 which online course platforms are best for the solopreneur. The person who doesn't have a team, doesn't have a big business and is really just starting to create and launch online courses. Maybe you're not already selling lots and lots of them, but you're getting into it and you hope that one day the income from selling online courses will become a significant part of your income because it's a wonderful business model these days to be able to teach what you love, to teach what you know is helpful for people and people can learn from you anywhere in the world as long as they have the internet. So your market is essentially global instead of being limited to your local area. And unfortunately, given the pandemic, students of every age, young to old, millions of millions of people are now learning for the first time how to learn online. So taking courses on everything from, of course, young students learning the basics of math, reading, history, science, technology, everything, art, music, to adults who are doing it for personal development and professional development and healing their bodies, their relationships, transforming their careers, finding their purpose, growing their spiritual life. People are taking courses on all kinds of topics. And so more than ever before teaching online courses is increasingly a great business model and one that also can create what's called a passive income for you. Meaning, well, for example, I just had a couple of people bought my courses in the past few days where I wasn't actively marketing them. They just found them on the internet, found them my courses and purchased them. I don't know who they are. I didn't know, they just found me because of Google or Facebook or YouTube or the other places where I posted content before. So the question is, as you are starting to create and launch and market your online courses, what's the technology that you should use as a solopreneur to host your course videos, your course documents, maybe audios, et cetera? So I did, I have just to give you some context, I have been teaching online courses actively since 2009 and I should clarify, I've been doing it as a full-time income since 2009. So more than 10 years now, my primary income has been teaching online courses and over the past 10 years, I have tried many different things, used different kinds of tech platforms. I've had many clients who have used many tech platforms. So I feel like I have a good intuition for good technology for online courses and when I think I have a pretty good sense of what to recommend to people. So let me give you my decade of experience in just a few minutes of video. And also this includes my recent internet searches on what's hot these days for online course platforms. And I also surveyed my clients and my audience, many of whom are solopreneurs about which online course platforms they have used recently as a student of online courses and some of them as teachers of online courses. All right, so here is the results. So first of all, let me kind of run through what are the most popular ones and then I'll talk about the ones that my audience felt were the best ones. So based on Google search, just some Google research, what's hot these days, Thinkific, Teachable, Podia, PODIA, Learn Worlds, Kajabi, WizIQ, Rizuku, and Google Classroom. Actually, Google Classroom is really the most popular right now because typically young students, many of the schools worldwide are using Google Classroom as a technology. But the other ones, Thinkific, Teachable, Podia, Learn Worlds, Kajabi, WizIQ, and Rizuku were also came up as very popular for especially business owners like us who are wanting to sell online courses not within an academic institution but just ourselves in our own business. All right, so after surveying my audience for what they most appreciated, what they most enjoyed as a student and as a teacher, the number one option, I would say by far, well, the number one option clearly was Teachable. Teachable, T-E-A-C-H-A-B-L-E dot com, Teachable dot com was the most popular one. Now, and then the second people liked Teachable because it was easy to use both from a student point of view and a teacher point of view and it's not super high cost. It starts at $30 a month and then goes up to, I think, $100 a month. I think it was, yeah, from $30 a month to $100 a month to $250 a month at different levels. And then the second most popular option that was highly recommended from those who had used it was Kajabi, K-A-J-A-B-I, Kajabi. And the thing about Kajabi is that it's really an integrated solution for a website, okay? A mailing list, affiliate software and courses, membership programs, et cetera. Kajabi tries to do it all, okay? And under one platform. So definitely worth considering for those of you who are thinking about it, the third most popular was Thinkific. Now, Thinkific, for those who mentioned it, nobody says, oh my God, I love Thinkific. It is so great. But everyone says, oh, it's definitely a solid option. Definitely worth doing. On the internet, when I was Googling, it was basically Thinkific and Teachable were equal popularity. So Thinkific, people like it because it's a smaller company. It has, you can have three courses, hosted on Thinkific, without paying anything as a teacher. But then once you have more than three courses, you have to start paying, I think $50 a month is the lowest tier. So Teachable, Kajabi, Thinkific. And then Google Classroom was recommended by an experienced course creator, Zoe Tobi, who is like a kindred spirit to me. We share many of the similar values and he really liked it because, well, one, it's really easy to get started because it's free, okay? It's from Google, so technology's pretty reliable, but it's minimalistic. It doesn't have as many of the bells and whistles that the others do, but it's free. And there's no paid tier, it's just free, okay? So they try to, I'm sure they keep improving it over time. Given Google, it's a huge company and they'll keep improving the product. And given that millions and millions of students across the world, probably tens of millions are using Google Classroom now. I'm sure they're continuing to improve it pretty rapidly. One that I should definitely mention is Learn Dash. For those of you who use WordPress, the most popular course platform plugin is Learn Dash. L-E-A-R-N-D-A-S-H, Learn Dash, like