Best platforms to sell downloadable files

Instructors are able to create an engaging virtual classroom environment by providing students with numerous media types like video, images, audio, downloadable files, text, and on some platforms, interactive elements like quizzes and whiteboards. Just like in a traditional classroom, students will take the course and learn from the lectures, perform classroom exercises, take tests and quizzes, and take notes.

Most of the platforms also allow for certificates of completion once the courses are complete as well. An online learning platform is a digital marketplace where instructors are able to upload courses and students who already exist on the platform can enroll in them if they choose to. Most online course platforms are focused on one main thing — helping you create and sell courses. Truth be told, some of the best platforms for courses in this list do NOT allow you to blog and host courses at the same time.

The reason? Not many of them are necessarily all-in-one platforms. But, you can use the custom pages feature within the platform to build a blog as needed as a workaround. LearnWorlds , like Teachable, offers a blog function on their platform as well. It has a similar function as the Teachable blogging platform and allows course creators to write content for their students as they become part of the community.

Personally, I tell people to start their own blog, and then if you want to sell courses, point people to the individual course pages. Yes, you absolutely can. In fact, my top 3 recommended online learning platforms offer this. If this is really important to you, I highly recommend that you use Thinkific , LearnWorlds , or Teachable.

Having a domain like www. One is branded and the other looks like a third-party platform. Of all of the online course platforms on this list, Thinkific and Teachable are the most popular. That said, many times people ask which of these platforms is better for them.

To assist with this, we created a post comparing Thinkific vs Teachable to help you understand the differences. While there are many different options to choose from, I recommend you consider the recommendations below based on your requirements.

Still not sure what platform is for you? Check out my individual reviews below :. Thanks for organizing this blog post! Very helpful and useful information for educators or soon to be educators, especially at the strategy formation stage of their online adventures. Interesting post!

What about Edactis? Do you know it? Classes generate free lessons for people who need them. Psyched that it helped you out, Wills. Please log in again. The login page will open in a new tab. After logging in you can close it and return to this page. Share 0. Tweet 0. Pin 0. Join Thinkific For Free.

Start LearnWorlds Free Trial. Start Teachable Free Trial. Start Teachery Free Trial. Start iSpring Market Free Trial. Start Podia Free Trial. Start Systeme. Start Kajabi Free Trial. Get a Free Pinlearn Demo. Download LearnDash Day Guarantee. Request Access to Zippy Courses. Get Started With Academy of Mine. Get Started With Udemy. The reason for this is because people hate digesting large chunks of content. While long-form content is getting more popular, you need to format it in a scannable way.

The same applies to your ebook. Use subheadings, short paragraphs, lists, and visuals to get your message across. Ideally, this should be a professional editor or a knowledgeable person in your industry, someone who can give you the hard truths about your writing style and execution of ideas.

Before you share the ebook, use an online spell checker or editor like Grammarly to get all the obvious spelling and grammar mistakes ironed out. Then your professional editor can focus on whether the ebook is solving the problems you say it is, and check there is a coherent flow. We already mentioned about formatting your text, but adding images and graphics can help illustrate important points and get your message across.

You really only need to use a basic font like Arial, Verdana or Georgia at size 14 or 16 with a simple color scheme like black with one other. There are so many different places to get images for your blog or ebook , but two of the best solutions we like are to use Shutterstock and your own photos. Remember, when using photos, you need to make sure you purchase the correct license and get permission.

Plus, you want to avoid stock photos that have been used thousands of times before. And Shutterstock covers those bases. And this can be expensive. Another way to enhance your ebook is to use graphics that contain stats or quotes.

An essential part of the process here is to have an enticing ebook cover to promote your PDF document. Book covers are great because they increase the perceived value of the product by making it seem like something solid. We highly recommend hiring a graphic designer from 99Designs or DesignCrowd to make you something professional. Remember, this is going to represent your whole brand.

The next stage is where your ebook baby is born. But if you want to learn about landing pages and selling your ebook, then take a look at this guide to great landing pages. Most ebooks are in PDF format. And most importantly, it also provides a consistent output. When you save a typical word document and send it to your friends, chances are everyone will see something different. They all look the same. Pro Tip: Other file formats are available, but the PDF works on all devices and is best-suited to free downloads.

We recommend using OptinMonster to make this process as straightforward as possible. OptinMonster has loads of high-converting campaign templates you can choose from. There are a few ways you can do this with OptinMonster, but we recommend using an instant Success Message plus a backup Email message.

