New Zenler is an all-in-one platform that allows you to build, market, and sell your courses. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced course creator, New Zenler makes it simple to create a professional course website.
But where do you start? How do you use the platform to create your website?
To make the process easier, we’ve created this step-by-step New Zenler tutorial. We’ll cover everything from setting up your courses to how to start selling them.
By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have a fully functional course website. So let’s get started.
1. Create a New Zenler Account
The first step is to create an account on the New Zenler website. The platform currently accepts new members by invitation only, but you can use our link to get immediate access to the platform.
Once you land on the New Zenler website, click on Signup Now. You’ll then be taken to the registration page, where you’ll be prompted to enter your email address and create a password.
After that, you’ll be asked to enter your phone number and then verify both your phone and email to access your site.
Next, you’ll need to choose a plan. While you can continue on the free beta plan, to host the website on your own domain, a paid Zenler plan will be required.
That’s all you need to do! You’ve successfully created your Zenler account.
2. Set Up Your Online Course
Setting up an online course in New Zenler is straightforward, and in this section, we’ll show you the steps to creating one.
Create a Course
To create a course, click on the Courses tab in the top menu of your admin dashboard. This will take you to the courses page, where you can select the Create New Course option.
In the next step, you’ll be prompted to enter some basic details about your course, including the course name, subtitle, and summary.
Click Create Course, and you’ll now enter New Zenler’s curriculum builder.
Here you’ll see the option to add sections and lessons to your course. In New Zenler, sections are just for the purpose of organizing your lessons, which are the actual course content that students will be learning.
So, your first step is to click Add Section and give it a name.
Now, click Add Lesson and, again, give it a name.
Once you add a lesson, you’ll see the types of content you can add to it, including videos, PDFs, images, text, and custom code.
The good thing about New Zenler’s lesson editor is that you can combine different content types in a single lesson. So, you can have a video, PowerPoint, PDF, text, and a quiz in the same lesson.
To add a particular content type, just select the correct option. For example, if you want to add a text-based block, click the Text icon, and you’ll be presented with the text editor.
Similarly, you can add a video and other content types to the lesson.
Meanwhile, you don’t have to add content to lessons individually because New Zenler supports bulk uploading. It allows you to upload multiple files simultaneously, and the course builder will automatically create lessons from the uploaded content.
You’ll see a bulk upload option toward the top of the builder, while there’s a small icon toward the end of each section as well.
Clicking on either of these buttons will open the bulk uploader, where you can directly drag the files from your device or add them from your cloud service.
Plus, you can upload different content types simultaneously.
Once the upload is complete, New Zenler’s curriculum builder will automatically create lessons from your uploaded files.
You can then use the drag-and-drop function to reorder lessons or even move them between sections. You can also open individual lessons and add text or additional files to them.
Now, let’s show you how to add quizzes and some other lesson types to your course.
New Zenler’s quiz builder allows you to create different types of questions, including true/false, image-based, and multiple-choice questions.
To add a quiz to your lesson, select the Quiz content type. This will open the quiz builder, where you can add questions and customize other settings.
Select the question type you’d like to create and drag it to the main canvas. Now, you can add the question text and answers, as well as input the correct answer.
Apart from adding questions, you can also add a timer, change the quiz design, randomize questions, and more from the Settings tab.
The only drawback is that you can’t upload questions in bulk to New Zenler. You must add them individually, which can be a cumbersome process if you’re creating an extensive question bank.
Manage Course Settings
Now that you know how to add different types of content to your course, let’s walk through some commonly used course and lesson settings.
In the curriculum builder, you’ll notice some settings above each lesson:
- Enable a free preview of the lesson
- Save it as a draft if you don’t want to publish it right away
- Enable lessons discussions
- Make the lesson mandatory so students must complete it before moving to the next one
Next, you have a few useful tools and settings at the course level.
The first one is content dripping, which can help you release your course content on a schedule.
To create a drip schedule, click on the Drip tab at the top of the curriculum builder page, and enable this feature.
Here, you can choose between the options to release course content after a specific number of days or on a set date.
And you can send email notifications every time new content is released.
To do that, click the Set notification mail button, and you’ll be taken to the Automation tab, where you’ll see a new automation for sending the drip email.
New Zenler Automations allow you to automate actions based on certain events in your school:
- A student enrolls in a specific course
- A student completes a course
- A student completes a lesson
Based on these actions, you can automatically send emails, add or remove tags, send a webhook, and notify the admin.
These automations are useful for sending personalized and targeted emails to your students. For instance, you can send a welcome email to new students and a congratulations email to those who complete the course.
At this point, your content should be ready for publishing, but you should first enable payments. So, let’s move on to that step.
3. Create a Pricing Plan
New Zenler supports various pricing options, including single payments, payment plans, and recurring subscriptions.
Before choosing the type of pricing for your course, ensure your New Zenler account is integrated with the supported payment gateways. The available payment options include Stripe, PayPal, and Razorpay.
To enable any of these payment methods, click on the Site menu in the header and then navigate to the Integrations tab in the left sidebar.
From here, select your preferred payment method and follow the instructions for connecting it to your account.
Once you finish the payment gateway setup, go back to the course and select the Pricing tab from the menu bar.
After clicking Add New Plan, you’ll see the four pricing options.
For this New Zenler tutorial, we’ve decided to show the steps for creating a one-time purchase, so go ahead and select that option.
On the following page, you’ll see different options that will allow you to customize your pricing plan. Apart from basic details, such as plan name, price, and currency, you can also do the following:
- Setting enrollment limits, i.e., the maximum number of students that can enroll in the course
- Setting availability with the start and end dates for your course
- Enabling tiers and select sections or lessons you want to include in the plan
- Adding students to a community if you’ve created one
All that’s left is to click the Finish button, and your pricing plan will be activated.
