Online learning continues to grow in popularity. People who might have once gone to night school or might have considered leaving their jobs in order to pursue knowledge and enrichment now have thousands of choices that fit their lives and schedules. It’s also easier than ever to level up on skills surgically, finding niche experts who offer their own accelerated learning experiences that focus on a specific process or area of proficiency.
With demand steadily climbing for these kinds of information products, it makes sense that more and more of us are also getting into the game by selling courses and subscriptions to paid membership websites.
If you’re interested in launching your own knowledge commerce business, whether it’s as a side project or as a key component to your revenue flow, then you’re going to need to build a great website dedicated to your knowledge products. This website needs to have the ability to attract an audience, get people interested, capture leads, collect payments and deliver dynamic course experiences. And all the better if the site can also work seamlessly with solutions for nurturing leads on autopilot.
However, patching multiple tools together for your online course website can be tough on your sanity and wallet. Plus, there’s always the possibility of running into compatibility roadblocks when trying to integrate several platforms.
Fortunately, there is a cost-effective way to build, market and sell online courses without having to worry about the tech side of things. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at Kajabi and discuss how you can use it to sell your knowledge online, whether it’s in the form of an online course, an e-book, or a membership site.
Overview of Kajabi
Kajabi is an all-in-one platform for building courses, marketing digital products, and memberships, and selling your knowledge. It packs several versatile features into one easy-to-use destination, including solutions to build and edit web pages, landing pages and courses; email marketing automation and contact management features; easy setup for collecting payments using Stripe or PayPal; and powerful business analytics, so you can prioritize your ongoing funnel optimization efforts.
Basically, Kajabi takes care of the infrastructure side of selling courses so you can focus on creating the actual course content and delivering value to students.
It’s also great for creating a membership site or selling different types of digital products that are designed to share knowledge, such as e-books. You can also use it to create quizzes and surveys to enhance your students’ learning experience and host engaging marketing webinars.
So yes, there’s a lot that goes into selling your knowledge online. Here, we’ll step through some of the key features on offer with Kajabi that make it easy for course instructors and membership site owners to start selling their courses, memberships, and digital products.
Working With Kajabi’s Website Builder
The first step you want to take towards selling your knowledge online is creating a website that lets you market and actually sell your products. Kajabi comes with a built-in knowledge commerce platform that you can use to sell all of your products from a single branded storefront.
Kajabi comes with several pre-built templates that make it easy to get things up and running so you can start selling right away. Right away, you can easily and quickly change the styles of different elements across all pages, including the text, colors, and images.
One of the best things about Kajabi is that you can personalize your site’s design without any coding knowledge though, if you are tech-savvy, the platform lets you modify code to create a custom site design. You can choose whether you want to keep these changes specific to a single page or apply them across your entire website.
Its built-in blogging platform is likewise super easy to set up and enables you to create new content and share updates with your students and community members. It’s also a great way to get the word out about your course or membership and generate leads.
You can also add a login page to your online course website that lets students access all the content they’ve purchased from you. This way, they can rest assured that they have easy access to all of the course content at all times.
Building out Your Products and Courses
Kajabi comes with several tools out of the box to help you quickly build your course site and add your products to it. And if you have already developed a lot of content and information but aren’t sure how to best structure it all into a course with lessons, video lectures, downloadable materials and interactive assessments, Kajabi’s Product Blueprints feature is a huge help.
Once you’ve created the actual course content, adding it to your site is a cakewalk.
Using Blueprints, you can create four different types of products:
- Online course
- Mini course
- Evergreen training
- Membership
In addition to this, you also have the option to start with a blank template. Kajabi will guide you through the step-by-step process of building your online course. Once that’s done, all you have to do is configure pricing plans and link to a payment solution of your choice.
In addition to building courses, it also lets you deliver an engaging, customizable learning experience to your students. Additionally, you can control the speed at which students receive your course material by dripping content based on a pre-defined schedule.
With Kajabi, you’re able to upload video files to your course site, while the actual file hosting, delivery and encoding of your video content is handled behind the scenes by Wistia. This way, your students will be able to view your course videos whenever and wherever they want, with best-in-class video streaming. This is especially useful for online learners who are always on the go.
