Today we are very excited to announce the release of our new online course and membership site plugin - OptimizeMentor.

If you want to create and sell online courses and memberships, you will be over the moon with this HUGE update to the OptimizePress tools Suite.

Today we are very excited to announce the release of our new online course and membership site plugin - OptimizeMentor.

If you want to create and sell online courses and memberships, you will be over the moon with this HUGE update to the OptimizePress tools Suite.

Course and membership functionality is frequently requested by our community, who want to be part of the booming industry of selling access to premium content.

Industry experts predict that the eLearning market will quadruple from around $250 billion in 2020 to $1 trillion in 2027 (Source: Global Market Insights).

We wanted to create a seamless experience that means you can market, sell and deliver access to your course content in one tool, making it as easy as possible for you to grow your online business and not be tangled in all the tech. 

Trying to patch together plugins and different services causes friction in any business and prevents growth. It also costs your business a lot of money that could be better spent on traffic generation to capture more leads and sales.

Today's announcement of the release of OptimizeMentor brings you the complete tool for:

This post will focus on the key features of OptimizeMentor and how you can use them to build membership sites, create online courses or sell access to your existing content.

OptimizeMentor makes it easy for you to create memberships and courses that you can sell to paying customers. If you want to add a course or membership product to your existing products lineup or if you're going to create an entire business around this, then OptimizeMentor is the perfect tool for you.

Here's a quick video to walk you through what you can do in your business with OptimizeMentor.

The opportunities for small businesses and solo creators to sell access to their content is endless. Nearly every business could offer some kind of paid subscription service for their customers.

Selling memberships and courses can add residual income to a business. Do the work once and sell it multiple times.

Any digital product you buy online can be delivered inside a members area.

Here's a short list of the types of digital products you could sell:

OptimizeMentor is a plugin for our OptimizePress Suite that simplifies how you protect content on your WordPress site and helps you create structured courses and membership areas.

It integrates with all of the tools in our OptimizePress Suite, such as OptimizeFunnels and OptimizeCheckouts. This means that you can quickly:

The all new OptimizeMentor dashboard gives you full oversight of your membership & course site stats

There is no need for the stress and headaches associated with connecting to third party integrations and external plugins, as you can do everything with the OptimizePress suite of tools.

Creating online courses is a breeze using the visual course builder to organise and structure your course content.

OptimizeMentor includes the full range of done-for-you templates that enable you to easily create membership pages and the pages needed for your course areas such as home, module and lesson.

The membership protection features mean you can protect any content on your website, including WordPress pages and posts. The membership features give you a wide range of flexibility when selling memberships and courses, as you can sell different levels of access and drip schedule content releases.

Let's dive into the main benefits and features of OptimizeMentor in more detail. 

In the same way that OptimizeFunnels has done-for-you funnels, OptimizeMentor has a range of done-for-you membership and course templates you can use on your site.

This means no need for previous web design experience and no need to hire any expensive help to make amazing looking courses and members areas.

These optimized templates use common course layouts with easy navigation and clear structure for your module and lesson content.

You can choose from a range of brand new Course Home, Module and Lesson page templates that we have specifically created to engage members in your content.

You can create full membership sites using the pre-created templates included with OptimizeMentor and wow members with a consistent and professional-looking design.

Memberships allow you to control who has access to what content on your site. You can protect courses, pages and even WordPress posts.

In addition to the types of content you can protect with a membership, you can create different membership levels and schedule what content is released and when.

This gives you a wide range of flexible options to grow and scale your business with ease.

Let's take a look at the settings you can control with Memberships.

The Content Access Settings allow you to control which memberships view what content and courses on your site.

You can create one membership level that gives access to all your content or create different membership tiers that access different levels of content based on the membership people purchase.

One of the key benefits of our Content Access Settings is that you don't have to create multiple versions of the same content. You can have different memberships that you sell, and they can all have access to the same pieces of content, such as course modules or protected blog posts.

This saves you time and gives you the flexibility to create a range of products using different membership access settings.

Control where your members go after they log in, join or register. You can send different members to different pages based on their membership.

Having these options allows you to tailor the user experience for each membership. Every membership could have its own welcome video on a different page.

To save you time and help you get ahead quickly once you install and activate the new OptimizeMentor, we have automatically created some primary pages you need to work with on your site.

These core pages help you manage how people access and navigate protected content.

Here's how these pages work:

Each new Membership you create automatically uses these default pages to manage different scenarios on your site.

As you can see below, these are set by default but you can easily change them by selecting other pages on your site.

The default pages, created for these events above can be easily edited using the OptimizeBuilder or you can replace these pages with any other pages you design. You have complete flexiblity and control.

