Looking to have a "Membership Site" where you get paid on a recurring basis and deliver members-only content to your customers?
We put "membership site" in quotes because Teachery is still a course platform at its core. That said, with a little bit of creativity, you can use a Teachery course (or a bundle of courses) and our recurring payment pages to host your membership! 🙌
The most important step here is to visualize your course as a members-only content area. The "Lessons" you create are simply pages where you add content your members can access.
There's nothing special you need to do for the initial course creation, just create a new course and structure the Lessons (and/or Sublessons) in a way that will make sense for your members.
Let's talk about setting up payment access for your membership...
Let's pretend you are selling a $20/month membership. Here's all you need to do:
While editing your course you're using as the membership
Open the "Payment Pages" area of the left sidebar
Click + Add Payment Page
Name the page (example: $20 Basic Membership)
Set the Payment Type to Monthly Recurring*
Set the Monthly Price to $20
In the "How Many Months" step, leave it blank if it's a membership someone pays for forever (if it's a 10-month membership, set it to "10")
Click Create Page and then customize the page to your liking ✅
*If you want to charge annually for your membership, just use the Yearly Recurring option here. And if you want to offer both monthly AND annual options, create two individual recurring payment pages and use the "Add Payment Options" feature on one/both of them.
Boom! You've created the recurring payment page a customer will use to purchase access to your membership! It's as simple as that.
If you're NOT charging monthly or annually to access your membership, then all you need to do is create a fixed (1-time) payment page!
Follow the steps above, but instead of Payment Type = Monthly/Annual, just used "Fixed."
Once a customer buys through the 1-time payment page, they will have access to the course you're using as a membership.
There are loads of ways you could structure a course to be used as a membership! Here are two of the most common we've seen from other Teachery users:
If your membership has new content added to it monthly, all you need to do is use new Lessons to "release" new content each month.
Create a new Lesson and keep it in DRAFT mode. Fill out the Lesson with all the content you want to deliver to your membership customers for the next month.
Once the next month rolls around and you want to make the Lesson available to your existing customers, just PUBLISH the Lesson ✔. That's it!
Want your membership to follow a weekly "schedule" but don't want to have so many Lessons that it overwhelms your customers? Use Sublessons as weeks! 🌟
Let's say your membership covers a year of content. You'll use the Lessons as the "monthly containers" and then Sublessons within them as "weekly containers."
The course would look like this:
Lesson 1: Month 1
Sublesson 1: Week 1
Sublesson 2: Week 2
Etc...
Lesson 2: Month 2
Sublesson 2.1: Week 5
Sublesson 2.2: Week 6
Etc...
You can (obviously 😉) rename the Lessons and Sublessons to whatever you want! The key is to use Sublessons as the nested content under Lessons to act as Weeks and Months.
If you went a slightly different route and chose to deliver your membership as a bundle of courses/products, here’s the setup in a nutshell (but be sure to read the full help doc here):
Set up a recurring payment page in your “main” (membership access) course for the full price of the membership.
Create a zero-cost upsell in that course and add it to the recurring payment page. Be sure to use the URL that has the upsell already preselected for users.
The overview page of your “main” course can simply serve to list handy info for your users on how/where to get started, how to navigate Teachery, how to contact you for support, the link to cancel their payment plans, a reset password link, etc.
In the “main” course, you can also create individual lessons that represent/introduce each of the courses/products in the bundle and in which you can include links to each of their overview/dashboard pages. In the case where it’s a new course/product you’ve just added to the bundle (don’t forget to add the new course/product to your upsell), you can also include a direct link to that course’s/product’s zero-cost payment page through which existing members can self-enrol into the new course (enrolment into future courses/products is not automatic).
Using our Recurring Payment Pages gives you the option of pausing a customer's membership. If you've ever sold anything with recurring payments, you'll know having a "pause" function is hard to come by! Read more about pausing recurring payments here.
When you view a customer's profile in Teachery, you'll find an Actions menu that allows you to do things like revoke access, cancel a recurring payment subscription, and more. You can read more about customer actions here.
The way Teachery works is once a customer has access to a course, they cannot purchase the same course again. If you want your customer to able to pay for your membership course again, you'd need to do the following three things:
In the Customer Profile: Actions > Revoke Course Access
In the Customer Profile: Actions > Cancel Subscription (a customer cannot have two active recurring payments at one time for the same course)
Once #1 and #2 are done, give your customer the link to the Recurring (or Fixed) Payment Page you want them to purchase and they can now purchase again!
Our Course Affiliates feature has you covered! Your members can promote your membership course on your behalf and earn commissions. Read more on Course Affiliates here.
We hope you can see all the creativity at your fingertips using a course as a membership site! If you have any questions about setting this up, send us a note through the 💬 in the bottom right of your screen.
