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With so many online options available to us, are you left wondering, ‘Which platform do I use when I want to host an online program?’ It’s a question I often get…but it’s not the first question you should be asking. I asked this question too when I was moving my business online and went through hours of research! 

I recommend you step back first and go through the steps to learn how to create an incredible learning experience for your clients –  which is the most important part. If we focus too much on figuring out the platform, it can block us from moving towards where we really need to start. 

In this episode, I’ll give you the answer to this question so that when you’ve gone through the foundation of creating your program, you’ll be ready to build it and offer it to the world. I go through four different ways you can teach online along with my experience and recommendations of each, and what I’m currently using. I share the few things you’ll need to make a decision between them – once you’re ready.

Figuring out the tech and getting your online program out into the world can seem overwhelming, but it’s not. You just haven’t done it before. Depending on your program, goals, clients and experience, any of these can be an appropriate solution for you. There’s no one right way and you can always move or change. Remember, what your program looks like today will be different than it will in a year!

If you enjoyed this podcast, you may enjoy these 3 other podcast episodes about structuring your program delivery:

• Ep. 03: Where Do I Start?
• Ep. 12: Membership vs. Program
• Ep.17: Drip Content vs. Full Access

Prefer reading? Here’s the transcript below

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Stephanie: Hey, there. Welcome to The Leveraged Practice Podcast, helping health professionals create online programs for their practice. I’m your host, Stephanie Clairmont, and in this podcast, you’ll get quick tips, insight from amazing interviews, and actionable strategies specific to the health industry. I’ll focus on what’s working now so you can get clear on how to get your program into the hands, well, onto the screens of your clients’ devices, so you can make a bigger impact, change more lives, and grow your practice. Let’s do this.

Which platform do I use when I want to host an online program? It’s a great question. I think it’s the most common question that I hear in Facebook groups and from potential clients, from clients, from listeners, and it’s not the first question. It is not the first question that you should be asking.

So full-out disclaimer, if you have not outlined your program, if you have not figured out what you’re teaching, if you have not gotten really clear on the vision for your online program as a product, in your business, or for your practice, your organization, what the point is, if you have not spent time getting to know the people that you will create this program for, or the problem that you are solving with this program, or the transformation that your students need to go through, my friend, you are jumping way too quickly in this question. No judgment at all because it is totally normal for us to get freaked out by technology and the thing we don’t know.

It’s like our mind knows, like our body knows that we can create an online program. Our body knows that we know everything we need to know, that we have the experience, that we have the knowledge, that we are brilliant, that we have the training, that we can teach, and as health practitioners or health professionals, you are a natural teacher.

Or if you’re not a natural teacher, you’ve learned how along the way, because that’s what you do. You probably teach group programs or you teach one-to-one. You have learned how to teach. Now, maybe you’re not the best teacher in the world, but you’re learning.

You’re doing a fine job, and so it’s like we know we can do this, but our mind gets freaked out by growth. Or freaked out by going beyond our comfort zone directly to the thing that we don’t know, and we want to ask this question or other questions about that thing that scares us. We want to go right into the reasons why we can’t do this thing, and then we sit on this question of, “How do I figure out the technology, Stephanie? What platform do I use? Do I do this? Do I do that?”

Now I’m going to answer your question today, and I’m going to go through the different ways to teach online. I’m going to give you a brief comparison, help you decide, and then give you some takeaways on what to do next, but it’s important that I give you this disclaimer first, that I got you.

I understand how your brain is working, and I know that we jump there. I do the same thing when I have a great idea, and the first thing I do is start to build a webpage about it, or I start to figure out how much I’m going to charge for it. Or I think, “Oh, I’m going to take up biking,” and then I go buy a $700 bike and I haven’t even biked once in 10 years.

We jump to this other kind of part, and I just want to advise you and recommend to you that you step back first and you go through the steps to create an incredible learning experience for your students. Take the time to really map out a product, or a program, or a teaching style online, a thing to deliver this incredible result for your clients and that you know that that is the most important part.

