How do I promote paid course access from my free lessons?

By default, all lessons of a course can only be accessed by students enrolled in that course. To enroll in that same course, you need to add access plans to that course. This access plan can be a free access plan (which would offer free access to all lessons of the course) or a paid access plan. In either case, the access plan will require user registration as part of the enrollment process.

However, there are times when you do not want users to register to a course before they can access your free lessons. In this case, instead of adding a free access plan, you mark some of your lessons as free. You can mark some or all lessons as free, one by one, in a given course. Those free lessons will be accessible to anyone with the link, without them having to login and without having to enroll in the course that contains the lesson.

If you have a course that has free lessons and paid lessons, the free lessons can be accessed without having to purchase the course. The paid lessons will require users to purchase the course using one of the access plans you added to that course. You’ll now want to promote paid access plans inside your free lessons. This way, if you students like the free content inside your free lessons, they’ll be encouraged to buy the whole course.

To do that, we can create a sort of “ad” in each of the free lessons in the course. One or more “ads” can be placed anywhere inside the content area of the course, but you should at least put one at the bottom of the lesson. This way, purchasing the course is the next logical step after reading/watching everything there is in the free lesson page.

That “ad” can be one of three links:

1. A link to an access plan purchase link.
2. A link to the course page, since it displays the pricing table.
3. A link to any page that displays the pricing table for the course.

Our Access Plan Button block can be used to easily add a link from your free lesson to an access plan for the course.

Once added, you can select the access plan and other options for the button.

These links can be attached to text or to an image.

If the link you want to attach is a purchase link, you can copy that link from the access plans that you have created:

If you want the customer to see all of your access plans, you can just use the link to your course page, if your course page displays the pricing table. The pricing table displays all your access plans to the front end except for hidden access plans.

Finally, you can also add a link to a separate sales page that you created inside WordPress Dashboard > Pages. This sales page can be as complex as you want — the only requirement is that this sales page contains one or more links to access plans that offer a way to enroll in your course. When designing your sales page, it is up to you whether you want these links to be attached to a text, an image, or to a button regardless of what page editor you are using (e.g., the block editor or something else).