Create a Membership Site Using a Course

If you want to sell a membership, a Teachery Course can do that!

Jason Zook avatar
Written by Jason Zook
Updated over a week ago

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 and our recurring payment pages to host your membership! πŸ™Œ

βš™οΈ How to setup a Course as a 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...

πŸ’Έ Using a recurring payment page for your membership

Let's pretend you are selling a $20/month membership. Here's all you need to do:

  1. While editing your course you're using as the membership

  2. Open the "Payment Pages" area of the left sidebar

  3. Click + Add Payment Page

  4. Name the page (example: $20 Basic Membership)

  5. Set the Payment Type to Monthly Recurring*

  6. Set the Monthly Price to $20

  7. 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")

  8. Click Create Page and then customize the page to your liking βœ…

*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.

When you fully create your first Recurring Payment Page we automatically set up a Recurring Payment Failed Email in the "Course Emails" section of the left sidebar. This email will help you capture failed payments. Learn more about recurring payment pages here.

πŸ’³ Using a fixed payment page for your membership

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.

πŸ’‘ Tips for Structuring a Course 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:

Example #1 - New Content Added Monthly

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 βœ”οΈ. That's it!

Remember: When a customer has access to a course, any new Lessons or Sublessons you add (or content you change in existing Lessons/Sublessons) will immediately be available to them. You can use our Lesson Locking feature to delay releasing new content.

Example #2 - Weekly Membership

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 πŸ˜‰) 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.

⚑️ Membership Actions

Pausing a customer's membership

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.

Revoking a customer's access or canceling their payments

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.

Allowing a member to upgrade to a different price

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:

  1. In the Customer Profile: Actions > Revoke Course Access

  2. In the Customer Profile: Actions > Cancel Subscription (a customer cannot have two active recurring payments at one time for the same course)

  3. 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!

Have affiliates of your membership

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 πŸ’¬ in the bottom right of your screen.

Did this answer your question?