Add Bonus Lessons and Modules to Thrive Apprentice Courses

Limited-time Bonus content in courses is a great way to increase sales if you plan to offer a version of the course that does not offer the bonus content.

Coming up with a way to deliver that bonus content in seamless way to your customers, however, requires some creative thinking.

Rather than delivering that content outside and separate from your course, as a Thrive Apprentice user you can deliver only one course to all of your customers but only grant access to the bonus content to those who purchased under the conditions that would grant them the access.

Watch the Step-By-Step Guide for How to Offer Bonus Course Content in Thrive Apprentice (in Video Format!)

Configuring Your Course with Bonus Content

Use Only One Course

In this tutorial we only need one version of your course. Do not create duplicate versions of your course.

Create a Product for Your Bonus Content

You may recall from my previous tutorials for Thrive Apprentice 4.0 that Products are now what you give access to when someone purchases or gets access to a course.

Courses can belong to as many products as you want. 

We need to add a new product specifically for the version of the course with the drip content.

Lock Access to Bonus Lessons/Modules Using Drip

The drip feature in Thrive Apprentice (more on how that works here) is the key to locking our content that is available only for those who purchase the version with the bonus content.

We're going to choose the "Thrive Automator Unlock" option because this means the content is only unlocked under conditions controlled by Thrive Automator. I like this way of locked the content for two reasons:

1. Show Locked Content in Lesson List

This toggle is available in the top right of the drip settings. This means students will see the content but in a locked state. More on that later.

2. You don't have to unlock it at all

Though technically we chose Thrive Automator as the unlock method, we don't even have to create a rule! If you want to keep things simplest, you're basically using this just as a method for locking the content in THIS product version of the course.

The point of the drip is simply to lock the content in this product.

Show the Content as Locked to Users who Do Not Have Access

Showing locked content is a great way to prompt an upsell or pique interest.

Inside of the drip campaign you set up in the previous step, in the top right corner toggle on the option to show locked content in the lesson lists. 

Next we want to stylize what this looks like to users who do not have access.

Navigate to your Thrive Apprentice design templates and locate the Course overview template.

When editing this template, click on the course list and edit. 

At the bottom of your screen you will see a bar (pictured below) with a dropdown.

Select 'Locked' from this drop down.

Now you're editing what the lessons look like if they are locked. I recommend editing the button to include a locked symbol, and alter the text to indicate the lesson is locked.

Create Custom Access Restriction Rules when Bonus Content is Accessed

When a user attempts to click on the locked lesson, we want to show them a distinct message as to why this content is locked.

Navigate to Thrive Apprentice Products and select the product you created for this version of the course without the bonus content.

Select Access Restriction Rules.

Look for the locked content section and choose to show custom content.

This is your opportunity to design a message around why the user doesn't have access. If you don't allow those who missed out on bonuses to get access ever, then you can state that. However, I like to offer an upsell opportunity. Maybe they missed the bonuses for free, but you can sell them separately or as part of your membership.

This is a great place to link to a sales page.

Sell and Give Access to the Bonus Content

If you want to sell access to these lessons, I recommend using ThriveCart. I have a complete funnel guide on how to create a ThriveCart + Thrive Apprentice funnel here at Convology.

Regardless of your cart of choice, you have options for how to get them access.

Option 1: Use Thrive Automator

Since we locked those lessons with Thrive Automator, you can create an integrate with Thrive Automator and any tool you want so that when something is purchase it triggers the specific unlocking of that content.

Option 2: Sell a Version of the Product without the Drip Locks

This is the easiest option. Simply link to a version of the product that has full access. You likely have all the heavy lifting done already from the original sale of your course.

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