LMScast – LifterLMS Podcast

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Derek Ashauer emphasizes the need of maximizing WordPress LMS websites and Tracking conversions.

Derek Ashauer is from Conversion Bridge, a platform that integrates with various analytics tools and WordPress plugins to streamline the process of tracking and improving conversions. From his vantage point, a sale is any activity a user plans to do such as clicking on an icon, email subscription, purchase of goods.

Starting the process, he advises using a privacy-oriented data tool like Plausible or Fathom or a Google data tool depending on this. By tying to many WordPress components, his response, Conversion Bridge, streamlines the procedure. Derek discusses conversion funnels websites’ tracking of user behavior and identification of spots where people often lose interest.

Privacy issues make it somewhat difficult to keep an eye on certain people throughout many sessions. However, looking at the bigger picture, group trends can be incredibly helpful. He suggests trying out multiple iterations of a page using FunnelKit and AB testing to boost response rates. For smaller websites, a method that is done by hand might also work well when changes are made and the results are tracked over time. Focusing on and improving key points in a user’s journey can help website managers get more users to stay on the site and make more money.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

Episode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Derek Ashore. He’s from conversionbridgewp. com. We’re going to nerd out today on analytics, conversion tracking. What is a conversion? Why does that matter for online course, websites, coaching businesses, even LMS is doing internal training for a company.

We’re going to go deep today, head on over to conversionbridgewp. com so you can see what we’re talking about today. But first welcome to the show, Derek. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it, Chris. I’m excited to nerd out with you a little bit on conversion tracking. It’s a big topic and I think the base level is people want to know where what caused a sale, whether they’re selling courses or memberships or whatever, but just at a kind of fundamental level.

How do you define conversions to a beginner? So they really grasp the concept.

Derek Ashauer: So conversion is just when someone does, takes an action that you want to keep track of. It could literally be anything from clicking a button or even just visiting a page. As simple as you know that signing up for your email newsletter.

Making a purchase, there’s submitting a form. Those are all pretty common things that we want to track on a website.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And what do you think is like the first place, if somebody wants to get set up for conversion tracking, like what are the fundamental pieces that they need to put together to make it work?

Do that. What do they need with a WordPress website?

Derek Ashauer: The WordPress, the first thing is getting an analytics platform. So the most typical one that people have heard of for over a decade now is Google analytics. But these days there’s a lot of other options that are privacy focused ones because of all the EU privacy laws.

There’s some great ones that are out there. Plausible, Fathom, Persh, UserMaven ConversionBridge itself integrates with 13 at the moment, different analytics platforms beyond just Google analytics.

Chris Badgett: And what like for the WordPress people out there, what plugins can ConversionBridge support? Bridge track conversions four.

I know there’s a long list, but let’s expand the scope of what’s possible here.

Derek Ashauer: Yeah, so of course there’s lifter, LMS is one of ’em, but at the moment of right now recording this, there’s 51 different plugin integrations. So there’s all the form plugins that you can think of WS form, gravity forms WP Forms all those, all the ones that you would expect.

E-commerce platforms, WooCommerce, easy digital downloads. There’s what else? There’s a bunch of newsletter ones like groundhog or CRMs and newsletter ones, groundhog, for example. Those track when they people sign up for your email newsletter forms are on there. Yeah, there’s just, there’s a whole bunch of them.

I’m trying to, I’m trying to go there right now to even remind myself there’s so many let’s see. We got some page builders. The big page builders are on there as well. Beaver builder. Let’s see, beaver builder bricks. Elementor so that you can makes it really easy. Simple toggle to set up conversion tracking on a button on there, even for modules or widgets, whatever one they call it, call the actions and things like that.

So it integrates with. All those things. Yeah, there’s just so many of them. There’s even some pop up integrations pop up that show up so that when you show a pop up, do they subscribe or do they click on the button within that pop up that could be another great one that you’d want to keep track of there’s even file downloads.

So there’s a couple of plugins that are built specifically to help make to organize file downloads so you can track one of those. Maybe you offer a white paper and you want to track whenever one, whenever someone downloads one of your free white papers on your website as a lead magnet or something along those lines.

So those are all a bunch of different, different types of plugins and things that you may want to be tracking conversions for.

Chris Badgett: Love that. And let’s zoom out even more and let’s actually use that white paper ebook download example. I think it makes sense that you would want to track like, Oh how many opt in conversions, email addresses, or am I capturing that from people that want the ebook?

But what if they land on a page to download? And then they don’t actually download it. What if I knew that conversion point? So you start chaining these things together. What are some of the most popular, ways to think about conversions and like situations that people would want to do without I want to track everything.

You don’t necessarily want to track everything. What are the important things?

Derek Ashauer: So what you started describing is called a funnel. So you get them to visit your homepage, your website, you then get them to go to another page that maybe talks about their email newsletter, get them to subscribe.

Then that gets them to a page where they download. Those are funnels. And so that’s a common thing is to track where do people do, how many people complete an entire funnel? Where do they exit that funnel? And so you’ve got to track when they take each one of those steps. And then you set up your funnels.

Some of the analytic platforms are better than the others, but you’d want to set up your funnel homepage, visit newsletter, subscribe visit the download page and then actually download the document in the end. And you can track, of the 100 percent of the people that visit my homepage, 50 percent of them landed, hit this one page that I want them to visit of those 50% 30 percent of them subscribed of those X amount did this.

And if you notice, there’s a huge, massive drop off at one point in that funnel, you can say, Oh, there’s something wrong with this page. What am I doing wrong? What could I improve it? Maybe, you got a whole bunch of people to that download page and nobody downloads it. There’s a technical issue.

Or maybe you just forgot to the, download button link just doesn’t exist or it’s hidden or it’s hard to find, or there’s some wording that doesn’t make it clear what they should do on that page so you can really determine how to improve your conversion rate on that page.

Chris Badgett: Let’s educate you out there watching or listening on there’s the perfect funnel, like where somebody goes through that flow, you mentioned of homepage opt in download, and then maybe they purchase a product, but oftentimes that doesn’t happen on one website visit.

Or maybe they don’t go through the thing in a certain order. And so how do you help people understand conversion tracking? Is it staying with them? Even if that whole process takes 30 days and then they. Maybe they did some other stuff on the website and it just didn’t perfectly go through the funnel.

How does that work or how should people think about that?

Derek Ashauer: Yeah that’s, a challenge in modern websites with privacy stuff. It becomes harder to do that to track an exact user or across this how do you tell someone maybe they subscribed while they were on their computer?

And then the next day they get the email and they’re using it on their phone. And unfortunately there’s not the, a great way to connect that same person. Because they’re on different devices and now that counts as a whole separate person. So a lot of the conversion stuff, you’re never going to get 100 percent accuracy of this exact person who’s that Jane Doe who sat down on this one device and then maybe use another device or that kind of stuff.

It’s not going to be perfect. But you go with generalizations in some ways, like 30%, roughly 30%. We never go 32. 339 percent of people did this. It, there’s no way to be perfect with it. So that’s why when we’re looking at our analytics, we just tell how many people hit this page. X amount of people left or this amount of people converted.

Now when they downloaded, how many are they, once they opted in, how many ended up clicking on that link and going to the download page? And we mark that as a conversion and things like that. And we just do it on overall numbers, of traffic and conversion bridge itself does have a conversion journey tool to it.

So what that means is that if it is the same person using the same browser because that’s how it’s tracked, it’s uses the other browser and some other stuff. And anonymizes it so that we don’t have any personally identifiable information, but then keeps track of that person so we can see what exact pages they did view throughout the entire journey.

But like I said, if they jumped to a mobile device in the middle of that journey, that does count as a whole separate user and view and stuff like that. But yeah, I lost track of the original question.

Chris Badgett: No, you got it there. It’s there’s converged, there’s these conversion points.

And then conversion bridge has calls it a journey, which is like a funnel. So like the individual elements and then that path is the funnel or the journey. So you look at metrics over time, what happens, you mentioned if they’re in the same browser, but let’s say it’s. They did each stage of the funnel a day apart, meaning the computer closed and got turned off and opened again.

Does it still know anonymously that user is the same person?

Derek Ashauer: It depends on the analytics platform that you use. Google analytics will be better. There’s some plausible and some other ones. There’s a handful that take privacy very seriously. And to their credit, they’re very serious about that.

And that it it doesn’t track a user, and across multiple pages. What it basically does is just tracks how many people in general came to a page. It doesn’t know that they went from one page to the next. And and that’s what. Most analytics is. So that’s why we’re playing this game of how do we determine what steps does a one specific user take a lot of the more privacy focused analytics and even Google analytics is having challenges with this to also obey all the privacy laws is what step by step, what did that person do on your website?

Conversion bridge itself does, like I said, adds a little bit. That in between it does add that. So it does have the conversion journey. So when someone does do a conversion, make a purchase, sign up for something, you can then see what was the first page they hit. What was the second, third, fourth, fifth, and all the steps that they took in between, but when you’re looking at just your analytics platform, that data and that exact journey, you’re never going to get that.

You usually get maybe an entry point where they started. And then where, and then that they actually did a conversion, but that’s about the most. And that’s also another area where conversion bridge itself helps, give you some extra data to learn. Oh, I’m noticing people are going from here to here.

All of the people that convert and buy something on my website or signed up, I noticed that a lot of them are going to my about page and then my services page. And then they buy or whatever that flow may be. And you can start to learn a little bit about what is important to your users and what, and to keep improving that content or making that content easier to get to in some ways.

Cause you know that’s the content that really gets people down that path to ultimately converting.

Chris Badgett: Love that. Let’s talk a little bit more about conversion rate optimization. Cause it’s really easy to get really busy in marketing, doing a lot of different things. But if you have this journey, like homepage or visit the site, downloads the lead magnet the opt in newsletter, whatever, and then buys like a cheap product, maybe it’s a trial or a little mini course or something like that.

And then they buy the big, product or the membership or the signature course or whatever. That’s four steps. And if you. Like just build your marketing and allocated your time around optimizing those. It makes a lot of sense, but what kind of things can people change or work on to test a theory on, Oh, maybe if I do X, I can increase my conversion rate at all those stages.

I think the. There’s like a one in marketing circles that has been around forever, which like, Oh, maybe you should change the button color or something like that. But what else can people do?

Derek Ashauer: Yeah. Yeah, that was a big thing of what I think, like orange or something like that, it was the best buy now color or something like that.

And

Chris Badgett: everybody had orange buttons. I still have orange buttons on my website, but yeah.

Derek Ashauer: Yeah. There’s. Yeah, you could literally change every last little pixel on your page. It could be down to copy to placement of that button. What does that button text stay? Does it say buy now or purchase now try now?

There, you could literally put any word on there and see what. You know what that does to your conversion rate. It’s a challenge because if you have a small website, you have to let that run for a while. You need a lot of data. And so what we’re talking about right now is what some people might have heard.

It’s called like AB testing ABC testing. You can run unlimited different. Tests on a page. And usually you only want to make one, maybe two changes to a page. You don’t want to, you could have two wholly separate designs two versions of that page, but then you don’t know what about that is what actually caused.

An increase or decrease in your conversions. So making small changes at a time, and it depends on your traffic. If you’re only getting 20 people a day to your site, you might have to six months to a year. To get enough data to even see if that’s enough. But it’s worth playing with those things to try it, give it yourself a little bit of time.

I think some people get impatient and think that after a a week or two, they’ll have enough data, to make a decision, but, but yeah, you can play with everything the headline at the top is that getting, is that telling people what they really need to know about your product or service in order to convert?

Where’s that button on the page? Is it right underneath the headline? Do I need to list the price next to the button or do I make a little more vague and say, buy now, and there’s no price included, all those are different kinds of things you can try.

Chris Badgett: So there are tools for A B testing, split testing.

I’d be curious if you know any that you might recommend for WordPress websites, but I’d also like to say that. You can do it the more rough way and just okay, I’m going to change this for a month. I’m not going to change a million other things. Wait another month and then make sure the traffic was more or less equal and get a, you don’t have to get into these fancy tools of AB testing, but is there, how does one get into the AB testing where it literally splits the traffic 50 50 with different paths?

Derek Ashauer: Yeah, that used to be done. There used to be a Google optimize. But unfortunately they shut that down. So that’s not really available. Yeah, there’s, I think it’s funnel kit might have an AB one.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Derek Ashauer: AB tool to it. Yeah, there, there really isn’t one. And, Yeah, that is something that is in the back of my mind and is in regards to conversion bridge itself, honestly, you honestly wasn’t planning on talking about that, but it is, it’s on a.

It’s on a list for conversion bridge is having an A B tool. So yeah, because it, when Google optimize disappeared that, a lot, everything was, there was so many tools that were built around using Google optimize and Google analytics as a way to do A B testing. And now that’s gone. So there really isn’t too much.

It is significantly harder these days to do A B testing.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about analytics platforms. A lot of people get frustrated, myself included, with Google Analytics. It’s hard to figure out. The interface changes a lot and getting the right report I want to try to see is a little difficult.

But it’s not always the case that you should abandon ship and go somewhere else. But what’s your advice to somebody who’s I’m feeling a little overwhelmed with Google Analytics. What should they do to either know they should stay or check out these other tools?

Derek Ashauer: So one great thing about conversion bridge is that it integrates with 13 analytic platforms right now, and you can enable all 13 of them at the exact same time.

If you wanted to, I do it while I’m testing. Honestly, it’s not that big of a deal. The analytics platforms themselves are very lightweight JavaScript that gets added to the page. I’m sure your theme probably adds. 100 times more javascript than these analytic platforms do. So it’s great.

You could test multiple different analytics platforms at once and while maintaining your Google analytics, you’re not losing any of your Google analytics data, but you could try say, fathom plausible, perch user, maven any of these other great tools. They also have many of them have free trials or they’re free while you’re under a certain amount of page visits.

So you could run it for a few weeks. See you and then see and test and see what you like about these other analytic platforms. I agree with you. It’s one reason why I created ConversionBridge is because When GA4 came out, I was like, what do I do? I don’t understand where did all these simple reports go?

When I was doing sites for clients, I could often set up Google analytics and say, here you go log in. And they’d be, Oh, this is great. And they could figure it out pretty simple. I never had to walk through Google analytics itself to explain what it was and what the data meant. And now with GA4.

Even I, as someone who’s been making websites for 20 years, I’m like, I don’t, what that was my first, I I spent a while and I still struggle to figure it out. I I doing conversion bridges forced me to take the time to do that, but something that requires a week long course to use, I think is, Like Google analytics to just look at basic traffic data is over engineered.

If you go to any of these alternative analytic platforms, it’s a single page. It’s incredibly easy to digest and understand. You could send it to any client or anyone I think could figure out what the data is and what it means within a few minutes. Yeah, I would recommend trying some of them out.

Pretty much all of them have a free trial at this point.

Chris Badgett: I know conversion bridge is impartial to like, Which one you choose.

Derek Ashauer: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: But sometimes it’s helpful for people to know if you’re frustrated with Google analytics, maybe try brand X next, like maybe it’s like pretty popular and a lot of people like it.

Is that like fathom or.

Derek Ashauer: Oh I think, each one has its pros and cons. If you have a blogging site, fathoms a great one. And you just have some information new, you have a newsletter sign up when you, some of the other ones, like maybe user Maven or perch are better. They have, they’re improving a lot faster and have a lot more robust reporting tools and funnels that you can set up and things like that.

And those are great if you’re doing more advanced things like an e commerce website where you want to send in more complicated data. Plausible is another one that can accept that. And what I mean by complicated data is for example, say you’re selling widgets you have a 5 widget and a 500 widget and and you go there and you say, okay, this ad that I ran on Google ads, it gave me 10 sales of my 5 widget.

Or this ad led to two sales of my 500 widget. You want to know which one’s getting you more money, maybe not necessarily more sales. So in some platforms, it’s very simple. It’s you just get the number of sales because I can’t as conversion bridge, I can’t send the data about how much the sale was worth, but in other platforms I can send that data in.

