by Thrive Themes announced a significant update to its WordPress course plugin Thrive Apprentice 4.0 that turns the fully customizable LMS into a complete membership site solution.
Selling online courses is still the most lucrative business model that you can start from home.
Create a course once, and you can sell it to an infinite number of customers with almost no additional costs. And yet, online courses can sell for hundreds to 1000`s of dollars. And that’s all profit for you and your business.
But what does it really take?
To grow an online course-based business, you need to choose a platform that’s both powerful and flexible. You need the freedom to package up and sell your content however you please.
Well, today, we’re proud to announce: Thrive apprentice 4.0
The next big step in online course creation allows you to sell anything and customize everything. Keep reading until the end of the article, where you’ll discover when you will get access to Thrive apprentice 4.0 and how you can get access at the lowest possible price.
In Thrive apprentice versions two and three, they focused on student experience and design. They have made it even easier for the students to log in, register, and purchase their online courses.
By integrating with three payment solutions and three popular membership plugins, then they gave you full visual editing of the entire online course experience.
They made Thrive apprentice so Designer Friendly that you can customize every single pixel in your online course templates, without ever even having to write or touch a line of code.
But we know that you’re probably not a designer, and you probably don’t want to hire a designer either. So they got their designers to pre-build stacks of online course templates that will inherit your logo, your brand color, and your typography, allowing you to set up a branded online course experience in literally minutes.
Then, with the power of dynamic template editing, you can make sweeping changes to the look and feel of your entire online course templates.
Everything about your online school can be edited, including the cost list, which automatically updates as you publish new courses to your website.
Needless to say, Thrive’s apprentice grew quite a lot during versions two and three. This brings us to today for Thrive apprentice 4.0.
They wanted to rethink how you sell content from your website. The team spoke with some online course creators to learn how they can help you to sell more.
And, then they decided to focus on three key features that all connect together, and we think they’re going to blow your mind.
Let us walk you through them, starting with the first milestone feature.
Thrive apprentice 4.0 introduces Products with a flexible digital layer for selling any content from your website.
And yes, we mean any content.
Products / Membership plugin
This mean that thrive apprentice is no longer just an online course platform. It’s now an entire membership plugin for WordPress.
You can restrict and sell access to any content on your website, such as specific pages content categories, members-only blog posts, or even custom post types.
In fact, you can use Thrive apprentice to build a Premium Members area without even having to create an online course under the hood.
A product is just an easy-to-manage set of access rules. So when your customers buy a product, they buy access to the content that the product protects thrive.
Apprentice products support dynamic rules, meaning you can restrict a specific content category. And as soon as you publish content into that category, it will immediately be protected and included in that product.
But if all you want to do is sell a single course, well that’s even easier. Just add it to a product and access will be restricted until someone buys it.
Then as your business grows, you can create a course bundle by adding multiple courses into a single product with the click of a button or use this feature to create hybrid products where courses are combined with any other type of content on your website.
You can sell PDFs, e-books, worksheets, downloads, ultimate guides, recipes, members-only blog posts, and more. Anything you can embed or build on your website can now be protected in sold with Thrive apprentice products, and thrive apprentice also allows you to customize the message visitors see if they tried to access your restricted content.
Rather than scaring potential customers away with access restriction warnings, why not show them an inviting visually editable message that tells them how they can pay for access?
Or, if you prefer, you can redirect them to your dedicated sales page. We’re really excited to see how you’re going to use Thrive apprentice products to package up and sell both your online courses and now any other content on your website.
Now it’s time to talk about the second milestone feature.
Drip
Thrive apprentice 4.0 introduces the most powerful and flexible drip solution that you’ve ever seen for an online course platform.
Drip is the ability to release lessons and modules and cost content to a student over an extended period of time, keeping them engaged for longer.
When we looked at what online course creators really need from a drip solution, and we looked at what other options were in the market, honestly, we were disappointed.
We saw rigid and inflexible drip scheduling. But what you require is flexibility so that your cost-based business is not restricted by your platform of choice.
Again, you require the freedom to package up and sell your content however you please.
