Our Experience of Going From Face to Face Training to Online Delivery and How We Did It

In 2001 we embarked upon our first journey into online learning with a membership site targeting the automotive sector, car dealers in particular. This was pre-Facebook and YouTube, and social media wasn't even on the agenda, and WordPress... that wasn't going to be released for another two years.

We invested time and money in developing a bespoke platform that allowed us to continually add content and online courses with all manner of benefits and features for the end-users using our own content management system (CMS.) We had a crude (by today's standards) course creation editor, quizzes and learning logs for users.

Everything was coded and created from scratch. It took months to develop and cost us a small fortune. The product was sold either as a membership offer with a small monthly fee or as a white-label package allowing businesses to brand it as their own for use by their employees or partners. It was a gamble, but thankfully we achieved a respectable ROI.

That was way back then...

How Things Have Changed!

Fast forward to 2020, and ever-advancing technology means that the same user benefit level and far more features can be delivered at a fraction of the cost, to a higher standard, with greater ease and more success. 

Content management systems such as WordPress and plugins like WP Courseware make setting up online courses and membership sites infinitely more accessible to everyone at a fraction of the cost.

And now there are even newer, simpler and more user-friendly knowledge commerce platforms appearing. Services such as Teachable, Thinkific, Zenler, LearnWorlds, and Kajabi all allow course creation and membership sites to be developed quicker than ever before as the rise in online learning and digital knowledge solutions explodes.

These SaaS platforms give the power of course creation over to everyone who has knowledge and expertise to share and wants to monetize it from individuals with an online presence to those who dominate their niche.

Why Did We Choose Kajabi?

Our platform of choice every time is Kajabi.

We can not speak highly enough of the product, what it does, how it performs, what it's like to work with. The support offered both directly from Kajabi themselves with their 24/7 live chat or the amazing Facebook Group community has arisen around it. Their tribe is awesome.

We have tried A LOT of different software, platforms, and solutions that promoted themselves as “easy to use” on our journey to create our own online courses and sell our knowledge. While many were well-intentioned, they definitely weren’t what we would've called “easy to use” or intuitive.

Most lacked the suite of packaged elements that you need to run your knowledge commerce business online, leaving you to have to integrate several third-party services such as email or funnels to get what your business needs.

But not Kajabi.

It's in a league of its own.

In 2015 the Kajabi team launched a "new generation" of Kajabi. The original version had already been around for several years.

New Kajabi was born.

We've been using it every day since then has enrolled on their founder's plan.

It’s truly the easiest software we’ve ever used. Not only that, but it does EVERYTHING you need to have for a successful online business.

Here are only a few of the things it can help you with:

• Easy website builder, with pre-designed templates...and free hosting!
• Completely robust email marketing with extensive automation tools.
• Ability to create and sell online courses, coaching, monthly memberships, and all types of digital products. Plus, each one includes fill in the blank outlines!
• Entire existing pipelines that take the customer's prospect with every single page already built out for you.

Then there’s the webinars, quizzes, blogs, and much more!

The user interface is beautiful, something Steve Jobs would have been impressed with. It truly is a joy to work with.

In our opinion, if you now want to sell digital products online, or support your business by offering customer training or need to provide online training for your franchisees and have it all simply on one easy to use, reliable platform...we cannot recommend Kajabi highly enough.

Give it a test drive and see if it’s something that might help you.

See how it all works right here: Get Started.

Getting Support With Your Kajabi Business

Transitioning from face to face training to online delivery is simplified with Kajabi. For the DIYers who are happy to tackle all aspects, Kajabi has made it as simple as possible. But that still involves work. You still have to dedicate the time to learning about the fundamentals as it's very different to WordPress and then implementing everything yourself.

This means that for the busy and successful coach, trainer, entrepreneur or business owner, the best route is to seek out a Kajabi consultant/expert's services. This can be challenging, and here's why.

Compared to WordPress, there are very few consultants or experts with Kajabi experience.

When writing this post, a quick search on Fiverr freelancers with the term "Kajabi" in their profile gave search results of 24 freelancers whilst the term "WordPress" gave 36582!

That's not to say that all those featured in the WordPress results offer consultancy services or freelance support, but it shows how much more familiar freelancers are with WordPress than Kajabi.

Read on, and I'll share with you how to get further independent Kajabi support. But first, let's talk about making the shift from WordPress to Kajabi.

Shifting Your WordPress Content Across to Kajabi

Due to the prevalence of WordPress, the chances are that most users will shift their business from WordPress to Kajabi. This is not difficult, but it can be tedious and time-consuming depending upon how much content your WordPress site has, especially if you have years of blog post content or courses developed with WordPress plugins like LearnDash or WP Courseware.

The key is to develop a migration plan to have a systematic approach to migrating your content. There's no Kajabi import feature, so everything is a matter of copying and pasting content, post by post and considering images, videos and audio files, PDFs etc.

When it comes to organising your blog content, Kajabi doesn't currently allow you to categorise posts, but it will allow tagging so you can organise content in that way. Features are continually being added to enhance the platform so that the Kajabi tech team may add some richer blogging features.

The thing to remember is that Kajabi isn't out to compete with WordPress blog functionality. Kajabi's genius area is in knowledge commerce - giving you the ability to create online courses and membership sites with the minimum of effort and then monetise that knowledge profitably.

What About Your Beloved WordPress Plugins?

Kajabi doesn't do plugins. There's a different approach to negating the need for these little software bloaters. Plugins often slow down page loading speeds. There are no such issues with Kajabi. When you need a little extra functionality from it, the chances are you can create that with a simple Zapier integration.

When we had our own WordPress sites, I'll admit we did have a few favourite plugins, such as Yoast SEO, and I do miss that. I liked the traffic light system that helped us write more effective copy. But Kajabi gives you the basic SEO metadata fields, so you're covered there.

Integrating WordPress and Kajabi as One

If you want to keep your WordPress site for blogging and have your Kajabi site as your course platform or membership site, it's perfectly achievable to have a seamless user experience. You can do this so that to the average non-techy site visitor, it looks as if it's all part of the same platform.

For example, one of our clients, the UK College of Hypnosis, used Kajabi for their online academy and WordPress for their main site as it was already a heavily developed site. See it here.

And will it work when you are one of the biggest names online?

Can you integrate the two platforms into your business model when you have millions of users?

Yes, even when you are as famous as Brendon Burchard, who has adopted New Kajabi for his online courses but has kept his existing WordPress domain.  

Getting Dedicated Kajabi Support

OK, a quick reminder about how to get Kajabi Support. Here are your options:

1. Use Kajabi's own 24/7 chat support.
2. Find a consultant/strategist/freelancer through a site such as Fiverr, Freelancer, etc.
3. Work with my team.

Working With Us

Our experience working with the Kajabi platform with clients worldwide means we can support you in any area of Kajabi use confidently. Our talented team of Kajabi Experts can help you with your needs from strategy to implementation.

Why not find out more about what we can do for you with a complimentary 20-minute call to help with any area of Kajabi.
Click here, or email us at [email protected].

We hope you now have a better insight into the experience of using Kajabi and how you can be supported at this challenging time.