So that is that’s a good important metric that you would want to keep track of. And if you go to the conversion bridge website. On the bottom, there’s a link to a comparison of all the different analytics platforms. And one of those is the, does it have advanced e commerce, tracking and abilities.

And so that’s if your site is doing that, then that is important. If you’re only doing like a blogging site and maybe you’re doing a newsletter subscribe, you could probably work with any of the analytics platforms. Cause all you care about is did someone subscribe? Did someone read a page? Did someone do that?

So on and so forth. And so those lower level Or more simplistic analytics platforms would be perfectly fine.

Chris Badgett: Let’s speak to the non developers out there who are busy doing a lot of things and setting up an analytics platform, it often is okay, here’s this code, install it, or give it to your developer.

And that creates a lot of friction. So how does a conversion bridge like talk about the setup and how people get started with it?

Derek Ashauer: So if you install a plugin, like you would with any WordPress plugin. And then there’s first thing you do is you select your analytics platform. All you have to do is toggle a little on switch for which analytics platform you’re using.

Then each platform gives you a unique ID. Each one calls it something different, but there’s some kind of unique ID for it. And you just copy and paste that unique ID and you’re done. It’s added all the track, the core tracking code to the website. So there’s no where do I add the code? How do I add the code?

Code, there’s no get, those plugins that where you, do insert the header and footer and all that kind of stuff, you just have to cut and paste that random character string that identifies your site and you’re done. You now have your analytics tracking code on the website.

Next step, you go to the integrations tab. In conversion bridge and there you’ll see a list of all the plugins that you have installed that conversion bridge works with so very simple outlines. Here are the ones. Here’s the ones that I can add conversion tracking for. All you have to do is click a toggle and you are done for almost every single for Every integration.

Some integrations require a little bit extra one extra step, for example, like forms. Because conversion tracking can be enabled on each individual form. Maybe some forms are just internal thing or using it for something obscure. You don’t really need to get conversion tracking on it, but maybe there’s more public facing forms.

So that’s why conversion tracking allows you to enable tracking on a perform basis. But when you go to edit your form, it’s the same thing. It’s just toggle and that’s all you got to do

Chris Badgett: right on. Yeah. That’s a huge time saver. I think we lost your video, but yeah, it’s cool. We can keep going. I’ll switch to, Oh, there it goes.

What, I know there’s a lot of stuff in the news you mentioned earlier about. Privacy and if you’re selling to an international audience, or and I, know the other, there’s two parts to this question. Another part is I think Apple and certain browsers take like a different approach.

Just what should people know if they’re trying to sell to the whole world, they don’t necessarily care what browser they’re on, or if they’re on a iPhone or something else. Other device like do privacy focused analytics platforms track better or are mostly just like respect better or respect privacy more?

How does how? Let’s dig in a little bit on privacy.

Derek Ashauer: Yeah, so those alternative analytics platforms by their nature. Our privacy focus. That’s why they were all developed was to solve that problem that Google analytics was causing for a lot of people who lived in countries or got traffic from countries where they really needed to respect the privacy of the users.

So those are. Inherently private. It does come with the downsides that that level of detail that Google analytics used to be able to get because they could just violate that user’s privacy and just keep tracking them no matter what. It comes with some trade offs.

So that’s why earlier when we talked about the exact user and all this kind of stuff. So yeah, so that’s, what’s great about those is that you don’t need a cookie banner for any of those alternative platforms. That’s another reason why. Okay. I got into this realms cause I did not want to have cookie banners on my website.

And so I started investigating alternative platforms.

Chris Badgett: Oh, that’s super cool. So if you don’t track them with cookies, then you don’t need that opt in thing. This

Derek Ashauer: is cookie. This is my current understanding. Again, I am not a lawyer to preface, but this is my current understanding.

Just because you have cookies doesn’t mean you have to have a cookie notice. If you’re tracking personally identifiable information, then you need a cookie notice. Personally identifiable information is stuff like IP address, their browser, their city. It doesn’t have to be their name and email. It could be even something as vague as some of those other things.

So that’s what these alternative analytics platforms are doing, is that they are tracking in a way that doesn’t grab personally identifiable information. And thus, they Then you no longer need to have a cookie banner on your website. There may be something else on your website that is causing you to need to get a cookie banner.

And that’s something that you have to research on your own. But but using those you’ll see the plausible fathom, all those ones they’ll specifically say, you do not need a cookie banner by using our, because you use our product. Do you have,

Chris Badgett: you’re back, do you have a, Like a take on, when, I’m trying to remember my thought there was a, it’ll come back to me, but let me see if I can grab the thread of where I was thinking, oh, conversion value.

So like sometimes like in Google analytics, when you set up events and you’re like, Hey, what’s a, like at Lifter, for example, we have a free plugin, download, page, which has a form and an opt in and let’s say in our view, based on looking at the data, that’s, I’m just pulling a number out of the air.

That’s like worth 20 or an email subscriber is worth whatever 4 is that. Can you help unpack that the theory behind assigning values like monetary values beyond outside of e commerce, why some people do that?

Derek Ashauer: I think it’s, I struggle to find use cases for it, to be honest as well. Because you go, you can do the math yourself honestly, and a lot of that stuff you go, okay I got 57 email newsletter subscribers.

It’s which one has better value to You Do you sign that’s a value of one? I just know that newsletter subscribers are usually worth about 1 a piece. So conversion version makes it available. You can put in a value for every single conversion, a custom value, whether they submit a form, sign up for an email newsletter, all that kind of stuff.

If it’s a purchase, the value is the value of the purchase itself that numerical number. But, But yeah, I don’t actually have a great answer for you on that one.

Chris Badgett: I think it comes from when people get into paid advertising and they’re not going straight for the sale, they’re like, okay I want them to book an appointment and there’s like a six week sales cycle and my, I know my appointments convert at this rate.

To tell if I can get row as or return on ad spend, I need to, they put that value in there to make sure their ads are running profitably. I think that’s where that comes from.

Derek Ashauer: Yeah. I still feel like if I I ran this ad for we spent 5, 000 on this ad and we got 500 email newsletters, subscribers, you can just go, was that worthwhile?

Cause I know how much an average newsletter subscriber is to me. You know what that, what that monetary value is. Like I said, that one I don’t have a great answer for you, but conversion bridge makes it available if you want to, if you want to do that. Yep. You need to go that.

Chris Badgett: Is there any more you would like to say on ads?

Cause I feel like ads is where people really get focused on conversion. Cause especially if you’re going to start shelling out, 30 a day or 300 a day or 3, 000 a day. You don’t want to just have a blindfold on and then be like, I hope this is working. Tell us how to think about ads, analytics and conversions on our site and how they work together.

Derek Ashauer: Yeah. So in my latest release, 1. 3 it was a big update for to work better with Google ads. Especially for those who are not using Google Analytics. Everyone kind of makes the assumption, I’m doing Google Ads, I have to use Google Analytics. ConversionBridge makes it very easy in a no code way to track those conversions even if I was using an alternative analytic platform.

So ads it’s very similar to what we were talking about earlier with kind of A B testing. Your webpage is you on a bunch of ads and you want to see what actually gets people to take an action to convert, whether it’s newsletter signups or purchases, whatever that, or fill out, filling out a request for a quote form.

If you’re like an agency or something like that. Yeah it’s important to track all those you gotta do that. And what’s great is also by converting those ads, Google analytics say you write 10 ads, sorry, if you write 10 ads and Google ads, you can Set Google ads to automatically optimize those, which ads they show based on which ones are performing better.

You have to tell Google ads, which ones are performing better by telling it, which ones are converting. So that’s what conversion bridge does. It says, Hey, this person bought something. Tell Google ads, Hey, this we got a conversion, we got a conversion and Google ads. Okay. Okay. Who is this person?

They’ve been tracking it and then they say, all right, we know that, we can tie this back to this ad type thing.

Chris Badgett: So it’s not just like building a bridge that goes one way from your website to the analytics platform. It can, they’re they can communicate both ways.

Maybe that’s a bad metaphor, but I’m going with the bridge there because that’s cool. I didn’t even realize that I didn’t even really realize that part about doing Google ads and split testing over there and optimizing because it knows the conversion. You

Derek Ashauer: want to see which ads are performing better. So you can get a better idea of, Hey, I’ve ripped.

It’s always great to write a whole bunch of different variations of your ad and then run them and see which one gets better performance.

Chris Badgett: But you can do that with, even if you’re not using Google analytics for your conversion tracking.

Derek Ashauer: Correct. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s pretty cool.

Derek Ashauer: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Cause if you fall in love with a different platform.

But you still want to use Google ads. I didn’t even know that you’re, I thought you were just married. Okay. I’m in Google. So I Google ads, I need to use Google analytics. I didn’t really

Derek Ashauer: and Google purposely that. It’s not.

Chris Badgett: what what are some of the common, like of the people who were coming into conversion bridge?

What, are some of their most common, like first steps? When they get started, they’ve installed the plugin. They’ve been, they’ve chosen their analytics platform. It’s syncing correctly. What’s, what would be like step one, two, and three from there?

Derek Ashauer: From there is just checking it every once in a while to make sure that you’re, confirmed that when you get a purchase or whatever conversion that you go into your analytics platform and make sure that they’re there.

And then from there, it’s what we talked about as well. You just let it run for a while, get some good data, say you learned that for every 100 people who come to this page. 3 percent of them convert, and then you can go what can we do to try and improve that? What and I know a common question that people ask is what’s a good conversion rate depends on what you’re trying to measure.

Every single thing is different. Every single industry is different. It’s the goal is to just get better than what you had last month. So it’s, hard to say and there’s so many factors that can affect that. So then at that point, it’s, once you start having some data, it’s. Doing the conversion rate optimization.

It’s playing with your content, playing with your website design, playing with your pricing playing with your placement of things like that. And just trying different things and see if there’s stuff that you can do to increase that conversion rate over time.

Chris Badgett: I love that. So if you are flying blind without conversion or analytics for your website this is like marketing is, Artistic and creative, but it’s also very scientific.

We’re on the scientific side here and you can use art and science together to grow your traffic, increase your sales, improve user behavior on your website, whatever you want them to do. This has been a great chat, Derek. What’s the best way for people to get started with ConversionBridge?

Derek Ashauer: Visiting the website, there’s conversionbridgewp.

com you can go in there and learn about all the different integrations and analytics platforms, learn about like I said, there’s a comparison table with some, I’ve started to write some reviews about each of the platforms themselves, so you can take a look and give it a shot and, Give it a go.

Chris Badgett: Thank you for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. I, in my opinion, everybody should set up their analytics integration with their WordPress website from the very beginning, it’s like part of the launch of the website. So if you haven’t done it yet, don’t feel bad. But let’s get it done.

Head on over to conversionbridgewp. com. Derek, thanks so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Chris.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post How Track Conversions on Your LMS Website with Derek Ashauer from Conversion Bridge appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Sandy Ellingson talks about her path from early childhood development to becoming a significant person in the RV business in an interesting conversation with Chris Badgett.

Sandy Ellingson is a vibrant professional with a broad background in technology, finance, early childhood development, and the recreational vehicle sector. Sandy describes how she moved from technology and banking to facilitating better collaboration between RV manufacturers and parks, particularly during COVID-19.

She highlights the need of providing correct information and fostering a sense of community, mentioning how she uses LifterLMS to create online training courses that are both scalable and effective. Sandy demonstrates how LifterLMS’s group and permissive user privacy features foster innovation and teamwork within the sector.

She also commends the platform’s help staff and the insightful conversations she had with other users during live calls. Sandy’s narrative demonstrates how she strategically used community development and technology to address industry issues and promote the expansion of the RV business.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Sandy Ellingson. She’s from the outdoor hospitality hub. Dot com that’s outdoor hospitality hub. com. Also check out the hub for RVers. com with dashes between each word. Welcome to the show, Sandy.

Sandy Ellingson: Hey, thanks for having me, Chris.

I’m excited to be here.

Chris Badgett: I love meeting with people that are using LifterLMS, getting into technology, marketing, building community, and all these things. It’s always fun. And I enjoy these conversations and really those people that are making that impact and putting out a positive message and helping people in their careers and their industry, just being a force for good in the world it’s, a lot of fun and an honor to chat with you.

Let’s start a little bit with your story. How did you get from early childhood development into all this techie community building, RV industry, building online training and all this what was the story there?

Sandy Ellingson: I graduated high school at 16 and I graduated college at 18 and in Georgia, you couldn’t teach until you were 21.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Sandy Ellingson: I couldn’t be a teacher. So I went in, I was already working in banking, so I stayed there for 10 years. Then my kids started coming along and I decided I wanted to stay home. And it was an accident that my brother called me one day and wanted some help. And he was running about a 2 million business on paper.

I said, I think I can figure this out. So I taught myself networking. I built the computers. I taught myself accounting, I brought in the accounting software. And basically it was just, that was the start of my career in technology. And so from there I ended up going and working for an accounting firm as a consultant, then starting my own firm.

Then a few years ago I retired and we were going to hit the road as RVers and just enjoy life. And we, I started helping campgrounds along the way because I did love what I was doing. Before you knew it, I was helping a hundred campgrounds. My husband said, honey, turn around. You’re not retired.

I was doing what I love, but not making any money at it. It’s just been a series of being at the right place at the right time. And I was very blessed to end up connecting with a lot of people in the industry side. So up until a few years ago, you had the industry side, which is the manufacturers who make the rigs and all those suppliers.

Campgrounds and they never really connected because one was manufacturing and the other was hospitality and because of what I had done with technology and building communities. I saw that there was this gap and there needed to be a connection. And so I basically spent the last 4 years. learning about each of the communities and then in my head, figuring out how we proactively connected them so that they were working together.

And that’s what the result of the outdoor hospitality hub is. It’s really a way of connecting the industry with campgrounds so that they can proactively make better decisions.

Chris Badgett: That’s it. There’s a saying that one of the hardest things to make is like a two sided marketplace. What were some of the challenges with getting campgrounds and RV manufacturers to sync up and help each other?

Sandy Ellingson: That was the biggest problem was they didn’t see what they had in common. And so I would talk to a campground and they’d say, why do I need to have anything to do with a manufacturer? They’re manufacturing, we’re hospitality and vice versa. And then COVID hit and COVID showed us that we had to work together.

There was so much going on and there were things that were innovating because of COVID that, but nobody was talking to each other and it could have worked better if we’d worked together. Yeah. That’s when I started getting involved. And there were about five industry challenges that we identified that I felt every one of those could be solved in a campground.

So I started saying, look, we can work with campgrounds to do this and solve this problem. And we started doing that. They said how do we it’s okay to do this 1 to 1, but that takes forever. And that’s, I kept thinking, I know I can do this. There’s got to be technology out there that I can use to build this bridge so that it’s not a one to one connection.

A couple of those is we have only 1 technician for every 4000 rigs on the road. And there’s an amazing school called that’s trying to train technicians, but then getting them out into the campgrounds are getting them out and getting them experience once they graduate. Was a challenge.

Now we can place them in a campground and they do what we call tech camping, where they work in conjunction with the campground. The campground can market that they have a tech, the tech gets the experience and everybody wins. And so there’s several all, five of those issues are that way. It’s a partnership where we all win.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And as an RVer myself, I was always amazed at when I go look at a YouTube video, like how to winterize an RPOD 179 or whatever I had, there’d be this video with a hundred thousand views. Can you tell us a little bit about like the size and the scope of the RV industry?

Sandy Ellingson: It’s one company is over six billion dollars, and that’s just one of the major companies. It’s big and thousands and thousands of units sold every year. Actually, what we’ve done with the Outdoor Hospitality Hub is going to solve another one of those problems where we have on YouTube is like the wild West, right?

And we have a lot of new RV years that came into our ecosystem during covet. They don’t know a thing about camping. They’ve never been in a rig. And then they go to YouTube and they’re watching a video on how to do something that is somebody that has been camping for two weeks, but everybody wants to be a YouTuber, right?

So what we’ve tried to do is make sure that there’s, the social side of our site and then there’s the educational side and everybody that is providing any kind of education or acting as a subject matter expert has to be vetted. And we only have content inside of our system that we know is accurate.

