Why Choose LearnDash to Publish Your Online Courses?

Want to make more money with your content online? We recommend you create online courses using LearnDash LMS to boost content sales and provide evergreen education to customers in your niche.

This article is Part 1 of 3 in our Guide to Increasing Your Online Course Sales with Learndash LMS.

For the competitive market in which we find ourselves this year, static business processes may not be enough to generate the expected sales you’re dreaming about. So how do you boost revenue and amp up your sales margins in today’s competitive market?

By creating and selling online courses in your niche.

TL;DR

You may have expertise related to your industry, but not everyone has the expertise to develop online courses with engaging content and personalized resources. The best course experience is delivered through a Learning Management Systems (LMS) which offers a complete set of resources to help you create, sell and manage your online courses.

This can play a huge role in setting you apart from your competitors.

Luckily, if you browse online, there’s a large collection of online course platforms available for businesses that make it easy to create the kinds of course material you can sell to potential students.

The only question that remains is, which one should you choose?

In our opinion, LearnDash is the most valuable choice, as it is known for its convenient usage and top-notch e-learning compatibility across the board.

The most interesting thing we love about LearnDash is that integrates with WordPress and gives you access to a ton of product-focused plugins. Since it is part of the WordPress open source environment it also means that you aren’t locked in by a 3rd party proprietary platform.

In fact, that’s why brands like extraktLAB use it for their online learning center to generate potential leads.

Other brands like Piano Online have a hybrid approach where they use LearnDash to collect leads and sell their curriculum to students.

LearnDash is extremely flexible as well, and can work within any niche. Truly, you can use LearnDash LMS in multiple ways according to your goals and business requirements.

That’s why we created this guide: to lead you in an exploration of the various LearnDash features and show you how its integration with WordPress can help you create and sell all your educational assets online!

Yoast SEO as an example integrates with LearnDash LMS to help businesses expand their course material.

“Yoast SEO was looking for an LMS to offer SEO-related courses online. Interestingly, LearnDash features helped the company to create and manage meaningful exercises. Now, they can offer various SEO courses with transcripts, assignments, video content, and recorded zoom meetings.”

Before we dig into why you should use an LMS, let’s define what an LMS is so you know just what you’re getting into.

What is LearnDash?

LearnDash is a powerful Learning Management System (LMS) designed to integrate seamlessly with WordPress websites. It allows users to create, promote, and sell online courses with ease. With LearnDash LMS, you can develop comprehensive course pages featuring lessons, topics, quizzes, and assignments. Additionally, LearnDash offers subscription options to promote long-term engagement with your clients.

And that’s not all! LearnDash prioritizes experiential learning by encouraging interactive content, such as exercises and note-taking. Plus, content can be added in multiple formats, including text, videos, and images, making e-learning more efficient.

LearnDash LMS also supports drip-feeding, allowing you to schedule content delivery to enhance learning experiences. You can even take advantage of robust features like quizzes and assignments, which help monitor student performance and learning outcomes, especially for those signed up through your LearnDash subscriptions.

Certificates and badges can then be awarded to learners for course completion and achievements, adding motivation and a sense of accomplishment. LearnDash LMS also offers a Gradebook feature for tracking and displaying student progress.

Lastly, LearnDash supports forum creation through integrations with plugins like BBPress, enabling a community-driven learning environment. With LearnDash, you have a comprehensive toolset to create, manage, and optimize your e-learning courses.

What is Learndash and How Does It Work? | LearnDash Support

What is LearnDash, you ask?

As we’ve said before, LearnDash LMS is one of the most productive Learning Management Systems out there, and is known for its cutting-edge e-learning compatibility.

The LearnDash LMS integrates with your WordPress website and allows you to create, promote and sell online courses.

LearnDash enables you to create dedicated course pages with various lessons, topics, quizzes, and assignments, including LearnDash subscription opportunities. You can track the progress of participants and even allow them to track their own progress using the Course Grid Add-on.

But how does it all work?

How Does LearnDash Work?

Looking at the capabilities for LearnDash LMS, you may still be wondering: How does LearnDash actually work?

Suppose you’re an experienced freelancer and want to share your freelancing expertise through an engaging course. You may have a website, but still have some challenges to face such as course creation, managing leads, personalization, checkouts, and more.

That can be a lot to swallow for those who have expertise in one niche, but not a lot of understanding about how to create and sell courses online.

Here, LearnDash LMS comes up as a lifesaver with a complete set of resources to help streamline the way you deliver course material. Whether you want to set up registration or payment functions, create subscription packages, or any other process that will boost your course sales, LearnDash LMS gives you direct access to multiple plugins designed to meet every requirement you may have.

Just integrate LearnDash LMS with your WordPress website, select add-ons, and automate all the e-learning processes as needed.

To help you visualize what add-ons you might want to use, here is a quick-list (with pictures) of our top five favorite features of LearnDash LMS:

1. Optional course grid that displays all available courses

2. Course description page

3. Registration forms for easy check-out

4. Optional welcome page that leads users to the course/membership dashboard

5. A dedicated course page which contains the series of lessons you offer (and where users can track their progress)

6. LearnDash subscription options to promote long-term client engagement

What Can You Do with LearnDash?

