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A 3,000+ Word Guide From Kajabi Experts

Are you interested in learning more about Kajabi? If so, you've come to the right place!

Over the years, our team has set up dozens of Kajabi sites that have helped drive over $100M+ in revenue. Whether you're a new brand just getting started with courses or you're making 7-figures and you want to make the switch to Kajabi, this is for you.

In this article, we'll introduce you to Kajabi and show you how easy it is to create and sell online courses with this platform. We'll also provide a few tips for getting started.

What is a Learning Management Software?

Kajabi is a "learning management software" or "LMS." A learning management software is a platform that helps you create and deliver online courses.

To be clear, an LMS does not:

• Film or edit the course for you
• Create the course material
• Market your course

An LMS, like Kajabi, simply provides a way for you to host your courses online and manage everything in one place. This includes things like accepting payments, delivering content to students, tracking student progress, and managing student accounts.

Without an LMS, you'd be stuck trying to piece together all of these different features yourself using a combination of different software platforms.

Kajabi Alternatives

Before we get too far, let's first talk about some of the different alternatives to Kajabi. There are a number of them out there and, while we won't cover these in depth in this article, it is worth your time to compare the features of the list below to Kajabi.

We'll start with the "direct" alternatives. These are platforms that have very similar features to Kajabi:

• Teachable
• Thinkific
• Podia

In addition, there are a few "indirect" alternatives. These may have different features from Kajabi, but they can still be used to create and sell courses:

• Mighty Networks
• LearnDash
• Memberpress
• Circle.so

(Of course, this isn't an exhaustive list. We've used all of these platforms and are able to compare them to Kajabi).

Features of Kajabi

Hang with me for just a minute! We're gonna get to a super practical step-by-step in a moment. I think it's important to understand some of the features of Kajabi first, just so you know what you have in your course-creation toolbelt.

Kajabi has a few "big" components... we're only going to talk about one of them.

1. First, they have a website builder. The website builder in Kajabi allows you to create a simple website for your courses without having to write any code or hire a web designer. You can use the website builder to create a single-page landing page for your course or an entire website with multiple pages, blog posts, and more. (Quick disclaimer: I personally don't love the website builder in Kajabi. I think it's fine if you're just starting or need to get a site up quickly, but I wouldn't recommend to a legit, growing business.)
2. Kajabi also has an email marketing tool. I'm not going to go too in-depth on this as I also don't love their email marketing tool (we use ActiveCampaign). It's fine for simple email campaigns, but it's going to be very limiting for anything else.
3. Lastly, and where we're going to spend our time today, Kajabi as a course platform where you can host all of your course content, manage payments and student accounts, deliver content to students, track student progress, and more. That's what we'll focus on for the rest of the article.

Let's focus on four of the best features of Kajabi for course creation.

1. Easy-to-Use Course Delivery

This is probably one of Kajabi's strongest features compared to other course platforms. The user interface and course delivery system are beautiful and incredibly easy to use.

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2. Simple Payment Processing With Stripe

Payment processing can be a huge headache when you're first starting out. Kajabi takes care of this for you by integrating with Stripe (one of the most popular payment processors). It takes just a few minutes to create your Stripe account and integrate it with Kajabi. Once you've set it up,  you can start selling courses right away and don't need to touch it. Then, every few days, Stripe will automatically transfer the funds to your bank account.

Kajabi also integrates with PayPal if you need to use that as as your payment processor (or in addition to Stripe).

3. Student Management and Progress Tracking

Kajabi makes it easy to keep track of your students and their progress through your courses. You can see when they last logged in (and how many times), which lessons they've completed, and which courses they have access to.

This is helpful for a number of reasons:

1. You can easily see which students are actively engaged in your courses and which ones need a little nudge. You can send reminders to students who haven't logged in for a while or reach out to them if they're having trouble with a particular lesson.
2. You can see common sticking and dropoff points for students and create resources to help them overcome those obstacles.
3. Sharing logins is one of the biggest challenges for course creators, so you can also see how many times students have logged in to the course. If a student has logged in 50 times but only had access for a week, that might indicate they're sharing their login.

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4. Transactional Emails & Functionality

Additionally, Kajabi has solid transactional capabilities for things like confirmation emails, thank you pages, abandoned cart emails, course process emails, etc.

These are important because they enhance the user experience making it more likely for them to start and continue with your course.

A Step-By-Step Guide for Creating Your Course in Kajabi

Getting Started

There are a few things you'll want to have ready to go before you jump in. Depending on your course, you might need a few more or different items than the list below, but this should be a good starting point.

