Sell a course from my own website
Teaching what you know shouldn't mean renting a second platform. Course platforms sell you a website, hosting and email you already have — wrapped around the one thing you're missing: lessons, enrolment and access. On a bernard-hosted site, that one missing piece is built by asking.
How it works
- Describe the course. In your bernard dashboard, tell Bernard the course name, the price, and where your first video lives — a YouTube or Vimeo link is perfect (Use the videos already on my YouTube or Vimeo). One lesson behind one payment is a complete course; you can grow it later.
- Shape it. Add lessons (Add a lesson to my course), set one free to watch (Let people watch one lesson free), attach worksheets (Give learners files with each lesson), choose pay-once or a fixed term (Charge once, or sell a year of access).
- Publish and approve. Everything drafts privately. Publish the course, check the preview, approve — and enrolment opens.
When someone enrols, they pay on your site through your own Stripe account (Where the money goes when someone enrols) and get a welcome email with their way back in — a link, not a password (Let learners in without accounts or passwords). You see every enrolment on your Courses page, including when a term ends.
Your course page carries the same invisible labelling as the rest of a bernard site, so search engines and AI assistants can read what you teach, what it costs, and which lesson is free to try — and recommend it when someone asks where to learn your craft.
The prompt
“Make a course called [the course name], priced at [the price]. Add the first lesson called [the lesson name] using this video: [paste the video link], with these notes: [a few lines for under the video].”
The [bracketed] parts are yours to fill in. First time? Log in to bernard → your site → Edit with AI → copy your access prompt, paste that into your AI first, then ask the above.
Questions people ask
- Can I sell an online course from my own website without a course platform?
- Yes. On a bernard-hosted site you describe the course — the name, the price, where your videos live — and bernard builds the course page, the lessons and the enrolment. There is no separate learning platform to run, and learners pay on your site.
- Who takes the money when someone enrols?
- You do. Enrolment payments go through your own Stripe account — bernard takes no cut of a sale. The only per-sale fees are Stripe's own.
- Does the course go live as soon as I make it?
- No. A course starts as a private draft. You add lessons, set the price, publish it when it's ready — and even then it only appears on your real site when you approve the change, like everything else on a bernard site.