The Access Duration control settings allow you to give different access levels to different memberships. Once you set up an access duration, it will run for each member on autopilot without you having to do anything.

The Access Duration setting is where you control how long the membership remains active for each member.

For example, if you want to sell access to your course content for a fixed period of time or have access removed on a set date, this is where you would control that. It can be different for each membership.

If you were selling a monthly subscription, you would choose "Lifetime" as the duration, or if you were giving a seven-day trial to your member's area, you would select "Fixed Time" and set access to expire after seven days.

Remember earlier when I said it integrates with OptimizeCheckouts. The prices you want to charge for membership and courses are set as products within OptimizeCheckouts. There is no need to use an external sales cart plugin or manage complicated integrations; the process is seamless.

I'll cover more on how you take payments for selling memberships and courses later.

The Drip Scheduling setting is where you control which content is released (dripped) and over what period.

For example, if you want new members to see a new lesson or piece of protected content every other day after they join, then Drip Scheduling will automatically manage that for you.

Drip scheduling helps you control what content is released and helps you manage evergreen memberships, and can restrict people from simply joining and downloading all your content.

Releasing content to your members over time can prevent them from becoming overwhelmed and limit cancellations. This also makes it easier for members to consume what you give them.

These drip scheduling features are super powerful and give you complete flexibility in how each membership has access to the different content on your site.

You can even drill down into what days you want content released.

Want to motivate your members at the start of the week? How about scheduling your content to be available on a Monday, the same day you send out an email to your members?

With memberships, you can quickly create a membership level with access to only your blog content. Using the Content Access settings, you can quickly control which blog post (or all posts) each plan can access.

This helps you begin growing a community to access your content without the need to build an entire course if you don't want to. The choice is yours. There are no limits to what you can protect.

Without getting too technical, you can easily sell the same content via different memberships AND for different prices. 

To go another step further, you could even drip this content to one group of people or give immediate access to those who want to pay more.

Using the Import Members feature, you can bring your existing customers into OptimizeMentor. Simply export them from your email service or CRM and import them via CSV.

During import, add them to a Membership, redirect them to a new welcome video after login and start publishing content for them to consume.

Now we're moving on to the course part of OptimizeMentor. We built the course's feature to help you structure how your content is laid out.

Complete visual course building! Using the visual course builder, you can easily and quickly create and sell an entire course.

OptimizeMentor gives you complete flexibility to bundle courses, control access, and give permission to paying members.

Building a course uses all the same page builder features and templates within your site using the OptimizeBuilder, and it allows you to visualise how your course content is structured.

The image below shows a course made with modules and lesson pages within that module. This clear visual layout makes course building easy and stress-free.

When creating a course you have complete flexibility to...

Creating a new course is a breeze. You choose a template, enter some basic details and begin adding modules and lessons to the course.

When you first create a new course, you can choose from a library of specially designed course home pages, and these are all optimized for content engagement and easy course navigation. You can also access any template from the OptimizePress template library or use your templates from your cloud account.

Once you have your course home page set up, you can add content to your course, such as chapters, modules and lessons. 

After you add modules and lessons, you will see a visual layout of your course with drag and drop features that allow you to organise the order of your content and open any course page with the OptimizeBuilder, right from within the course visual interface.

Each course you make has individual settings for Content Access and Drip Schedule.

Once you have your course created, you can control access to your course and, if required, add any drip schedule you want to set.

Each course has the option to set which memberships can access the content within the course, or you can create new memberships on the fly.

Remember, every course you make can have multiple memberships access it. That means the same content can be shown to different members.

You have the option to specify which content, in the course, you want that membership to access.

It can be all content or selected modules.

This means you can have one membership that can access everything and another membership to access only module 1 & 2. Perfect for setting up trials or free teaser access to your content.

This wide range of options means you can offer different options to different membership tiers or plans that you sell.

By using the Content Access feature you can create new memberships that only have access to the first module or lesson of a course.

This means you can easily tease potential customers into joining. Simply get them to join your "teaser" membership and give them access to Lesson 1 only. Next, use the Redirect Settings to send them to the Upgrade page when they try to view more of the content.

All of this can be automated, just get them to join your teaser plan and let OptimizeMentor do the rest.

You can create a drip schedule for your course where you control when content (modules/lessons) are released.

Using the Drip Schedule feature, you set a trigger for the start time.

We'll cover more of these settings in detail in our help articles and training, so that everything is clear and simple for you. Dripped content is a very powerful way to retain members and control content distribution.

The Drip Schedule lets you drill down to how your content is released. You have options to release content over a range of durations (Daily/Weekly/Monthly/Yearly).