There’s some actual dangerous stuff out there, especially when you start talking about propane and some of those things. If you don’t know what you’re doing and you think it’s you’re just doing this YouTube to try and get click clicks, or you do worse, do click bait. And, Mislead people that doesn’t help the industry overall. So we hope that by having this inside and that was 1 of the reasons we added on the RV portal is because we had such demand over the last 60 days with saying, we don’t know what to do. There’s videos out there, but how do we know if they’re accurate?

And so this will give them a place where they can go and know they’re getting accurate information.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I like to use the phrase trusted advisor. Like people are looking for a trusted advisor. There’s a lot of content on the internet, but they, what they really want is that kind of brand that they know they can trust what you’re building.

How, do you get RV manufacturers or campgrounds or. Our viewers themselves onto the site. Like, how do you get traffic? How do you think about just growing the platform?

Sandy Ellingson: So it’s actually just in a soft launch right now. We don’t do our full launch until June the 15th, but what’s been interesting is.

I have been encouraged and even pushed by those entities to do this. So it’s not like I’m having to go out and do a lot of marketing. One of the things I like to do on the campground side is work with the state associations. A lot of people don’t really understand the value of their state associations.

So the first course that I created was called understanding the benefits of a state association. It even blew my mind. When I started doing the math, and so it was a lot of fun. So if I get the campground associations involved. Then all of their parks come in. So I’m not just going after an individual park.

And it’s the same thing with the industry side of things. There’s a lot of Hot buttons that they have needs they have and all I have to do is give them That opportunity and they’re ready. They’re jumping in and I just left a big national rally Last week that was in indiana And there were about a thousand people there, and I was inundated with requests for, can I download the mobile app yet?

And of course, it’s not ready, so I had to throw up real quick a page that said, here, give me your name if you’re interested in being notified. And before we left the campground, I had over 500 names on the list. It’s that part of it has been really easy because the need is so great.

Chris Badgett: I love that. I like to say you really got product market fit when they’re like the, your audience is like pulling the product out of you.

You’re not pushing it. And then also that kind of one to many approach you’re doing. If you get an association, they’ve got all their people, one campground, and they bring all the others and all that, stuff. It’s very scaled out way of thinking and tapping a river of demand and meeting the needs that they’re desperately looking for a solution for.

That’s, awesome. How did you get into WordPress?

Sandy Ellingson: Years ago, I thought I could be a web developer. Actually it was funny. I started playing with websites in Drupal.

Chris Badgett: Me too.

Sandy Ellingson: That is I thought when you learn that way, you don’t realize how much more complex it is than WordPress.

And so then I would hear people talking about WordPress and I go that’s the kindergarten version, right? If you can do Drupal, you can do anything. But then of course as WordPress took off and was so great for smaller companies and people that wanted to learn it themselves working with nonprofits, which is what I did a lot.

It became a superior option for me. And so I wanted to learn enough about it that I could talk the talk, right? Don’t I’m a functional girl. I’m not a pretty girl. Okay. I can make things sing on the back end, but I do not make things pretty. And so I learned my where my weaknesses were, and then I went out to find how I could to, could fill those gaps.

So I got involved in a design conference called Creative South. Every year I was got to be with thousands of designers and make friends and mama them. So I pulled in and found people that could do what I couldn’t do. Started partnering with them. And so that’s when I started really, a lot of them were using WordPress, right?

And so that’s when I started really loving WordPress. So I’m, I am maybe a hacker, but I can hack enough to get it going.

Chris Badgett: You sound like a lot like me. A lot of people think I’m a web developer, but I can’t write a single line of code I’ve, but I learned how to work with people and get on the mission vision and do the parts that I do well.

And, build the team around you. I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that. It’s a lot to where as an education entrepreneur, to be a technologist, an entrepreneur, a community builder. An instructional designer or teacher and do all these things like in one person, some of the most successful projects tend to have multiple people involved.

Why did you choose LFTR LMS for the learning management system? How did that happen?

Sandy Ellingson: I had worked with mighty networks for a while and so I knew they were out there. They are perfect for some of my small churches and some of my nonprofits, they were very easy for them to adopt. And I knew a sort of about the LMS is, and then I had a client that used can jobby and she liked that.

And she kept saying, you should try this, but I didn’t really have a reason for it. But then when this came up, I knew that the demand was going to be much greater and even in, in talking to them, they were like, we don’t think we’re going to be able to handle it. I really believe that. 18 months from now, we’ll have 100, 000 users hitting the system at any one time.

And so they just did not feel like they could scale to that. So then so nothing against them. I think they’re great, but not for this situation. And I built my career on not standardizing with just one thing. I would never represent software for commission. I wanted to make sure I was representing them because I believed in them.

And then we actually found another software. And we thought we were going to go with it. It was very complex. And we liked it, but then they had a limitation. They could meet the demand, but they couldn’t meet some of the other things. And I’m still searching and found Lifter LMS in a Google search and started watching you guys videos and stuff.

And I was like. Oh, my gosh, this is amazing. And the more we got into it, we did the free trial. And the more we got into it, it was like. This is awesome. And so it was just basically through trial and error and Google searches and we didn’t know anybody else using it or anything, but I do have a gift because of the last 10 years of my career, I worked with venture capitalists to see what they should invest in and what they shouldn’t.

So I look at things with a very critical eye and I can almost look at the front end of something and tell you what the back end is, what language it’s written in, what database they’re using. You look at so many, you just get used to it. Yeah. And I kept trying to find a flaw and I’m like, little things that I might tweak or do differently or functions that I would add, but for the most part, I couldn’t find one.

And everybody on my team was raving. So we knew this. We found the right one when we found Lifter LMS.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. What, do you know what, like Lifter LMS add ons that were important to you? I’m just curious, some of the stuff we have e commerce related or. Integrating with the email marketing or like advanced videos or groups, social learning, things like that.

Like what are you using or excited about?

Sandy Ellingson: All of those things were important to me. We’re not going to have a store right now, but in the future I do see that. So all of that was important. I loved that the integration with buddy boss for the expanded social side. So we my elevator speech is we do, we connect.

We communicate, we collaborate, and then we innovate, and it happens in that order. And for me, when we’re using, we connect and communicate first, and then LFTR LMS handles the heavy lifting, which is the collaborating and the innovating, because we use the groups extensively. And we’ve even come up with a really creative idea of how to use groups.

So we are using groups as what we call opportunities. So let’s say somebody in the industry wants to connect with some parks, then they create a group that’s a category of opportunity. And so those show up on 1 page. And then we notify the campgrounds that are within the parameters And so we can restrict the group by saying we only want 50 people in this group, but they can say, look, we’re looking for 50 parts who are interested in storing the most common failure parts that we we need and we want to have a conversation about it.

They can then permissively join that group because it’s really important to me that everything is permissive inside the hub. And and their name might be Sandy Ellingson, but it also might be Sparkle right from inside the hub. So when they join that group, they’re still not giving away their identity.

And then beyond that once they start communicating, if they choose to identify who they are and go outside the ecosystem, that’s fine. But I love all of that. The ability to protect and be permissive. I look for that a lot as an inbound marketing certification person. I want to know that we’re being permissive and that people aren’t getting spammed.

And so all of that was really important to us.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. What’s your experience with Lifter LMS? Support I’ve seen you on some live calls and stuff. What would you say?

Sandy Ellingson: Oh I, love the way you guys do things. I join, usually I try to join both the calls. There’s two every week.

But the Thursday call, I really enjoy. I have learned. You need to be prepared. Otherwise, we will have some fun conversations, but not necessarily learn as much as I want to learn. I’m the check every box kind of girl, right? And Curt and Will, they see me coming and they’re like, okay, Sandy’s already ready and posted all her questions, but I am also really impressed by the people that join the calls.

These people know their stuff. stuff. It’s amazing. And so I learned just from listening to the other people. And then anytime I’ve had to send in a support ticket somebody messages me back pretty much 24 seven. I’m hearing back within a reasonable amount of time. And it’s always, Hey very very polite.

When I’m asking a stupid question that I probably could have Googled and found the answer to. But I just didn’t see me. Here’s the reference. We’re so glad she contacted us. It makes me feel good about being a newbie in the system.

Chris Badgett: I appreciate that. Yeah. We’re, we know a thing or two about building community here as well.

And like you said, even just being in a community of other education, entrepreneurs, or service providers who are working in the industry, you just learn through osmosis, that’s one of the biggest benefits of community. What other technology is important to you? Like you mentioned a buddy boss. What do you use for web hosting or what do you see is like your super critical tools to pull off the outdoor hospitality hub?

Sandy Ellingson: I chose to work with 1 of the experts that you guys recommended for to find the right hosting. At some point, there is a data center when we get super large that I’ll probably move to that I’ve worked with in the past. And they’re, huge. They. And work with Homeland Security and all that.

So as we go international, I’ll probably move to that. But for right now, we’re really happy with the hosting company that he recommended and I do. I love the, expert that we’re working with. He’s really good about letting us do what we can do and then picking up the ball when we can’t. Can’t get beyond that, or we need it and just saying, I can do that quicker for you, or you can spend 4 hours pulling your hair out.

And I’m like, thank you very much. Take it right. But very respectful of our budget. So that’s important is to have those experts for when you need them, but somebody that will let you do as much as you can do. And not just run away with the budget. So we love that. And then I’m using several other CR in a plug ins here and there.

We’re just now getting ready to implement fluent CRM and so we haven’t gotten that yet. It’s not as important immediately. And I really want to implement an SMS system. So having something like that is going to be important because I still think email is Very difficult to get the responses you need.

And so for, especially in our industry, people really like the text messages. So we want to do that

Chris Badgett: on the text messaging front. Lifter LMS does have a Twilio integration, which does some cool SMS stuff. That’s awesome. And I go ahead of

Sandy Ellingson: the software companies that I work with that does prop property management.

He’s written this whole module for Twilio, which basically, It allows my parks to do marketing and use different telephone numbers so that they can even track the success of traditional marketing You know like a billboard or whatever because it has a unique number that they’re calling into And so i’m thinking there’s you know a future there with maybe looking at some of that as well

Chris Badgett: Tell us some more data points.

I’m just interested you mentioned you’re forecasting like a hundred thousand users in a future How many courses do you plan on? You’ve made some courses. Like how many we’ve talked a little bit about the scale of the RV industry and the campground industry and just RVers, what are some like what do you see in the data?

Like just around. The outdoor hospitality hub.

Sandy Ellingson: I think it’s going to be huge because we’re, we’ve already signed contracts with about 31 subject matter experts. These are the people that will be creating our, primarily our content. We haven’t started teaching them how to do it yet because I’m still playing around with it again.

I like to learn it myself first. And there’s some things that I want them to be able to do on their own, but a little bit easier. So we’re playing around. Like I messaged you guys about cloning and some things like that. How do I make it easier for them to create the different types of content? And because my background is teaching, I want to make sure that we’re using all the different kinds of learning.

And I really would like to have to create some templates, whether we do that with our The person that’s working with us, and we do it outside of what you guys have already done make it a little bit easier. But ultimately, I think that by the end of the year, we’ll have at least 1000 lessons.

I don’t know how many courses that will be. And then we’ve got some really great CEOs in the industry that they’re going to they’ve already given me 52. Lessons they’re gonna do once a month. Once a week, I’m gonna interview them like this. It’ll be an 8 minute in out kind of thing. And then the next 1 will drop the next week and then the next week.

But these are amazing. CEOs of big companies who having the ability to connect with somebody at that level for all of my parks and my other people is huge. And so we’re doing culture and leadership with one of them. We’re doing all these different types of things about financing and how to grow your park and, what, things should you be looking at for KPIs based on today, not Five years ago when the old content was written.

So that’s some of the things we’re like a thousand lessons is our goal. We hope to exceed it.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And just to double click on the subject matter experts.

I’ve heard a lot of folks with goals to build the training platform that’s bigger than one individual. What are some tips you have and things you’ve learned on recruiting content creators to help make courses or other content on your site?

How do you make that happen?

Sandy Ellingson: I think that we’re a little bit different from a lot that I’ve seen in some of the case studies I’ve read in that. The hub is set up so that you cannot do commerce inside the hub. I don’t want it to be a place where people feel they’re inundated with sales pitches. But you can establish yourself as a subject matter expert and to teach others about doing that.

We, that’s why we have 50 that we’re bringing in as our initial subject matter experts and they are an extension of us and they sign an agreement that says we agree not to do certain things. What’s nice is that these 50 people are very passionate about what we’re passionate about. So they they’re doing this.

As themselves with no financial benefit to themselves. And so I’m very fortunate in that situation. Now, our 2nd tier, where we have other people that are suppliers and people that basically do sell to parks and things, they’re still coming in and they can establish themselves and get involved and have conversations and build relationships.

But if they want to start, if they. If somebody asks them, hey, can we buy your product? They have to give them a link inside. And then we give them a disclaimer that says you’re now leaving the hub to work with one of our premier providers, but we are capturing no data. And anything you decide to give to them is you’re, giving it to them because I think it’s really important for us to stay Switzerland and to not, I don’t want anybody thinking, oh, I’m getting a piece of the action.

I think in that situation we’re very different and it makes it easier to invite people and get them involved because everybody I am working with is about creating education and improving the ecosystem as a whole.

Chris Badgett: I love that. I’m a big fan and community building of giving before you get.

So if you have this real strong mission, like kind of value community, no pitch zone where it’s the focus is on the community, the sales will come later. And people get to know and trust you and that makes selling easy.

Sandy Ellingson: That’s why it’s taken me four years to get here because I had to earn, the trust of the people.

I really quick, funny story when I got introduced in the industry to all the big people, there was a gentleman that he’s known as the person that if in the industry, everybody listens to. So we’re at this nice dinner and he’s behind me with his back to me. And I hear him say, Oh, she’s just a flash in the pan.

She won’t last. And I turned around and said hello. How are you? And his face was blood red because he knew I had heard him and I did not bring it up. I just had the conversation with the people that he was there. And then as everybody started to walk off. I leaned close to him and I said no he, said I was the flavor of the month.

And I said, you know what? I might be the flavor of the month. But I’m chocolate or vanilla because they can stand the test of time. He started cracking up laughing. What was funny was he became my biggest advocate. So that’s what I feel like. If you treat others the way you want to be treated, I’ve developed this with my hands wide open.

Everybody that’s involved, and there’s a lot of big organizations. I have gone to them and said, is this going to be in conflict with you, right? If it is, I’ll give it to you, right? You can have access to it for free, or if you’re not doing it, do you want to work with me? And because of that, I think that people understand my real motivation, which is to improve our industry.

If we do that, then You know, there may be money that comes along. And you know what? Honestly, if we don’t, I don’t care because I’m not motivated by money. I’m motivated by making a change. So

Chris Badgett: I love that. I have a similar story. I won’t get into where someone said, Oh, you shouldn’t get into software.

That’s really hard. And it’s just funny how it works out. So we were talking a little bit about like data numbers and figures, but qualitatively, I’m also Not I guess the word would be scared of retirement. Like I like working. I like community. I like helping people I like being creative.

But what do you see as like the kind of qualitative benefits of this project?

Sandy Ellingson: So are you talking about the long term kps? Is that what you mean,

Chris Badgett: Not non Data, but like just like more like sense of fulfillment or creativity you know meeting amazing people like more What what lights you up and what are the benefits of this project for you that have nothing to do with money or the eyes or anything?

Yeah.

Sandy Ellingson: Yeah. That’s exactly what I was saying. I established my personal mission statement when I was 26 years old and it has not changed. And it is, I want to make a difference with people who make a difference doing things that make a difference. And as a consultant, every new client I got, I said, can I make a difference?

Are the people I’m working with, can they make a difference? And then the last one was where everything would either rise or fall, because are they willing to do the things that make a difference? Because a lot of people are afraid of change. And I know when I can make a difference. It’s a gut feeling and I’m committed. I’m I am going to stick it out.