In your OptinMonster campaign, from the Design tab, select Success at the top of the screen to display the Success Message that corresponds to the campaign theme:. The default option shown above is to have the lead magnet link sent via email, but you can add a Download Now button with some easy customizations. I want to create a technical course having mostly PPTs and screen-cast videos.

I thought of creating the same in Udemy because they will market the courses. Hi Jeff, Your Learning Revolution is so informative. The material is going to be a self-study course using a downloaded written course to their computer. The students need 72 credits every 3 years so the site needs to keep their information so when they come back and open their profile the completed courses with be there.

There will not be any videos or webinars and anything live just a list of all the courses available, a cart for them to pay and a student profile for the course to be downloaded to their computer. Please let me know when you get a chance, Thank you again, Take care, Linda.

Hi Linda — What you describe will require a more sophisticated solution than anything covered in this post. I will e-mail you to discuss.

Wow, thank you for compiling this list and putting all of these great resources together! Anyone looking to create online courses will surely be lucky to stumble upon this piece. So much to choose from! It needs to be intuitive, easy for the user, and not cost a bundle. Thanks and any suggestions? Hi Jeff Thank you for a comprehensive post. There is so much choice out there, the more you read the more confusing things become. I am hoping you can simplfy and point me in the right direction.

I am setting up an education website, where I will primarily sell recorded webinars. I have a wordpress site and purchased webinar ignition WI under the assumption that I could record webinars and offer them through WI. So now I am looking for software that I can integrate into my website and allow me to sell recorded webinars multiple times to different people. I hope this information makes send!

Could you tell me the top 3 platforms you would recommend. Lisa — A recorded Webinar is just a video and pretty much all of the platforms listed here will enable you to set up a video as a course and selling as many times as you want to whoever you want. Just to help you narrow the choices, I would recommend starting with Teachable or Thinkific both listed above — Jeff.

Can you recommend a reputable company that creates scorm compliant elearning videos for LMS platforms? I have books to sell, as well. I also teach LIVE seminars. Any other suggestions you might have? Thank you! The fees quoted for LearnDash are not a once-only fee — they are for a one-year subscription.

Barbara — Thanks for noting that. I work with a non-profit arts and crafts group. We want to create courses for our members. We have multiple instructors who will create the content, but our group will actually present the courses. All of these platforms seem to be focused on a direct relationship between course and instructor.

I need something that will allow for lack of a better term a middle-man to manage the process. All the classes are pre-build, on-demand. Some might have a weekly live broadcast.

All courses are lessons, and are presented over the course of a month. Bob — I would nee to know a bit more about the content and process you have in mind — i. I have read all of the posts but continue to have questions regarding my desire to create training modules, with testing and online completion for businesses. I want to sell customized courses to businesses, perferbaly small businesses. My idea is to find their training needs and create the module based on their business.

I am assuming it will need to be cloud based. I am a retired technology and business instructor and looking to fulfill my creative outlet and make some extra money if possible. I have used educational platforms but not the current offerings that are overwhelming me when trying to make this decision.

I want to be sure I am not overlooking valuable information. Any suggestions? Thanks and great posts and information! Any of the platforms here could, in theory, do what you describe. It will depend on how you need the purchase and access to happen.

Will the clients always come to your site, for example, or do some need to be able to run the courses on their own platforms?

Do you want to provide clients with their own, branded entrance into purchasing your courses? How much control do you want to provide clients for enrolling and managing their own learners? HoneyCoach allows you to sell without fixed costs, and allows you to sell single videos, online classes and coaching programs. Thanks for noting. CourseIndex is already linked to under the Course Merchant entry above. Hi nice job with this comprehensive write-up, I tried still cannot really figure the difference between LMS and authoring tools.

Is authoring tool a part of an LMS? I actually thought authoring tools are just platforms used to link texts, pictures, videos and audios to form a flow in a presentation… so not so sure how that was independently used for elearning in the past. Mike — Good question. Eventually, though, LMSes started including tools to do just what you describe — i. The main issue with this is that every LMS does it a bit different, So, if you build your courses in the LMS, you will almost certainly have to re-build them when you move to a new LMS.

Authoring tools are LMS-independent. You build your course in the authoring tool and then can import it into any LMS.

There are standards that have been developed to support this — SCORM being the main one historically. For some additional info on all of this see:. So, if you treat your lessons as courses, and then also sell packages that bundle multiple courses together, you can achieve what I think you are talking about.