Where you host it, how much you pay for that, how pretty it looks is not as important as the customer or client learning experience and ensuring that they get great results. This is an important question to ask, but it’s not the most important one, okay? Sit on that for a minute, and let’s just give you a little bit of relief around this technology question.

When I coach my clients in The Leveraged Practice Workshop, we talk about this, we talk about technology. I help them with delivery, and it’s a little scary. Once we have these conversations in the workshop or with any of my clients, they feel a heck of a lot better. They feel more confident, and they feel like, “Okay, I can do this,” so I want to have this conversation with you, even though you’re not my client, on this podcast right now to give you a little bit of extra confidence that you can create an online program, and it’s not as scary as it seems.

When we don’t know something or we’ve never done it before, it seems scary. Maybe you don’t want to use the word scary, but it seems, whatever your word is, overwhelming, unattainable, impossible, but it’s not. You just have never done it before, right? You’ve heard how people say, “We don’t think a child isn’t going to walk because he’s never walked before.” We keep teaching. We keep encouraging, and that kid walks.

It’s the same thing with online teaching. You’ve just never done it before, it makes you feel uncomfortable, but you can do it. You can do hard things.

The Four Ways You Can Teach Online

 

Let’s talk about four different ways that you can teach online. One is called an LMS, a learning management system. If you start to Google this…Oh my gosh, this is what I did in the beginning and I was so overwhelmed, so maybe don’t Google LMSs. An LMS is a entire system, a quite robust way to deliver online training programs. There are lots of different options. I’ll talk about that in a second and we’ll do a comparison.

The second way that you can teach online is using some kind of software. It’s some kind of software or platform that’s already built for you, that’s pretty accessible and affordable. It’s kind of done for you and has all the features to deliver your content. This would be something that you’ve seen pop up online like Teachable, or Thinkific, or Kajabi, or something like that. They manage the software and you pay a monthly or annual fee to use it, and to put your program on it.

The third is kind of new and used for certain things, which is a community. People sometimes ask me this question like, “Can I just teach my program in a Facebook group?” Technically, you can. You can sell some type of program or membership that just lives in a Facebook group, or you can actually create a private Instagram account and you can sell that, like access to that. It can live in a Slack channel. It can be more of a membership community, and yes, you can use a Facebook group for that. I’ll talk about that in a second and if I recommend that.

The fourth is a custom-build. Sometimes we jump to this where we think we need to hire a developer, and we need to give them money, and they need to develop an online program right on our website, so right on our WordPress website or right in in the website tool that you’re using. We’ll talk about this in a second, but you don’t necessarily need to do that, but that is another option for you. So you hire a developer, they build ir, they put all the code in, they create a custom experience for your clients right in your website or a new website. You can also do this yourself if you’re very technologically savvy. I don’t recommend that. I could tell you a story all about that, friends, but that’s another option and it’s a great option. Let’s talk about a bit of a comparison and when to use each of them.

Learning Management Software for Your Health Online Program

 

Let me start with LMS, so learning management software. Again, if you Google this kind of stuff, it is a generally pretty big topic and there are lots of different options. It’s all over the map in regards to investment. Like you can purchase LearnDash, for example, which is a plugin that allows you to build an LMS in a custom solution right on your WordPress site. Super affordable, like a couple hundred bucks. That’s really an LMS kind of plugin where you’re still going to have a custom-build, and you’re going to hire a developer probably to do this.

Then, there are LMS robust softwares and platforms that universities will use. That’s really what it’s for. It’s a corporate solution that’s going to cost probably tens of thousands of dollars to set up because you’re going to need the team. So sometimes you’ll have a LMS software that you can purchase, that that company that provides the LMS runs that as well, so you invest in their team building it, setting it up, and creating this giant kind of thing for you. It’s a $10,000-$50,000 investment. It’s very robust. It has tons of features.

It’s not necessarily needed for what you want to deliver, and think of it as like a very corporate solution for universities and colleges and things like that. If you ever took a distance ed course, whatever you went to college or university, it was probably built on some kind of old-school LMS, and these things, I guess I don’t have the history of online educational tools, but I think they existed first.

