Kajabi Course Creation Step-by-Step

Thinking about building your online courses on Kajabi? In this guide I’ll show you step-by-step the fastest way to get your Kajabi course built and launched!

Whether you are a coach, consultant, speaker, expert, or content creator, if you’re planning to build online courses using Kajabi, this guide is for you.

Whether you are going to create your own online course yourself, or better, delegate most of the course building to your team if you have one, the steps outline in this guide are critical.

THEY said that building your online course in Kajabi was easy! Well, compared to all the Kajabi alternatives, it is easier for course creation but not easy! If you aren’t a tech expert it can still be confusing at times.

Woman confused with Kajabi setup
Woman confused with Kajabi setup

Don’t worry! In this guide I am going to simplify everything about getting your course built and launched in Kajabi. If you haven’t yet created a Kajabi account, you can sign up here through my partner link and receive an extended trial period and a free bonus package of resources from me at no additional cost. You’ll want to be sure to sign up now so you can follow along this guide and by the end have everything setup!

How to build and sell online courses

In this guide I’m going to outline a step-by-step process showing you how to build your own online course with Kajabi. The key steps are:

  • Plan
  • Prepare
  • Build
  • Test
  • Launch

If you are going to build an online business and sell online courses, a simple but robust development process is a must. These are the details you won’t find in Kajabi University but are critical to online course creation.

Plan your Kajabi course outline

The first step is planning your course outline. Whether your are building a mini-course with just a few small lessons or a flagship online course, membership sites, or program with dozens of lessons and resources, the planning process is the same. The specifics vary depending on which online course platform you are using.

Investing the time up front to plan and map out your course outline will make the rest of the process go MUCH faster.

I’ll use a cooking analogy to set the stage. Imagine you have friends coming over for dinner and you want to treat them to appetizers, a main course, and a dessert.

Without a plan, you’ll be throwing things together at the last minute, missing key ingredients, starting over a few times, and most likely serving at best a mediocre dinner that is late and overcooked.

Now imagine the difference with a proper plan. You know exactly what you are going to prepare. You have recipes for each with the specific ingredients and amounts. You’ve bought all of the ingredients ahead of time.

When it’s time to cook the three parts of the meal, it’s now just a matter of following basic instructions.

Since you are organized, you can probably have a drink and converse with your friends while cooking instead of running around panicking like the previous example!

For your course outline, think of it just like that set of three recipes. All online courses have these three basic elements: Sales funnel (in Kajabi these are called pipelines), the course itself (videos, resources, assessments, etc.), and a support mechanism (emails, chat, group calls, etc.)

To keep the process organized, I’m including with this article the exact outline template we use with our agency client’s when we build their courses for them.

There’s a lot more to beautiful online courses than just your videos. You will need sales funnels with landing pages and sales pages. A membership site or area, course pages, and more. Kajabi provides all the tools you need but again the more organized you are going in, the more quickly you of your team can build your program.

To help you plan and track all of the videos, images, files, and settings you need for your Kajabi course, I’ve created the Ultimate Kajabi Course Planner which you can download for free:

Ultimate Kajabi Course Planner

You don’t want to be in the middle of building your sales funnel or your Kajabi courses and be missing the cover images for your lessons and have to scramble to design one in Canva. Or be stuck staring at a blank screen trying to figure out a good title for one of your lessons.

In the planning process we are creating the recipes for each of those three elements so that when it comes time to actually build them in Kajabi, we have all the ingredients and it becomes a simple, even fun process to watch your sales funnel, course, and support come alive.

Sales Funnel / Kajabi Pipeline

The sales funnel for you Kajabi course is the set of pages and emails that take your audience from a lead to a customer. There are dozens of different funnel types. For this example we’ll go with the most common: sales page –> order/checkout page –> thank you page.

Kajabi Product

In Kajabi you create “products” which become the container for your Kajabi courses, your Kajabi coaching programs, or any private Kajabi podcasts you might sell. For now, you’ll just be creating a placeholder product with the name of your program.

