Online courses consist of modules, lessons, quizzes and certifications.

Here's some inspiration

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Online courses built with MemberSpace

Step 1

Choose your topic

Your course should be about one thing that you’re an expert on, with a specific result or transformation your course members will achieve from it.

It’s best to start small and build from there! You can always add more content, bonus lessons, or new courses later. 🙂

Step 2

Outline your lessons and course format

Break your chosen topic into even smaller pieces — these subtopics will be your lessons. If you begin writing out your lessons and find they’re getting very long or involved, you may need to go back to step one and break your course topic down even further!

Choose how you’d like to structure your course and what format would pair best with the information you want to share. Many digital courses contain a mix of written and video content. Some include workbooks or other downloads. Again, start small! You can always add more later.

There are many free tools that you can use to create your course:

Canva is a free graphic design program with lots of templates for guides, workbooks, and handouts.
Unsplash has a great library of royalty-free photos for use in your guides or promotional materials.
Loom lets you record videos — including picture-in-picture walkthroughs perfect for sharing your screen — for free.

Step 3

Create your course pages on your website

You will need:

A public landing page to advertise your course
Individual lesson pages that contain the educational content

Public landing page

Individual lesson page

Nest these pages underneath each other, creating a hierarchy known as a subdirectory. For example:

Public landing page:
yourwebsite.com/course

Lesson pages:

yourwebsite.com/course/lesson-1

yourwebsite.com/course/lesson-2

yourwebsite.com/course/lesson-3

Step 4

Protect your pages with MemberSpace

After building your course pages on your website, you’ll protect these pages with MemberSpace so only members can access them. If you’ve structured your pages with the nested format above, you can protect all pages en masse.

Remember to keep your highest-level page (e.g. yourwebsite.com/course) public for new members to sign up.

💡 MemberSpace Tip

When protecting pages, you can specify when each page should become available to members — immediately, a certain number of days after signup, or on a specific date/time. This allows you to provide all lessons at once, or release new lessons on a certain schedule (drip out Member Page access).

When protecting each of your lesson pages, choose a title (and, if you’d like, emoji) to appear in your Member Menu — this is how your logged in students will access your course content.

🔐 Optional
For an added layer of protection, you can add our extra security code to each of your protected pages.

Step 5

Add course content to your protected pages

Now that your pages are protected, build out your content however you’d like on your course pages. You have complete design control over how this looks! 🙌

To add files like workbooks or videos to your course pages, simply link to private videos and documents you’ve uploaded to your website.

🎬 Protecting videos

You’ll host your videos on YouTube, Vimeo, or Wistia. These services allow you to upload videos without making them public in the video streaming app itself. Then, you can add your videos to your course pages either directly via your website’s editor, or using MemberSpace Content Links.

🔐 Optional
MemberSpace Content Links provide additional security by generating a unique URL for each of your files; these files are then only accessible to paying customers who are logged in to your course.

Some people like to include quizzes in their online course and provide a certificate upon completion. There are many tools you can use to create a quiz or certificate!

Create a quiz:

Typeform
Survey Monkey
Google Forms

Design a certificate:

Canva
Bannerbear
VistaCreate

Step 6

Set a price for access

Now that your course pages and content is protected, you’ll create a plan that gives your students access!

MemberSpace offers flexible payment options so you can choose the billing format that works best for your needs:

Recurring payment (e.g. $100 per month)
Multiple payment (e.g. 3 payments of $100)
One-time payment (e.g. 1 payment of $100)
Free (no payment)

Courses are often sold via one-time payment. If the cost of the course may be a barrier for some students, you can also offer a multiple payment option for members to pay via a payment plan.

If you offer multiple forms of content (like a course + community), you can sell different tiers of access by creating multiple plans and differentiating which plan(s) have access to higher-tier content.

Step 7

Add the signup link to your website

Copy your plan’s signup link via the gray button next to your plan’s name. Add the signup link to your course sales page so that visitors can purchase access.

Your course is now live! 🚀

MemberSpace Resources

Adding products and protecting pages
How to protect pages en masse
What type of content can I protect with MemberSpace?
Creating member plans

Adding Content Links

Setting up your Member Menu
Member signup and login link options
Testing your member experience

For additional resources on marketing and selling your online course, check out MemberSpace University, our hub of step-by-step guides, educational videos, technical and strategy tips, and more.

Launching your online course

It’s a good idea to try out your new course pages before launching to the public. Set up a free test plan or temporary 100% off coupon and use it to “join” your course.

Once you are happy with how everything looks, it’s time to launch! There are no limits to how you can promote your course when using MemberSpace, so share your landing page link on social media, in an email signature, or anywhere else you can paste a URL.