Thinkific Tutorial for Beginners: How to Create an Online Course in 2026

in this video I'll show you how to create your first course in thinkific step by step from sign up all the way through to publishing your curriculum first I'll show you how to build your course curriculum using chapters and lessons to structure your course content and then second I'll show you everything else that you need to complete before you can sell your course important settings establishing your price and preparing your course landing page for publishing by the end of the video you'll understand all of the basics of the thinkific platform needed to create your course and if you stick around until the end I'll cover a few more advanced settings thinkific has a 14-day free trial but if you use our affiliate link listed in the description below that will extend your free trial to 30 days it doesn't cost you anything extra and we appreciate it when you use this link as it helps us bring you great free tutorials like this one I'm going to enter my email and then start my 30-day trial my name is Dan by the way and I'll also fill out some basic personal information on this first screen then you do need to enter a credit card for the trial but it won't be charged then claim offer I'm going to skip personalization for now and just get right to creating my course when you first sign up thinkific is going to highlight a few places within the application they have sort of a guided workflow to get you going here and we're going to create our first digital product you can see the different types of products that you can create within think EIC but we'll create a course now I personally like to learn the basics first then see if I can trust AI to streamline things for me so for now let's click skip create blank product and here we have our course creation dashboard and we can see our course is titled new course and we can see that it is in draft mode if we had used the AI assisted setup we would have seen a different Title Here by default to change it we can skip ahead to the settings and then right at the top we can change this to our new course name for me it's going to be YouTube ranking Academy the action buttons are going to be in blue to help you navigate and we'll click save settings here let's go back to our curriculum and then we'll refresh the page to see our new name take effect thinkific has a nice clean UI that really helps guide us through the process let's click add chapter let's call it the basics we'll select set new lessons to draft by default when we think about the curriculum hierarchy each chapter that we create can have one or more lessons checking this box ensures that we won't have any lessons go live accidentally click save we'll use the top navigation to proceed through our course setup if we go back to the curriculum tab we can add our second chapter using this button along the bottom let's call this one setting up your channel and one more creating your first video so now we have three chapters a skelet of our course we can simply drag and drop chapters to rearrange if needed and if we click these chapter titles we can go back and edit the names so in this case perhaps I want to label each chapter with a number now under chapter one we can add a lesson to see the different lesson types I'll choose video for this first lesson but take note that if exam functionality is crucial for you you'll need a grow or a plus plan to be able to access that let's click video for my lesson title I'll paste in how the algorithm Works once you have videos uploaded you can select them from this dropdown or because we don't we can upload a brand new one First Take note that the maximum video size is 2 GB if you have videos larger thinkific suggests compressing your videos using handbrake I've used this before and it's a very reputable tool let's browse our files and we'll select our first lesson video file the video preview here is going to take a little bit of time to process after that upload is complete this is going to take some time to upload process and encode in the meantime we can see this message thumbnails closed captions and settings are going to be found in the video library we're going to take a look at that as soon as we save this first lesson if you want you can add some text to the video I'll paste in my pre-written summary from When I Was preparing my course and you have all the normal tools that you would expect for formatting here we could bold algorithm for example and add some bullets and I'm not going to here but you could also add downloadable content here and this could be helpful if you wanted to add a PDF or a file for any lesson where your students need to follow along in the lesson settings you could make this a free preview lesson I'm not going to do that for now you could make it a prerequisite so students will be required to complete this before any lessons after you could enable discussion this lesson I'll do that and you can make this video downloadable if you wanted we also could change the icon here there are a small selection of options and this label if we wanted to but I'll keep these the same and save this lesson now let's go back and take a quick look at the video library settings now under manage video settings that will open up the video library in a new tab we could click anywhere on this row this is the video that we just uploaded for lesson one or we have a menu here and we can click it at the top we have our video preview and right underneath is the thumbnail this one has been selected by default similar to other video players think ific recommends a 1920 x 1080 pixel image in a 16x9 aspect ratio we can upload here let's select our file pretty simple but we could design anything more in depth if we wanted if you're transcribing your video lessons you can typically download the SRT files so I've done that for my first lesson let's find that I'll select English here and then once you save you then can choose to enable auto show captions if you'd like and if we come back up here we can see these captions are displayed in the bottom third and then we can also change the appearance of the player by always showing the play bar if we'd like and we can change the player color so if we toggle this you can see that bar disappears on the bottom I like to leave that on and then we could change this to something a little bit more neutral maybe just like black to match our thumbnails and then finally if you want to see any summary statistics for your videos that can be found in the video library as well now that we've updated this video in the video library we can go back to our previous tab and we can save our lesson and then we can always preview in the top right here this will open it in a new tab and we can get a sense of how our lesson looks and how our chapters and lessons are laid out on the left hand pane let's close this for now as we work left to right along the top I want to show you the content uploader this is really helpful if you already have the bulk of your course ready to upload all at once and you have mainly PDF video or audio lessons let's click upload content under our second chapter and here I'll select three more videos that I already have prepared I'll open and I