If your course or program has just one tier or level then you only need to create one product. If your course is going to have different tiers with different content then you may need to create multiple products (like Silver, Gold, Platinum).

Before you do that though, first understand that with Kajabi it is in the Offers section that you can create one or more price/checkout options for your products. It’s a bit confusing but also very powerful so I’ll show three quick examples:

  1. Single product / single offer – If your course is simple and every customer gets the same content and experience then you would create one product and one offer
  2. Single product / multiple-offers – If your course has multiple tiers (Gold, Silver, Platinum) AND those tiers all have the same course content but the differences are things outside of Kajabi like access to a FB group, or group coaching calls with you, then you still only need one product (which is the course itself) and you can simply create three offers, one for Gold, Silver, Platinum which would then each have their own checkout pages so you can have different prices and descriptions for them. Your landing page would have a pricing table with the information and checkout links to each of the three tiers.
  3. Multiple products / multiple offers – If your program will consist of multiple smaller courses which you may also sell separately, then you would create a product for each small course, and then you would create offers for each combination of them that you want to sell. Similar to #2 you would then have landing page with pricing table and checkout links to each offer.

Taking time now to think this through and map out placeholders for your products and offers is important. Your plan and outline can always change in the future and that’s ok!

Kajabi Offer(s)

In Kajabi, an offer associates a price, checkout page, emails, and automations to a given product. As mentioned above, you can have multiple offers associated to a single product. Even if you are building free courses, you will still use offers with a zero cost.

Using example #2 from above, where your Silver tier is just the course and your Gold tier is the course plus group coaching, you’d create two offers, one for each.

What would be different between the two offers would be the price, higher for Gold tier. You would also have different email follow ups and/or automations.

For the Gold tier you would need to send them information about the group coaching sessions that you wouldn’t send to the Silver tiers since they didn’t purchase that tier.

For now, for you course outline, capture the offers you will need for your specific course or program.

Landing Page

Designing a high conversion sales page for your Kajabi courses could be a course in and of itself! For the purposes of this article we’ll keep it basic. As you’ll see in the course outline template, the ingredients we need to prepare for the sales funnel or Kajabi pipeline are:

  • Ideal customer call out
  • Hook and Headline
  • Problem description
  • Empathy section
  • Before / After description
  • Offer introduction
  • Testimonials
  • Offer details (this is placeholder for now, when you complete the outline of your course materials you would add that here)
  • Bonuses
  • Pricing details
  • Guarantee

Additionally, your landing page will typically leverage these design assets:

  • Brand colors
  • Brand fonts
  • Hero image / background image
  • Icons or bullet styles
  • Supporting images
  • Box shot / product mockup images

As you create these items, add or link them to your course outline. For the landing page copy it’s best to have an associated Word or Google doc that you link to from the outline. For everything else, embed the actual materials or links to the outline.

The outline becomes the single source or starting point for everything you need when the build starts.

Checkout Page(s)

In Kajabi, your checkout pages exist within each Offer you create. With checkout pages in Kajabi you have access to customize some of the page content and design but it is limited compared to a landing page.

For your checkout pages you’ll want to have the following:

  • Hero image / background image
  • Product image / thumbnail
  • Product benefits / description
  • Bonuses benefits /description

Your Kajabi Course

The next step is outlining the contents of your course or program. The lessons, topics, resources, assessments, etc. We’ll start with the content outline then add the other elements as needed.

In Kajabi, there are three levels of course outline, similar to most of the Kajabi alternatives. These are Category, Subcategory, and Post. We generally recommend keeping it simple and have a two level outline of Category + Post like this:

Module 1 (Category)

Post 1 (Lesson)

Post 2 (Lesson)

Don’t make the mistake of equating the value of their online course to the number of modules / lessons it has and trying to pack in dozens or hundreds of lessons.

When the last time was you thought “I really want to find the longest possible course I can with the hours and hours of videos to watch”? Probably never, who has time right?

What most of us (and most of your audience) are looking for is what is the shortest most focused course I can find that helps me get to my desired outcome the fastest.

