I want to start a WordPress site and deliver video lessons to paying clients. Is this the best option?
Where do I host the videos? Is Youtube a good option? Can I make the videos available only on my site page and accessible only to paying clients? How do I do that?
I have four different online courses with video content right now and there are lots of choices. If you're just starting out and want something that is easy with no monthly fee and built-in sales/landing pages with the ability to stop video downloads, you should check out Gumroad.com
Give me a call if you want to discuss any strategy about how to actually sell the courses/videos.
Thanks
David Barnett
You can use Paid Memberships Pro + WP Courseware together to provide a Udemy like courseware site.
You can host videos on YouTube or if videos are screen captures, encode your videos at 1000kbs + mono/128k audio + 15fps. This will produce HD videos which are very small.
This way you can self host your videos, which allows easier protection schemes + avoids expensive video services or YouTube Ads, which might be for competitors or just random + certainly will take attention away from your course.
Look at PMP + WP Courseware docs for how to associate videos with different membership levels + only allow people who've paid for specific membership levels to access related videos.
The paid-memberships-pro-for-wp-courseware plugin available at WordPress.org provides glue between PMP + WP Courseware, making using both even easier.
Keep in mind, depending on how many people are logged in to your site simultaneously, you can run into site performance problems.
Best to hire someone who understands tooling membership sites, to allow many simultaneous logged in users with no performance loss.
This type of site design is fairly easy to do from scratch...
And very difficult to do after a site is running.
Best to design your WordPress site based on expect numbers of simultaneous users.
When you are starting out you want a system that's got built in "funnels" that allow you to create courses, add bundles or recommend additional courses to your students. Your system should be easy to use, give you templates that you can modify and add your branding to and your videos are stored via a cloud system. I recommend Thinkific.com. They also handle the payment processing.
If you'd like to reach out to me I'd be happy to talk about targeting students for your courses with you.
Cheers,
Iolande
Successful Business Builders
There's a new platform called Uscreen that pretty much takes care of everything you've mentioned.
Vimeo also has a few of these features in their mid-tier packages.
You can see examples of video embeds on our site:
https://www.vidico.com
They are a pretty phenomenal hosting service nowadays.