It was those first solutions because the people who were teaching online first were huge organizations like universities. It wasn’t little small businesses or clinics like us. So if you are thinking long-term, maybe you work for a hospital, or you work for a government agency, it might be a solution that you consider, depending on what your concerns are. If you’re a larger organization like a hospital for example, then there may be some compliancy issues. You might want to have your program on your own server. There are a whole bunch of reasons why you would do a big LMS/custom-build with it, because you need your own servers, and you need your own technology, and you’re going larger.

That said, it’s not like you can’t put hundreds of thousands of people on another option, but just as a starting out solution, I wouldn’t recommend it to most of us. I wouldn’t even recommend that you go down into the rabbit hole of Googling and learning and comparing all the LMS softwares. I actually went down into this rabbit hole for months, when I first created my first online program, which was, I think in like 2013 and it was a professional program.

Remember, there weren’t a lot of platforms back then. I don’t really think there were any, and so it had to be a custom-build. I had phone calls with sales reps from all these LMS companies, and I went through and I compared them all. I’m telling you, it was $10,000-$30,000 to invest, and I had a small, little idea. So that’s why I hired someone to custom-build within my website from Pakistan, who cost $3,000.

I say that because sometimes it’s great to hire people who are from other countries. It was kind of tricky because they’re on different time zones often, and so it’s hard to communicate. The company I worked with didn’t have really great English, so it was hard to communicate exactly what we needed, so if you are hiring a company overseas, it’s okay. It can work out fantastically. Just for me, it was so early, I didn’t know what to expect and it didn’t work out very well for me. That is the first thing. Most of the time, I would recommend you leave that one alone.

Using a Platform for Your Health Online Program

 

The next is a platform and a more affordable, accessible, simple software that’s already built and already set up for you. Where you basically create an account and for most of them, you can create a free account to start with. You pay a monthly fee or an annual fee for access to that software where you just upload your content. Super easy.

These are platforms like Thinkific, Teachable, Kajabi, Podia. There’s a whole bunch of them. I’m not going to dig deeply into all the different platforms, but those are kind of like the top four that are affordable and accessible and people are using today.

Now, again, the way that a platform works is super simple. It takes all of the technology headache away from you. For example, if you have a small team, maybe it’s just you, or you have a small clinic maybe with an assistant or you don’t have a technology person on staff, then the best thing about this platform is that you don’t have to worry about it. It usually works, and if someone’s having a weird experience, like let’s say someone didn’t get their receipt, or they can’t log in, or a video doesn’t work, it’s not really your problem.

I mean, it is your problem because you’re selling the program, but you are paying a monthly fee for that technology to work, so you just open up a quick, old help desk ticket, slap urgent on the subject line, or choose urgent in regards to options of priorities. Some of them like Thinkific I know will allow you to choose like, “Urgent, answer me right away,” and you’ll get a response. You’ll get someone helpful, helping you to serve that customer better. I have been using platforms for years. I have used Teachable, Simplero and Thinkific. I can’t remember if I’ve used any others.

I love using a platform for this reason, really simple, really quick, and I don’t have a lot of problems because it’s hosted on their servers, with their technology. They have hundreds of thousands, if not, millions of users and customers on there, so that’s their job. They’re doing a great job at it.

A platform is great if you don’t have a technology person on your team, you don’t want to do a custom-build, you have a small budget so you just want to get started. Because it requires a small budget, it’s great if you’ve never run your online program before because you’re learning about what your customers need, what the experience is, what kind of features they require and that kind of thing. So if you’re just getting started with a new idea and a new online program, I highly recommend starting with one of the platforms.

Now, if we look at the platforms a little more deeply, what you’re going to see is some platforms have a lot of features. For example, Kajabi allows you to have different landing pages, so it gets into the marketing and sales part of it as well. It allows you to do all your email marketing in there and have a couple different micro sites.