will upload these three files you can see the count think if it shows us that multiple files are currently uploading at once in the content uploader tab we still have the ability to rename these lessons so I could clean these up a little bit and then we can move lessons across existing chapters so we don't ever need to worry too too much about whether or not we've uploaded everything in the right spot to begin with can rename this one again if you want to replicate anything from a prior lesson we can also copy a lesson so in the destination chapter let's say I want to copy a lesson to chapter 3 we can open the menu and select copy lesson from and we could copy 2A for example and that will slot in as a copy in chapter 3 and if we need to delete any given lesson we can use the trash icon from the content uploader tab or if we open the lesson and we scroll down we can see the delete lesson button here as well with one final confirmation now that we have the basics down for course creation I want to show you the settings that you have for customization we won't go too in-depth on these but I do want to show you what's possible to change and where you would do so here's the course name that we changed from earlier if you had multiple instructor setup you could select a new one here access settings of private and hidden will give you more options over how students can enroll private courses remain public but students must request access and hidden courses don't appear at all and you need the direct link to enroll if you have a text Heavy course and you think much of the value is in the text itself you might consider disabling text copying in my opinion that might be an annoyance to students so I leave the text copyable and if you need to remove the course at any time after publishing or even in the draft state that we are in right now this is where you would do so you should prepare a course image and course product description we can click upload here and add a short description you have some control over how your course player appears to illustrate I've opened up the course player preview we can see this is how it looks let's change it to Dark theme we could add a new primary color and we could change the font if we wanted if we save come to the course player preview and refresh you can see how those changes will take effect I'm going to revert save again and stick with that light theme that we had and I'm not sure that I would use this but we could add a course player logo if we wanted as well if we save refresh our preview once more you can see that's how the logo will show progress and completion are are important for keeping some students engaged you can have videos autoplay I like to require 100% video completion but I don't want to necessarily overwhelm my students with chapter completion messages and certificates I'll disable this if you did want to add a completion certificate you can select one from this dropdown if you have one existing or if you don't I'll open this in a new tab and it will bring you to users and certificates in the left-and navigation menu so you can always get back to this screen if you need to from here to get back to where we were you could select products courses and you could then re-edit the course that we had created and now you're back to settings under progress and completion skipping over drip schedule for the moment admins Revenue partners and Affiliates are all areas that you might want to be aware of if your courses or offerings are growing in scale but as a single instructor with no team you likely won't need to worry about these now coming back to the drip schedule the drip schedule is something that's important to know if you don't want all of your lessons to be available at once in that case you can drip them out enabling drip will create a new navigation menu tab let's save and open that up here is the drip schedule tab we've already saved so let's continue create a drip schedule you have the flexibility to choose a different drip type and then if you click on each chapter over here you can enter the drip schedule for each lesson based on the drip type type you've selected let's add one and two save now if you want to rework this the easy way to do so is to go back to drip type if you select another drip type and save you'll get this notification that doing so will clear out your course's schedule and if that's what you want to be able to redo and rework this that's easy way to clear those out finally to remove the drip schedule and make your course lessons available all at once click delete on drip type again think if it will prompt you let's select okay then go back to settings drip schedule and then we can toggle enable drip schedule and if we save we should watch this tab disappear at this point we've got our course in good shape so we need to price and package it for publishing thinkific has fairly flexible pricing options but I'm going to price this course as a one-time payment this is fitting for my type of audience and it's also more fitting given the fact that I'll launch my lessons all at once when the course goes live but the functionality does exist to charge a subscription to charge a monthly payment and even to set up additional payment plans I'm going to charge $99 and I'll let my students have lifetime access so I'll leave enrollment duration blank let's save primary pricing and here thinkific has flagged that products can't be purchased if payments setup isn't complete that's because we need a method to receive pay payment when our students enroll let's set up our payments now that's going to open in a new tab in another helpful message thinkific States your email must be verified to enable a card processor if you go to the email that you signed up with you'll see a welcome email likely and you have a verification email that they would have sent you first and if you confirm that will bring you back to your dashboard let's close this new tab in my email inbox and if we Refresh on our original tab thinkific has recognized that we've verified our account thinkific payments are powered by stripe so I'm going to set up thinkific payments here and that will start to walk you through your stripe setup if you don't have an account already now I've hidden my personal details here but stripe setup will ask for your legal name your email address your date of birth your home address your phone number and at least in the United States your social security number click continue on the review page you might want to change a few things under professional details it's going to show your thinkific site URL by default but you could change that to a personal website and embed your thinkific offering in that if you'd like you also might want to edit your public details for instance the descriptor shown on customer statements defaults in my case to Dan site and that's not super helpful for people I might change that to something a bit more descriptive yet still Broad in case I sell other courses or offerings in the future the email that you signed up with is also going to prepopulate as the customer support email so you could change that if you need it as well I'll cancel this finally I'll agree and submit now that stripe is set up you would want to add your