1. Your course videos in MP4 format. All videos will need to be under 4GB each.
2. 1-2 sentence module descriptions. These simply help the student know what's in that particular module.
3. Course thumbnails. Typically, Kajabi thumbnails are sized 1280px 720px (horizontally). I'd recommend making these in Canva and having one thumbnail per video.
4. Any course downloads or resources.
5. Your logo and brand colors in a HEX code.
6. A Stripe account (it's free).

Once you have those things, it's time to create your Kajabi account.

Click here for a 30-day free trial (the Kajabi website only offers 14 days).

Configuring Account Settings

Before I jump into the upload of the course and do all the fun stuff, I like to configure my account settings to make sure I don't miss anything later on. Below are the key areas I focus on. You can access these items by clicking "Settings" in the bottom left corner of your screen.

Site Details

Here you can set your site name, apply a support email address (I like "[email protected]"), upload your branding and colors, and set instructor information.

Under site details, you'll also want to choose a homepage. This is the first page users will see when they log in to the site. If your website is NOT on Kajabi, I'd recommend setting this to "Library." This will take your student directly to their course library when they log in rather than sending them to a random page on your site.

Payment Integrations

Remember a few minutes ago when I said it's super easy to integrate Stripe with your Kajabi site? Here's where you'll do that.

Click the Payment Integrations box under Settings and then click "Connect" next to Stripe. It'll prompt you to log in to your Stripe account and will walk you through the process of getting connected. It should only take a minute or two.

Quick Note: You can't set up "Offers" (we'll get to those in a minute) until you connect your payment processor, so it's important you don't skip this step.

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Email Templates

Email templates are where you'll find all the transactional emails I mentioned earlier. You can customize each of these to say what you want.

I'd recommend editing the following transactional emails:

• Cart Abandonment - this email is sent when a student starts the checkout process but they don't complete it.
• Offer Grant Confirmation - this email is sent when you grant access to a student. Typically used when you add friends and family, influencers, etc.
• Offer Purchase Notification - this is the most important email on this list. It's sent when a student buys your course and it's one of first interactions they have with you as a paying customer.

There are additional settings under this tab you can play around with, but I'd recommend focusing on these three to get started.

Creating Your Course

Alright, let's get into the fun stuff!  It's time to get your course created.

You're going to want to click "Products" in the left-hand sidebar and then click "+ New Product."

Kajabi has recently rolled out an update that will better walk you through the initial setup process, so just follow their instructions and choose the options that are right for your course.

Once you've completed that setup, you'll be greeted with a screen that looks similar to the one below.

Uploading Your Course Videos & Resources

Kajabi will give you some starter modules to work with, but you can delete those and start from scratch if you want. I usually like to start with a blank slate so I can add in my modules exactly how I want them.

Let's do a quick glossary of terms so you know what you're working with:

• Lesson - a lesson is one, individual video in your course.
• Submodule - a submodule is a small collection of similar lessons. For example, if you have "Lesson 3a, 3b, and 3c" those might go in a submodule.
• Module - a module is a section of your course that likely contains multiple video lessons and submodiles. Think about modules like a "folder" for your content.

There are two ways you can upload your course videos:

1. One module at a time. This is going to allow you to move slowly and make sure nothing gets missed. I like doing this if I have fewer than 10 videos/lessons to work with. To upload one lesson at a time, click "Add Content" and then click "Add Lesson."
2. "Bulk" upload all videos. This will essentially allow you to upload all videos for your course at once. I like doing this if I have more than 10 videos to work with since it saves a ton of time. If you want to upload multiple course videos at once, click "Add Content" and then choose "Upload Multiple Videos" at the bottom of the dropdown. I've found the easiest way to do this is to store your videos in Dropbox or Google Drive and then connect that account to Kajabi.

Whether you go one at a time, or bulk upload your videos, you'll want to make sure you have clear titles, descriptions, and thumbnails for each.

Ready to keep going? Let's do it.

Editing Lesson Information

Don't skip this step! This is how your content will appear to your student and could be the difference between them continuing with the course or dropping off.

Take a quick look at the lesson screenshot below and then we'll cover each area.

Lesson Details

The first thing you'll want to do is update the "Lesson Details." This includes the lesson title, description, media, and downloads.

Quick Note: Keep your lesson titles consistent. I typically recommend you use title case (Which is When Your Titles Look Like This) and add the module/lesson number. For example, if your lessons is about how to knit a quilt and it's the second lesson in the third module, your title might be: "3b. How to Knit a Quilt"

When you come to "Media," you'll simply choose what that lesson is about.  Is it a video? An audio recording? Content only? Choose whichever applies to that lesson.

Next, grab the lesson description and paste it in the big text box.