These are some good options. However, where can we find partners to help create the content or build courses for us? Just wondering, does anyone know of any new online course software packages similar to LearnDash [but not Learndash] that are more like a stand-alone program with a one time fee?

I believe the pricing model may be similar though. You may want to contact them. Hi Jeff, I was looking for some useful Online Courses online and suddenly found your post. You have shared very useful information about the online course platforms which will surely make the process of choosing easier for everyone.

This way, people looking for online training can get an excellent and wide selection of the latest platforms that provide online courses. Also, big thanks for keeping this useful list updated. Here, I want to share a platform which provides useful business, computer, safety, banking, management, leadership and several other useful courses. This is a wonder post and has truly crystallized everything for me. I was originally thinking of setting up everything through WordPress but am now gravitating towards Thinkific.

What are the potential risks and repercussions of doing this? Is it not that big of a deal or is it not advisable? My thoughts are this. As long as you can export the customer list from the old system with their passwords and then import it into the new system you are fine.

But I am not sure if most systems support this. Any input is appreciated. Really, it comes down to the nature of your content and how much you rely on the tools contained within any specific platform to create your courses.

If you rely on those tools heavily, then you will have to redo quite a bit when you go to a new platform. But it could be a big deal if that is not the case. As far as dat goes, with most platforms you will be able to export the names and e-mail addresses of your customers, but there is a very good chance you would not be able to simply export passwords and import them into your new system.

This would require a more complex level of migration unless you have the tech skills will probably require some help. That said, it is often possible to import the names and e-mails and then have people reset their passwords to simply establish a new password in the new system. After taking a subscription of any type of these platforms — what will happen to the website, domain and contents upon cancellation?

Are they easily transferable? Or I find cheaper prices else where? Ally — The domain remains in your control always. You would just point it to your new site. Content is a bigger question. The ones that are WordPress-based would technically have an export functionality for all of the content and you should be able to get a copy of the database — all of which would you allow to set most if it back up in another WordPress installation.

But there is definitely a lot of devil in the details — so, be sure to ask about this up front and make sure you feel confident you will be able to get your content out in a usable form.

Keep in mind that, when you build courses in a proprietary delivery platform, as opposed to in a separate authoring tool, you are almost always going to have to do some re-constructing when you switch to a new site.

Very glad to have found this post! My courses are pre-recorded videos, 1 — 4 hours in length and ready to upload. I have been scouring around trying to find a good platform that can do a few things I need:. Does anyone know of anything that might be a good fit?

I have sold on Udemy before for consumer level, non-credentialed courses and I have been tinkering with Thinkific which I like very much, but they do no limit the ability for the viewer to simply skip to the end of the video as pretend they completed it. Did you get a response to your post.

Your situation is very similar to mine and I would be interested in the answer. I wanted to set up all our courses with Academy Mine a couple of years ago. We have one large 12 part course and 15 smaller 4 part courses and over students. I paid someone else to set it all up and learn how to use it as I just didnt have the time myself. Students email their course work submissions to me. It works and costs nothing but I often wish for a more streamlined way to complete assessments.

Hi guys! COM it would be great if you can add it to the list! For any questions please write us to [email protected]. There are plenty of marketplaces for recorded courses but does anyone have leads for live, realtime courses marketplace. So we are looking for new places to sell our ready made course online to gain a wider audience and sales. Any recommendations and wise words for us? It sounds like what you really need are good ways to drive traffic to a sales page for your course on your Web site.

The best way, by far, is through your own e-mail list. Great list! Jeff, You will want to update your content here, if you are not already working on this. Thanks for chiming in with the update info — Udemy changes often enough that it can be hard to keep up. The post has been updated to reflect this info.

I am brand new to this. I did not even know there were such platforms. I have looked at some of the reviews here, but no idea which to try.

There are a lot of them. The one that jumped out at me is called Teachable. Since I am just starting out, I have no idea how many classes I might sell, so I cant afford to pay a monthly and they just take a percentage of my sells. What I am looking for though are suggestions and recommendations. I dont want to invest lots of time and money into developing classes on Teachable, if its not a good platform. Phillip — Hopefully some other will chime in hear with their comments.

What it really comes down to is whether they have everything you feel you really need to support both your learning and business model. They are very responsive and will make changes where possible that the big players would never make for us. Highly recommend.