It might take me 10 years, but I’m going to succeed. I will not give up. And but there’s times when I’ve had to give up on others because they were not willing. To do those things, and for me at the end of the day, if I’ve established relationships with people, and I’ve been able to help them grow, and I’ve been able to ultimately help the industry.

That’s gonna be the reward for me. But the other thing, too, is, of course as my heart being teaching love mentoring. I was I’ve always been a mentor in the technology industry. So we have what we call we have. It’s called the hub, but we have spokes on the hub and you have to fill out an application to be a spoke on the hub.

And you have to tell us either what industry problem are you solving? Or how are you innovating? And so I’ve got 17 applications right now of people wanting to come into the hub after we launch that these are their businesses and they are for profit businesses. These are things they’re going to do and they are going to be changing the industry.

And so I love that model to think that I helped to launch something else with some young person, right? That sets them up for their life, doing what they love. That’s what’s going to motivate me to keep going.

Chris Badgett: Can you share your mission statement again?

Sandy Ellingson: I want to make a difference with people who make a difference doing things that make a difference.

Chris Badgett: I love that. I have a similar thing with where I, my life mission and my company mission are the same. to lift up others through education. That’s what lights me up in my personal life, my business life. And it’s fulfilling to have that peace of mind and that compass and being like a hundred percent alignment with it.

So I’m really happy for you that you found out and you’ve been, just, it hasn’t changed and you just, you found your calling.

Sandy Ellingson: Yep, I do too. I think it makes it so easy. And I can’t imagine having gone through life without it. Because then how do you measure up and know there’s opportunities everywhere, right?

How do you know which ones to go after if you don’t have something to measure it by based on what you want to do?

Chris Badgett: Said what? Like when you sat up in the RV and you were like. I guess, I’m not retired.

Sandy Ellingson: No.

Chris Badgett: How long? I think I know the answer, but how long before that moment and then this project that you knew it was going to work.

And I think you would say I knew I already knew at the beginning, but like, when did you really get the signal? Like how much time passed where it was like, you know what? My vision is coming true. This is going to work.

Sandy Ellingson: Wow. Really, the year before COVID hit. I started making some headway, but it was slow progress. But then when COVID hit, that created all of these opportunities. I had to work with new people. Because initially campgrounds weren’t seen as essential businesses.

So they were closed. And we had to fight to get get our campgrounds open again. And that’s when the industry side started going, Oh, wow, it is important for us to to be working with campgrounds. Obviously, if the campgrounds are closed. Nobody’s buying an RV, right? And so suddenly it was like, glaringly obvious we needed to do this.

Since COVID has, we’ve come out of that. And then now we’re in this recovery process that the doors are much easier to open. literally it’s just been in the last probably six months where I’m like, not only is this going to succeed, it is going to succeed above my wildest dreams and expectations.

And it’s not me, right? I’m just that vehicle that sticks it out there. It’s like you said. It’s the industry that is clamoring for this and wants this right now. And so I’m just super excited, but it has been in the last six months where I’m going, wow, this is going to happen. Am I ready for it?

Chris Badgett: Amazing.

Anything else you’d like to share about the project? Or just where you’re at and what’s happening.

Sandy Ellingson: You guys just keep an eye on me and watch out on the 15th. There might be a lot of support tickets that come in.

Chris Badgett: We’re ready for it. We’re ready for it. Awesome. Sandy. I want to thank you for coming on the show.

This has been an awesome conversation and talking to education entrepreneurs like you, you’re just a shining example of what lights me up. And I’ll see you next time. Helping people make a difference and all that stuff, create value in the world. It’s, really inspiring. So thank you for sharing your story with us today.

What are the best places for people to go check out what you’re up to?

Sandy Ellingson: So outdoorhospitalityhub. com is the industry side. So if you’re a campground or someone working in the RV industry as a whole. Then the hub for RVers with the dashes in there is a place to go for campers if you’re interested in connecting.

And the most important thing to know about that is this is a unique space. It’s, we’re not trying to replace Facebook and we’re not trying to replace YouTube. We’re trying to meet a larger need for campers and give them the ability to connect. With the industry and permissive ways to get problems solved.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Sandy Thank you for coming on the show I can’t wait to do a follow up with you in a couple years and see where we’re at and Yeah, thanks for all the great work you do. I really appreciate it

Sandy Ellingson: Thank you so much, Chris. This was a lot of fun.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post Creating Niche Industry Online Education and Community with Sandy Ellingson appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Jason Coleman discusses insights into entrepreneurship, starting a consulting business. Also shares about important ideas from his company’s journey route map. In 2006, he and his wife Kim started their own consulting business.

Jason Coleman, CTO of LifterLMS and co-founder of Paid Memberships Pro. At first, they focused on e-commerce solutions, but later they switched their focus to Linux. Because of this, they made Paid Memberships Pro, a membership tool that became open source in 2012. By 2016, they were handling a virtual team of 15 people thanks to the help of this plugin, which helped them become a plugin-centric organization.

Jason looks at the value of open source projects, their involvement in the PHP community, and the inspiration behind PHP e-commerce development. Apart from the difficulties working with a partner, he looks at the need of reaching harmony and using effective communication. Their commitment to innovative ideas and community involvement has been crucial even if keeping competitiveness in an industry that is always changing and controlling their development presents difficulties. Jason counsels budding business owners to start small, experience real-world challenges, maintain a tenacious and strong attitude while open to honest criticism.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a very special guest. He’s a friend. He is co owner of Lifter LMS with his wife, Kim. He’s the founder, co founder of Paid Memberships Pro. We’re going to have an awesome conversation today. I know Jason really well. I think the world of the guy and I’m excited for you to listen in to our conversation.

Welcome to the show, Jason.

Jason Coleman: Thank you, Chris. I I’m happy to be here. I don’t know why it’s taken so long to get on this podcast, but hopefully this breaks the seal and I can be like your most frequent guest.

Chris Badgett: That would be fun. Jason and I have played around about starting a separate podcast by the way.

And so we want to hear what you think about this episode. But getting into it for those that don’t know you, at the beginning of 2023 you and your wife, Kim Coleman joined LFTR LMS as owners. You’ve been helping in the business. If you out there listening or watching is a user of LFTR LMS, and you’ve seen a lot of the great innovation and stuff that’s been happening over the past couple of years, Jason and Kim have been a huge part of that.

But I know Jason from back in the day when I first started using WordPress and I needed a membership plugin and I installed paid memberships pro, which they created. So give us the high level story of paid memberships pro where that started and what year it was and how that began.

Jason Coleman: Yeah, totally. So you’ve mentioned Kim a couple of times and.

It’s really Kim and I are married, but also business partners and been in business together since 2006 or so we started out as consultants building anything, lots of prototypes in the web 2. 0 era. And then we solely focused on WordPress and then focused on e commerce and then focused on membership sites.

And we. Back in 2010 or 11, we had four customers that needed membership functionality, excuse me. And we, didn’t like the plugin options that were there. We also saw how, building open source tools and making your code available and inviting other people to contribute and share and hosting your plugin on the wordpress.

org repository, that was a way to you don’t get more exposure for the software and more people involved. So we build a membership plugin for our four customers and open sourced it around 2012. Sometime in 2016, we were able to switch from being like a consultant company with a plugin to like a plugin company that only sold support and updates and, stuff around the plugin.

So since 2016, so now we’ve been growing just slow and steady every year. And at this point we’re about 15 people on the paid memberships pro side. And we all work remote updating the plugin, maintaining it, taking care of our customers.

Chris Badgett: One of the things I love about Jason is he’s a very humble dude.

And so I always find out things like, Oh, wow, this guy’s really good at investing, which we’re going to talk about later. But back in the day, you had an investing blog and you had a wine blog Gary Vaynerchuk, tell us about that, like your blogging era there.

Jason Coleman: Yeah that, and it’s turning out that like that’s like a magic moment of the internet where, like when blogging was taking off, that people were interested in things could write about it.

And that, that was useful. It wasn’t like right nowadays, there’s so much Content is automatically generated and generated for business. And now AI is generating content and social media is so fast. We there’s some blogs around that still work, but we, really don’t have the attention for the, I don’t know the golden era of blogging.

So we had a investing blog with a three friends. I think I met Gary. I. We had a site wine log, which was like a kind of social network for wine drinkers to keep track of their notes and things. And Gary advertised on the site. And I remember giving him a hard time. Like he, I forget what it was. He was like going to pay me 600 bucks and I forced him to pay me like whatever the industry standard CPM was.

And he’s like, all right, man, you’re driving a hard bargain. He’s you might regret this. Cause it’s more important, the biz dev than the 600 bucks. But but. He pay for the ad. That’s funny. And so at different conferences, I used to run into him back in the day when he was doing the wine library TV thing.

Chris Badgett: And then the

Jason Coleman: investing blog, like what happened there? Yeah, that was interesting. Like I thought we did, a good job. So it was just me and two friends. Like we newly out of college, we had like 401ks, but we didn’t know what they were. So writing about something forces you to learn it. I was really interested in it.

And so it was as we invested and thought about investment, we just wrote about what we learned. And part of me regrets because we, it got pretty popular was like one of the top whatever, what was the site that used to like rank. Blogs, but we were always fighting for the top five investing blogs.

And I think the three of us had different separate ways. I tapped my table. Sorry about that. And and so we never really got to lean into it, but it’s always, so it’s been a hobby of mine, but that really is like the first time I used WordPress was for that investing blog. And it’s still around that one.

Investorgeeks. com has the old content and it’s like a lot of it holds up. As the economy goes through a cycle again, like the last time, like the yield curve inverted, I was like, Hey, what does this mean? What’s the yield curve? It’s Oh, this old Jason kind of is pretty smart. He did some research.

So it’s funny.

Chris Badgett: One of the other stories I love that I don’t think gets enough attention is you created possibly the first e commerce transaction on WordPress. What was that about?

Jason Coleman: Yeah. It’s like hard to claim that. When I’ve, I was talking with you about that. Made me think, is there a way I could validate this and I’m certain I wasn’t like the very 1st, but definitely 1 of the 1st.

Kim actually was still in college and she went to a business school and had to like, start a business in a quarter and they started a laundry service. And so it was a website. Built on WordPress do something maybe, or like 2000 four ish, and we embedded PayPal into it. And then after that we, got other customers and we embedded like OS commerce was a open source.

It’s still around, I think PHP based we embedded OS commerce into WordPress. And then sometime around 2006, we were like, we should build like the e commerce directly into WordPress instead of taking another tool and swapping it in. So we built like an early e commerce plugin, but we only managed it for like our four customers that were doing e commerce and they integrated with PayPal at the time was like the only gateway really in town.

And so we saw it was awesome. It had like integration with FedEx shipping. And I always thought the way that we did options was pretty clever. But it, yeah, it was, so that was back in like 2006, we were building e commerce in the WordPress. And we saw how the open source version of that WP e commerce was like the first big one.

There was one called shop with two P’s. And then later Jiggo shop. We’re like, it’s like, Oh, like you could build this in an open source way and share it with everyone. And other people would use your tools and that helps build a better tool. But also I, feel good that we can enable people to make money on the internet without having to be like they’re single developer on a single site.

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s, awesome. Piece of history there. And I’ve heard you interviewed before, so we don’t have to park on it for long, but people always ask you and Kim, what’s not, what’s it like to work so closely with your spouse, but you guys do a really good job and I’m sure you have family stuff and whatever, but if somebody is like thinking about working with their spouse or trying to make it better, what.

What’s the big lesson that you’ve learned there, one or two things that like make it,

Jason Coleman: man, I, don’t know if it’s something you can learn. So it’s you have to try it. I suspect definitely not every couple can do this, but if it does work, it’s awesome. Cause you get to spend Kim and I get to spend tons of quality time together.

And actually now that the business has grown, we have different. Areas that we have to manage. We don’t work together as much. And it’s man, can we just like work on a little project together? That’s really fun. First like just managing different teams and, bring in each other, like the headaches that come up in like normal course of business.

But I guess like some tips, we were both the type of people that work through problems and don’t take things personal. And so we’re able to get heated, about work things and then separate it as good as possible. It doesn’t always sometimes it bleeds over into the personal life.

But we’re good in general. Outside of business, when there’s conflict between Kim and I or things coming up We talk and communicate well and solve it. So that, like the, fact, if you can manage that part of your relationship well together, that’s like an indicator that you can manage those same kinds of issues in business.

And then like it is, it’s good to, set time for each other and the typical things of Hey, we’re not working now, but it’s harder, especially like you work from home in the home business. And you were so when we hang out, we go out to dinner, we’re talking about work.

It’s interesting. Yeah. And we, try to make time for other things, but we also don’t get too hard on ourselves. I think Alex or Mazzi had, or Layla they’re another like couple that work together and they, say we just we’d doing the work, like I don’t feel guilty about it.

So that’s good too. I don’t feel guilty. Like we got to dinner and we talk about work. It’s fun. Like we’re enjoying building stuff together. So we, don’t feel guilty about it, but we do try to make safe spaces where it’s like, Hey, we’re with the family, with the

Chris Badgett: kids, we’re doing all this stuff.

Speaking of building stuff together we’re part of the creator economy. We create software, we’ve done blogs, we make content. What’s your view on how the creator economy is, what it used to be and where it’s going, it seems like it’s having a moment right now where like creator, it’s like, there’s a lot of desire and drive.

For people to build creator businesses, but it’s always been around change. What’s your perspective there?

Jason Coleman: We are riding a wave of people selling themselves online in some way, creating courses, content. And so that’s been interesting aspect of the business. And it, feels like that kind of thing is.

Going to continue that, we’re building all these tools for people to start these online businesses. They’re going to use them. What, one of the most important things about this is just I even don’t really understand it as the scale of the internet. So there’s so many people out there. And, so when you sell a course or some content online or a membership site.

Your total addressable market is huge. Even it’s just it’s not just like the little town you’re in. It’s like all of America, but also all of the world. And I think so some stat is like for every 22, 000 people in the United States, there’s a McDonald’s. So if you like, that’s like a unit of a metric.

And so if there’s a McDonald’s, there’s probably like a law office, like a garage to fix your car like all these services that a dentist for every 22, 000 people. So if you imagine like the 22, 000 people around the McDonald’s is closest to you could you sell your course to 1 of them?

Okay, cool. Now, There’s not 22, 000 people in the world. There’s 3 billion people on the internet. I did the math earlier. It’s 150, 000 times more people on the internet than like around your local McDonald’s. And so it’s 150, 000 is like a huge number. So if you could sell one person at the McDonald’s, like over the course of a week, there’s 150, 000 people like that person in the rest of the world I don’t know if the math works out.

And it’s that’s just why, and that’s, I think that’s like the, one of the secret sauces of why. This career path is so successful is that if you really can build something that people need in one. There’s, you can find the audience online and that’s not easy. That’s work sometimes.

But if you do there’s tons of money to be made and also you’re making a bigger impact. If you are in the education space and you’re teaching people. Like it’s very admirable to be a teacher at a school and you get like a classroom every year, 30 or so kids per year.

But if you’re teaching online and you can hit 150, 000 people every year, it’s just like a bigger impact. So I think that’s why people are drawn to the space.

Chris Badgett: One of the core missions of paid memberships pro is helping people get paid. Where does that where did that mission come from? I can see it in the thread of your story, like, all right, I’m deleting commerce.

On WordPress and figuring that out and helping facilitate the money to go through you’re trying, you’re, you built your own creator career, but where does, what’s the genesis of helping people get paid?

Jason Coleman: I remember I was on a, like a radio show in the Philly area. And the interviewer kept pressing me like, what did your parents teach you about business?

And at first I was like, nothing, man. I’m my own, I’m self made. Like they had nothing to do with it. I did this all myself. And I I was like, I don’t remember that as childhood. Like I this is my adult life. Why are you keep pushing me back to my childhood? He’s there’s something in your childhood that did it.

So it forced me to reflect. And I was like, they’re absolutely right that when I was a child, like my family had money problems, I came from like a middle class maybe like lower middle class. And when my parents got slightly better jobs, moved up a little bit family and like money was tight.