So when you think about your course outline, keep that in mind and add just enough to get your audience the result they desire the fastest.

Once you’ve built the two or three level outline for your online course, the next step is adding all of the related ingredients. These can include:

  • Thumbnail images for each category and topic (1280px x 720px image size minimum)
  • Attention grabbing titles
  • Short text description or introduction to each lesson
  • As you record the content for each, add links to each finished video
  • Placeholders or links to any files or resources for each lesson (PDF downloads, audio / mp3 downloads of transcripts etc)
  • If you are going to use assessments or quizzes, add links to them or placeholders

It is very common for course creators to re-arrange and re-work their course outline multiple times before it is “just right”. Use whatever method you find natural for that part. Some like to use post it notes and re-arrange until they like the flow. Others move around rows in a spreadsheet like our planning outline.

Once you are comfortable with the structure, make sure to add it to the planning sheet with all the details and links for each item.

This becomes the recipe in our cooking analogy. When it comes time to build your Kajabi course, you’ll have all the ingredients and the recipe to build your online course.

Online course support

The last section to plan is the support elements of your online courses and programs. Once a person purchases your course an a user account is created for them in the Kajabi platform and they will see your course in their library. This is where the support phase starts.

When you sell online courses you need to decide what type of support to offer. It could include any of these types of items:

  • Email support
  • Group coaching calls
  • 1:1 sessions
  • Bonus content or resources

In your Kajabi course outline you’ll want to capture these and their relevant details like which email address to students should use for support. A calendar or timeline of any group coaching calls. A calendar booking capability (such as Kajabi’s coaching features) for scheduling 1:1 sessions) and so on.

Prepare your Kajabi platform

If the online course you are outlining is your first and this is the first time you are using Kajabi for your online business then there are important settings and decisions that need to be made before you start building a course in Kajabi. These areas all revolve around your domain name, email settings, design settings and so on.

Domain Name – You’ll need to decide and configure the domain name and URL your customers will use. This can be either <your name>.mykajabi.com or a custom name like members.<your domain name>.com We generally recommend the latter format, using your own domain name. This requires a few extra setup steps covered in the Kajabi help documentation.

Similarly for email, it can be sent from the kajabimail.com domain or your own domain name. This also requires a few extra setup steps covered in the Kajabi help documentation.

To accept credit card payments for your course or program, you’ll need to have business accounts with either Stripe, PayPal, or both (recommended).

In your course outline, at the top fill in your choices for the items like site name, course name, and the rest of the items indicated like links to logos, brand colors, etc.

Build your course in Kajabi

Finally! This is where all the hard work and planning starts to pay off: building your online course in Kajabi! This should go very smoothly now because you have all the ingredients you need in front of you, and your course outline is the recipe.

First up will be configuring your Kajabi platform settings…

Configure your Kajabi platform settings

Your naming and design settings for your site need to be configured in the Kajabi site settings. The choices you made earlier around your domain name and whether to use a custom domain now get configured.

Your marketing settings need to be configured in the Kajabi marketing settings. The choices you made earlier about whether to use a custom email domain now get configured.

Note: if you are on a Kajabi trial account, you will not be able to configure a custom email domain. You can only do that once your account has converted to a paid account.

You also need to configure your payment integrations (with Stripe and/or PayPal) and checkout settings.

Your checkout settings need to be configured in the checkout settings.

These are the bare minimum settings that need to be configured on in order to create, sell, and deliver an online course using the Kajabi platform.

Build your course contents in Kajabi

At this point, the next steps depend on whether you have already prepared and created all of your course content or whether you are going to pre-sell your course and build the content live as you deliver it for the first time.

If you have your course material created already or are going to create if first, do that now and come back to this step. If you are going to pre-sell your course first, then skip to the next section on testing to make sure your sales funnel (Kajabi pipeline) works as expected.

The setup of your course in Kajabi begins with the placeholder Product you created earlier. This is where you will setup your Categories, Subcategories, and Posts that you captured in your course outline.