Thanks for this great list, and keeping it updated as well. Would you say there are any platforms better suited than others for offering courses about professional skills development?

Not really — it depends on the nature of the material, the learning objectives, and the audience. In theory, any of the platforms listed here could support professional skills development. I tried other platforms first, but theirs is easier to use. I am checking out withcoach as well. Click here for an example. Thanks for outlining all of these options. I am curious to know if any others have a community building around them where the instructors can help share students?

Good question. I know both Teachable and Ruzuku have strong Facebook groups for people authoring in their systems. How about Alison, anybody had an experience with this company? I see they offer free courses but make some profit from the certificates. Hi Carol, please tell us about your experiences with online course platforms.

Hi, thanks, this is very helpful! Hopefully someone else here will have some input, though. Please send us an email at [email protected] and someone will reach out to discuss. Thanks Jay. While I understand the criticism related to such aspects of the platform as controlling user data and communications with students as well as some difficulties with the review process, I have had an excellent experience with them. The bottom line is, Udemy courses sell.

They just have some specific requirements for your video files that they use to manage quality and standardize the service bit. At any rate, I just wanted to say that I have 19 courses on Udemy, with one more in the works right now, and I make more money on there per course than any other platform that I have tried BY FAR.

Oh, and also I have recently discovered two newer marketplaces similar to Udemy that market the courses for you and do a profit share: CyberU, and On-Ed. I am in the process of testing them, I will return to the thread to let you know my experience.

Hey Jeff Cobb, you done a great job at providing a well rounded list of online education websites. Here is another that is a great website which has allot ot offer for people starting to develop there business skills and help get there business started in just 3 days.

If you want to help grow the mentorship and community which is startupacademy. Out of the box solutions are much better for small businesses as they can get started easily themselves at a relatively low pricepoint.

I used Teachble to build my first school where I presently have ten courses available with ten more yet to upload. However, while I do like the way that their software makes my school look, it was pretty steep learning curve to figure out how to use it to create a school and courses since their website is not at all intuitive.

In addition, I found numerous small annoyances with their software which made the process more cumbersome. But, the main problem with Teachable is that their advertising leads you to believe that all you have to do is build the school and students will flock to sign up!

However, nothing could possibly be further from the truth!!! Fortunately, I have over twenty-five years of retail experience and thus, I knew that going in.

However, while they do provide some learning resources with their blog and their free webinars, they do not have single resource that provides you with a complete step-by-step process for marketing your courses. Also, they fail to make it clear that marketing an online course is very different from marketing a standard web site. Thus, I had to spend numerous hours on YouTube watching instructional videos to discover that, unlike a standard web site where you build, and then publish, the site and then vie with competitors for top ranking on Google and Bing, you instead have to build a permission based e-mail list to market to.

But, they also fail to provide you with the resources to accomplish that task and thus, you have to turn to other service providers such as Mail Chimp and Timer Monkey to launch an e-mail marketing campaign.

Plus, while they do have some resources on building an e-mail list, it is woefully inadequate and far less than clear. In addition, on the few occasions I have contacted their customer service for clarification, I have gotten a couple of good answers from one technician and half-assed answers from others. For instance, I read an article on their blog about how to implement an evergreen e-mail sequence but, it was poorly written and left out quite a bit of pertinent information.

But, when I contacted their customer service to ask for clarification, they had no idea what I was talking about and repeatedly gave me half-assed answers to my questions! Thus, I had to turn to a video on YouTube to learn how to implement an evergreen e-mail marketing sequence. But, what has really set me off is that when I first signed up with them, they sent me e-mails on a regular basis but, suddenly stopped doing so.

Then, the other day, I got a pop up window at the bottom of my screen informing me that their Teachable Summit was starting right then! So, I followed the link and signed up for their summit. But, not only did not receive notice of the impending summit via e-mail, I did not receive a confirmation e-mail that I had signed up for the summit! Thus, I contacted their customer service again to ask why I received neither notice of the summit nor a confirmation e-mail and that is when the run around started!

First, I was told to check both of my e-mail addresses and my Spam folder. But, after my reply to that message, I was then told that their e-mails had bounced back to me too many times and that I had been removed from their e-mail list!

However, I find all of this very suspicious since their e-mails to me suddenly stopped after I received a survey from them where I left poor feedback for them because their advertising is misleading, they only provide half of the solution for marketing an online course, and very little of the information needed to do so. But, after informing the customer service agent of this, I have not had reply from them of any sort whatsoever!