So they took their time to really diagnose what a course creator needs, and then turn that into what we believe is the most flexible and powerful drip campaign editor you’ll ever see in Thrive apprentice.
Once you’ve built an online course, just swap over to the drip tab, create a new campaign. And from there, you’ll have six different drip campaign templates to choose from all of which can be manually edited.
Afterward, you can then choose what event should trigger your drip campaign, be at the moment a student purchases your course, or maybe when they start a course, or perhaps a specific calendar date.
You can then apply your drip schedule, either as a systematic schedule, or as a custom schedule where you can set any calendar dates yourself. Or, through Thrive Automator, which allows any third-party event to trigger the unlocking of drip content in your course.
Systematic schedules let you choose to unlock lessons or modules every day, week, month, day of the week, day of the month, and so on.
Once you apply your campaign, you’ll see a visual timeline of how your students will access your content. You can edit or add new unlock conditions so that specific lessons or modules will be dripped at Custom intervals.
They built it this way so that they can add new unlock conditions such as assignment submission, or quiz completion coming in 2022.
Visibility lets you choose if upcoming lessons should be visible in a locked state. Or if they should be completely hidden until the conditions on your drip timeline are met.
You can even combine the two, meaning that you can show some upcoming content before students have unlocked it.
And then, once they meet certain conditions, suddenly unlock a hidden module to surprise your students at the end of the course.
As you can see, this is very flexible and yet very easy to use. But there’s one other feature of drip for Thrive apprentice 4.0 that we think is a real game-changer.
Decoupled drip schedules
Decoupled drip means you aren’t just restricted to one schedule per course, you can create multiple schedules for the same online course and select which one to sell with each product.
Without decoupled drip, that just can’t be done.
You would have to duplicate your entire course for each new drip schedule he wanted to offer, flooding your website with multiple copies of the same course.
And no way to centrally update those courses together in every way de-coupled drip just makes more sense.
Here are two examples:
Let’s say you have a six-week online course that trips one module per week, easy. But now let’s say you want to include that course in a premium bundle of 10 courses.
Do you want all the courses in that bundle to start dripping as soon as the customer purchases, that would mean 10 different courses dripping 10 unrelated modules every week, probably not.
So for your 10-course bundle, you could either sell the courses without a drip schedule, and your customers would get access to all the material as soon as they purchase.
Or, and here is the magic of decoupled drip.
You simply sell a different drip campaign with the bundle, then you do the single course product when where the trigger is set to start course instead of buying the product.
As the result, students buy the bundle but only trigger a drip schedule when they start each course, it just makes sense.
For a second powerful example, they built decoupled drip to support cohort learning.
Cohort learning is when you move a group of students through your entire course together.
So they all start the course on the same date and everyone gets access to each new module at the same time.
It creates a sense of community between students who are learning together, you can easily do this with Thrive apprentice 4.0
Just create a scheduled repeating campaign choose a calendar start date and the content of your course will begin dripping out to students from that start date at exactly the same intervals for each student.
You can then pre-sell your course, knowing that students won’t be able to access it until the official start date.
And if someone buys after the start date, they’ll only have access to backdated course content that has been made available since the trigger date.
Amazing, right? But what if six months later you want to sell that course to a whole new batch of students without messing up the first cohort.
So what do you do?
Instead of duplicating the course you just create a new drip schedule with a different start date, tie it to a new product in front of the apprentice and sell that done. You can do this an unlimited number of times reselling the same course in new ways that suit your business model.
As you can see, Thrive apprentice 4.0 is a well-thought-out meticulously planned, and developed course platform.
And if all this isn’t impressive enough, they have a third major milestone included in the release of Thrive apprentice 4.0.
And this one is special, it’s special because it doesn’t just affect Thrive apprentice, it affects our visual editor, which means it’s available across all of our plugins.
So for the release of Thrive apprentice 4.0, they’re adding a brand-new feature to thrive suite called conditional display.
Conditional display
The conditional display lets you take a content box, a background section, or a common block of content on a given page and create alternate versions of that content.
Each version is then assigned conditional display rules governing what each visitor to that page will see.
So, for example, you can build a pricing table that shows one price for non-customers and a different price for existing customers.
