Create your course sales page on your website (not on Thinkific)
Do you have online courses hosted on a third-party platform such as Thinkific, Podia or Teachable? If you do, here’s a way that you can improve the visibility of your courses and increase sales too.
Most often, I see my clients create their course sales pages on the third-party teaching platform.
While these teaching platforms are great for hosting your course content, I always recommend creating your sales page on your own website.
Creating your sales page on your website can:
Support your incredible offering to stand out
Help your ideal clients effortlessly find and buy your course
Ultimately boost sales to the people who need your course the most (yay for helping more people and generating passive income too!)
In this article, I’ll explain why:
your course is easier to find (aka better seo)
In terms of search engine optimisation, it’s always better to keep someone on your website rather than sending them to a third-party platform. This is because search engines like Google take into account the number of pages, internal (and external) linking to your pages, and the quality of content on a website when determining its rank in search engine rankings.
When using a third-party platform, you’re essentially sending people away from your website, which can harm your position in search engine rankings.
your customers experience an effortless buying journey
When someone clicks through to a third-party platform to view your sales page, they are taken away from your website and the navigational structure along the top of the page will also change. This can create confusion, causing visitors to lose their way and leading to people abandoning their purchase.
Creating a sales page on your own website, however, means that the entire process – right up to checkout – happens within your website’s navigational structure, leading to a smoother and more ease-filled experience for your visitors (which also means they are more likely to press that buy button!).
protect your course from platform and technology changes
Once your course is launched, it’s likely that you’ll link to that course in blog articles and on social media. You may even find that your network also shares links to your course as well.
If you create your sales page on your teaching platform, if you ever decide to change teaching platform providers, the links to your sales page will also change and break (eeek!). This is super bad for SEO and for sales too.
On the flip side, when you create a sales page on your own website, you are safeguarding your course from any future teaching platform changes, ensuring that your customers will always be able to find your course through the link to your website.
create a sales page that resonates with your audience (and converts!)
How your sales page looks and the journey it takes people on matters and can mean the difference between a “yes” or a “no” from the people who lay their eyes on it.
An effective sales page doesn’t just need to be visually appealing, it needs to be strategically designed too, helping your ideal customers to make an informed and empowered purchasing decision.
One of the limitations with using the sales page layouts on third-party teaching platforms is that you lose the flexibility to create a page that truly caters to your ideal customers’ journey.
By creating the sales page on your website (particularly if your website is built on Squarespace), you have full control over how your page looks, how it’s laid out, and the journey it takes people on. You can design it in a way that’s tailored to your target audience and that resonates with them.
This means your incredible offering is given the support it needs to stand out, be valued, and capture the hearts of your ideal clients.
Needing help creating aesthetically beautiful and strategically crafted sales pages that do your offering justice? Take a look at our one day sales pages.
build trust and help your customers remember you
Creating your sales page on a third-party platform means setting up all of your branding (colours and fonts) on this platform. Many of these platforms also have limitations on what you can and can’t style so without coding knowledge, it can be difficult to get your sales page to look on brand. This can lead to cognitive dissonance as your customer shifts from one platform to the next, which creates confusion and ultimately can impact whether the customer purchases your course or not.
When you build your sales page on your own website it’s much easier to stay on brand. You’ll be able to quickly take advantage of the existing branding applied to your website, which creates a seamless visual experience as a customer moves through the purchasing journey. Not to mention, when you stay on brand across all your platforms, the visual cues of your branding, helps potential customers to recognise and remember you, your business and your offerings – WIN!
See a real life example of someone who has done this well!
Check out my client, Dani Gardner The Quiet Marketer. We’ve helped Dani create her Tiny Course library and sales pages on her website, while her course content is still stored over on Thinkific. Take a look here.
If you’re ready to create an aesthetically beautiful and strategically crafted sales page on your website, I can help.
Check out our one day sales pages – supporting you to sell your offerings with kindness while generating a sustainable income full of integrity.