So some people will use a software like Kajabi as an entire platform. They just have everything on it, and so Kajabi can get a little more expensive. Well, I guess they all have a kind of upper limits as you grow, but you’re going to pay a little more starting out the gate because if you’re doing your email marketing on there, it’s taking over for a whole bunch of tools. You’re going to have your website on there and that kind of thing, so it can get up to around $300, which still isn’t a big deal.It can go even higher than that, but just know that tool allows you to create an online program or course, but it also brings in some of the sales and marketing tools.

Same with some other ones. There are some other platforms that are just like that where they’re an all-in-one solution. ClickFunnels does that where you can create online courses and memberships with ClickFunnels, and there are some others like Kartra. So if you are looking at those, they’re this all-in-one solution. Everything’s in one place.

That can be good and bad, like do you want to have everything in one place? I mean, it sounds kind of fun, but it also sounds a little overwhelming because you have everything in one place. It could be confusing to find everything and start to use it. I know that they’re working really hard on customer experience and allowing it to be intuitive. It depends what you need. Maybe you don’t need all those features. That’s kind of that group of platforms and online softwares that you can use. All you have to do is upload your content. You upload your videos, you upload your handouts, whatever you need to put in there.

Another option is something like Teachable or Thinkific. If you want to do a full comparison of Teachable and Thinkific, you can just Google Teachable versus Thinkific, and you’ll find some great articles on the Thinkific site. I would highly recommend that you read those articles on the comparison between Teachable and Thinkific.

What you’ll see is that Thinkific is a simple solution. It doesn’t have any of your marketing pieces to it. It does allow you to do a sales page, which is great if you’re just getting started. It’s just drag and drop. It’s super easy and intuitive to use, so you can put your sales page on there. That’s about it, and it basically focuses on customer experience. It focuses on the learner’s journey. It has many, many features. I think the number is like 48 or 38, something like that. More features than Teachable that all have to do with how your student or how your client learns, so I love Thinkific.

It is a platform that I recommend to all my students and clients who are working with me and creating an online program, at least for their first few versions before they potentially create a custom-build solution. Some of us never really need a custom-build solution and we can use a platform super easily.

I recommend it because of some of the really great learning features on it, and when it comes to health, I think that we need to educate a little differently than perhaps someone who’s selling a course on Pinterest, or Instagram, or someone who’s selling a program on learning how to knit. These other subjects are different than health, and when we think about running a program in health, there are some things that we need to do, and as I teach my students, we want to create a really fantastic learning experience for our clients and incredible results. So to produce incredible results with people, we need some engagement, and I think that Thinkific does a great job in creating features in the platform that allow you to do a really good job.

I’m not biased, like you don’t have to buy Thinkific or anything. I don’t make money on this and this podcast episode is not sponsored by Thinkific, but I’m going to tell you a couple of features that I love in Thinkific. So when you’re making your choice and you’re trying to compare, you’re looking for some of these things and this resonates with you.

One thing that they have is this feature called Assignment. You can create an assignment right in Thinkific, and I won’t go too deeply into what it is, but basically, it allows people to upload a file. How great is that as a health practitioner running an online program? You can have someone submit a food journal for you to review, or an exercise activity log for you to review. Or if you’re a therapist or you’re helping with some of the mental health aspects, you might want to have people submit their weekly plan or a journal or something like that.

I think for a lot of us in our health and medical practices, we want to see some work back. It’s not like we want people to complete homework, but we kind of do, and so this assignment feature is super cool. You can build it right into a module, a lesson, a week, whatever you’re building your program, and then have people upload their journal or whatever you want to look at and give them feedback, which is great. I love that feature.

They also have your standard features, which you want to look in for anywhere, which is drip and prerequisite. What that means is if you’re running your program, this is something that I highly recommend and I teach, is that we don’t just create self-study programs. I don’t think they work really well in health, and so what you want to do is create some prerequisite content.

