How to Control Access to Your Course
How do you control access to your membership sites, courses, modules, and lessons?
That's what we're talking about in this lesson -
Couple different methods -
- Via Product purchase
- Via List Signup
- Via a Trigger
- Via an Automation
Products and Automations will be fully covered in upcoming modules so for now I just show how to provide access with those.
Video Transcript:
(00:00):
In this lesson, I want to show you how to control the access to your courses. Okay? So nothing is worse than putting all this time, effort, and energy into setting up a course only to realize that you haven't properly set up the access and everyone is getting free access. So what we're going to do is go through all the different ways that you can control access to your course. So let's get into it. I'm going to share my screen. And the first thing I've put together here is actually a little graphic for the visual learners. Okay? So there's two types of membership sites. You could have a closed membership site, meaning it's not available to the public. You have to be given access to that membership site. And in fact, if I come in here and I go content membership sites and I click into configure on a particular membership site, this is what I'm talking about, the site privacy.
(01:01):
So you can see this particular membership site is set to closed, right? Only people who have been granted access get access to this. But these two options are open. Uh, and that's what we're talking about here. Okay? So if you have a closed membership site and they try to access either of these courses and they don't have access to the membership site, they won't be able to get in. If they get access to the membership site, they will have access to this course because it's in published status. Anybody who gets access to the membership site gets access to the published course, but they will not have access to this auto publish course. They need to be given access via product, via trigger, via an automation. And I'll show you how to do that. All right? Going over to this option, open membership site,
(01:53):
anybody can access this membership site and then because this course is published, anybody can access that course. So this course as it stands right now is available to the public, which is fine in some use cases. Some people want that. This one is not this one. They would need specific access. All right? So I'm going to show you a few different ways to provide access, uh, to a particular course. And the first one is via a product. So in this particular example that we're looking at, there's five different courses. Okay. Uh, they're all in published status. Meaning as soon as you get access to this membership site, you get access here. But let's say I change it to auto publish, I can give access via a product. So when somebody purchases a particular product and I go to sales products and I click on the product that I've set up and then I can come over here to content
(02:53):
and I can define exactly what people get access to, uh, when they purchase particular product. And all I have to do is check the membership site and then check the courses. As it stands right now, this is a little bit overkill. I don't necessarily even need to check these courses because like I just said, they were in published status. And you can see even here they're unlocked. Meaning if you get access to this membership site, you get access to all of these courses as well. But if they were an auto published, they would show a lock and then I could give access that way. So that is the first method. It is via the products. If I go sales product, I can select what they get access to. I can also set up a trigger to give access. So let's say I want to give access to a course for somebody who joins the list. So I go contacts list, selected my list, and then I go to content within that list. And then when they join the list, I can give them access. Okay. The other option is we can use an automation and if I go to marketing automations a, here's a particular welcome automation that I have, but what I can do in this autumn, and this is just an email series, but what I can do is I can add an automation step and that step would be moving my picture over here. That step would be give access
(04:24):
to a course and then I can select which course they get access to. And only the options that are in auto publish will appear here. So if it's not an auto publish, it won't appear as an option here. Okay. So those are the different ways you can give access to a course. The other way is in the course itself. This is the final way I can click into this course and I can go to the settings.
(04:55):
I clicked into the course, I went to the settings here. If I scroll down to access control, right now, it says everyone available to everyone who can access this site. I can also say, I only want it available to people who purchase this product. So that's another way to define access. So you've got the product itself, you've got a trigger on a list, you've got a, oops, I did not want to click that. We've got an automation. And then finally, within the course itself, you can select only available to customers who've purchased this product. Okay? So I hope that helps you understand how exactly you can control access to your course. The most common if you're running a course where you, um, a paid course is to, of course, set it up via the product, set up a product that represents that course. They purchase that product and then they get access to the course. Any questions? Let me know. If not, good luck.
2 comments
Thanks Damon,
One question: If a particular module is autopublished, would I then need to make all the underlying lessons be 'autopublished' as well in order to drip out that module? Or is it enough to make the related lessons be published and then control the whole access through the module's status (as autopublished)? I hope it makes sense :) Thanks, Thomas
If the module is set to “auto-publish” and the lessons inside it to “published” people will get instant access to all lessons inside the module when you trigger/ give access to the module. If you would set everything to “auto-publish” and you give people access/trigger the module, but not the lessons then people get access to the module but it appears empty until you also give access to the auto-published lessons. I hope that makes sense.
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