Thrive Content Builder Review
I’m a design amateur. I simply don’t have a natural ability to see things in my mind and then translate them onto page or screen so that they look good.
Since taking up photography and trying to design landing pages, I’ve gotten a lot better. However, I’m nowhere near great at designing web pages without templates or guidelines.
I’ve built websites for years. I’m thankful to everyone at Themeforest for the fact I don’t have to worry about pages looking good anymore; I just buy a template and they tend to look great once you’ve installed images, menus and widgets on a site.
But designing for WordPress is a bit of a pain. It’s a million times better than writing a website in HTML, but you’re constantly having to swap between the page builder and previews, and if you want to add in HTML elements or anything tricky, that’s another couple of windows that you have to add.
So when I saw a video about a piece of software that lets you drag and drop elements onto a page, I was pretty excited.
I’ve been using this plugin for about a week, and I’m impressed.
Thrive Content Builder Review: The Plugin
Thrive Content Builder includes three separate “features.”
- Thrive Content Builder is a visual editor that lets you drag and drop things onto a page.
- Thrive Landing Pages lets you build landing pages (and a lot more.)
- Thrive Lightbox… I don’t really know what this does as I haven’t used it!
It costs $47 (I think) for one website, or $97 for an unlimited amount of sites – provided you are the owner. I went with the unlimited sites option because I love starting new websites. Going with this option means that you can also use Thrive Content Builder to build dedicated sites for each of your book launches.
Is Thrive Content Builder A Quality Product?
I can’t remember if I’ve written this on any other post here, but I’m a cautious shopper. I don’t buy something unless I’ve researched it to death, made sure it does exactly what I want and then taken a few weeks to make sure it’s not an impulse purchase.
Especially when it comes to internet marketing stuff, you should always be more cautious than not. There are a lot of marginally-ok products that use super evil sales techniques to make themselves sound like the next coming of Jesus.
So I spent weeks looking at various things before buying Thrive Content Builder. I looked up which themes it was/wasn’t compatible with. I looked up whether you could save the templates you make in it and transfer them to another site. I looked up whether or not you could add contact forms to pages. The list of long-tail keywords I used before buying Thrive Content Builder must have been insane.
The only thing I’m a bit sad about is that I wasted two weeks waiting to buy Thrive Content Builder. It does everything it says it can.
Thrive Content Builder: The Good
I’m just going to list a few benefits here based on my first couple of hours using it:
- It’s easy to set up. You pay, login, get your license and then upload and validate the plugin. Then it’s as simple as creating a new page or post by clicking the “Edit with Thrive Content Builder” button:
- The Thrive Landing Pages plugin could mean you have great landing page within minutes of starting the plug. It comes with over a hundred landing pages which you can just load up and slot your content and images into:
- By far the best feature is that you can save your own templates. For instance, if you create a landing page with your company’s brand, image placement and general structure, you can save that and import it again whenever you’ve got another landing page to create. This will take hours off a launch project. Especially when there are editable templates already for every stage of a product launch.
- Like I said above – if you want to launch a product, there are already pages for each and every stage of a launch. If you want a webinar signup page or other opt-in, then those are there. If you want a “Thanks for registering page” they’ve got those too. Upsells? Product download pages? Building a sales funnel will be really quick and easy with this plugin.
- Buttons, calls to action, and more. There are a lot of elements for pretty much everything.
Thrive Content Builder: The Bad
No product is perfect. There are a few things that I should mention about Thrive Content Builder:
- The features are pretty exhaustive. As I wrote above, I don’t even know what lightboxes do or why I want them yet. There are a great amount of features that are probably great if you know what you’re doing when you design a landing page, but I don’t really.
- Thrive Content Builder can be clunky when you use it with your theme. There’s an option to use your current WordPress theme in conjunction with Thrive Content Builder as opposed to building an entirely new page/template. I found this – and I don’t know whether it was Thrive Content Builder itself or the Genesis framework (which the site I tested on uses) – but something was a bit awry.
- It brings into focus that you don’t know what you’re doing if that’s the case. I thought that with this tool, I’d be making beautiful landing pages within minutes. The first landing page was dire. It wasn’t the fault of the Thrive Content Builder though; it was because I was still a design amateur. I threw everything in. Buttons. Coloured boxes. It looked like a Lego house.
Thrive Content Builder: Final Thoughts
I’ll undoubtedly come back to this program as I learn how to better use it. To close the show though, I’ll say that it’s great software – too great for me at the moment! It’s powerful and if you’re one of the following people you should probably get it immediately:
- Content business owners.
- Web designers.
- Design-challenged writers who want to sell their digital products and look like a professional whilst doing it.
- People who design layouts for web pages in Photoshop but want to get paid for making people’s websites (you’ll need the agency membership to work on client websites though, which is a recurring payment but you get access to a lot more than just this plugin.)
If you’re not one of those people but are interested in the plugin, drop your comments below and I’ll try and answer them.
Otherwise: