Thrive Apprentice Plugin: Online Courses In WordPress

How do you create online courses using the Thrive Apprentice plugin, including email marketing integration and your own affiliate program?

Just like with everything, there are advantages and disadvantages.

• Your course is on your WordPress blog
• No need to pay monthly fees – inexpensive
• You need to do your own marketing
• More complicated to to set up the payment processor

Recommended: Take a look at actual Thrive Apprentice-hosted courses to see what you can expect and how to integrate it with WooCommerce.

Thrive Apprentice Alternatives

Podia costs $39/month. If you want the Pro version with an affiliate program feature, you would pay $79/month.

Teachable Basic plan costs $39/month, plus 5% in transaction fees, payouts are monthly, drip course content and integrated email marketing. Their Pro plan costs $99/month, no transaction fees and instant payouts, graded quizzes and integrated affiliate marketing. There is no marketplace, therefore you need to market your course.

Udemy: There is no fee to become a premium instructor, and Udemy does not charge any transaction fees when delivering payment to instructors. Udemy does, however, keep a percentage of each sale depending on the transaction. With Udemy, you have the advantage of using the marketplace to drive traffic to your course.

• 97% revenue share on sales made by instructors,
• 50% revenue share on organic sales and
• 25% instructor revenue share if the sale is made by other affiliates

Skillshare; You can get Skillshare Premium free for 2 months. After that, it costs just $15.00 per month. You can also choose the annual membership, which is $8.25 per month or $99.00 per year. Each month, 30% of Skillshare’s total Premium Membership revenue goes to a royalty pool for teachers.

Thinkific costs $49/month. It also has a free plan that doesn’t have an affiliate program.

But the biggest problem with these platforms is that they store the email addresses of your students and they send marketing emails to them. And if you know anything about online marketing, then you know that your most valuable asset is your mailing list.

(This post contains affiliate links. This means I get a commission if you make a purchase through my links. There is no additional cost to you, but it enables me to provide you information like this for free. Please read my disclosure for more info.)

Your Online Course WordPress Theme

The best WordPress theme for online courses is any of the Thrive themes, because of compatibility reasons.

Thrive Theme Builder is designed to work together with the Thrive Apprentice plugin.

You can, however use any other theme. If you have a premium theme already, you can keep using it without problems.

The layout of my courses, which you see below, come from the Thrive Apprentice plugin, not the theme.

You can read the full process of customizing your course template.

The WordPress Plugins Needed for Your Courses

Thrive Apprentice

With this is an online course plugin you can set up a regular or a video course as well. You can select if you want to host your videos on YouTube, Vistia or Vimeo.

Thrive Apprentice is a ready-to-go platform where you don’t need to bother with building pages from scratch. All you need to do is add your photos, text and videos.

The plugin gives you an entire online course template. There is already a nice lesson structure arranged that is comparable with Teachable or any other premium platform, without the monthly fees and cost. (It costs $67 for 1 website, $97 for 5 websites.)

The updated version of Thrive Apprentice has built-in integration with SendOwl, which means for roughly $10 per month, ($15 if you want an affiliate program) you can sell your course and you don’t need a third party plugin. SendOwl has built-in EU VAT compliance.

Thrive Architect

You will need Thrive Architect to edit the lessons of your course and to set up your opt-in and sales pages. Just select your template, add your photos, text and videos. At the same time you have the freedom to add all kinds of components to the pre-made templates.

(Thrive Architect costs $67 for 1 website, $97 for 5 websites. However for $219 you can get all of the Thrive Themes plugins, including Thrive Leads and also all of their premium themes.)

Membership plugin (free) or WooCommerce (free)

Thrive Apprentice doesn’t include selling and collecting payments for your course.

To do that, you can choose from the following membership plugins, however these don’t include EU VAT feature:

• Paid Membership Pro
• S2Member
• Simple Membership (free)

Alternatively you can use WooCommerce for collecting payments. The advantage of Woo is that

• it has a variety of payment gateway integrations
• because of this it is easy to implement it in a foreign language
• its free WooCommerce Services plugin has built-in VAT support

The disadvantage is that you will need an additional plugin like YITH Automatic Role Changer for WooCommerce Premium to assign a given membership role to the buyer – this is how they can be granted access to that specific course.

I personally tested both versions and I prefer the WooCommerce version, because you don’t have a limit on the number of courses you can sell and you are not stuck with a PayPal payment button that would make your sales page cheesy.

How To Create An Online Course With Thrive Apprentice

Now I am going to show you how easy it is to build a course with the Thrive Apprentice WordPress course plugin.

First create a new page where all your courses will be listed, like “Online Courses”.

Then create a registration page for your courses.

The earlier versions of Thrive Apprentice had to be activated from the Theme Options and only some of the themes were designed to support the course feature.

Instead, you just need to go to the Thrive Dashboard, then click on Thrive Apprentice >Thrive Dashboard.

You will see the following:

Welcome to Thrive Apprentice 2.0!

In order to create your online teaching platform, we need to set up two-three things really quickly.

Step 1: Choose a page where all your courses will reside.

You can search through existing pages and select the one you just created or you can create a new one.

The next screen:

Template Setup

Step 2: You can choose to personalize the template for your courses or go directly to creating courses by loading the default template.

You can always edit the course template by going to Settings > Template Options.

Click on Load Default Template.

You will be taken to your Thrive Apprentice Dashboard.

Go to Settings>General Settings

Set your course registration page and you can enable comments if you want to.

Go to Settings>Template Settings

Here you can change the course’s name, description, font sizes, all the placeholders and  button texts.

With this you can even set your course up to display in a certain language. Just change all text to that language.

Click on Course Topics. It will say “General”.

In this case I am adding “Introductory” for my free stuff and “Premium” for my blog traffic course.

You can assign a photo and pick a color to color code the different types of courses.

Like green for free and dark blue for premium.

Under Filter by Topics you are now able to see the categories you just created.

Now click Add Course.

You can add your course name, URL, write a short introduction.

Then upload an image, approximate size 1170 x 382.

If you press the switch on the left bottom, you can add a video also.

If you click on Advanced Settings, you can set some details like instructor name, if comments are allowed and category.

But more importantly, this is where you can set whether the course is available for logged-in users only and for which user roles. (The plugin uses the built-in WordPress user role system.)

This is the point where the membership or shopping cart plugin connects to the course and therefore you will

• need to have a plugin that enables you to add new user roles to WordPress
• upon payment the membership/shopping cart needs to assign the user role to the customer

Some membership plugins like S2 Member have such features.

You also have a chance to exclude some lessons from the protection rules and use them as teasers.

When you are done, click Save to save your course.

You will see that the plugin pulled your profile photo as instructor. (You can change the instructor to be any registered WordPress user.)

Now you can add lessons.

First you add the intro of the lesson.

To add the actual lesson content, click Edit with Architect. This will open Thrive Architect for adding/editing your lesson content.

From the right sidebar menu you drag and drop either the Paragraph element, in which case you type your text in, but you can also do it with the WordPress Content element, in which case you can use the full WordPress editor to add whatever you wish, even affiliate links.

After you added your first lesson, you can publish it.

After you have done that, you can also publish your course.

If you only have one course, your student will be taken straight to the first lesson. If you have more, you will be taken to an index page like this:

Apprentice Course Page Isn’t Showing Up

I had this problem and it took a while to figure out why.

As a general rule, if you have any problems with Thrive Themes or plugins, there are two reasons.

1. The browser cache or your hosting cache needs to be purged
2. Plugin conflict

If you see a page loading gray, it is always plugin conflict. Identify which plugin is causing the problem by turning them off – you can try one by one, but if that doesn’t work, turn off all plugins (except Thrive) and then turn them on one by one.

The reason why my course pages weren’t showing up was the Thirsty Affiliates plugin. I turned it off and then on and this fixed the problem.

Creating A Sales Page For Your Course

In order to sell your course, you need a sales page. I use Thrive Architect for creating all of my sales pages.

It has a template called Know-How for online courses, which includes not just the sales page, but lead generation page, video sales page, email confirmation page, etc.

You just open the template, change the text, the photos or add any needed elements from the left sidebar, such as text, buttons, background, etc. You can easily change the font, the color, the style of the background, add shadow, pattern, etc.

Click here to see the Know-How sales page demo and the sales page I created for Blogging On The First Page of Google course or my Effective Email Marketing course.

I also created a Course Registration page. I simply took an email confirmation page, deleted some content and added a pricing table from Thrive Architect.

The procedure is similar if you want to create a lead generation page, email confirmation page, etc.

Adding Sales & Membership Features To Thrive Apprentice

We have used Thrive Apprentice to set the course up.

However this plugin doesn’t itself have a feature to sell your course and doesn’t include the membership registration, etc. functions of your site.

Important note: If you sell digital products but aren’t EU VAT compliant, your business is in a vulnerable position and could be fined.

EU VAT calculation and collection built-in:

• SendOwl
• Teachable
• Thrive Cart

Some EU VAT integration if you pay for 3rd-party providers:

• MemberPress
• Paid Memberships Pro
• S2Member
• Kajabi

No EU VAT features:

• LearnDash
• Lifter LMS
• MemberMouse
• AccessAlly
• Thinkific
• Zippy Courses

Set Up A Free Course Sign-up Through WP

If you are giving your course away for free, you can sign someone up for for your mailing list and your free course at the same time:

Selling Your Online Course With SendOwl

You can easily create a purchasing process for your courses, if you create a link between Thrive Apprentice and SendOwl and this is their officially recommended solution.

Naturally, besides having Thrive Apprentice, you will need to have a SendOwl account as well, in order to do this. Once you have both of these, you can start by establishing an API connection between them.

Adding the connection is really easy.

• In the Thrive Dashboard, scroll down a bit to see the “API Connections” card and click on the “Manage Connections” button from it.
• You will see a list with the active connections that you have already set up. Look for the “Add New Connection” section and click on it.
• Select SendOwl

You can read the Knowledge Base for a more detailed tutorial.