I saw money problems. And my dad would talk to me very openly about it. And he was optimistic about he’s you don’t want to work in a factory like I do. You should be a doctor or a lawyer, or you could do more. Like he was, he opened my mind to like entrepreneurship, even though he didn’t do it himself, he knew it was an opportunity.

And so as a child, he’d have these conversations with me and he always encouraged it when we did it as kids, like we were selling newspapers on the side at school, we got in trouble. Cause it was like a underground newspaper verse, like the official school newspaper. And like selling candy to your friends and stuff.

Like I was always doing these entrepreneurial things and my dad He saw that like I was a path and so instilled in me that if you have money problems, you actually can address them. You can take control of them. And, I took that in my childhood and whenever it’s you got to get to college and you need, how do you get scholarships for this?

It’s figure it out. You want to get a car. So I, and, and so I saw the flip side of that, both like the people who don’t have money, and then people also who feel like. They don’t have the power to do anything about it. Like they feel victimized by it. So I was like, Oh, like it’s, it feels good to build these tools to help people get paid and then also teach them how to use them so that they can.

Take care of themselves and also like associations and charities that use our tools collectively use the money to like, to do good in the world that that they want to do

Chris Badgett: speaking of building tools, why open source, like, why is that important to you as a engineer and entrepreneur?

Jason Coleman: Yeah, so part of that was that story of when we had basically a closed source solution for our four customers, they were the only ones who could use it. So I see it as a way of putting making it public and available for others to use. And then I also feel like it makes the best software. The more people who use it, the more people who get involved, the more kind of incentive and motivation it is for a random consultant implementing it for one customer, finds the bug and helps you patch it.

So I was It seems like the way to make the best software. And then I think I there’s also like this kind of like business model, like the business model aspect of it, of giving it away for free and just charging for the services that for some reason that bothers me, like when a business model feels like a tall.

I think I, I developed this like watching the MP3s Napster music industry phenomenon. And there’s a version of that going on with AI content too, where like the technology Is moving in a direction and it’s get on board or there’s like a physics of it of information is free.

And like the cost to clone an MP3 and give it away is free. So it has to happen. Like people want it for free and they don’t want to pay for it. And you set up a toll. It just, it doesn’t feel right. So I kind of business models like that where like software is you like charge for it and you only give it to people if they charge.

Like it, it just feels. I’m fighting against the physics of the information of the internet. And so I was more inclined to like, hey, give it away for free and then find ways to build businesses on top of that get people using it. And then if I’m helping people make money and saving time and stuff I’ll find ways to make money business.

On top of that,

Chris Badgett: you’re probably one of the biggest champions of open source. I know. And in some ways you take it the challenge to be even more open source than WordPress itself. What does that look like to you? How do you think about that? Like, how can we be even more open source?

Jason Coleman: Yeah. Like one kind of specific way is that the code that we write all, we make all of it publicly available on GitHub.

There’s some internal tools that aren’t. And sometimes when we’re starting a new project, we keep it private for a little bit until it’s ready to go. But otherwise all there’s 198 repositories or so stranger studios, every line of code is on GitHub. So people can. Interact with it, but also use it like it’s easy to like, you download a zip file, you install it and run it like there’s no kind of complication.

There’s no service required to get it running. The same exact plug in that you would get off wordpress. org. Or if you come to our site and give us money or go to get hub, it’s like the same exact plug in. And as a developer myself, that just enables so many things like weekly, I’m working on something.

Just today it was or I was building something and I know that this other company has a similar thing. And I’m like, I wish I could just look at that code and see how they do it. And I know I can get it. I can go to find someone who has it or buy it from them or GPL vault.

It’s like weird that I have to go through these hoops to gain access to the code. Because what we’re going to end up doing is is building a better thing. So I don’t want. That friction on our, software. They’re still like putting the code away for free. And I feel like when automatic bought WooCommerce a few years ago, I know WooCommerce had closed repositories for their plugins and be at that time, most of the WordPress plugin type stuff automatic did was on.

org and open. And so I was like, what’s going to happen here? We’ll like the automatic influence over WooCommerce and their plugins will get open or will. The WooCommerce kind of business aspect, charging for software. Influence automatic. And I think the latter happened, like you still, the extensions.

And as I’m talking about this, I’m not judging. I’m just saying what I see out there. Cause there’s very valid reasons for doing things the way that they do they, and they have business relationships with all the developers who made those extensions and they feel that keeping the code hidden will drive more revenue.

What I’d like to do a naturally lifter could be an example of this. Also has Extensions that aren’t fully open on GitHub is we can test that because I saw it with our own plugins that it doesn’t seem to have an impact on revenue with some of the sand hill stuff that they did before the awesome mode of acquisition.

I think they’ve had repositories that went from private to public, I believe, or either the other direction. They didn’t see any change in sales. And so I think we can make money off, other things than just keeping people from using the tool. And I, also, it’s we’re motivated to get people to use the tool.

Like I, if someone uses our plugin and makes money off it and I’m not involved I’m like, that’s great. That’s actually the goal is Like I’m doing well, we’ll do well enough. We’ll make enough money to maintain the plugin. Like my real goal is to get as many people using the software as possible.

And that’s not the goal of every business out there. There is like a weight of a user who’s not paying you and you have to support them and stuff like that, and it’s fair that businesses make business decisions to not support people that aren’t giving them money. But it’s weird. I I was watching a Sam Altman interview.

It’s like weird to compare myself to him. He’s like the most popular person in the planet right now, but, but something that rung true with me that he was talking about how, when, they did some kind of reformation of open AI, he didn’t take any equity in the business. And people were like, why not?

He’s I’m already a billionaire. I don’t need any more money. And they’re like, so why are you doing this? He’s I want to build AGI and give it to humanity. And everyone’s yeah, but what do you really want to do? What’s your real goal? Like people don’t trust that’s his incentive. And everyone.

He said on an interview, something like, if I just took a bunch of money and said, I’m trying to make as much money as possible, they’d be like, oh, okay. And then he can make the money and give it away or something. It like society and the business partners and everyone would accept it. More readily than him saying I’m just trying to make cool software.

So I feel like I’m in the same boat. It’s a different kind of thing. Like we’re making a membership plugin and he’s making like AGI, but I’m like, I’m really just trying to like, that, that is the goal. And I struggle with it. Cause it feels like you’re fighting, like going uphill. It’s, like, it’s similar to that, like the physics of the information.

I’m trying to like, go with that wave, but there’s this like capitalism saying nah, man, like people understand when you’re asking for money. People understand when business relationships are incentivized by the money involved. It is like the common currency of like how deals get done. And I don’t I know it’s a strain that I got to work out in the business.

Chris Badgett: And that’s not a magic trick. There is value for paying for the software and accessing the support team and having automatic updates. Like it’s not like a win lose scenario. My big takeaway from listening to you is there’s the physics of innovation. And if you really care about that and care about an open source and decentralization and empowering people, that can work with greater velocity if you are truly open source and you can still build a business around at the same time, it’s not mutually exclusive.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. Yeah. It’s you don’t want to fight those factors. I think maybe like a tip that helps like the course creators and content creators out there too, or if you believe in this thing I’m talking about, it’s similar to that MP3 analogy where Spotify is the way people get their music now or similar tools.

And it’s all about the easing the delivery like they they, I’m grasping at the words here, but it’s not the actual music that they deliver. It’s the, the ease of use, they make it easier. They package it better. They, bring it to all the devices where you want it, They make it as fast as possible, all that stuff.

And I think there’s a similar thing in the content space where I’ve often told people, and I’d like to like, hands on feel this experiment. Cause, To know that it really works, but a lot of people are scared to put their content out there, or they have free content and they want to make paid content.

And now they feel like their paid content has to be better. And it’s no you already have the awesome video that teaches someone how to stop, quit drinking or how to build something or how to connect this tool. You don’t have to make a better version of that. You just have to, ease the delivery package it up in the right way that the people want, find the customers where they are and put it in the format and everywhere they want it, like just value in that. So that’s very similar in terms of like music. It’s all about delivering it to them in the way that they want our plugins with delivering it to them in the way that they want.

We make it easier for them. They’re happy to give us some money to do it. So they don’t have to download it off, get hub and figure it out on their own. And the course content that we give them, they can find the same stuff in YouTube or ask chat GPT, but. If we deliver it exactly where they want it in the format that best works for them.

And, also maybe like we segue to the AI conversation, like with the human touch people, you can ask chat GPT about things and it’s getting more and more knowledgeable and smarter and able to browse the web and figure things out and reason, but people still like learning certain things in particular from human, other humans.

And they, like chatting, I think like communities becoming more popular. It’s that’s like a, that’s a thing that you. Putting these people of like interest in the same chat room to talk with each other and facilitating that is that’s something that, you that’s valuable that people are willing to pay for it.

And it can’t be automated yet. Maybe that’s an opportunity to automate it. But,

Chris Badgett: Yeah, you have a lot of experimentation with AI and have studied it and language models and all this. And you’re definitely on the front end of all that stuff. What, how can course creators, people building coaching programs, membership sites, just building websites in general, what are some of, what are some of your principles around AI and where it’s going for the creator?

Jason Coleman: Yeah, it, for myself, I’m, trying to have an AI first mentality when I’m solving problems or doing work where. I might like struggle through a first draft on my own and I’m like, man, the AI is really good at taking my notes and turn it into a first draft take my notes turn into a first draft.

And so that’s 1, 2 is if you really embrace the tools and use them, it can speed up a lot of things and it can get you over these like creative humps that you have. And it’s It’s very similar. It’s like writing in particular, but there’s analogies to video production and other things is it’s easier to make a bad first draft and then go into edit mode and edit it.

And so using the AI, it’s like good at both those things in different ways. It’s it can help you get that bad first draft more quickly and it can also help you with the editing. So, like embracing the tools is good. I do think like in terms of the type of content the creators are making, AI is going to have an influence.

So in the short term, there’s going to be this phase where humans plus AI will make better content than AI alone or humans alone, even, and that’s similar to what happens in chess and poker and other places where computers got really good at playing those games. If you think of course, creation as a game the computer is getting good at it.

I don’t know how long that phase is going to be, but say it’s 5 years, you got to so embrace the tools and try to use them. You’ll be able to make better stuff than without it. But again back on that, like the type of content, I think, there was a kind of content that was mostly informational, It was like how to pass a test and, the language models have a lot of this even built in, or they can figure it out, they find it.

And I think they’re only going to get better. Like the, it’s just like the MP3 world, like the data’s out there. Even if the LLM in some way is going to consume someone else’s old course, regurgitate it, you can’t stop that from happening. Like the information, so courses that were informational I would fade those.

They seem less useful because people are going to have these answers, like really good versions of the answers at their fingertips, but there’s other kinds of courses, like I said, like community type stuff, bringing humans together, stuff that’s like IRL in the real world, almost what are the best places to eat in Paris is like a better course maybe in the future than how to pass X, Y, Z test because people want a human to answer obviously the LLMs can’t eat yet.

But like people, they can aggregate reviews but like people, even if you could get like the aggregated reviews and you get like the human aspect, like people want that content from a human. So I think actually ask that question, what kinds of content, what kinds of interactions do people.

Yeah. Want to do with a human, I think like art is big. So even though the generative models are good at writing, they’re good at painting and making images and stuff. There’s something like human about art that like, it, like it devalues the art when you can just ask the computer to generate a painting and you’re like I’ve seen this in my, I felt it.

Other people probably interact with these tools. They’re like, yeah, so what big deal. And you’re like, so you’re not amazed by the awesome painting of a dragon in space and like neon colors, but like art, like the story of the art, the connection to humanity, the connection to your own story, like all that stuff is real and you can’t, you can’t make, it’s not artificial.

You can’t make it. So that kind of stuff will have value. So I think like communities, stuff that’s in real life, stuff related to art, people are going to value, like learning about that stuff from humans.

Chris Badgett: What’s your take as an engineer and a developer with AI? If you’re, let’s say customizing, you want to write a custom plugin for paid memberships pro or lift your LMS and you’re not a developer.

Can AI do that? Maybe not now, maybe in the future. Like how do you use AI as a developer and where do you see it going?

Jason Coleman: Yeah, it feels like the tools now. are really good for experts and also good for training, but like a little dangerous in the tools in the hands of a beginner. And I get in certain contexts that’s okay.

But if you’ve never programmed before you like 90 percent of the time, it’ll be like 95 percent of the time, maybe 99 percent of the time you get code that works. And that’s exactly what you want. But that 1 percent of the time, like if you don’t understand. And it’s more than 1 percent now, but this stuff will get better.

But it’s often making like little mistakes, adding S’s to the end of something that totally breaks. And so people using the tools, it’s good. I tell my teams, it’s you have to check every single line that of code that the AI writes. And you, have to understand every line of code. So it speeds up the process, especially for some like tedious things that when you’re programming, there’s like tedious things that you do.

And the AI is just here’s a pattern and then you, similar to like writing content, it helps you get over that hump it gives you bad code and then you fix it up. It’s really good at if you know how to, so if you know how to program one language, it’s really good to help you learn another language.

And so that’s good. Like when the world is changing and it’s like, Hey old, timer. Now learn, react it’s shoot. And it doesn’t feel like starting at square one. It feels like you get a couple of steps ahead. Cause the, the co pilots and things like that, help you pull it up.

But if you have enough programming knowledge to know, like when something is wrong, It helps a lot. It saves time. I it’s, almost, it’s almost, it’s like calculators in school. There’s a reason to learn it’s hard. I think education is tough with LMS. Like you, you have to not have that tool.

So you learn how to do it with your human brain and appreciate it. And then okay, here’s a tool. And you’re like, oh my God, now I can do so much more. But these language models and AI now, they’re also good tutors. Like they can watch you, what you’re doing and help you learn. So there’s such a temptation, like it can just do it for you, but there’s still value in learning how to program, I think.

And you want to try to use the tool to help you learn rather than just like leaning on it to just give you the answer. It’s tough. I don’t know.

Chris Badgett: Crossing back over to the human side, if or one of the things I love about working with you and Kim is. You’re positive people, right? And you treat people well and, but you navigate complex and situations, sometimes conflict.

What I’ve learned is I know you have as well when you’re reaching, this, those so many people, the one out of 22 at every McDonald’s around the world. You’re like interacting with humanity at scale through the internet. Sometimes you get treated, a little nasty, let’s say, like in a support ticket or, just some kind of communication or a review of your software.

Even just more broadly, like working remotely when you’re not like in an office together or whatever, like sometimes people behave differently than when they’re in person, pressing the flesh, how, and it can hurt people especially if you’re sensitive and empathetic. And somebody treats you nasty when you’re trying to provide this tool and you’re genuinely care about helping them.

And how do you, how have you, it’s not just like building thick skin or whatever, like how do you navigate negativity when you’re operating at scale on the internet?

Jason Coleman: Yeah, this is, important to me. Cause I like, two reasons. One is, like you said, it’s not just developing a thick skin and getting over it I don’t know, you can’t get your skin thick enough for those negative interactions to not ruin your day.

Like the first time I I yelled at my kid cause I was like, In a mood, because I was talking with a bad customer in the morning, it was like, wow, this is wrong. I have to get a handle on this so that the negative stress of work doesn’t bleed into my, the rest of my life. And then I also, I talked to other creators, people building products, you want to sell things and they’re like, oh I would, do that.

I’d rather sell to a small number of people. Cause I don’t want to deal with the backlash or I don’t want to go on Instagram. Like people are gonna make fun of me or talk this, or I don’t want to do this. Cause these people get upset. So people are making business decisions based on like their perceived inability to handle the negative feedback in certain cases.

So I, there’s a, I’ll talk about this. I have a blog post called dealing with haters on the paid memberships pro blogs. So if you search for that, you might find it. It lays out a lot of this stuff, but, there’s some things like you can do some things to prevent it. If you have a all money guarantee give them their money back and get them away from you as soon as possible that can diffuse it.

So you don’t even have to deal with it. You can, process your refunds quickly every time someone gets upset about something like we often end up adding a line to our terms of service or tweaking on this line here. Like famously someone said you said this would be easy.