I mean, it’s not for every program and it’s totally up for you to decide, but perhaps you want people to only have access to information one week at a time, or perhaps you want people to complete something before they complete the next thing. Completing one thing before the next is called a prerequisite, which Thinkific has. Dripping content, meaning I release a new class every Monday over eight weeks or whatever is drip content, so they have that as well. That’s something to think about. That’s a feature really great for health.

There are a couple of other integrations that Thinkific has. I love how they integrate with Typeform, which allows me to create consent forms at the beginning of my program. So in the health space, there is some information that you might want to gather early on. You may want people to complete some type of assessment or survey to make sure that they’re a good fit for your program. Or you might want them to agree or disagree to a consent or a waiver form or something like that. I teach my students how to build into Thinkific and I think they do a good job with that.

There’s a whole bunch more features that you can read about if you just Google Teachable versus Thinkific, and there’s a cool article on their website. I can also put the link in the show notes if you want to click on that and learn a little bit about those two platforms specifically, and so there’s just a variety of things.

Podia is another cool solution. I’ve never used that one. It’s very affordable. These are great starting out places to look at, and really, I’m going to tell you in a few minutes how to make a choice.

Using a Community To Teach Your Health Online Program

 

The next is community, so this is more about selling a community where you show up and you do weekly talks, or weekly office hours, where people maybe don’t want to search content or they don’t want to go back. It’s great for something that doesn’t have a process, so if you don’t need people to go through step one, two, three, four, five, you just want people to have access to you for office hours or community to connect with, then you might think about selling a program that you deliver mostly on a Facebook group. Again, this can be Facebook, Instagram, Slack, like any type of community.

I really don’t love this for most programs. If you have like week one, two, three, four, five, or you have things that people need to do first, second or third, or you run your program live and you put people through, I really love a solid-structured course structure that we can get in any other solution besides a community.

I also think that a community does have a place. Perhaps you have a membership where after people work with you one-to-one, they still want to connect with you and be able to ask you questions, or connect with others. This is great for a topic area of working with new moms. It’s lonely being a new mom. It’s lonely being a mom with little kids, and so perhaps after working with you or after doing your workshop or even your program, you have an ongoing community. Maybe it’s $20 a month, and you show up twice a month and you just answer questions, that kind of thing. I do think there’s a place for running a program there, but really limited to that.

Creating a Custom-Built Health Online Program

 

Finally, is a custom-build solution. Custom-build is great once you know exactly what tools, features, and items that your clients need. We have a custom-built solution for my IBS program. We use the LMS called AccessAlly, and we’ve built a lot of features into it. But I’ve run this program for almost five years, and so after running it quite a few times on quite a few different platforms in different ways, I know exactly what we need to do in order to provide a really incredible experience and get really incredible results. So long-term, maybe a year or two from running your online program, you might move to a custom-built.

A particular feature that’s really important for us is delivering emails. So we want to deliver a different email when someone completes a week and when they do not complete a week. If you’re in my program and you start week one, and you complete it, that’s great. We’ll send you an email next week that says, “Okay, week two is open. Go and watch it.” If you sign up for my program and you do not complete week one, I will send you a different email that says, “Hey, what happened? Go log in now and complete week one.”

That type of customized experience, where you’re sending different communications to different people is super, super awesome, really customized, and also it’s automated, which is incredible. We are fine-tuning the journey of our customers. I think that’s a really cool thing that we do and a really great feature for them, where we’re just connecting and knowing where they’re at.

So you want to deliver and you want to start small. You want to deliver your program a few times probably. You want to test the product, run a beta or a pilot a few times, really get some data on what the experience is like before you do a custom-build. That’s not the answer for everyone. Some people may be starting off right off the gate, want a custom-build solution and they want to put $5,000 or $10,000 into building the right online program.

If you are an organization, public health, hospital, or maybe you’ve run your clinic for years and you know exactly what people need, you can start there. That investment is going to be a bit higher, so like I said, estimating $5,000 to $10,000. It could be a little less than $5,000. It depends, but you want to get a really good developer. You want to get someone who’s done this before and who’s incredible at building sites.

