A new year means new opportunities, new growth and new ways to succeed. We have a lot of additions planned for Rainmaker Platform — and we’re excited to have you along for the ride.
We also have several new (or revitalized) content offerings planned for 2025, including:
- The return of webinars — come chat with us about what’s happening in digital marketing.
- Dispatch Discussions — we sit down with subject matter experts about trends and topics that affect marketing for businesses like yours.
- Condensed Dispatch articles — easier for you to digest during the workday, and natively available on LinkedIn and Facebook.
We’re also re-evaluating our social media. Right now, we’re phasing out our X (Twitter) presence and adding new platforms to better connect with our audience. Here’s where you can find us on social media:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rmds
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/@RainmakerDigital/
- BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/rainmakerds.bsky.social
- Threads: https://www.threads.net/@rainmakerds
Follow us wherever you have an account and we’ll follow you back.
As a reminder, if you’re not on our mailing list for the Rainmaker Dispatch yet, sign up to get all of our articles and the best marketing news, tips and tricks from around the web:
https://rainmakerdigital.com/weekly-dispatch-signup/
And please, let us know what content you’re interested in for 2025 — drop us a line on socials or send us an email at marketing@rainmakerdigital.com. We’d love to hear from you.
Now — on to this month’s State of the Platform.
Rainmaker Platform Update 3.4.10
Since the last State of the Platform, we’ve released one new update: 3.4.10. This version was primarily focused on our SEO capabilities.
We’ve upgraded our Yoast functionality with new AI tools including a description generator and title generator, as well as an optimizer for keyphrases. For more information on what’s changed, see the changelog:
https://rainmakerdigital.com/andromeda_changelog/
Start the Year with a New Course
Courses are among the most powerful tools in your digital toolbox. They let you share knowledge, establish authority, build an incremental revenue stream, prove your brand is a destination for a topic … and more. A course can be a top of funnel content piece or a bottom of funnel revenue driver. You choose.
Rainmaker Platform has several options for creating courses — the most robust of which is our LearnDash integration. It’s easy to build and sell courses with LearnDash on Rainmaker Platform. But if you’ve never done it before, it might be intimidating to get started.
Here’s how you can build a course from scratch.
Start with the strategy: Define your goals
The reason for the course will determine the way you build it.
Is this something that you’re planning to sell? Make it robust; provide enough information that the person buying it feels like they’re getting value for money.
On the other hand, if it’s meant to be a top of funnel offering (for example, as a lead magnet), it shouldn’t be as robust.
Is this an introduction to a subject? Or a deep dive?
Write down in one sentence what you want this course to accomplish. For example, “This course is designed to get people interested in signing up for my email list.”
Figure out what your audience wants
Every course must either solve a problem or create an opportunity for the course taker. What problems or opportunities does your audience have? You may have some idea already if you’ve done some research, or if your audience looks a lot like you. But it never hurts to ask.
Consider creating a landing page to gather interest — “Hey, interested in learning about X? Sign up here.” This is how Buffer famously started: an idea and a signup form. If this sounds like something you want to do, it’s worth brushing up on the minimum viable product (MVP) concept popularized by The Lean Startup.
Define a learning outcome using ABCD
Now that you know why you’re creating the course and what your audience wants out of it, it’s time to define what you want the course to accomplish. One of the best formulas for doing this is called ABCD — for audience, behavior, condition and degree.
- Audience: Who’s taking the course?
- Behavior: What are the skills or knowledge that they should take away from the course?
- Condition: Are there any requirements they need before they start? Education, knowledge, credentials?
- Degree: Is there accreditation associated with completing this course?
Create a course outline
Break your course down into its constituent pieces.
A course includes all the pieces the student needs to reach their knowledge goal. In LearnDash, each course is made up of lessons, topics and quizzes. You can see a breakdown of these in the screenshot of the LearnDash Builder below:
- Lessons: The bite-size pieces of knowledge that drive towards the knowledge goal. In the example course “Fundamentals of Basketball Shooting,” one of those is “Balance.”
- Topics: Under each lesson are the topics, or the building blocks of that lesson. In this case, one of our topics for “Balance” is “Proper balance in form shooting posture.” So this is a specific piece of the bigger lesson.
- Quizzes: Quizzes can be added to topics or lessons to test understanding and verify knowledge before continuing.
These three elements make up the structure of a course. Put together a list of what your lessons should be and which topics should be covered in each lesson, as well as any points where you think evaluation is important before the student moves on.
Video courses continue to grow in popularity. If you already have a video playlist online for a specific topic, LearnDash makes it easy to import the playlist directly into the Builder as a course outline. You can also use the included AI content features to help you generate an outline. For more on these options, see our article “Course Creation Made Simple.”
Set up your course
Now it’s time to actually create your course.
If you haven’t turned on LearnDash, you’ll need to enable it by going to the Settings gear icon > Features.
This will take you to the Modules, Add-ons and Features section of your Rainmaker Platform site, where you can enable and disable extra features on your site. You’ll need to enable LearnDash. Scroll down the page, make sure the box next to Enable LearnDash Module is checked, then click Save at the bottom of the page.
Then click the Add-Ons tab. Review the additional Add-Ons and check the box next to anything related to LearnDash that you’ll need. Click Save at the bottom of the page.
After you’ve enabled LearnDash, you can create a new course by going to the left hand menu > Content > LearnDash > Courses.
From the Courses screen, click the blue Add New button at the top right.
From here, click the Builder tab to start building your course.
On this screen, you can create your lessons, topics and quizzes, edit the course settings and add course content. For a step-by-step walkthrough of how to build a course in LearnDash, see our article “Building Your First LearnDash Course.” It covers all the settings and how to edit your content in great depth.
Manage course access
Once your course is set up, you need to control who can see it.
Whether you’re selling your course or not, you should have some way to manage access. A course is a premium offering — at the minimum, people should have to give an email address to access it. That means putting it behind content control.
The best way to do this is by setting a MemberPress Rule for your course. We have a step-by-step walkthrough on how to use MemberPress Rules to gate access to your courses in the article “Turn Knowledge into Profit.” This method works whether you’re using the course as a lead magnet, selling it to a fresh audience or adding it to an existing subscription.
Create a landing page for your course
LearnDash will create a landing page for your course automatically, but that landing page isn’t optimized to get people interested in taking action. To do that, create a landing page from scratch with some sales copy and a signup or checkout form.
There are multiple ways to build landing pages with Rainmaker Platform. For a step-by-step walkthrough of each method, see our article “How to Build Your Landing Pages.” And if you’re not familiar with landing page strategy, we have a foolproof starter’s guide in “The ABCs of Landing Pages.”
Of course, if you want a hand with building one of these pages (or any other aspect of this process), we’re always happy to help on a per-project basis or as part of an ongoing agency relationship.
Embrace Courses in 2025
Reach out to us at https://rainmakerdigital.com/contact to set up a chat and we’ll take you through the options. Use this brief guide and the resources we’ve linked to start your 2025 course creation journey and take advantage of Rainmaker Platform’s ability to test, market, create and sell courses. And if you feel like you need a little extra help, that’s what we’re here for. Just drop us a line, anytime.
Best Regards,
David Brandon
Copywriter
Rainmaker Digital Services