And I was like, who said business would be easy. I was like, so I was like, told the team. Scrub the word easy from our website, which is it’s like inverse marketing. Like everyone’s like the easiest plugin. And I was like, this stuff ain’t easy. And I was like, we got to find like other messaging.

That’s not easy. Cause of course we’re trying to make the software as easy to use as possible, but dude you’re, building a business. Like it’s not, going to be easy. So yeah, like up to Managing expectations helps, but you can’t avoid it because as if you go from 30, we went from consulting the products.

So we had 30 customers a year, maybe. And you could deal with it. And then actually like the way to deal with it, it’s different. Like when, you’re in consulting, you go above and beyond and someone’s getting out of line. You would just find the time poured on them over deliver.

Clear your conscience and then stop working with them, but you really could pour on the love and give them some good stuff to smooth it over but you have 30, 000 users, like you just can’t do that. And there’s so many more people who are just having a bad day.

There are raids, they’re having to fall in through the cracks. They’re upset. And they lash out at you. So so it’s like finding, so some tips too, is look for that criticism. So like I said, update the terms of service and your expectations and your copy is there positive feedback in there?

Can you like pull your most, not get defensive and be like they have a point we messed up here so you got to look for those, you can like a trick I do is like you write a draft. So to get the energy out someone calls you an asshole, try delete the email address or whatever it is.

So you don’t actually accidentally send or maybe copy it into a notepad and then type up like what you really want to say to this guy. A couple of those leaked out and got out when I’ve done that in the past. Usually I get it out of my system and then you okay, I got it off my chest. And I can try to respond to them in a What’s best for the business and them and everyone else spectating sometimes in public forums on this stuff.

I also like, yeah, just always. Reply professionally you don’t want to get involved. You don’t want to lead them on. There’s the isolate. Isolation that’s important in a number of ways. 1 is, like I said, make sure that you’re not answering customer support from your phone at the dinner table, where your kids are around do it at a time when you have time before and after.

To transition, so try to like, if you’re doing that activity, don’t just do it whenever it comes up, schedule it so that you’re doing a certain time. Also we get the higher folks to handle the support and I always try to monitor this. I feel like I’m like, putting them on the front lines of a war to like, deal with this negative energy.

Some people are just better at doing it. So they’re okay. They’re also like, they don’t take it as personal. I assume they don’t take it as personal because they’re not invested in it. Like we are. Or sometimes you’re literally saying like Jason I’d want to punch Jason in the face. So if you’re not Jason and you read that it, it, hits different.

But so we gotta take care of those people cause they but you can hire people to insulate you from it. And then so you’ll get the stress from these things. I think also like, I think I’m gonna say is you I said, you can’t avoid it. It’s going to happen.

And there’s different people who said versions of this, but like anything that’s useful and beneficial to the world is going to have people who hate it and fight it. And you don’t want to like, you want to listen to it as much as possible, but you’re like, like you can’t avoid it.

So you have to deal with that stress. And I started meditating. As a practice really helped a lot to separate and slow things down. So I’m not as responsive. Another tip then in isolation, buddy system, having people help you. Another one is like engaging with happy customers.

So we’ve done this almost as a cleansing, you get a bunch of 1 star reviews and you can, if you have access to your community through a newsletter or slack space, You can just be like, Hey do you all mind writing a positive review over at this place and just send them the link and you’ll get a few, or ask for feedback from your happy customers that like you, and you’ll get some of that.

So that’ll help warm your heart and counterbalance the negativity bias that we have in dealing with these things,

Chris Badgett: so many good tips. If we shift back to helping people get paid or just thinking about money in general, one of the things just watching you operate over almost two decades, is that’s two decades.

You’re in the long game. There’s this thing with creator economy, get rich quick, or if you’re building software, build it up and scale it and sell it as fast as possible. But you tend to, you’ve shown like. Long game chops, like playing the long game. What are your thoughts? Or, and I’m not saying that get rich quick is even a bad thing or scaling and starting software, scaling it fast and selling it as a bad thing.

But what’s, your take on the long game versus the short game when it comes to making money on the internet?

Jason Coleman: Yeah, I think there’s many paths. And so there are those other paths, but. They’re very shiny. So people are aware of them. And maybe it’s not as shiny to just have a business that grows 2025 percent per year for 20 years.

But like compounding interest, you’re like, oh, that goes from making 150, 000 a year to making 2 million a year over a few years. And so My personality is like conservative with money in a sense. Like I didn’t like taking loans or pushing for like huge wins in a sense, I we, really just always, we have an old spreadsheet when we did consulting that was how many customers, what’s the average price how much money can we expect to make?

And then the fun thing is we’ll try to grow 25 percent per year and you drag the Excel sheet down. And then you’re like, I don’t know the money we make. But the hard part of that, so that’s easy. You’re like, cool, the number moves. And I like that target. The hard part then is it forces you to figure out okay, how do we actually do that?

How can we actually make 25 percent more money? We’re either raising our prices, getting more customers or selling more stuff to the same people. And, that’s how we operated. And I guess we started there at the business. We were just Let’s try to grow. How are we going to do it?

And at some point it made sense to flop from like consulting the products. And maybe at this point in our life, we’re we still set those growth targets, but we struggle with do we really need to grow? Cause we’re, but, yeah, so maybe it’s just my personality. I think, yeah, like it’s good to know it’s an option and there, there are returns in this.

I think I’m benefiting in ways and I’ll continue to benefit that. Becoming an expert in the same thing and kind of driving home the point and working on the same thing over so long. You become an asset to the world as long as that thing is useful still. And all the people who are in it for the get quick, rich kind of bounce in and out.

And I think probably our plugins are in a phase where. There’s a lot of consolidation in the WordPress space. And this happens like in other spaces too. But we, if we’re well run profitable businesses that don’t have these issues, cause we didn’t like swing for the fences and waste a bunch of money. And so we can just sit around and as the competitors fall, we can hopefully we can pick them up, but we compete with these giant public companies.

It’s easier for them to pick up the pieces. So that’s something I have to figure out, but yeah. Yeah. So it’s like sticking with it. It, yeah. Compounding. Like it makes sense in investing the compounding interest is hard. I used to, but it also happens in terms of like your skillset and your ability to influence the world that compounds to, if you stick with it.

When around investing, one of the things I did on the investor geek site was like a spreadsheet where it was like, if you you could buy a brand new car now, or buy like a used car. And I forget it was at the time, if you save like 10, 000, all right, now invest that 10, 000 in the average stock market returns.

And then in 25 years, you’ll have a hundred grand or something like that. But I remember like enough money to buy a sports car when you’re going through your midlife crisis. So it’s like you’re fresh out of school by the use car. Now put some money away in, in an account, let it grow. And when you have your midlife crisis, you can buy a Porsche.

And so like that, like spreadsheets can show that compound growth when we don’t really feel it. It’s hard to delay gratification that way. And I, for some reason, it’s easy for me with money and things like that. It’s harder with eating the best food in the restaurant. It’s hard for me to eat a little less to delay gratification into my old age.

Chris Badgett: But yeah. Speaking of compounding, I think it was Warren Buffett who said the eighth wonder of the world is compounding. It’s one of those things like. The scale of the internet is really hard to comprehend. The power of compounding is really hard to comprehend. One of the things I look up to you with is your experience and skills and advice and investing.

And we could do a whole episode about investing. So just to frame it in for the creators out there, or if you build websites for clients, or you’re getting you’re getting paid and you’re able to like you’ve got your cost of living down and you’re thinking about what should I do with this money?

How do you think people that are new to investing should think about getting in the game and you know You can invest in your business. You can invest in yourself and your own education There’s stocks, real estate, crypto collectibles. There’s like all this stuff. And like how would you advise like an, a newer person to investing to start making some smart moves?

Jason Coleman: And yeah, maybe so a fun, maybe a fun, humble brag story to set the tone. I guess people understand investing is important. But we’ve always, we’ve worked, Kim and I have kept our expenses lean. And, always have been like set targets to invest. So it was there was a time when it was like all the money went away, we run through that and then we were lucky enough to have this skillset that we could sell.

And we we became, Hey, we can live and eat and do things. But then we operated lean so we could always save money. And so we’ve always been saving like 10 or 20 percent of our income over time which is a lot. Not everyone can get there, but we, kept that as like a, as a goal and I made some good moves in Bitcoin and Netflix and Tesla and whatever.

But the power of that is that like recent, like a few years ago, there’s this consolidation and WordPress space and people are trying to buy the plugin. And I was like, we should talk to them like this March, let’s talk to everyone and hear their best offer. And they’re making offers and they’re like, dude, this could be life changing money for you.

This could be life changing money for you. And I remember talking to Kim, I was like, what’s your number, like what’s your number that like you would need to sell the business and get out. And she gave me a number and I was like, We already have that much money. Like we’ve invested well and sure.

It feels good to have a lot of money, but it was like, I have the freedom. I didn’t have to sell my business to someone to make that money. Cause I want to send my kids through college or cause I don’t want to work. I, have the free, like Kim and I have the freedom to choose to show up and do this instead of being forced to, and that’s partially due to saving.

Being disciplined about money, saving money and letting it compound over 15 years, but so that’s it. It’s you want to, save, you want to get to that spot. If you have to spend all your money cause you’re you’re. You’re only making enough to really sustain yourself where you’re living.

You have to get there first. And then it’s you want a skill that the world values, you can parlay that into making money. So you want to set aside a big chunk. It helps to like, do it first, have a separate savings account. Like when the money comes to your check ins account, always put some into the savings account, that’s that’s the money to save.

And there’s a number of ways to do it. Like you should invest in your 401k or IRA. Most people should just invest in like total market funds, like the VTI, the NASDAQ funds, like technology. That’s like maybe one tip if you want to be like a little risky is put half your money in the QQQ, the NASDAQ has most of the tech companies.

And if you’re optimistic about technology, like I am, like they should outperform, like they continue to outperform like they have in the past. But, If you start picking stocks and things, I do that because it’s fun. I realized, it’s in my wheelhouse and especially the technology stuff that I have an understanding of how it all interplays in the players and the companies and what they’re doing.

So when I hear Microsoft say, we’re going to make AI that will change the world. And Facebook says, we’re going to make AI that will change the world. I can judge who’s really going to benefit from that. In other areas where I don’t have domain expertise, like, the energy sector or in pharmaceuticals, I, they all say the same thing.

And I was like, I can’t pick which pharmaceutical company is going to outperform. But, you want to keep it simple. And there’s different ways, the, what’s that little book of invest in John. Bogle is like invest 60, 40 portfolio, something simple. There’s timeframe ETFs.

You can just you can buy like a I’m going to retire in 30 years and they just generally invest in the stock market. So specifically what to do, like you should do that. So it Hey, make enough money to get by as soon as you do set up an account. That’s separate from your main checking account.

So you can hide the money away and you don’t feel it. And whenever you get a raise or you make more money, set aside a certain percentage of that goes into the investment account and then regularly move that money into a very generalized, Investing scheme. And that’s probably like the number one thing you can do is then as your income grows, as you’re going, like you’re continually setting aside certain amount into investing.

Chris Badgett: How do you think about time horizon for a beginner? Yeah.

Jason Coleman: For, of investing time horizons.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I heard this advice once, think of it as being a collector, not an investor. Long time horizon. Yeah. You can day trade and have short term stuff that you do, but if you’re investing for your future, just start as young as possible and forget about it, put it,

Jason Coleman: but what would you say?

There was like Robert Kawasaki, rich dad, poor dad, that, that book is decent, especially if you. Come from a poor dad. That character Kawasaki is a problematic these days, but, but I remember he had a game that like you would play, it was like Monopoly, but it was a little more real world and it was all about building assets versus expenses.

So it’s like you go on vacation, all that money leaves. If buy a stock, you get a return every year on that. If you buy a treasury bond, you get a return, or if you buy a business, it probably has a return or, that’s like a way to I just like that book talks about that, like building assets.

There’s also a good one called like Phil town has one called rule number one and then one called payback. And that’s interesting. Cause rule number one is he’s introduced to day trading and swing trading. I think actually he’s swing trader, which so swing trading is like over. You hold a investment over the course of a week or a month instead of a day.

So he’s all in and he has really good advice on picking stocks and then learning technical analysis. And his second book, he’s I was all wrong. Like I was, Investing way too active. The people who are really, rich, they just own the stock and hold it forever. And so that’s like that idea of collecting these assets over time.

I definitely have that. I think most, like I said, most people should just buy the ETF and maybe you can try to get as many shares of the VTI. It’s hard to personify like an ETF, the same way you can like net, like if you’re investing like companies, you’re like, I’m on team Facebook, I’m on team Apple.

And you can, make room for making individual investments like that. I do, when you do that, . And I do recommend you want to think of it as like you’re owning a business. You can even just take apple and chop off whatever it is, like six zeros. It’s oh it’s a company that has about 300, 000 and makes about 500, 000 a year and has about. If you are trained it’s if you’re buying a laundry mat.

First buying Apple, you can make like an investment in the stock with that same mindset. And if you’re not thinking about price going up and down, you’re just it is a superpower. If you’re investing in individual stocks to have a five year timeframe. Cause no, no one does really like you, like managers have a yearly timeframe.

They have to deliver. The fund managers who buy most of the stocks they have to deliver every year. And so they’re making moves and you’re like, only Warren Buffett is the guy who’s buying and holding stocks forever. And so you have an advantage if you can sit out the swings, but it’s hard.

You have to be able to, met like when stock you buy goes down, see it as a positive, if you really feel invested in the company, like I know it’s temporary. It’s easy though. It’s easier to hold that stock and you want to buy you like it’s on sale by more. If you’re thinking 5 years out and you have some kind of model saying it’s going to be worth 2 times 5 years out, you don’t mind that it dips 10, 20, even 50 percent now.

I don’t know. So yeah, just rambling about the way that, yeah, having that five year timeframe on those kinds of investments, no one, because no one else is thinking on that timeframe, it’s a superpower. Like you’re, it gets a little technical, but there’s things like, I always lose like options trading, like when options expire, that’s like a gamble you can say I think they’re going to win.

They’re going to lose. There’s like literally super computers that are analyzing all the trades and then they just figure out how to suck up all the money. Like they’re just Oh, like they have enough money that they can like manipulate the market. It’s like tinfoil hat stuff, but it’s effectively happening.

They can manipulate the market to have a stock go down. Everyone, like the most amount of people lose money on their options, then the stock goes back up and they get in. And so it’s like, when you’re. It’s like playing online poker and you’re playing with bots that are superhuman. If you’re, but if you’re investing on a short timeframe you’re literally investing against computers that are superhuman on it, but the computers aren’t investing on the five year timeframe.

So it’s like a different game. You’re like, you get to go hang out with the old guys at the poker lodge and they’re playing Omaha and they never even read a book, so it’s I’d rather be in that poker game that then a poker game with a bunch of computers that are better than I am.

I’m

Chris Badgett: sure you’d agree with me that if you must be a gambler or a DGN do it with 5% or some smaller percent or after a certain threshold. Like you don’t Yeah. It’s not like you have to choose to you can split that focus and like still feed that need to pick stocks ’cause they’re fun or try something risky, but Yeah.

Yeah. Don’t bet the farm,

Jason Coleman: right? Yeah, I think so. That’s like common advice I don’t know where it’s 10% or 5% you want. It’s good. You, I always treat it like, like it’s educational. And even, like I said I, always lose that, that options trading thing. I still do it from time to time. Cause it forces me to interact in the market in a way I don’t usually.

And I learn a lot and I lose money, but it’s a relatively small amount. It’s less than 10 it’s like less than 1 percent of what I have invested. I’m making bets on stuff like that. So yeah, if you have that mindset of it’s a small amount of money, I can lose it, I’m going to do this investment.

I’m going to learn. In the process, like you can’t lose, even if you lose the money, you’re like, okay I’ve learned a new way to lose money and I’m glad it was only extra cent and not everything. And I think that’s good. Cause sometimes I think there are opportunities. If you really understand the business well.