You will be able to see which content is released and on what day after an event is triggered.

With OptimizeMentor, you can create unlimited memberships and courses. No matter how many products you have, each of them could have its own paid membership and course pages. 

The ability to create unlimited memberships and courses allows you to scale and grow your business without restrictions.

We recently released the Custom Experiences feature where you can control what content appears on a page based on different events or visitor criteria.

When you use Custom Experiences with your course content you can hide or show content based on different rules that you set. 

This means that you do not have to create different course pages for different membership tiers. You can have a course lesson page for example and show or hide content on that page based on different membership rules.

Example 1: You could show or hide lesson downloads on a lesson page for different membership tiers.

Example 2: You could show or hide different welcome videos on your course home page for different membership tiers.

Here's a few more ways you can use custom experiences with your memberships and courses:

Read more about our Custom Experiences feature here.

At the start of this post, we mentioned OptimizeMentor integrates with OptimizeCheckouts. This means you use OptimizeCheckouts to sell your courses and memberships and it works directly with OptimizeMentor to give customers the correct access to the content they have purchased.

Selling your courses with OptimizeCheckouts means you collect customer payments and deliver course content all within one tool - OptimizePress. 

Using one tool means you save huge amounts of time and stress as there is no need to connect to any third party tools or systems. 

This avoids the unnecessary stress and headaches of connecting tools together and managing additional plugins. 

A streamlined and branded checkout experience for your customers means higher sales conversions of members into your courses and memberships.

Once you activate OptimizeMentor there are zero payment settings to configure within the membership product itself, as this is fully controlled with OptimizeCheckouts.

To set up a price for your membership or course, you would make a new product within OptimizeCheckouts.

This is also where you set the rules for payment successful (Grant Access) or fails (Revoke Access).

This image shows a new product called "Gold Membership" in OptimizeCheckouts with two new integrations rules.

The product you make inside OptimizeCheckouts lets you set the payment types, payment gateways, payment plans, trial periods, trial amounts and more.

As OptimizeCheckouts includes a wide range of "done-for-you" sales optimized templates you can easily have a new checkout live ready to sell your memberships and courses in minutes.

We have built OptimizeMentor to work seamlessly with the OptimizeBuilder, OptimizeFunnels and OptimizeCheckouts. 

This means you can promote and sell your courses with our done-for-you sales funnels. 

Whether you sell one-time payment access or a monthly subscription for your courses, you can collect payments into your bank account using our checkouts.

These integrations allow for beautiful login and registration forms on your site, creating a seamless user experience as members join and access your site for the first time.

Welcome emails and login details are sent out automatically to add to this overall experience.

It’s a complete all-in-one system, which means you don’t have the headache of connecting various tools and getting them to work.

One of the big stress points of working with course and membership tools is connecting them to various third party systems and plugins. 

Using the OptimizePress Suite, your progress is significantly increased as you can promote, sell, take payments into your bank and deliver your protected courses and membership content without the need for anything else.

With OptimizeMentor, we have created a range of new dynamic OptimizeBuilder editor elements and options. 

These elements pull information from your course settings directly onto your course pages. 

Dynamic Elements are a huge time saver as they mean you can enter course details such as lesson titles or the number of videos in a course. All this information is pulled directly onto the course pages saving you from having to add this information manually.

Another feature of Dynamic Elements is the next/previous lesson button. OptimizeMentor will automatically connect the pages and modules in your lessons together so that course members can easily navigate your content. 

Easy navigation makes it easier for course members to consume your content and engages them in your course. It also saves you the manual work of connecting the lessons.

We are extending the range of Dynamic Elements and more will be released over the coming months.

OptimizeMentor is a new product from the OptimizePress team and can be activated now for all active OptimizePress Suite customers from inside the OptimizePress Dashboard. 

If you are not an OptimizePress Suite member, you can upgrade your existing account now to access the new OptimizeMentor plugin plus the additional benefits of OptimizeFunnels, OptimizeCheckouts, OptimizeUrgency, OptimizeLeads and more.

Over the coming weeks, we will be sharing more ideas on how you can best use OptimizeMentor and how you can take advantage of the growing trend of selling courses and memberships. 

We also have additional course/membership features in the pipeline to ensure you have the best options for your business.

OptimizeMentor is a huge update, and OptimizePress Suite package owners can activate it now and instantly start building memberships and courses. If you are not an OptimizePress Suite package owner, you can upgrade today before the upcoming package price rises.

We invite you to ask your questions in the comment section below, and we look forward to answering them.

What else do you want to know about OptimizeMentor?

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