Thus, I am now searching for a new home for my online outdoor academy! They are two totally different products. I recommend going with ConvertKit for your mailing list provider, incidentally. But, I hope you can have some more reasonable expectations of your service providers. You may also like this e-Learning platform which allows you to create your own e-shop — marketplace and there sell your courses for FREE and with no extra effort!

This e-shop function can be switched on by one click in the platform settings. You only need to select the courses you want to display. Learning Cart has been fantastic for me! I entered the field on Teachable because they provide a lot of guidance on how to get your course s noticed.

So, I moved to Thinkific who has a little bigger feature set, but their tools for creating the home and landing pages were not very flexible and did not offer much for customizing, unless you are a coder.

Their tools for customizing their template are much better and they have all the features I need. Most of all, their support is fantastic! With that said, our business model is to provide training on a wide range of business topics, from technical to management. I do not teach any of the courses. Instead, I find experts who have a course or idea and want to make some money, I market the courses and manage the site.

You just teach! Yes this is great content but now we have many more other option. I just want to leverage off an e-Learning site for marketing purposes. Hello Jeff.. My needs seem to be a little different, and I hope you can be able to guide me. I work for a non-profit organization and we offer elearning courses for business owners at no charge.

Our approach is to develop the content, have someone produce it as an ecourse — and we own it. Wondering if you have suggestions of elearning developers that produce the courses without any ties into monthly fees and revenue sharing.

There is an another very good online teaching platform called Learnyst Teach Online. They help you build your own branded school. Their online learning platforms are affordable, simple to use, and cater to educators, tutors, coaches, and people looking to start a virtual school. Thanks for the excellent article.

Atbetterce continuing education courses are designed to provide the much needed workforce skills needed to acquire professional caliber for a lot of in-demand occupations and all our courses are state approved in many professions. Hi everyone!

So sad???? Thanks for the Article Jeff. But I like the way you described Ruzuku. My first course so I want as much help as possible.

Will teachable be as supportive, why did you them the especial nod? Great information thank you very much is there a platform that offers a subscription based pay I am a success coach and work with a lot of companies that would rather pay by the month and have access for all of their employees then by the course. Thank you for your help. I started using teachable and really like the functionality, UI, and ease of setting up the course. The problem I ran into is that files cannot be larger than 2GB.

A lot of our training videos are 3GB and more, so we cant upload them. You own the content that you put into Udemy. I realize this is a few years old now… but I am looking simply for an online platform that I can publish the course and not charge any money for.

Is there anything like that out there? Thanks Jeff for the info. If i create a course on teachable can I use social media to market the Teachable course?

It looks very user friendly feels like a social media platform and it has a lot of great features. You get the benefit of all the MATRIX features, but without having to commit to monthly fees — you only pay a small percentage of what you sell. We also give you full support, free of charge. We are offering some fantastic deals for early adopters, or if you want to get your own branded version of MATRIX, we can also help with that too. We are a small religious order with a newly formed seminary wherein we would like to offer an eLearning option.

We would like something more like an authoring tool platform, like Moodle, to create our courses and track everything from our own website. You might give Educadium a shot — it is Moodle-based, but much friendlier to use, and they deal with the security.

In , just as millennials and the internet itself were coming of age, Napster hit the web and changed the world forever. Allowing a network of global users to easily share music files, the site boomed as the Recording Industry Association of America RIAA and other major industry organizations scrambled to catch up and fetch their high-dollar lawyers.

At its height, Napster hosted around 80 million users , and paved the way for other peer-to-peer sites like LimeWire, uTorrent, and many more. While Napster was eventually shuttered in , the genie was out of the bottle, so to speak, and the piles of cash that CD sales had hauled in began to slowly but surely fade away.

Perhaps just as striking, iTunes sales became a musical powerhouse for Apple, engorging its coffers and changing the way people purchased music — for those who still did pay for it. In , iTunes outpaced CD sales in two major physical stores for the first time. But the modest victory would be short-lived. The first major on-demand service, Spotify, came eight years later, and together, the two companies helped rewrite the music playbook.

In , streaming revenue eclipsed CD sales for the first time, and did the same for digital downloads in Yet, as the physical CD readies to slide into its saddle and ride into the sunset, the music industry is still in relative disarray. Spotify, the biggest on-demand streamer by leaps and bounds, has yet to turn a profit 10 years on.