With New Zenler, you can also add upsells and order bumps, which will appear during or after the checkout process.
To add these to your plan, select the Pages tab from the curriculum builder, and depending on whether you want to add an upsell or order bump, select the Thank You or Checkout page.
To add an order bump, click the Pencil icon next to the checkout page.
Then, click the Add Order Bump button to select the product you want to add to your main offer.
Once you click the button, a slide-out menu will appear on the right side of the screen where you can select the course and the plan to offer as a bump.
You can add an upsell to your thank you page in a similar way.
4. Build Your Course Landing Page
You need a sales page to start selling your course, and the good news is that New Zenler automatically creates landing pages for courses. So you don’t have to build a sales page from scratch. Rather you can use the page builder to modify the copy and design.
To get started, go back to your course and select the Pages tab. Here you’ll see all the course landing pages, including sales, checkout, thank-you, and course access pages.
Click the pencil icon next to the sales page. This will open the page builder, where you can customize the existing page sections or add new ones.
Pages in New Zenler use blocks. You can think of these as page sections with several elements, such as text, headings, images, videos, buttons, etc.
Adding new blocks to your page is pretty simple. Click the Blocks option at the top and select the correct block type. Supported blocks range from the hero section and course curriculum to FAQs and CTAs.
Once you select a block type, New Zenler lets you choose from dozens of pre-designed templates and add them to your page in a single click.
Modifying an element is as easy as clicking on it and entering your changes. To access more settings, select the block and click the cog icon.
This will pop up the settings window where you can do things like changing the background color and image, modifying spacing, adding animation, and more.
Now, you can modify your checkout and thank-you pages and even your other website pages (e.g., homepage, contact) in a similar way. The page builder experience is consistent, regardless of the page type.
If you need inspiration for designing your course website, check out this ultimate list of New Zenler website examples.
5. Do Final Settings and Publish the Course
There are a few things you must do before publishing your course, and we’ll discuss them in this section.
Set up a Custom Domain
Your website points to a New Zenler subdomain, and your URL will look like this: yoursite.newzenler.com.
However, you can change that by adding a custom domain, and we suggest you do this.
Go to the Site tab from your admin dashboard, then Site Settings → Custom Domain.
In the Custom Domain field, enter your domain name and head to your web hosting account.
From there, you should update your DNS records, and New Zenler’s support article explains how to do that in detail.
Do the Essential Integrations
Your next step is to set up the essential integrations to extend your course website functionality.
Here are a few integrations you should consider setting up:
- Google Analytics: The course builder has decent course reporting tools, but you need to connect it to Google Analytics to get more insights on your site visitors.
- Email marketing tool: New Zenler’s email-marketing features are basic, so you should connect to a specialized email marketing platform like ConvertKit.
- Zapier: Connect your New Zenler site to various services and automate workflows using Zapier.
You can access these integrations by going to Site → Integrations.
Make a Free Purchase and Test the Flow
The final step is to test the entire flow to make sure students can buy your course and watch it without any glitches. To do that, create a 100% off coupon.
So, go to the Site tab and select Coupons from the left-side menu.
Click the Create Coupon button, and on the next screen, create a code for it, set the discount percentage to 100, and choose your course as the product to which you’d like to apply it.
Next, open a new private window and paste the URL of your course to view the course sales page as a student. Enroll in the course, apply the coupon, and purchase the course.
At this point, you can also download the New Zenler mobile app and test the student viewing experience on the app as well.
And if everything works well, hit the Publish button!
Bonus Tips to Take Your New Zenler Course to the Next Level
Now that your online school is live, you can do a few things to make it even better.
Use New Zenler Live to Drive Engagement
New Zenler Live is a suite of tools that allow you to create live sessions and engage your audience. You can create a few different types of live events:
- Live classes for sessions embedded in your courses
- Live webinars for noninteractive sessions
- Live interactive webinars for interactive meetings
- Live stream for streaming to YouTube, Facebook, or Twitch
- 1-1 bookings for one-on-one coaching sessions
This is one of the standout aspects of New Zenler, and we suggest you incorporate a live strategy into your business.
Build a Community Around Your Course
Another way to increase course engagement is to add a community to it, and New Zenler’s community feature lets you do that easily.
You can create a single community for your online school or create a separate one for each course. This way, students can ask questions, share resources, and get help from one another.
However, the community builder is very limited in terms of functionality, and you’ll be better off using a dedicated community platform like Circle if you need more advanced features.
Start a Blog to Grow Your Audience
Content marketing can be a great way to reach a larger audience and get more students.
New Zenler’s blog feature will let you quickly create a blog and start publishing content. You can then use the blog to write guides and articles related to your course topic.
You can share your content on social media and increase your site’s visibility in search engines.
Create a Course Marketing Funnel
You can also create a complete course funnel within New Zenler so you can capture leads and convert them into paying customers.
The funnel feature with New Zenler allows you to quickly build a funnel using ready-made templates. It supports a few funnel types, including lead magnet funnels, video series funnels, and webinar funnels.
You can customize each page of the funnel or create a brand-new one from scratch. And then you can nurture your audience via emails.
Conclusion
In this New Zenler tutorial, we’ve covered all the steps for creating a course on this platform. From building your curriculum to setting up landing pages, we hope you’ve learned how to set up your course website on the platform.
Now it’s your turn to take what you’ve learned and start creating your courses. If you aren’t signed up for New Zenler yet, you can get started with a free account.
If you have any questions about how to use New Zenler, make sure to post them in the comments below.
