Once you have started pre-selling your course and are confident that you have enough interest to move forward with creating your course content, we have a few recommendations for setting this up in Thinkific.
Are you just exploring the idea of pre-selling and not sure where to get started? Check out How to Pre-sell a Course
In this article:
Creating Your Launch Content
Once you start getting sign ups and are confident that you want to continue creating your full course, you'll want to make sure that your students don't have access to the course content until launch day. There are a couple approaches you can consider when adding this content to Thinkific:
Create Content in Your Existing Course
The simplest way to get started is to create content in your existing pre-sell course. There are some great features in Thinkific you can use to prevent students from seeing content before launch:
Draft Lessons
Draft lessons are lessons that you can work on within your course that are not visible to students currently enrolled. You can select "set to draft" in your lesson or chapter settings to hide them. Once your course is ready to launch, you can simply uncheck this box!
Drip Schedule by Calendar Date
Our Drip Schedule feature is available on paid plans and allows you to control when lessons will be visible to your students. Students will be able to see lesson names within the Course Player, but not any of the lesson content until specified by the Drip Schedule. You can simply set your Drip date to match your launch date and students will automatically have access on that date!
Advantages with creating content in your existing course:
- Students will automatically access your content once you remove the Draft setting and/or if you have a Drip Schedule applied
Important considerations:
- Once you have created and removed the Draft setting for all of your content, make sure to Recalculate Progress. This will ensure that student progress is calculated based on the current lessons available within the course.
Create a New Launch Course
Another option for creating your launch content is to create an entirely new course and enroll your pre-sell students into this full course on launch day! Enrolling existing students into your new course uses features available our Pro plan plus Growth package or higher.
Advantages with creating a new launch course:
- You don't have to worry about setting lessons to Draft or Recalculating Progress
- You can add a Drip Schedule by student enrollment date. Since you will be enrolling students into a new course on launch day, their enrollment date will be the date of your launch, which works great if you would like to Drip release content based on student enrollment date!
- You can add a Drip Schedule by course start date. Since you will be enrolling students into a new course on launch day, they won't be able to access the course until that date. If a student doesn't access the course until a few days after launch, no problem! Their Drip will start as soon as they access your lessons for the first time.
Important considerations:
- With this option, you will be manually enrolling students into your new course which requires our Pro plan plus Growth package or higher
- You will need to filter for students currently enrolled in your pre-sell course and bulk enroll them into your new course on launch day
- You will need to customize your new course landing page
- You will need to unpublish your pre-sell course after launching
- Also consider customizing any call to action buttons on your pre-sell course landing page to direct any visitors after launch to your new course landing page
Great! So should I create content in my existing course or create a new launch course?
We know that this can be a lot to consider. We have seen success with both options and if you are not sure which route to go, here is a high level overview of what to consider before choosing:
| Create Content in Your Existing Course | Create a New Launch Course |
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Course Launch
You are finally ready to launch, congrats! On launch day, make sure to check out the following steps based on the content option you went with in the previous step.
Next Steps: If Launch Content Is in Your Existing Course
- If you have Draft lessons, make sure to uncheck the draft setting on all chapters and lessons
- If you previously offered early-bird pricing, make sure to make any pricing updates now
- Reach out to your students to let them know the course is available!
Next Steps: If you Created a New Launch Course
- Make sure your new course is published and your current price is set
- Customize and enable your Course Welcome Email if you would like to notify students that your course is now available
- Unpublish your pre-sell course
- Customize and call to action buttons on your pre-sell course landing page to direct new visitors to your launch course!
- Now for enrolling your students! Filter for students currently enrolled in your pre-sell course and then bulk enroll them into your launch course.
And that's it! Your students will now have access to all of your content.