations.
When I first made an online course back in 2014 there were hardly any options out there to simplify the technology behind hosting and selling your course.
I spent hours researching different WordPress LMS plugins and in the end had to pay a developer to help us get it all working.
Thankfully, alongside the boom in people selling online courses, things have improved massively in the last couple of years. There are now lots of options for creating an online course and getting it all set up online without touching a single bit of code.
The trouble is choosing which platform to use – which can be a major headache in itself!
For some guidance in understanding all the different options and working out what is going to be right for, check out my in-depth guide to choosing an online course platform.
All the options claim to be the best and it can be hard to know which is best for you. This Teachable review will help you decide if it’s the right platform for your needs as we take a look at the main pros and cons. Does teachable have Trial offer? Many of our Teachable creators have found ways to offer free trials for online courses. We’ve now made it official to help you convert paying students.
As with any option in this area, the proper choice for you will depend on your individual circumstances. This article is intended to help you make the best choice of platform to create and sell online courses. By evaluating these pros and cons, you can compare them to your individual needs, and see whether Teachable is the online course platform for you.
Who Is Using Teachable?
Teachable is used by a wide range of people, including coaches, business experts, and instructors. The 68,000+ users on the platform have made over $338 million. As many sellers on the Teachable platform teach within a specific niche, it allows them to make a sizable amount of money.
Its user base also includes people like Angela Ferr, a watercolor artist who has sold a range of painting courses on Teachable. In 2015, she launched a new class and earned over $8,000 in a single month.
Another notable individual who uses Teachable is Lee Wasilenko, who teaches aspiring developers how to make virtual reality games. He started building his audience by offering free courses. But when he finally launched his first paid course, he made over $35,000 in a couple of weeks.
Teachable Features
Teachable comes with some fantastic features that help you create, sell, and manage your courses, including:
Build & Brand
Using Teachable, you can build an online school using a range of customization options.
This platform allows you to fit the theme of your website around your brand. You can add logos, change the background, adjust the font and colors, include links, revise the navigation, and add languages.
Teachable also lets you create your own custom domain and include a blogging section. Blog posts can be a valuable marketing and promotion asset.
Best Features
Let’s take a look at the best features of Teachable and how they can help you to create and sell your online course:
Easy to use
This is a big one! The main dashboard which you use to create and run your course(s) is really intuitive and easy to use. It’s a huge benefit of Teachable – it makes it really simple to do any of the main tasks you might need to do: upload course files, check on analytics, monitor payouts, issue refunds, communicate with students etc.
The actual content for each course is organised within Teachable using the Curriculum Editor. You can group resources together according to topics and themes.
These easy organization and customization features make this course a winner if you are not especially tech savvy but still crave customization features and want to organize and sell your course your own way.
Teachable is great so you can create and customize the offer your own way without the complicated tech aspect.
Drag and drop functionality allows you to shift things around and re-organize without fuss. The interface is clean and uncluttered, making it easy to see what is where, but as you’ll see further below, the look and feel of the area your students see is fairly basic at the moment.
Image and branding
How your online course looks is important, not just in terms of how usable it is for the student, but also in terms of the brand and positioning you wish to portray.
Whether you’re working as a business or an individual, you need a professional looking design that is clearly identifiable as yours. Teachable understands this and offers marketing features so you can brand your course your own way.
Teachable understands your needs and provides a nice looking theme for your school and course landing pages out of the box. You just have to upload your logos, images, text and choose colour schemes to get something that looks like this:
You can also host your course on a custom domain (e.g. www.courses.yourdomain.com) on all plans from Basic upwards and you can remove the Teachable branding on the Professional and High Volume plans too if you wish, though it’s not intrusive if you do keep it.
These marketing integrations are all highly useful to help you create and market your course as you see fit. Teachable also offers the ability to customise the look of your course homepage and landing page using it’s Power Editor, although it requires an understanding of HTML or CSS code and is not very user friendly (this is one of my main criticisms of Teachable, see below).
You could pay someone to do this for you, but it sort of defeats the point of using Teachable. If custom design is important to you, you may be better of creating your course with WordPress.
Teachable tries to strike a balance between simplicity and complexity, so if you are looking for advanced design features, you may find that the ones on offer are not quite what you need.
Easy & efficient uploading
When creating your course, you’re likely to have a lot of files to upload – videos, pdf’s, document or spreadsheets for example.
This should be as quick and intuitive as possible. Teachable does well here. Its drag and drop interface allows you to easily pull in your files from wherever they’re stored.
Good file handling
Teachable can handle all the main file types, including images and films. There’s no need for additional coding, embedding or manual linkage as there would be if built on your own website. Once your files are in there, they’re ready to use.
Video is well optimized and supports high-quality playback across a range of devices, including iPads and other tablets. It can cope with different bandwidths and video content can also be played at different speeds.
Once again, this intuitiveness eliminates the stress of dealing with multiple file types for providing your digital products, and contributes to Teachable’s overall ease of use.
Monitoring & Analytics
Creating a course and publishing it online is only part of the story. Once it’s gone live, it’s important to be able to keep track of how it’s progressing, how many students have enrolled and how engaged they are with your course.