Kajabi includes a drag-and-drop builder for implementing your course outline. I recommend building your full outline in the builder first, then going into each element and adding your images, videos, text, etc. As you get each Category, Subcategory, and Post created, mark them as complete in your course outline.

Here’s what a completed course outline in the planner looks like. Note that everything you need once you start building your course in Kajabi is captured and organized in your planner:

Sample Kajabi course outline in the planner

Here’s what an example course outline looks like in the Kajabi builder:

Image of a Kajabi course outline with categories and posts.
Sample Kajabi course outline

As you build you may decide you want to re-order things or break some items up into more Posts, etc. As you do that make the changes in both your course outline and in Kajabi.

Once you have them all setup, take a break! Hit the Preview button and see how great your course looks!

You’ll notice that this section of this guide is pretty short. That’s because actually building your course in Kajabi is quite easy when you have the course outline and all of the ingredients prepared ahead of time!

If you haven’t downloaded the course planner yet, now is the time!

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Test your Kajabi course

Testing your course sales funnel and the course itself is a step most people gloss over when first building their online business. They may test one quick purchase and if all looks good they move on. If you have an extremely simple course with one tier, one payment gateway, one email follow up then that quick test might be all that’s needed.

Considering you will have both desktop and mobile users, people that visit your offer but don’t buy that you might want to follow up with, and a number of other scenarios you start to see that you do need to have a good test plan to make sure you don’t lose potential sales. This is key to building a successful online business.

The quickest way to put together a test plan is to look at your entire lead to sales and sales to support flow for your online courses. At any point in the flow where there are options (like pay in full vs payment plan or choosing Silver, Gold, Platinum tiers) each combination of potential choices becomes something you should test to make sure the outcome is what you expect.

For example, you don’t want someone purchasing Silver to get access to and all the emails for your Platinum tiers. Or worse, maybe you forgot to update the price to a higher amount for Platinum and it still has your Silver price.

All of these types of issues are easily fixed but you need a test plan with all the combinations so that you actually see the problems before your customers do.

Your test plan should have the same structure are the course outline we’ve been working on. This means testing of your base Kajabi setup, the Kajabi pipeline (sales funnel) for your course, the course itself, and any support items like scheduled emails, automations, and so on.

For your testing you should use test email accounts separate from your Kajabi login. For testing purchases, you can create a 99% off coupon code. This way you test everything end to end including your payment processors.

Here are the main things you should test:

  • All of your sales funnel and pipeline pages on both a desktop and mobile browser making sure your pages look good on both
  • All of the paths through your sales funnel (checkouts, order bumps, upsells, payment types)
  • Email follow ups (abandoned cart, purchase confirmation, drip email or campaigns related to your course)
  • Navigating through all of the categories, subcategories, and posts in your course verifying the correct thumbnails, videos, and resources are all setup correctly
  • Take any assessments you are including in your Kajabi course
  • If you are including any post-purchase events like group coaching calls or 1:1 coaching scheduling, verify those notifications or pages are setup correctly
  • Verify that any tracking or other integrations you need like the Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics, etc. are connected and working

If everything is looking good, the final step would be to have someone else or a small group of beta testers go through your funnel and program and collect any feedback they have. If you join my Facebook group and post your links, I’d be happy to test and give you feedback as well!

Launch your Kajabi course and online business

Time to launch and celebrate! If you followed the steps outlines in this guide, you are a professional course creator! You have just launched your own online course!

You cared enough about your audience and your brand to leverage the best online course platform, go through a complete plan, build, test, and launch process like the pros do.

You can launch your online courses with the confidence that all the critical elements from your sales funnel and Kajabi pipeline all the way through your course and support are working as expected so you won’t lose any sales due to simple errors or mistakes in course creation.

As you begin generating leads and sales, keep an eye on conversion rates and early feedback from both buyers and anyone you are able to follow up with that chose not to buy to see if there are any improvements you can make.

With your online learning platform now built in Kajabi and hopefully generating sales, you can consider building other courses and programs, higher end flagship programs, and any other combination that makes sense for your business.