GrooveMember Tutorial – How To Create An Online Membership Site For Free

GrooveMember is a free online membership site and course creation portal.

It is part of Groove’s all in one platform that allows you to build website, landing pages, sales funnel, email marketing, host videos for courses and memberships and more!

GrooveMember is now out of BETA and the user interface looks amazing.

Unlike other learning management systems like “thinkific” or “teachable”, GrooveMember gives you that flexibility of customizing the layout of your course lessons. 

If you just want to create a free online course that allows you to drip out content and give your members a username and password…

Then GrooveMember will do just the job for you and it’s free!

How To Create An Online Membership Site In GrooveMember Tutorial

In this GrooveMember tutorial example, I’m going to build out my GrooveFunnels quick start course.

I’m not going to build out the whole course as the main purpose of this tutorial is to show you the configuration setup inside of GrooveMember.

Create An Outline Of Your Course

  • Create an outline of your course and lessons in a Google doc or planning document.
  • I’ve already uploaded these videos in GrooveVideo and I have the code embed for each video in my outline.
  • If you don’t know how to upload your videos onto  GrooveVideo then check out my review here.

Creating A New Membership Site

  • Log in to GrooveFunnels and click on “Manage Memberships”. 
  • Click on “Content” on the left panel and select the “Memberships”. 
  • To create your membership, head over to the top right of the page and click on the “New Membership” button. 
  • A pop-up will appear, give your membership a name. 
  • I’ll call mine “GrooveFunnels Quick Start Course”. 
  • For the subdomain, this is a name that will be used to generate a subdomain on GrooveMember.com so it must be unique. 
    • i.e. subdomainname.groovemember.net = gfrockstar.groovemember.net
    • I’m going to call this “gfrockstars” and click create a membership. 

This will pre-load the membership wizard that walks you through seven steps to set up your membership correctly…

Step 1: Basic Information On Membership

  • Under the Name and Description, it’s preloaded with your membership name, description. 
  • Under Sales Page, enter your sales page URL with a https in front.
  • Click on “Save & Next”. 

Step 2: Design

  • Under Instructor, create instructor by clicking on “Create New Instructor”. 
  • Under the Instructor Name, I’ve already put in “Jane Do”.  
  • Under Instructor Description, I’ve just put in “Jane has been launching digital marketing campaigns…”
  • Tip: Instructor description cannot be more than 80 characters.
  • Under the Instructor Image, choose an image from the library or upload a photo then click “Select”
  • Once your information has been filled out, click on “Create”.
  • Under the Customize Tab, to upload a logo, click on “Choose Image” then select or upload an image of your logo. 
  • For the featured image, select a photo again from your media library.
  • Underneath there is “Show Progress Bar”, you can toggle this left to right to show the progress.  
  • Then click on “Save & next”. 

Step 3: The Builder

  • This is where you design the layout and add content to the members’ areas. 
  • Click on the “Click Here To Open Builder”.
  • As you can see in the image below, the logo is appearing to be outside of the header so I suggest you test the size of your logo.  
  • In this particular logo, I’ve got it at 60 pixels height and you might want to make that smaller.  
  • Over on the left sidebar, you have the “+” and the “Outline” button.
  • The “+” button, is where you can drag in headings, text, video code embeds links it allows you to customize the membership layout for each lesson. 
  • Let’s click on “Outline”
  • The home tab is defaulted for you and that will always be there (you can rename this tab to whatever you like) 
  • To build out your course outline, you’ll click on the plus button in that category name. 
  • Think of a category as a module, enter in our first module name. 
  • TIP: Create a course outline first before building your membership site so you could save some time.
  • And I’ll highlight the title from my outline and copy then paste it in the name on GrooveMember.  
  • Click on “Add category”.
  • You can click on these three dots beside the outline name to rename and to clone lessons. 
  • You will have the subcategory automatically loaded under the category. 
  • So Category = Module and Subcategories= Lesson.  
  • TIP: When you’re building out your membership, create your categories first and add one lesson only because you get to format the lessons first. That way, you can clone the lesson with a fixed layout and you don’t need to go back and format every lesson in terms of its layout. 
  • Repeat the same process to build out your modules and courses.