Inside SendOwl, you can create products — a series of actions that take place upon purchase — as well as customize your cart and checkout experience for customers. You can set your checkout to appear when visitors click ‘buy now’ buttons on your sales page — a super easy step to set up when using the Thrive Architect landing page and content builder.

You can insert the purchase links of your products on sales pages by linking them either to call-to-action texts, buttons, images or to other elements of your choice, using Thrive Architect.

Setting up a Checkout and a Thank you page is the final part of the “SendOwl Settings” process.

Go to your Thrive Apprentice dashboard and click on the “Settings” section from the upper right corner of the page:

This is where you can configure all these settings. You can read the Knowledge Base for more details.

If your customer is from the EU, VAT will automatically be calculated, collected and reported for you by SendOwl— no expensive tax software add-ons needed. It also has a built-in affiliate program where you can reward other bloggers for selling your courses.

SendOwl does not replace your Email Service Provider, but does integrate directly with:

• ActiveCampaign
• AWeber
• Campaign Monitor
• Constant Contact
• ConvertKit
• Drip (Mailing List)
• GetResponse
• InfusionSoft
• Mad Mimi
• MailChimp
• MailerLite
• Sendy

Selling Your Online Course With ThriveCart

Now you are able to sell Thrive Apprentice online courses through ThriveCart without any need for a 3rd party membership tool.

ThriveCart is not created by Thrive Themes. They have a similar name but are a different company.

Let’s go through the setup process.

Step 1. The first step is to create a Thrive Apprentice API key to connect with ThriveCart.

You’ll only need to complete this step once per website.

In Thrive Apprentice, find the new API Keys option under the Settings dropdown.

Follow the steps and create your own API key.

Now, head over to ThriveCart and navigate to Settings > Integrations.

You’ll find Thrive Apprentice listed as a membership platform.

Under the integration settings, enter the Thrive Apprentice site name, URL (including https before the address), and your API Key, then save the site.

Step 2: Connect a ThriveCart product to a Thrive Apprentice course

Inside of Thrive Apprentice, you’ll find a new option under the ‘Access Restrictions’ tab for your courses: ThriveCart Product.

It’s super simple. Select it, click Add Rule and Save. The rest will be managed from ThriveCart.

Note: Courses will only show up in ThriveCart if they are published and have the correct access rule set.
Now it’s time to configure a product in ThriveCart.

When you arrive at the Fulfillment tab in ThriveCart’s product setup, choose ‘Add them to my membership site’. The name may seem a bit misleading, since you are not applying a membership tier. Instead, you are providing access to a specific course.

You’ll then be able to select Thrive Apprentice, find the name of your site and select the Thrive Apprentice course that you would like to sell.

You’ll also be able to add courses as order bumps, or for any upsells and downsells in your sales funnel.

Now you can either use ThriveCart’s own checkout pages or embed the checkout into the funnel pages on your WordPress site built with our landing page builder, Thrive Architect. If you’d like to do the latter, we have a video tutorial on exactly how to set that up right here.

How the Purchase Flow Works

Once a customer has entered your sales funnel and completed a purchase, an account will be made on your WordPress website tied to the email address they used at the checkout, and they’ll be granted access to their courses.

If a WordPress account with that email address already exists, the customer can go ahead and login with the password they’re already using.

If an account does not yet exist, you can now automatically send them their login details via email.

How to Configure the Login Details Email

Under Settings in Thrive Apprentice, you’ll find a Email Templates area.

Inside this area, you’ll see a ‘New Account Created’ email template.

You can use this same template for SendOwl or for free courses you offer as lead magnets

Thrive Apprentice + WooCommerce

The above is really neat, however I was looking for a solution that doesn’t require a monthly fee.

WooCommerce is great for this.

Learn the full setup details in the article on Thrive Apprentice WooCommerce Integration.

Membership Plugin Integrations

Despite what many people think, you don’t need Woo and a membership plugin.

You can choose which one is better for you.

Learn the details on how to use membership plugins to sell your course.

Adding Email Marketing To Your Online Course

I mentioned that the plugins I recommend have the ability to connect with AWeber, MailChimp, etc.

With the email problem fixed as above, you now also have an alternative way to send out emails with the Newsletter plugin. It also has a very affordable S2 Members extension for $16.99.

Marketing Your Online Course

Thrive Themes has Course Craft, the course that teaches you the complete system for building a highly profitable online course business.

Shane, the CEO was in the online courses business and personally released 6 and 7 figure courses on a shoestring budget. In fact he started Thrive Themes and git into the plugin business because he was unhappy about the existing online course solutions.

Shane is going to show you how you can create an online course that sells for $200… and sell on average, 1 of them per day.

With this release Thrive Apprentice was made available for purchase as a plugin on its own and SendOwl integration was added.

If you don’t want to pay the monthly fee, keep reading, check out the rest of  this post.

Can I integrate Thrive Apprentice with SendOwl after creating my course?

Yes, you can integrate it at any time.

Conclusion

If you want to see how an actual WordPress online course looks like, you can check out the demo course I built with the Thrive Apprentice plugin. (I will be releasing my actual course soon.)