On the exact same sales page. You can even show or hide different blocks of content amongst your logged-in users who have different user roles like editor, author, or subscriber.
Your visitors will only see the version of the content you want them to base on the display rules you set for them.
And they won’t know that the content they’re seeing is different from what other visitors who meet different display criteria see.
So why is a conditional display such a big deal for Thrive Apprentice 4.0?
Well, you can create conditional display rules based on which thrive apprentice products a visitor has purchased. That means you can create sneak peeks where some content is visible publicly, while the remaining content is protected behind a paywall.
And that’s a game-changer because paying members can now share your teaser content on social media to help grow your business.
It also allows you to create assets like a downloads page, a premium resources page, or even your own e-book library.
And just by creating conditional display rules for specific content that lives on such pages, you can hide your premium content from visitors until they purchase the right product in Thrive apprentice.
Think about this like selling individual blocks of premium content that only become visible after the correct purchases are made.
Simply put, the new conditional display feature blows the door wide open when it comes to visual editing flexibility.
And once again, it means you can use Thrive apprentice to sell more content from your website in unique ways, with or without creating online courses.
As you’ve seen with the new product features the de-coupled drip, and the conditional display, thrive apprentice really lets you sell anything and customize everything.
Now it’s time to mark your calendars.
Thrive apprentice 4.0 will be available on the 25th of January 2022. This means that on Tuesday the 25th.
As a current customer of Thrive apprentice, you will get access to thrive apprentice 4.0 at no additional cost.
And if you are not a customer yet, the best way to get access at the lowest possible price is to sign up for Thrive suite today.
Because after the Thrive apprentice 4.0 launch, they are increasing the prices to reflect the huge amount of value that they’ve added to their products over two years.
However, if you sign up today, you’ll be grandfathered in at the lowest possible price for as long as you keep using our product.
That means that you will be immune to this price increase and that you will get all the new features and improvements along the way.
So go ahead, sign up for Thrive suite today to lock in the lowest possible price.
We are very excited to see how you’re going to use Thrive apprentice 4.0 to sell even more from your website.
Included with Thrive Suite you get all the tools to launch your membership site in one place:
- Thrive Theme Builder
Take complete control of your Membership Site’s brand aesthetic with unrivalled visual editing for your entire WordPress theme. - Thrive Architect
Rapidly create conversion optimized landing pages, login pages, sales pages and funnels to market your membership business. - Thrive Leads
Grow your email list faster than ever. Design and deploy opt-in forms with ease, run A/B tests, analyze the data with automated reports and get actionable insights with ease.
- Thrive Comments
Engage your online community by gamifying your posts without adding multiple plugins. Add likes, up-votes, featured comments and badges in seconds.
- Thrive Ultimatum
Boost sales and member subscriptions by running automated scarcity campaigns with uncheatable, limited-time offer countdown timers. - Thrive Ovation
Collect rich customer testimonials and boost social proof for your membership business without a fuss. - Thrive Optimize
Improve conversions and digital product sales with straightforward A/B testing anyone can use.
For more information on this jaw dropping deal… take a look here.
So, let`s recap again:
Membership and Products
- Functions as a full membership plugin for WordPress
- Allows you to sell flexible combinations and variations of ANY website content
- Display custom messages to non-members or customers attempting to access restricted content
- Redirect new visitors or current customers to specific sales or upsell pages to buy access to your premium membership or single-purchase product content
Drip Schedules
- Precision lesson scheduling for online course content
- 6 fully customizable drip schedule templates (including the ability to create your own from scratch)
- Make changes to drip schedules with a visual drag and drop editor
De-coupled Drip
- Launch independent drip schedules for different student intakes of the same course throughout the year (ideal for cohort courses)
- Release course content with complete drip scheduling flexibility
Conditional Display
- Release ‘sneak peeks’ of premium content that can be shared on social media, but require purchase to gain full access.
- Create single pages that include multiple Premium content assets (that must each be purchased separately) like a Premium Resources Page, a Digital Downloads Page or an eBook Library
Conclusion
Thanks for reading until here, and hope this helps you build a better business.
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