And the stock is on sale, if you had bought individual stocks before, you’ll feel more confident to be able to do it now, so you won’t miss those opportunities if you, educate yourself on that. But I struggle with that because I’m like a nerd about this and I spend like hours every day interacting with it.

And I’m like, if I didn’t do that, I don’t know, like, how it. But if, yeah, if you are going to do it, it’s good to do it. Like with that mindset of I’m going to learn and it’s a small amount of money. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: That’s Jason Coleman from paid memberships pro and partner at lifter LMS with his wife, Kim Coleman.

Thanks for coming on the show, Jason. I really appreciate it. I’d encourage you to go check out paid memberships pro as a paid memberships pro. com. They also have a feature for using LMS together called streamline. So you can actually use both tools side by side if you want, and it’s great to be on the journey with you, Jason.

Any final words for the people as we say goodbye or other ways that people can track you or connect with you on the Internet?

Jason Coleman: That’s good. I am on X Twitter, Jason underscore Coleman. That’s a decent way to follow. My occasional posting and get in touch with me by DM or something there.

Chris Badgett: Awesome.

Thanks so much for coming on the show and I look forward to doing it again with you sometime.

Jason Coleman: All right. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, everyone.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post Entrepreneurship Money and Life with Jason Coleman Cofounder of Paid Memberships Pro appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Will Middleton talk about his path from high school dropout to successful solopreneur by the time he is 22.

Will Middleton is from WP Course Guide. Will talks about how he first felt unsatisfied with regular schooling and how he decided to become an entrepreneur because he was afraid of living an empty existence. His introduction into the WordPress community happened when the CEO of LifterLMS extended an opportunity to him to work as a freelance copywriter.

Will developed his own firm and produced instructional material throughout the years, going from a beginner to a WordPress guru. To foster development, he underlines the need of always learning, adjusting, and facing personal anxieties.

His capacity to relate to consumers by discovering their problems and offering customized solutions is essential to his success. would counsels business owners to meet customers where they are, provide relevant material, and interact with them in a way that would draw in new business. His experience emphasizes the need of tenacity, compassion, and interpersonal relationships in creating a profitable internet company.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s been a while since Will’s been on, but we’ve got Will Middleton. He’s from WP Course Guide. Will has a fascinating journey and story. We’re going to talk about how will by the age of 22 build a successful one person web development solopreneur business how that started how it’s going and the journey along the way I think you’re going to find this a lot of fun.

Welcome to the show will

Will Middleton: thank you. Yeah that journey that was That’s a really good journey to be talking to you about yeah dive in i’m happy to be here

Chris Badgett: Life is a journey that, it’s always a process of becoming and changing and all that stuff, but just to frame it in for you out there watching or listening what was your first step into the online business world?

Can you set the stage for us of where this journey started?

Will Middleton: Yeah. So being a kid in high school, like really discontent, not liking the system, not believing in a future where I had like college and a high school diploma. I don’t know, I was just lost. I didn’t really know what I was going to be doing.

And so I I was like, you know what I’m gonna do? I’m going to take the ACT SAT and I’m going to get into a college. I’m just going to go to college and be like not interested in high school anymore. Just go into college. But then I’m like if I can get into college without a high school degree, could I get into my career without a degree?

Could I, Maybe not go to college because what do I want to go to college for? When I sit down and ask that question, I really just don’t know the answer. And so I am in this position of being a 15 year old, having a midlife crisis as 15 year olds usually do. And then I’m like, okay, the solution to my life now is to be an entrepreneur.

I’m going to drop out of high school and then just start being an entrepreneur, whatever that means. And then The CEO of the company, my mom worked for at the time. Cause I was in Boy Scouts and stuff. So she’d talk about me, here and there. And so CEO knew I existed and was like, Hey. Does we’ll want to position writing for our podcast is regarding marketing entrepreneurship courses.

I sounds like that’s what we’ll try to get into. And yeah, so so I got hired into that. And that was at Lifter LMS. That was the LMS cast. That was you hiring me into being like a freelance copywriter. And this is before I had really opened WordPress. I probably opened WordPress before, but I like I’m like, I don’t know.

I added a page and I don’t know what to do. Like I’m just gonna do this in HTML. And then to eventually becoming like a WordPress expert, full time WordPress person, and now business owner.

Chris Badgett: And so that was seven years ago and tell us where you’re at today.

Will Middleton: Today is very far from the beginning.

It’s like today is. I’m like a developer running my own agency, creating my own knowledge based business content working with clients mostly with Lifter LMS, but just really anybody who uses WordPress, I’m just doing that thing. And so basically just the, I don’t know, work from home, be your own entrepreneur person, that’s what I’m doing.

And I’m. Just experimenting with creating different kinds of content. I’m experimenting with what it means to take content to a higher level. Some course creators might be in that position where they have a course and they’re like, I’m not really proud of this, but my customers tell me they like it and that’s the position I’m at where I’m like, I look at my content and I’m like, Whoa.

That wasn’t like wonderful quality. It’s like how I look at my videos from years ago and they’re like useful and stuff and they get a couple thousand views, but it’s like how to do this, how to do that in WordPress where I feel like I could create something more interesting or high quality.

So it’s I got some validation with my courses and stuff, and now I want to take it to the next level. In addition to running an agency, that’s where I’m at.

Chris Badgett: Nice. A lot happened in that time period. One of the things I’ve always admired about you is. You have an extreme growth mindset and an ability to learn on the fly, continuously improve, try on different things.

I’ve seen you be a writer, a designer, a website builder, a developer, a manager of people, and the list goes on and on, an entrepreneur in your own stuff, an affiliate, like you do, you like, Try the whole menu and then you keep evolving to the things you enjoy where you create the most value and all that.

But at the core of that, that enabled you to try on so many different hats and evolve as your own entrepreneur. What was the underlying motivation that, you wake up every day. And what motivated you and still does to this day. And maybe those motivations change as you go, but tell us about the motivation.

Will Middleton: I totally think they change. I think the motivation has changed a lot, for years I’d been chasing things that were like external of me of Oh, I want to be an entrepreneur. And I want to have a cool car because entrepreneurs have cool cars I want to have but I now have a Honda element.

And that’s like the coolest car I could imagine, but it’s not the Ferrari I was thinking of. So I did absolutely have external goals along the way the whole time. But I think the real motivation was like fear. If I’m being honest, like it’s the fear, like I was zooming back to being in high school and being like, I don’t want to do this.

Like my fear is like that I’m not going to live a fulfilling life if I don’t go for this. I’m not going to like. I don’t know what am I going to do with my life? I have no vision for my life, I have no goals. And I don’t see myself anywhere 10 years from now, I feel bad about that. I know that I don’t see my future and I feel bad about it.

And so I was very afraid. And so I left high school and I’m like, I’m going to pursue any other life. Then, so I’m like, the only way that I’m ever going to work this math out where I’m happy in life is if I take action today, I’m going where I want to go, where I say I want to go. And so fear asked me to leave high school.

And then I. Was super excited, super motivated. I remember when my, I first asked you in like an email of Hey Chris, do you think you could meet with me once a month for an hour while I figure out how to be an entrepreneur? Like just for six months, timeframe, six meetings. You’re like, yeah.

And I was like jumping around my room because I’m like, okay, I’m really afraid of high school and I’m really pulled towards this future. And so then, and then I go into it and I start doing lifter things. I start building sites for clients, start learning how to use LFTR. I built my own online course that completely flopped, but it was the experience of learning how to use the platform and learning what failure felt like for the fifth time of just trying to be an entrepreneur, trying to create new projects, trying to put myself out there.

And it was in the LFTR space where I found a lot of success with things where I was talking about Elementor I’d go into the Facebook group and I would, answer questions about like someone would ask a question, I would copy and paste it into the title of the video, make the video, post the video, reply in the comments of the video in like under an hour.

And I was like, so proud of myself. It was like a game. And then I was manning the Lifter LMS sales chat. You’re like, Hey, how about like a commission sales basis. And I’m like, sure. So I started selling Lifter products in the chat, answering questions, fuels that to fuel my experts program where I was doing like copy and paste content entry, site migrations, quality checking on websites was doing those things.

In addition to doing things in Lifter side by side. And so I was like afraid of okay, I’m doing content entry. I’m afraid if I don’t grow my career, like I could do copywriting, I can do. This and that, if I don’t grow though, in this world where growth is happening so fast, how am I going to get to the next level?

So I’m always focused on trying to learn something new and it’s like a problematic pattern, but it’s also like helpful, but it’s also problematic. It’s I don’t know. Yeah, so I’m always growing of I know, caught writing. Let’s learn how to build sites, let’s learn how to like just build sites from scratch.

Let’s learn it, learn how to do consulting, troubleshooting errors, developing code and the billion things that are in between. Just learning new things and trying new things all the time. It was all out of fear. And so then I’m like, how am I going to live a life that I’m not really afraid of? It’s I got to lean into my true, like passion and authenticity and whatever.

I don’t know what any of that means, but I’m trying to figure it out. And so figuring it out through creating things in the world. So that’s how I got from like where I’m at to where I’m at now, like out of fear.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. One of the things that really impresses me about you that I noticed very early in your career is your ability to work with human beings, because in the online business world, there’s all, there’s this myth of like money coming out of the laptop, you like set something up and money flows into your bank account or whatever.

There’s like hardware, software, and then what I call wetware, which is the human beings. There’s still human beings involved in this process. And there’s clients that want things done. There’s software users that have real feelings, emotions, wants, goals, needs, and so on. Like selling and is like a very human thing.

Like when you’re talking to people during a sales process, you naturally, Were a natural at talking to all different types of people from all kinds of different backgrounds with all kinds of different needs Where do you think that skill comes from and where do you? What are your thoughts around the human part of online business?

Will Middleton: Yeah, I always think about humans. I can’t stop thinking about humans like all the time. I like your term wet where but where’s the human part? That’s what I would say if I like peed my pants during a client meeting. But I think where I God so I was always trying to read people as a kid and figure out like, if I could, I was like always seeking validation because I’m like, Oh, the adult, I was like a only child.

And so I’m like, always looking for attention of adults. All the people I hung out with were adults, but I was a kid and I wasn’t an adult. So I was like, they were writing shopping lists and I would see they’re writing a list and I didn’t know how to write or what words were, but I was like, take a, took a pen and was like forming lists, just mimicking what other people were doing.

That’s always what I’ve been doing, where I’m like, I see something, I want someone I like, and I go try to figure out how they do what they do. And so in that process, when people ask questions, I have this idea of what’s going on in their brain. That’s like mostly wrong, but I’m like, what.

What would be the perspective of this person asking this question as the best response they could get? So maybe a video, like in the Facebook group, people go to the Facebook group because they don’t want to read the documentation. And we’re the code, right? They’re clearly in a place where their, whatever solution they were looking for didn’t answer their question even though it might have answered the question if they looked closer.

What I’ll then do is create a piece of content basically exactly answering their question exactly where they’re at. Instead of being like, oh, we’ll go cite this material elsewhere because you haven’t done enough work into this. But I’ll try to meet people where they’re at. And so with that idea of meeting people with her at mentally, that’s where I got into that idea of trying to connect with people and trying to really understand what people’s problems are in addition to also like secretly manipulating myself and other people in negative ways.

But that’s what I’m working on now. And like figuring out how I can like actually be authentic, actually have fun without trying to dress a certain way or act a certain way or speak a certain way to make somebody else think something specific of me, because it also develops that problem too. Like imposter syndrome with online course creation is do I really have the expertise to put this out there? Do I really? Because I go into that right to yes, last night where I’m like making this membership is this really high quality enough? Does this really feel good enough? But it really feels good to me. And so what I’m doing is basically making content to answer other people’s questions directly.

In addition to making content to answer my own questions regarding getting more social media engagement or whatever problem I’m working on. So that’s how I try to meet people where they’re at. And also use the telepathy to try to read the

Chris Badgett: universe. All right. I’ll ask you one of the most popular questions that people come to this podcast for whether they’re building websites for clients or they’re building courses, coaching programs, memberships.

A lot of people want to know how to get more clients. One of the things I’ve noticed with you, we have a thing called the lifter LMS experts program. Will’s on there with a bunch of other people as well. You can find them at WP course guide. com by the way, if you want to reach out to him, but. Some people in the experts program tend to generate a lot more client lead flow and whether it’s the experts program or anywhere on the internet, what have you learned in terms of how to get more.

Clients, how can people get more clients? What have you thought about what you do that actually generates a client, a lead, and then ultimately a sale? It’s two step process.

Will Middleton: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. It’s like the answer to the last question is the meeting people where they’re at is I think a lot of business owners don’t try to meet people where they’re at.

I think they try to make people come to them, especially when they’re starting out, that can be a huge, complicated thing because you don’t even have the identity or thesis for what your business is going to be in the longterm figured out, or maybe you already have. do have it figured out and it’s been working for you for years, but now it’s no longer working and it’s time to pivot the business model to start like producing milk chocolate because online courses are declining and milk chocolate is gaining.

It’s just cause you’re looking at like the online course industry inclining every year is like a good reason to get into it. There’s like a lot of other people who are doing that. A lot of other people at different experience levels who are doing that. And WordPress as a whole is interesting because it’s like.

software that anyone can use to make website. You don’t necessarily need to know how to code. So it’s just lowering the barrier to entry like Lifter LMS and all the plugins of the WordPress ecosystem that are free like Lifter LMS is you can just get those plugins, put them on your website and start to build something that you wouldn’t have otherwise been able to build without like higher levels of experience.

And sure you could take a computer science course and learn to code. It’s ah, that’s going to take you like three years. It’s taken me about eight so far and it’s still like amateur, not done, but like However long it takes you to learn things, you’re gonna have to go through some kind of learning journey.

And the more you can compress that learning journey for people, even though there’s already content on the internet that’s out there that can answer their questions probably more concisely and better than you can, but that’s okay because you can also answer the content and put it out there. And whether you’re creating a course or whether you’re, like, being an expert trying to get more clients, It’s the same thing about meeting people where they’re at and trying to answer their, the questions they have.

If you’re a developer who likes to build your own plugins from scratch, but most of the demand for projects is like, Hey, I just need this small customization. I just need a little PHP snippet or something. I’m not looking for a whole custom job, I’m not looking to get into a three or 5, job. I’m just looking for like really relatively basic thing and a plugin that’s going to be easy to edit.

And WordPress is becoming more easy to edit. By more people. The more that happens and the more you can ride the wave of like really meeting people where they’re at instead of just trying to be where you’re at. Your solution.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that makes sense. Part of your journey that I’ve found fascinating is just your relationship with technology.

So what I mean is you mentioned earlier you were making content about Elementor and I’ve seen you, get into cadence. I’ve seen you get into full site editing. Lifter rolled out a new theme, full site editing theme called Skypilot. And you really mastered that. Development houses, all its tools and tooling.

And there’s some of, for some folks that can be overwhelming. Like it’s a moving target and tools are changing. What the market wants is changing. But you seem to just do dance with the tools and just go with the flow. What is your approach to. Technology tools in a way that doesn’t create overwhelm.

And I’m sure you do get overwhelmed sometimes about whatever, learning something, but you tend to evolve with the market and just keep upgrading yourself and trying different things and using what works best for you. How do you do that?

Will Middleton: Yeah. So I think Kurt, who’s not on this call, but is on a bunch of other calls will completely agree with this.

And I’m going to. I’m going to put words in his mouth in this situation because I’m confident this would also be his answer. And also your answer, right? Is you just, I go, maybe I go into things I’d like. It’s have you seen those game shows where there’s like pad, it’s like a Ninja warrior, American Ninja warrior, or, but like the ones where the props are moving and stuff, some people just completely eat it.

And some people like gracefully move through it, but nobody could gracefully move through it the first time. Like the first time to go through an American Ninja warrior course is to go like smash your face in. on the second jump into the little course is or to practice slowly over time.