Now that we have explored various LearnDash features and know how they add value to your WordPress courses, it’s time to explore some interesting things that you can do with LearnDash LMS to get the best return on your investments–and even boost sales!

Here are the top seven opportunities to grow your business with LearnDash:

1. Create and Sell Online Courses:

Online course creation and sales are the primary purposes of using LearnDash. The LMS offers you a platform to create personalized online courses with videos, animations, and more. You can even convert your Zoom recordings into an on-demand “evergreen” course.

When we talk about selling courses, remember that we are assuming you already have access to famous eCommerce plugins such as WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads (EDD).

These plugins allow you to offer one-time purchases, subscriptions, course bundles, and membership plans for the courses you want to sell.

2. Add Content:

In a world where content is kind and is a way to market your products AND make money from your expertise, finding more ways to add and even reuse content is integral to your business.

We’re not just talking about written lessons either; videos and images make e-learning really efficient and engaging for the participants. From text to videos, you can add and manage every type of content using the LearnDash LMS.

Even if you’re looking to organize videos by topic, LearnDash LMS is a perfect option for you. It’s a highly scalable plugin and gives you access to add lessons and bonus content whenever you want–even through mobile.

The LMS allows you to host course videos on the platforms like Vimeo, YouTube, and more. If you already hosted the video, you can organize it on your website with other learning resources to sell over and over again.

3. Drip Feeding:

Drip feeding here means scheduling the content, courses, or lessons at a predefined time. Even if you may not need this feature right now we recommend the LMS you select allows for drip feeding. It will make it easier for you to offer on-demand courses or companion materials to a live course as your business grows.

With LearnDash drip content, you can schedule the course lessons using Calendar dates to get it posted on the website or unlock access after a set number of days since the registration date of a student. LearnDash actually features an option to share information through email to participants once it’s available.

Plugins like ActiveMember360 and ActiveCampaign support even complex schedules with various tags or lessons. Suppose you have a course with 12 lessons. You can provide the first four lessons for free, whereby participants are required to make a purchase to access the other eight lessons.

Then, through the drip-feed process, those course lessons will be automatically delivered to the customer’s inbox without you having to do anything manually to get the products to them.

4. Quiz and Assignments:

Quizzes and assignments are among the most important parts of an online course through e-learning platforms. This helps ensure that your students achieve their learning objectives.

Interestingly, LearnDash supports eight different types of formats for quizzes and assignments. You can choose from Fill-In-The-Blank, Single Answer, MCQs, Matching, Survey, Sorting, and more.

As a result, these options help you monitor student performance, and understand more about course retention and drop off. You can even use LearnDash to give education credits according to the performance!

5. Certificate and Badges:

A participant enrolled in your online course or through your LearnDash subscription tier will seek an official certificate or badge from your business. With LearnDash, you can create customized certificates using the pre-installed templates and hand those over to the participant after course completion.

Besides certificates, LearnDash also enables you to create in-course badges according to the participant’s performance–which gives them more incentive and motivation to continue with your program. If you delve into badges you’ll want to put a strategy behind your gamification to ensure it is meaningful for your students.

The way these badges work is like this: Suppose a participant has completed the first 10 lessons of the course. You can create a custom badge to mark that event in their progress as a kind of positive reinforcement tool that makes them feel they’re doing well.

6. Gradebook:

You may have added assignments or quizzes in your online course to check participants’ performance. But how will you display their performance so they can see it? Grading is a perfect way to display the progress and performance of your online course participants.

For instance, you can take advantage of the LearnDash Gradebook premium plugin, which automates the grading process according to participant performance in quizzes and assignments. Furthermore, you can also use this plugin for manual grading, creating report cards, and more.

7. Forum Creation:

Last but not least, forums are a great way to encourage communications among educators and participants. LearnDash integrations work with forum plugins such as BBPress to create course-based forums for the participants.

This is beneficial since the community can keep students motivated to keep learning, and they have a way to ask questions from other students if you don’t offer live feedback sessions.

In fact, Zapier allows you to integrate your LearnDash LMS with various third-party applications like Circles.io and Peerboard.com to create exciting forum centers where people and students can interact. You can restrict certain discussion areas to students of specific courses to control the conversation and who gets to participate in it.

Keep in mind however that LearnDash doesn’t create a forum itself so you will have to manage that yourself, or have your developer manage it for you, unless you pick a hosted discussion board like Peerboard and Circles.

Too many integrations? Don’t worry!

We understand how complicated it is to integrate various plugins and use them to boost your WordPress LMS. This is why you’ll want to jump to part 2, 9 WordPress Integrations for LearnDash LMS we Love!

If you are looking at converting more students and customers, then you’ll want to attend our free masterclass that will help you convert your virtual meetings into a lead and sales engine that makes you money–or you can hire yourself a trusted LearnDash developer through The Digital Navigator.

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This article is Part 1 of 3 in our Guide to Increasing Your Online Course Sales with Learndash LMS. Click to ahead to Part Two: 9 WordPress Integrations for LearnDash LMS we Love!, or Part Three:How to Make More Money with LearnDash.