You can also further enrich your lessons by uploading multiple types of resources including images, documents, presentations, and audio files and allow students to download course content directly from your site.
Kajabi lets you facilitate engaging in-course discussions with your students. It sends automatic notifications via email to students and members if someone replies to their comments, making it easy for them to rejoin the discussion.
Managing Leads and Online Learners
Kajabi makes it easy for course instructors and membership site owners to manage their contacts. For example, you can bulk import users to your platform simply by pasting in a list of names and email addresses.
You can also view a complete list of students who’ve purchased your content and easily see who has bought what, using the built-in filter tool. Similarly, the member dashboard lets you view specific details about each user, including their payment and login history. It also lets you create notes to record specific discussions you might have had with a student or member.
Kajabi lets you easily see all user comments posted across your website from one place, which makes it easy to moderate them and reply to questions.
It’s also worth mentioning that Kajabi enhances the student’s user experience in different ways. For example, it lets you create a multi-step checkout process that’s designed to eliminate friction and minimize cart abandonment rates.
It also has a built-in lifecycle feature that allows you to better understand and track the customer’s journey. This lets you develop a better understanding of their first interaction with your website, where they’re currently at, and how they interact with your marketing messages.
Kajabi’s tagging feature lets you segment contacts based on their behavior. You can also use it to bulk tag member groups for a specific action (for example, to drip specific course content to them) or to run a specific marketing campaign geared towards them.
Kajabi lets you tag users when you first import them into the platform, after they opt-in, or once they complete an email sequence, purchase an offer, attend an event, answer specific quiz questions or anything else. This makes it easy to work towards optimizing the lifetime value of your relationships.
Unleashing Powerful Marketing Automation
You’ll need to market your courses in order to get the word out, attract qualified leads, and sell courses and memberships. While other course platforms might offer lower monthly fees for sellers, Kajabi’s marketing functionalities are clear differentiators that pay for themselves.
You can use Kajabi to create conversion-optimized landing pages for capturing leads and delivering special offers. All you have to do is select a template, add your own messaging to it, and (optionally) customize its design.
Kajabi’s Pipelines feature lets you create specific marketing funnels aimed at guiding different audience segments through a particular experience towards conversion. Here’s how it works.
Let’s say you offer web design training for freelancers and have a large email list broken down into segments according to experience: college students who haven’t yet started freelancing, people who are just starting to freelance on the side and are considering scaling up, and seasoned freelancers who are hoping to improve their business efficiencies. You could create a pipeline that promotes your course with a series of videos that show the different ways your course helps college students to build amazing design portfolio websites.
People who engage with many assets along the way are sent additional content resources and eventually a special offer. Those who don’t click on your emails might receive a short re-engagement prompt, asking if they might prefer to unsubscribe and to share what their biggest challenges are. And you can build out similar pipelines for the other two segments, each pipeline having a different flow and different marketing messages.
Upgraded Analytics for Business Strategy Insights
Kajabi’s recently launched Professional Analytics feature lets you make the most of all of the data signals your website and other Kajabi-connected marketing assets receive and gives you useful insights about your business.
This information can help you make improvements to your site’s design, course content and marketing strategy.
Here are some of the different types of reports you get with Kajabi:
- Its sales report lets you view exactly how many courses you’ve sold over a specific time period and your conversion rate.
- The opt-in report lets you see how many users opted in to your pipelines and calculates the opt-in percentage.
- Page view reports let you see how many people viewed your landing pages, monitor your site traffic, and how much time each user spent on each page.
Conclusion
Kajabi is an all-in-one platform that gives you pretty much everything you need to build online courses, deliver enhanced learning experiences to students, and market and sell your products. In addition to this, it comes with a number of powerful features that make it easy for course instructors to manage students and see how their courses are performing.
While other platforms like Thinkific or Podia might offer cheaper payment plans for course sellers, the marketing features that I’ve seen supported on these platforms are sparse. Kajabi’s Pipelines, Tags and brand new Professional Analytics modules make it the best value on the market from my perspective.