Adding Elements to Each Lesson

  • Click on the “Add” on the left panel to drag in the text element and pop it in the canvas.  
  • Highlight the text and paste in the description of the lesson. 
  • Head back to “Add” again and drag in the “Code Embed” element. 
  • The reason why I dragged in the code embed is that I want to embed the GrooveVideo code (GrooveVideo is part of Groove’s platform and is a hosting app) 
  • Go back to your outline then copy the source code of the video on GrooveVideo.
  • Click on the code embed element then click on the cogwheel icon. 
  • Paste in the code and press “Save” then it will load up my video on the builder. 
  • To customize the text format, click on the text, and over on the right-hand side, you can format its spacing, font, etc. like on GroovePages. 
  • You can go back to “Add” and drag in a button then pop it right underneath the video. 
  • Click on the video, and add margin so that the button won’t be too close to each other.
  • Click on the “Download Cheat Sheet”, configure that on the right-hand panel and link it to a pdf download, and then press “Update”.  

That’s how I would format it for a lesson, keeping it simple where you have the text description, video lesson and some resources to download. 

So once you’ve got the basic layout of your lesson, press on “Save” and start cloning each lesson and re-naming it.

  • Head back to “Outline” and click on the first lesson you created then click on the three dots to clone it.
  • Again, click three dots and rename it which will be lesson two. 
  • Head back to your outline again and copy the description of the lesson as well as the video code embed then paste it on GrooveMember. 

TIP: if you plan your course outline, modules, lessons, description and video code embed, it just makes the whole process really easy.  

Repeat the same process until you have created your whole course.

In the example, I’ve created three modules and two lessons each as you can see on the image below the membership outline.

Once you have formatted your course, click “Save & Exit” on the top bar. 

Step 4: Comments

  • Under “Enable Comments”, you can choose to enable comments for each lesson by toggling it to the right.
  • To disable comments, toggle it to the left. 
  • Under “Comment Moderation”, it will default to “Auto-approve all comments” or you can select the “Comments must be approved by an admin”. 
  • Then click on “Save & Next”. 

Step 5: Access Levels 

  • Under “Membership Access”, let’s say you have a Silver, Gold, and Platinum plan.
  • Underr level 1, click on the pencil icon to rename it to “Silver” and press “Save”.
  • Over on the right, click on the “+” button to add the second level. 
  • For the second level, we’ll call that “Gold” and press “Save”. 
  • Repeat the process to create the third level, “Platinum Plan”.
  • Now that there are three levels, you can toggle each lesson to the right and decide which lessons you want to give access to depending on what level the person is on. 
  • For example, let’s say for level one, you only want to give access to the first two lesson.
  • For level two, which is the gold plan, you might want to give them access to four lessons.
  • Then for a platinum plan that person gets access to all lessons. 
  • You would have more lessons than what I have and add more products to your membership. 

If you click on the pencil icon next to “Instant access”, you have the option to:

  • Give instant access
  • “Drip Feed” the content after some days or
  • give “Access to the content after a specific date”. 

So let’s click on the “Drip Feed Access” and you can set it to give access after two days. 

  • Or you can select the “Access from a specific date” and if you click on the date, a calendar will pop up and you can set the date that you want that person to have access to.  
  • I’ll cancel out of that and just give “Instant Access” then press update. 

Now because GrooveMember is still in beta, what you’ve noticed is that all the lessons have defaulted to no access so you’ll need to go through and give access to different levels again. 

Then click on “Save & Next”. 

Step 6: Welcome Message

  • Leave it at “Sending default welcome email” because you want a GrooveMember to automatically email our members with their username and password. 
  • Click on “Save & Next”. 
  • Ok, you’re finished…

Testing Membership Site

  • Open up chrome in “Incognito” and access the member’s login. 
  • I’ll enter in my name a test email and create a password for myself then click “Register”. 
  • On the image below you can see that the logo hasn’t loaded properly but that’s okay. 
  • You can go back and fix it and add in a new logo. 

Want To Increase Sales Conversions For Your Online Course?

I recommend writing great copy with relevant custom graphics on your sales page.

In this day and age, people don’t read long blocks of copy.

They’re usually skimming and only stop scrolling when they see a compelling image.

I’ve always struggled with design and could not justify hiring expensive graphic designers.

Not anymore.

The banner below was created WITHOUT any design skills and under 60 seconds.

Just point-and-click, drag-and-drop, then export!

Click the banner to learn how you can create stunning 3D online course mockups and sales funnel graphics without any design skills.

Clickdesigns review
Photo of author

Aimee Vo

Aimee Vo is a digital marketing expert with over 12 years hands-on experience in SEO and paid traffic. She publishes content on sales funnels, lead generation, and content marketing with insights from personal experience.