I spend a lot (no really, A LOT) of time answering the question
“I want to make an online course/membership site. Which plugin should I use?”
And while there is no easy answer, and your choice will depend on a whole heap of variables, I do have some favourites. Today we are talking all about AccessAlly. (You can read more about one of my other faves, Wishlist Member, here)
What is AccessAlly?
AccessAlly is a WordPress plugin that allows you to build, sell and deliver your online courses and membership content.
But, honestly, that’s underselling it.
Access Ally is designed to increase your sales, increase your engagement, make learning easy, and integrate with your other marketing systems. It is your complete, one stop shop for getting your content online and making money from it.
What does it do?
It would be easier to tell you what it doesn’t do…but here goes.
I’ve split all of the features below into 2 main areas, selling your courses and running your courses.
Realistically, I could have created more categories, but let’s keep it simple.
Selling your Courses
Accept payments for your courses or memberships:
Take payments through your WordPress website with Stripe or Paypal. The easy to use order forms not only reduce your abandoned cart numbers, but accept multiple currencies, and can offer payment plans or subscriptions.
To make things even better, the order forms are mobile friendly and you can add things like testimonials or guarantees (all which will help increase your conversions).
Offer trial periods, and easy up-sells:
AccessAlly likes to make things easy. You can offer trial periods which are followed by subscription payments, or easily offer additional courses or access with upsell options.
Plus you can offer coupons and discount codes, which are both unique and time sensitive. Great for a launch, or to entice people who’ve looked, but not purchased, to come back.
Create your own affiliate program:
Don’t fiddle around with an affiliate plugin as well. AccessAlly can do it all for you. Create your affiliate program your way. Customise the tiers and payments, create links and provide them with a dashboard full of resources to help them promote your courses more successfully. It’s win, win.
AccessAlly allows you to easily create a dashboard which showcases all of your courses and programs. Customise the icons to match your programs and link to them for instant upsells.
Image: Nathalie Lussier’s Training Vault Dashboard. Courses you can access shown in colour, courses not yet purchased are in grey. A great way to show your students what else is available.
Automated Follow-Up:
Because you have enough things to do, AccessAlly can automate follow up for just about every step of the process. Not just when they join for the first time, or when they cancel… but you can trigger automated sequences when they access certain content, watch videos, complete quizzes and homework, or even share on social media.
Imagine being able to trigger a congratulations email when they smash that quiz and ace all the answers… well, you can.
Running Your Courses
Unlimited Drip Fed Courses:
Because I know you have more than one course (or at least more than one idea for a course), AccessAlly lets you create unlimited courses and membership levels all in one login area. This keeps everything organised in one spot and allows you to easily cross sell, up sell or move students between programs.
Want to build a second membership site on a different domain? You’ll need a second license for that.
Gamification of your content:
This is where it gets really fun. You can gamify your content by creating a credit system. Students can earn points for achieving goals, or even for social sharing images, certificates and their progress. You can them allow them to spend their credits to unlock bonus content (or you could add other bonus rewards such as meet ups, one on one sessions, or just about anything you can think of).
3 Quiz Types:
You can use these for assessment (for example, asking them to complete questions to unlock the next module) or get smart, and use something like a personality test to tag members, and then allocate specific work or content based on tags. That’s right, your course can morph specifically to suit your student. Pretty cool stuff.
This might have to be one of my favourite functions. Gorgeous progress bars, pie charts and checklists that let students see which parts of your course or membership site they have completed so far, and which bits are still to go. Great for increasing your completion rates.
The image shows tracking on one of the previous modules inside my Academy.
Allows students to submit homework:
Want to make sure they are doing what they are supposed to be doing?
Private notes give students the ability to ask or answer questions, upload files, and submit homework for review, with email notifications, letting you know that it’s there and allowing you to reply personally and privately.
Got too many students? These email notifications can go to another teacher on your team, or to your VA.
Certificates of Completion:
Let your students celebrate completing their course by downloading their own certificate. You can upload your own certificate documents, or customise one of the templates available. It can even personalise their name, date of completion, and anything else you want to include.
Member Directory Plugin:
Easily create multiple student directories to help your students get to know each other, connect and build relationships. They can update their profiles and upload a photo.
This is a great way to build a community, not just a group of students.
Your directory can be open to the public if you wish, or kept private and accessed just by your students.
The pros?
One Plugin
Well… as you can see from above, it does just about everything.
AccessAlly takes the role of almost a dozen other plugins. This keeps the back end of your website clean and organised, increases your load speed, decreases your chances of getting hacked through an outdated plugin… and could save you a heap of money along the way.
It’s purposely designed
Nathalie Lussier builds and creates a whole heap of plug ins and software specifically for online entrepreneurs
She runs some great tools, including Pop Up Ally, which creates polite pop ups for your website.
What I love about this, is that AccessAlly was designed, created and USED by a successful online marketer, prior to being released for sale.
She’s not just a coder who designed something to ride the online course creation wave, and make some money. She’s a successful online business owner, who knows what works and what doesn’t.
While it has definitely been built with student engagement and completion in mind, it has a strong sales focus.
Because after all, if no one is buying your course… then no one is learning from it.
The cons?
It’s not free or the cheapest
If you’re looking for a free product, then this isn’t for you.
The price isn’t a bad thing. I truly believe that you get what you pay for… and in this case, you are getting a service that takes you from sales, through to sign up, delivery, support and even through up sell.
It will save you on paying for multiple services and plugins, and will increase your sales… but you have to be willing to pay for those results.
The Wrap up
AccessAlly is a full service, full feature, one stop shop for running your online course or membership site.
It integrates and automates just about every aspect of the process from beginning to end.
Check out all the info for AccessAlly here
Final Note:
If AccessAlly isn’t for you, make sure you go and check out Nathalie Lussier anyway. She has a great free 30 day list building challenge, which shows you how to build your email list. I first took it about 2 years ago, and grew my list by over 500 people just using her methods, so it is well worth a look. You can check out the FREE challenge by clicking here.
Disclaimer:
This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may be rewarded for you purchasing through my link.
This doesn’t impact the price you pay in any way.
I wouldn’t be telling you about it if I didn’t love it. So go on, have a look, and see what you think.