We all know that WordPress is the best blogging platform around. It’s also the best way to create a full-blown website. But have you thought of using WordPress to teach, train, and make your job more efficient? With the explosion of technology, it’s easier than ever to create a learning center on your website. Here are 4 ways to use WordPress for training, eLearning and Online Courses.

When my company, True Focus Media, first started, we offered video marketing and website development services. We quickly found that the intersection of those services was creating online courses, eLearning portals, and video-based training. Plus it helped that we love doing these projects! The foundation of much of these projects are built with WordPress, thanks to its flexibility and robust plugins and features.

1. Think of your website as a learning center

Let’s start at the foundation. It’s time to stop thinking of your website as a brochure, “just a blog” or a static document. Start thinking of your website as a learning center where you teach your audience. This will make your website a living thing that’s always changing as you add content. The more content you add to your website, the more Google will reward you with higher rankings and good SEO. We all know that content which has a variety of modes will improve engagement, learning and will help you take your website to the next level. We’ve seen a dramatic increase in our website traffic once we started treating our website as a learning center.

Here are some types of content that you should consider adding to your Learning Center:

• Tutorials
• Infographics
• Blogs
• White Papers
• Videos
• Podcasts

2. Use Your Website to Teach Your Clients/Customers (external training)

What are some things that you’re constantly telling your clients or customers? Perhaps you notice that you keep saying the same things but you haven’t created a system to streamline this part of your business. Why not create a tutorial or online course that you create once and send to your clients or customers? If you’re a website developer/designer, you can create a course about “WordPress Basics” that you can send to your clients. I recommend putting any training material on your own website so your clients continually go to your website to access the content. That way they’re constantly seeing the value that you provide by logging into YOUR website with your logo and branding. This give them a reason to come back to your website, so you will be at the top of their minds. Plus, if it’s on your website, it’s easier to manage the course content. Think about creating “screen capture” tutorials where you record your computer screen to teach the content. The two best options are ScreenFlow for the Mac and Camtasia for PC.

3. Systematize your employee onboarding and training (internal training)

We all know how long it takes to bring on a new employee and get them up to speed. While you can’t fully replace the human interaction of training and onboarding, you should consider “systematizing” parts of the process and placing them into an online learning portal. You can include PDF downloads for them to print out and return to you, training videos, other sensitive corporate material and quizzes and test to ensure they learned the material. You will want to put all of this on a Learning Management System so each person has their own login credentials. This way you can monitor their progress and keep out people that don’t need to see the sensitive information.

4. Create an Online Course to Teach Your Expertise

Are you an expert at your craft? Even if you feel like you aren’t, there are always people that know less than you do. The Online Course industry is exploding and platforms like WordPress has made it easy to create a membership site, a Learning Management System or eLearning portal, so you can teach your students. To create a good online course, you will need to create training modules, typically using video content. Video content has been shown to deepen the learning experience for students. You will want to consider creating screen capture videos, interviews, on-camera videos and webcam based videos. If you don’t know how to make videos for your online courses, consider EasyVideoForCourses.com, which will show you how to create effective videos without spending a lot of time, even if you don’t want to be on camera. The more engaging your training content is, the more the students will learn and remember.

Whether you’re brand new to WordPress or not, consider how you can leverage the power of this robust platform to teach, train, and make your life more efficient.

To learn more about the topics above and more, come to the session at WordCamp Cincinnati with Jeff Long called, Creating Online Courses with WordPress.