I have worked with a variety of people over the last five or six years, and I’ve been let down a lot of times. So I would highly recommend who I work with now, and otherwise, you can work with whoever you want. But it is a bit of a difficult situation to get and you want to make sure that you really vet someone for a custom-build.

Custom-build is great. You get to pick the design of your site, so you get to be a bit more creative. You get to deliver a different kind of experience from the front end. So when people log into a platform like Thinkific or Teachable, it looks the same. When they log into your custom-build, it can be something magical and wonderful and crazy, or it can be super simple. But you do get to control the customer experience and the client journey a lot differently with a custom-build platform.

Definitely a long-term solution for many of us, but it’s not where you need to start out and it’s actually not where you should start out because you could put thousands of dollars into a custom-build, run your program, maybe put 20, 30, 40, 50 people, 100 people through, and then realize that it needs to be very different. That’s one to think about.

As you can see, my biggest recommendation is that you do start with a platform like Thinkific. That said, depending on you, your program, your goals, your customer, your experience, any of these could be an appropriate solution for you. There is no one right way to do this. You can start one way, like with a platform, and in 12 months from now, build a custom platform, or move, or change, or do it differently.

What your program looks like today or tomorrow or a month from now will be different from what it looks like a year from now. It just will, and so the few things that you’re going to use in order to make a decision are going to be, one, your budget, two, your timeline of how quickly do you want to get this going?, three, your own experience and knowledge delivering this content online…it’s different online than one-to-one, and four, the features that you want.

So you might do a little more work on this, or you might just let this go and focus on what I recommended, which are all the things I teach in The Leveraged Practice Workshop. Like focusing on the people and the problem you’re solving, and getting them that transformation they need, and leave the advanced technology and logistical delivery for the third or fourth time that you run it.

Of course, if you want any help with that, you can join me in a workshop. I’d love to have you, and I can help you dig more into those aspects, as well as the delivery and getting your first platform or your first program out into the world.

How To Decide Which Platform to Use for Your Health Online Program

 

I’m going to leave you with a few takeaways from this episode. One, I recommend starting budget-friendly, but don’t be cheap. You don’t necessarily need to pay $0 to get your program out in the world. I mean, you can start with the free version. Some of my clients do, and it works fine for them. Podia andThinkific are great, affordable solutions. Same with Teachable.

They’re great for starting out, but I would recommend at least for your beta or your pilot, the first, second, third time you run it, just get it out there. Don’t get stopped by technology. Start with a budget-friendly option, but again, don’t be cheap. There are some things you have to pay for it to still create a great experience for your clients.

Two, consider a live beta. This is one of the things that I teach in my workshop. For some of my clients, it works best for them to actually do live the first time around, so they don’t spend tons of time and money recording content that they’re going to change.

Three, enter into the process of building your online program knowing that what you deliver today will be different from what you deliver in the future. It just will.You have to do it to learn from it and make it better.

Four, learn from your clients along the way. Be open to feedback, build in evaluation forms, and really check in with them to figure out what works, what they like, and what they don’t. These are all part of the process. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope that you found it helpful.

If you liked this episode, you can hop on over to iTunes and give me a review. You can comment on Facebook and Instagram. Let me know what you think and share it with your friends. I love to hear how these episodes are working for you, and if you like them, it’s always great for me to get a review or get your feedback on them as well, or if you don’t like them, or if there’s something more you want to hear from me, a different topic that I haven’t shared about or how I can help. I hope you found this one super valuable.

Remember, you have everything you need right now to create your online program. We’re going to leverage what you already know, what you’re already doing, and bring it out in the world. It doesn’t have to be complicated and complex. We can get it up and going within the next couple of months. Don’t let technology stop you. It was great hanging out with you today, and I’ll see you again next time.

Hey again. If you enjoyed this podcast and you’re thinking about creating an online program for your health practice, you’ve got to check out The Leveraged Practice Workshop. It’s my program where I walk you through my tried and tested framework to plan, launch, and deliver your online health program. Join me at TheLeveragedPractice.com. I’d love to have you join me for the next workshop.