bank account details so that you can actually be paid in the future once we close that tab we're back in our original workflow we're on the pricing page if we refresh our primary price of 99 is saved and there's no more message asking us to add payments next we're going to modify the landing page for our course the page people will see when they share our course URL and when they're deciding whether or not to buy or enroll when you first navigate to The Landing Page tab think if it will prompt you to see if you want to start with a style preset you can scroll through these if you'd like but like usual I'm going to start with a blank canvas at the top we can modify the slug of the course URL we can call this YouTube ranking Academy and save then after we select the edit page button the landing page becomes much more like a classic website builder with AI assist if we hover we can see each section outlined in a blue Highlight we have the banner the highlights with images title and paragraph text and media and each of the different sections has an editable layout so for the banner I might not like this full page image I can select something like this and apply for the highlights I might actually just want these little thumbnails or if I don't have images in a a pinch I could start with just the names of the highlights and apply that for the individual elements within a section thinkific is going to give you the recommended Dimensions so that you can make this look as nice as possible and we can change the background colors of these sections as well we could use an image if we wanted or here's the color selector I like the white so let's cancel we can add sections as well so one thing we might want to add is a video testimonial we could come down here scroll through the different types of sections to add and I could click video if we select this I don't have my course trailer uploaded unlisted on YouTube quite yet but this is where you would paste that URL and you could upload a cover image and we could apply this curriculum section doesn't show here in preview but I will show you what this looks like after we publish and then if we scroll back up here in the top right we can toggle between the mobile preview anytime that we want this is how our landing page looks on mobile we can come back to desktop in page settings we can enable a header and footer if we wanted so you can see what that looks like when this header and this footer are added I kind of like that so we can leave them if we come back to settings we can also access SEO settings for this page and think if it has prepopulated this for us we could change it we could also add some keywords here I like to put something here so that I'm not actively hurting myself from an SEO standpoint but it's good to expect your main track traffic will come from your existing Network your existing audience or perhaps from your mailing list I'll go ahead and save and then under brand Styles this is where you can change fonts colors and Corners so we have our whole font families and control over font weights we can change these primary text and background colors so you can see this is when choosing a theme how some of these might pre-populate and you can also round your Corners if you'd like I don't really like rounded buttons I kind of like that crisp clean look on some of these elements so we'll save unrounded Corners after changing the style this image is obviously not a great fit so I might upload something a little different and apply that finally I find the built-in AI helpful for filling out the copy on the course landing page for just about any text on the page you can click it and click this AI button then you can give the AI text generator a tone of voice and some context if You' like I want the page to be friendly and say this is a course to teach my students how to rank videos on YouTube and we can generate a text once we've regenerated the AI text generator will then spit out a few options and obviously some of these will be easier to create ourselves than others but if you're not a copywriter and I'm not this might be helpful it can let you quickly get to a decent starting point if you don't have much copyrighting experience once you're happy with the copy on your landing page let's click save in the top right we can exit here the final tab is publish up top and we're finally ready to publish now if we select publish we should be prompted that our lessons are still in draft that's what it's displaying here so if we go back to curriculum and we open a lesson we can uncheck draft let's do that on these other few if we come back to publish that message has gone away and we can save after refreshing we can see this draft status is now set to published from our dashboard we can get the link to our course by going to courses hovering over the published course until we see that share link clicking share your course and then we can copy that link here now that we've opened this in a new tab our last thing is to give it a run through and see if we want to change anything so already I know that I probably want to slightly tweak this graphic I want to Swap this one out for a genuine picture of myself and here's how the curriculum looks once we are published so it will show each individual lesson and here I probably want to clean up this lesson name it's always good to give this one final walkthrough before sharing with your audience for just this reason you want it to look as professional as possible from the course page we could click edit and we could go ahead and make those changes and if we refresh our course page that image is looking a little bit better I've replaced the instructor image with an image of myself and our lesson titles are nicely adjusted this is looking ready to share with our audience but first as promised there are a few Advanced features that might help you in selling your course that I want to show you and those can be found under sales order bumps if you have two products maybe that's two courses that go together you can offer a second course at the time of checkout for a discounted price here you would select your order bump product this would be the product that you want shown on the checkout page of your course in our case this might an ebook about YouTube I would want to create that digital download before setting up this order bump then we would select our course YouTube ranking Academy as the product that we want the order bump to display alongside we would then price our order bump that would be the ebook and we could add some details so order bumps are a good way to offer your audience more value and increase your revenue and if we go to sales coupons that's another way to entice your existing audience especially for example if you wanted to offer your course with an introductory discount so we could set up a coupon called launch 10 with no expiry date think ific will walk you through the steps here we'll take $10 off our YouTube ranking Academy and click continue and then this code will be launch 10 and we'll allow the first 10 people that take advantage of this coupon to get this discount and we can save and here we see our launch t 10 coupon created best of luck creating and selling your course and thanks for watching