Run Dash, Learn Dash. And anyway, there were a couple other ones that if you wanna look at my blog post, it'll list some of the other ones that were not mentioned as often or had a bit more mixed reviews, but they were still good enough to mention. Lots of people are still using them, so check those out. Now, you might be wondering, well, George, after all this research, what are you gonna go with? And what are you gonna recommend to your clients? I'm glad you asked. After all this research and thinking about my clients, many of whom are kind of getting going in course creation, course launching. Yeah, some of my clients are quite advanced in that area and I can coach them on that advanced level of scaling their course marketing and integrating their technology better. So I have a few clients like that, but most of my clients are more in the beginner or beginner-intermediate stage where maybe they've sold some courses or some are just starting to sell courses. So because of that fact, my recommendation is still going to be the most basic way possible. So either Google Classroom or doing it the way that I've been doing it, I have always biased myself towards the technology that is most usable by the beginners and the beginner-intermediates because that has been the majority of my students and clients. And I think that's the majority of everyone in the world who are just getting going with creating courses. Fewer people are advanced or intermediate advanced. So my recommendation is either look into Google Classroom, create one there, try it yourself, or do it the way that I do it, which is I teach courses mostly live through Zoom. When I say live these days, especially, it's online live, meaning in real time. I teach it through Zoom and then I upload the video to YouTube as an unlisted video. Yes, my paid course material is all on YouTube, but you can't find it because it's called unlisted. When you upload a video to YouTube, you can do it as public, which means anyone can find it and the people can go to my channel and find those public videos like this one. Unlisted means it's not listed on my channel and it's not listed in the Google search or YouTube search algorithms. So only those with the exact link, in other words, my students, only they can find or they can access those videos. So YouTube Unlisted is where I host my course videos. An alternative is to host your course videos on Google Drive. Google Drive uploaded there, click share, click anyone with the link can view and you could share your course videos that way. Course documents I hosted on Google Docs. Any other course files like audio files or PDFs or anything else can be hosted on Google Drive, okay? And if I need a student community, I hosted on Facebook, Facebook private groups. And why Facebook? Because even though Facebook groups is not the most organized way, there is something called social learning units on Facebook. You can add it to your Facebook group so that you can have a units tab in your Facebook group which then allows you to organize the course material and other orientation videos or orientation posts. So I know that what I need to do a better job of is make better orientation videos that walk my students through how to use the Facebook group step by step, how to get started. So I know that that's my current learning edge but besides that I think Facebook groups are great because everyone already has a Facebook login just about everyone compared to having to make them create a login on Teachable or a login on Kajabi or whatever. Everyone already has, so the login problem is solved which is actually a real problem because otherwise you'll get customer service requests, student service requests every now and then. Also, since everyone already serves Facebook when they're surfing Facebook, they're gonna see some of the course postings which then reminds them, inspires them hopefully to go back and engage with the course again. So Facebook is very usable by just about everyone knows how to use Facebook. So that learning curve is already over as long as we create better, I'm speaking to myself and to everyone here, as long as I create, we create a better orientation video walking people through, okay, here's how you start getting into the course materials. Here's step one, here's how to view the videos. Here's step two, here's how to view the documents. Here's step three, here's how to engage, that kind of thing. So that's my recommendation. And it's really the most sustainable solution for everyone and in my blog post that I've linked to this video, you'll see a couple of quotes from experienced students who will also have taught some of their own courses and some of them not surprisingly agree with my method to say, this is really the most sustainable way to go because my method, YouTube is free, Google Docs is free, Google Drive is free, Facebook Group is free. So it's very sustainable as if you're getting started launching courses, you might not, in any given month, maybe in a given month, if you're not launching you might not sell a course and do you still wanna keep paying thinkific or teachable or kajabi or the other things. So anyway, when as you scale, okay you might then go for teachable or kajabi but really starting out, think about Google Classroom as an integrated course hosting solution or do it the way that I do it and just in terms of mailing out the course materials I use MailChimp for that. So anyway, I hope this is helpful or maybe this is interesting and I have an online course and support group for those of you who want to create and launch your own online courses and really the most important thing about all this is learning how to market, learning how to launch so that you actually get sales because at the end of the day if you don't get enough sales for your online courses it doesn't matter what technology you use you're gonna regret it. But if you get enough sales then you have the money to then choose whatever technology you want. So that's actually more important that's really what my program, my training program, my online course focuses more on is how to launch and market so that you get enough sales so that the course tech platform choice is much easier for you at that point. Anyway, I hope this is helpful and I look forward to seeing what you decide to do and how you go with launching your online courses. Take care.