Finally, add any "Downloads" that the student might need. These are likely going to be in a PDF format. I like using Canva to create resources.

Automation

This is a little advanced, so we won't go too in-depth here. An "automation" is an email that you can send to your students based on specific actions they might take. For example, once they complete that lesson, you can send them an email congratulating them and prompting them to keep going.

Comment

This will determine if students can leave comments on your lessons or not. I personally don't like comments, so I usually set them to "Hidden," but you can set the comments to "Visible" (default) if you'd prefer.

Lesson Thumbnail

Your lesson thumbnail will appear on the course curriculum page and at the top of the lesson prior to the student playing the video, so it's important to set something here. I would recommend designing the thumbnail to match your branding and simply adding the title of the lesson and maybe your logo. Again, I like using Canva to create these.

Status

Lastly, we have "Status." This will determine if the lesson is "Published" (available for students to see and access), or "Draft" mode. If you're still working on the lesson, you can set it to "Draft" and no one will be able to see it until you're ready.

When you're all done, click "Save."

And that's it! You've now created and published your first lesson. Repeat that process for all lessons in your course.

Making Your Course Available to Purchase

Once your course is complete, it's time to make it available for purchase!

Kajabi uses "Offers" to grant access to "Products" (ie, your course). So let's talk about creating your offer so students can buy your course.

To create an offer, click "Sales" from the left sidebar and then click "Offers." If you've never created an offer before, click "Get Started" on that screen.  

Creating Offer Details

Next, you'll need to fill out some basic information in the offer popup window.

Offer Title

This should be one of two things:

1. If you're giving direct access to your course with this offer, you can give it the same name as your course.
2. If this offer will grant access to multiple courses or a bundle, name it after the bundle.

Select Your Product

Right below the offer title, you'll see a dropdown menu to choose your product. Click that dropdown and select the products you'd like to grant the student access to once they buy.

Payment Type

Lastly,  you have the option to set the payment type. Here are the options you have:

• One-Time Payment - the student pays a flat, one-time fee to access the content.
• Multiple Payments - the student pays 2+ times. This is helpful if your course is expensive and you want to break the payments up (eg, the course is $1,000 and you want to offer four payments of $250).
• Subscription -  the student pays a recurring fee to access the content. This may be chosen if you plan on releasing new content regularly and want to keep the students subscribed (eg, $50/month).
• Free - if your course is free, choose this.

Depending on what you choose, more options around pricing will show. Go ahead and set your price and your currency in those options.

Finalizing Offer Details

You're doing great! We're allllmost to the point where you can start selling your course.

Once you've created your offer, you'll want to finalize some of the details and tell the offer exactly what you need it to do for you.

Let's walk through a two of those things.

Product Access

In the Product Access area,  you have the option to set how long a student has access to your course content.

Remember, once a student purchases an offer, they're granted access to the product(s) you've selected in that offer. So if they purchase an offer that gives them access to your course, they will have access to your course for as long as you've specified in the Product Access area.

The options you have for setting product access are:

1. "Begin access at a specific date" -  this means that even if they purchase the offer immediately, they won't have access to the content until the date you've specified. This is helpful if you need all students to start at one time.
2. "Restrict access to a specific amount of days" - once the student has purchased the offer, they will have access to the content for a set number of days. After those days are up, they will no longer have access to the content. This is useful if you want to limit access to a few months, for example.

Keep in mind, though, you don't have to turn any of these options on. If you don't set these options, the student can get access right away and will have lifetime access by default.

Post-Purchase

This is where you'll choose what happens after the student makes a purchase. Personally, I like to send the user to their library (default) and send the default email. We already set that email in Kajabi settings, so we don't need to write it again.

Designing the Offer Checkout Page

Last step... promise.

Kajabi has a default checkout page (which you can access by clicking "Edit Checkout") that has some placeholder text and a header image. You're going to want to customize this page.

Now, there are a ton of things you can do, but I'm going to make three recommendations. You can go back later and design some of the more advanced items.

1. Edit Page Content

Describe your course in more detail. What does the student get? What will they learn? What bonuses are included? Make your course sound and feel compelling. (We have an example of a good checkout page here).

2. Add Testimonials

Buried at the bottom of the page content screen is a button to add testimonials. Click that and add 2-3 testimonials about your course.

3. Change Design/Banner Image

You can adjust the primary color on this screen to match your brand. You can also upload a banner image that students will see at the top of the screen (instead of the default blue one).

When all of that is done, be sure to click "Save."

From there, you can click "Get Link" in the top right corner. That's the direct link you can send to potential students, allowing them to buy and then access your course!

When you're ready, we have a 30-day free trial link to get started on Kajabi