I’m not really a fan of practicing slowly over time. I’d rather just get into the Ninja Warrior stuff and just work on each individual skill until I could get it. And so it’s like going into those obstacle game show courses where you get knocked down, you build a course site, nobody shows up, you, you like try to generate an interest list and nobody’s interested, but it’s it’s free.

I’m making a free program. All my content is free on the internet and nobody cares. That’s like getting hit. with a some moving piece of plastic and falling into a bucket of water it like feels terrible and you don’t want to get back up again you don’t want to try again because you just got humiliated and physically hurt at the same time but it’s like you can you can get up and do it again and Develop an interest in that and then it’s like you will just get to the point where you can do what other people perceive to be complicated in a graceful way.

A lot of people in the audience can already do that because if you’re like experienced with life, when he or beyond or whatever, you could your daughter made a course when she was like really small. It doesn’t matter how old you are. If you like have any life experience or have learned to do anything or learn to change in any way.

Or have changed in any way. There’s something there that you can do gracefully that other people admire. And that’s like what you would tap into for learning technology, learning marketing, learning photography, and teaching a course about it, learning how to even do instructional design and what to create a course, how to help people learn, like anything can be done gracefully if you just spend enough time with it, I think.

Chris Badgett: I’ve watched you go through three distinct kind of. Milestones when it comes to becoming a solopreneur developer. The first stage at the beginning is you learn how to talk about the product, like you were doing pre sales before you were listening to other people on the podcast, talk about what they’re doing and stuff,

Will Middleton: and then

Chris Badgett: you get into the build phase where you start building websites and this is what makes WordPress and tools like Lifter LMS and everything so awesome is that anybody can build with this, you don’t have to be a developer.

But then there’s this third phase where, Oh, I’m 95 percent happy with the website I’ve built, but I need a, I need some custom code, like something custom developed. And you’ve learned how to do that. How have you what were the key things that got you from one phase to the next?

Will Middleton: Like I talked about earlier in fear and it’s like going into your warrior course where you’re going to get knocked into the water.

But like the fear of not moving becomes so great at some points in time. I think if you’re listening to this podcast right now, you’re either an entrepreneur or you Are considering being an entrepreneur, right? Or you’re trying to maybe incorporate online courses into an existing business.

So you’re an intrapreneur at that point, right? You’re doing things that most people aren’t doing as if you’re listening to this. And so in that. There’s automatically this kind of person who likes to improve themselves or improve other things. They’re trying to take action that’s different from what the world is doing in some kind of way, whether it means starting your own business as an entrepreneur or working within someone else’s business in unique ways as an entrepreneur, whatever you are in the spectrum, being here means that you like to upgrade in some way.

And the fear of not changing as you’ve experienced in life becomes so great that you need to change. You need to Figure things out in a new way. Like life becomes so painful and the fear becomes so great that you need to change and move on to the next thing. You need to navigate to the next stage.

It’s like Angela Brown, someone who has a wonderful LMS cast. Podcast episode here. And she talks about that change of I’m in the middle of my life. I have this skill and I need to learn a bunch of digital skills to upgrade my business.

Chris Badgett: She became a builder. She learned how to put the site together by watching videos.

Will Middleton: Yeah. And it’s there’s that kind of personality that I think people watching this. People watching other episodes, reading case studies can tell that everyone in the community has this kind of idea that they’re trying to affect the world in some way. That requires just sometimes leveling up or changing what you do entirely.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, going on a quest. And sometimes you don’t have to become the developer too. You don’t have to learn how to write code you can hire somebody like will at wpcourseguide. com but at least getting Like at least learning some of the basics of hey, how do websites work and what? What is the plugin and what is the theme and all this stuff?

If knowledge is power, right? Yeah.

Will Middleton: Yeah. And so get this, I have all this expertise and I’m a genius, but if you know how to open the WordPress editor and go to the WP admin and log in, things that some WordPress users don’t know how to do seriously, I’ve been on a lot of calls lately where I’m like, how do you log into WordPress?

Is it a WordPress. com or WordPress? Free open source software on a hosting company. Some people don’t know the answer to that question. If you don’t know the answer, that’s okay. But they’re like, I don’t know. I log into my hosting or and I click log in, it just sends me and it’s we don’t know what the WP admin is like.

No. And maybe you’ve logged into WordPress just once and understand the WP admin because you’re interested in the open source software piece of it. But even now that’s open source hosting companies still just give you auto log in links. Even if you use those links, or have used the links, and you learn that there’s a WordPress admin, you can make a video and tell people, Hey, here’s how you log into WordPress.

It’s different than Squarespace. And guess what happens when you back, log into the back end of WordPress? There’s more customization. You can do all these plugins. Isn’t this crazy? There’s a lot of people here contributing to them. You know so much that you can communicate. gracefully then you need to make content about it.

That’s a much, as much knowledge as you need to make content about how to build things in WordPress. So I always had this perception that like I needed to be a developer or I needed to be a better salesperson or a better marketer or a better customer success for something. I just needed to upgrade my game in some way in order to be good enough.

But I think with what you do know now, you are definitely good enough, even though it doesn’t feel like it. And trust me, I’ve been not feeling good enough for eight years. from day one. I’m like, I don’t know enough. And now it’s day later. It’s sometime in the future. And I’m like, I still don’t know enough.

And I know that in the future, I’m going to feel the same way. So I’m like, just make the content with the knowledge you have today. And don’t be ashamed of clicking the publish button.

Chris Badgett: One of the things that. I’ve seen you do well. And this goes back to working with human beings. One of the challenges of let’s say a business owner and a consultant or developer website builder is getting on the same page with communication.

Sometimes the client doesn’t have a fully formed idea or maybe they’re. They got some quote, bad advice or like over focusing on this one piece when there’s like a lot more things we have to consider here. What advice do you have to create like a winning relationship between a web developer and a client?

But speaking to both sides of the table, what would you tell the aspiring solopreneur developer? And what would you tell? a client to put them at ease about your expertise and being like a trusted advisor in the consulting process. Talk to both those people.

Will Middleton: Yeah. I think there’s a level of like where a client comes to you and you clearly know how to do everything they’re asking you to do.

And so then you just yeah, of course we could do that. There’s no problem there. It’s only a matter of seconds. Don’t worry about it. And so it’s like way over, and so you’re going to undersell your jobs there though. You’re going to undersell the value. You’re going to undersell the fact that the person came to you with questions.

There’s an aspect there that I missed for years about the fact that you’re coming to me with questions, I want to thank you for, and I want to make you feel good about the fact that you came to me for questions. It’s not what are you, did you seriously. Book a 30 minute call with me to ask me about this thing that there’s documentation about or this thing I did a video about that’s don’t do that.

I was in that for years where it’s like, Oh, I want to give people the most useful solution possible. And I know what’s best useful for them, but that’s not really true. And so sometimes people will come to you and you will know everything about how to do the project up front, but really taking the time to be intentional with the process is going to unlock a lot of insights with those projects.

Maybe everyone in the audience already knows that, but it took me years to figure that out. That’s when customers come to you with jobs that you already know everything to do, I think a more complicated situation is when people come to you with jobs and you’re like I know how to do 30 percent of that.

And I speculate about the other 70 percent about that this might be able to be done. And the more tools you learn, the more you learn WordPress, the more you learn more plugins, the more you’ll have in your toolkit to do. to build with the 30 percent might become more like 70%. But in some projects you’ll still have an under unknown degree amount of stuff.

You want to figure out it’s complicated emotional experience, but I think presenting it to the client saying Hey, okay, this is what I’m confident on. And this is what I still need to figure out. Going and figuring it out or it, okay. So if going and figuring it out is something that’s going to take too much money, don’t be afraid of a discovery process.

I just started doing discovery processes for, With project work lately, not people are doing how they work, but like project work. And it’s cool. It’s cool as hell. I’m like, you know what? Give me one hour, give me two hours of time, give me 150, 300 bucks. We’re going to figure out the scope. These are, I’m going to use this time to figure out what we don’t know now.

Chris Badgett: And it’s not fully formed

Will Middleton: It’s not fully formed. And people lie about it being fully formed. They’re like, this is where projects get tangled up. They’re like, yes. I know how to use a REST API. I can do this. The REST API doesn’t have the right endpoints. What am I going to do? And so you need to make sure that you’re communicating 100 percent truth.

And you might know everything, but maybe then you want to communicate more of like, why did someone come to me with questions and how can I best help them? You might come to you with unknown information and sometimes they’ll come to you and 100 percent of the project, like I have no clue how to do that, but I’m excited to figure it out.

And then if you tell them that they might still hire you. But yeah, that’s my opinion on that.

Chris Badgett: It’s funny. I love that way you describe that because If you look at, agency websites or solopreneur websites on the internet, everybody knows how to do everything. But the reality is that, it’s usually like, all right, I think I have 60 percent I’m rock solid here.

Maybe there’s some unknowns, maybe there’s a new skill I have to learn. Maybe I have to like, Hire an outsourced person to help me fulfill this complete scope. Yeah. What do you think is a healthy what’s it, what would you say is an average healthy percentage that like you should feel super confident with as long as you have the ability to learn and, figure out the pieces.

Cause I think some people oversell and what’s more common is people undersell or don’t believe in themselves and their ability. And their resourcefulness. So what is it like, as long as you’ve got like a 50 percent lock on it, you’re probably good. Or is it more like 60 or 80 or, should you probably stay away from projects where you know how to do 10 percent of it?

I’m sure that’s an, it depends answer, but what would you say?

Will Middleton: Never. Always take every project.

I think if you’re looking for projects, if you’re looking for new projects, if you need new, if you don’t really know what your, it depends on where you’re at in your career, really, I don’t think it depends on whether you know a certain percentage of the project.

It’s like, where are you at in your career? And like, where are you looking to go next? If you don’t know these things, take everything that comes in the door and figure out how you feel about it. But if you’re like at the point where you’re like, oh, okay, I know what I want to do. I know what’s next for me to develop in my life.

And I want to align my money and my personal development with the same thing so that I can build the life I want to, you might be at either stage. You like, I think at different times we’re in either stage, maybe I get married and have a kid and I like now change the part of my life. I’m in dramatically into I’m back in scarcity.

Just trying to make money. Like it could be that But I think the percentage of confidence you need is 100 percent confidence that you’re telling the truth and that everybody knows the truth because if you’re a handyman and you’ve had no experience with sinks ever, you don’t, you’ve never opened the bottom of a sink, but you’ve replaced toilets, then it’s you could communicate that to the person be like, look, I have no clue how to operate on a sink.

I’ve never installed a garbage disposal, I’ve never cut pipes. I’ve done what’s what I think is easier things. Up to this point, but I’m totally willing to give it a try. This is what it’s going to look like for me to maybe I could figure out sync by watching a YouTube video. Sorry.

There’s a siren in the background. Can you hear that?

Chris Badgett: It’s not very loud. It’s very faint. I think it’s

Will Middleton: going to get louder. That’s okay. I think

Chris Badgett: the noise canceling is working. Okay.

Will Middleton: Noise canceling technology, the future. Yeah. So if If you’re up front about not knowing how to work on things, but you’re like saying, okay, give me an hour to figure it out.

They might go with that. Or you could say I don’t, I’m not going to be able to figure this out until I get into it. So then you’re like but guess what? I’m going to communicate with you. The whole time about where I’m at, what I’m thinking and where we’re out on price. And then if I can’t do it for you, I’m, I’ve got a recommendation of where you can go next.

Fiverr. com go back to the Lifter LMS experts page. Maybe you actually do know somebody who might be an upgraded service who could help them. But as long as you’re honest up front, I’ve had people willing to pay me what I thought was a lot of money, like sway way so much money at the time. I was like, it was like 50 bucks an hour.

Cause I was like, like a 17 year old kid. I’m like, Oh my gosh. And so then I’m like, 17 year olds are teenagers, not kids, specifically different category. But they, cause I hate it when people call me a kid and now I call everybody a kid. I call people like 70 years old. I’m like, Hey kid. But sorry that’s a rabbit hole.

But yeah, I think that people would pay me just to figure it out because they’re like, Oh, this is a bright kid. I want to invest in their future or whatever. And you could be a kid. Like I said, up until you’re about 70 years old. So it doesn’t matter. Yeah. What you know or don’t know as long as other people are honestly communicated about it and you’re like Willing to work together.

It’s just what do you feel good about really figuring that out?

Chris Badgett: What would you say about niching? I mean for you just based on your journey You ended up in this e learning niche and you were there for a very long time and you’re still there And some people who want to become web developers, they’re like, I don’t really have a niche.

I like to write code or I like to build websites how, and it’s not like you don’t have any interests outside of e learning and you’ve built stuff outside of e learning, but you’ve done a lot in the e learning industry. How much of that. Just niche focus, do you think contributes to your success as a builder?

Will Middleton: I don’t know. I don’t have any clue at all. Actually. The I was, I don’t, I really don’t know. It’s like I was answering the questions that were in front of me. The people who had their ears open, I talked to them. And so those people are in the flow of

Chris Badgett: demand.

Will Middleton: In the flow of demand, wherever you are in the flow of demand is where you start.

That’s what I think a lot of people don’t go with online courses, entrepreneurship. I didn’t years. It’s I’m always trying to resist it. Okay, how am I going to get to, how am I going to get to Vegas? And how am I going to make a billion dollars? And how am I going to be in cool hotels all the time?

It’s no, I’m not there. I’m in Minnesota. And I’m figuring out what I can do with the opportunities in front of me right now. And so that approach led me to a very niche community because we’re at a time in the economy where niche services are popular. It’s very popular with forum questions about very specific questions because AI and all this stuff is becoming better at like generating generic answers that like more specific answers are just becoming higher demand.

These terrible videos I made that are outdated from years ago are getting more views than ever because I’m like, I don’t know. It’s very specific and AI is getting so good at being generic with people and it’ll get good at being specific too. So then we’ll have to do something else like being beef farmers, but, like something else to stimulate the economy in a way that robots can’t.

But while you have an opportunity to answer questions in front of you in a way that could potentially lead to making money or having an offering, I think you’re good to go. Whether those questions are generic, whether it’s like your grandma asking you how to connect to the internet, and so then you make a YouTube video about how to set up that kind of router, Or like you’re trying to fix the box fan in your room because it has too much lint on the freaking blades.

And I don’t know how to take the box fan apart. I’ve looked it up on the internet. There’s no video. So then Will records a video about it, puts it on the internet. No matter where you’re at in your learning journey, fixing a fan, connecting to the internet, or learning very weird, complicated WordPress things, whatever questions people are asking you, answering those will be the path to unlocking your community.

Chris Badgett: One last question for the. Agency folks out there for your clients that you’ve worked with long term. What do you see as the keys to like long term client relationship?

Will Middleton: Okay. I like this. This is a wonderful question. I think having just an awesome time. That’s what I think it is like the experience matters.

Yeah. Experience does matter. But sometimes you don’t have experience. Sometimes you’re going into a space where you’re like, Oh because I think you need this is a fun framework. I like this framework. You need to be able to get jobs done fast. You need to be able to get jobs done cheap or you need to be able to get jobs done with high quality.

I think you’ll need two of these three things. I think two of the three things are very important, right? Get a high quality job with a lot of money, high quality job, very fast. Yeah. That’s going to cost a lot of money. But then you get the one that’s a cheap job and it is high quality, but then you sacrifice time.

It takes a long time to get that job done. It’s an Angela Brown story where you learn it over the course of eight years or like my story, it took a long time. Or you could get, what’s the third permutation? Time and quality is expensive quality and time is quality and cheap is longterm.

What is cheap and quality. Okay. No cheap in time. If you get it, if you get it fast and cheap, it’ll be low quality. Yeah, if I was drawing this on an iPad, this would be so much easier. But yeah yeah so we need some combination of those skills to be able to offer services, but you might not have.

Quality, you might have time because I show up to my calls on time. I’m available tomorrow. I’m available today, but very fast, very cheap, but I have no clue what I’m doing and you can still make it. I’ve had clients. I still have clients. I talked to today at 150 an hour rates that I was talking to at 30 an hour.

Like I, most of my money comes from clients on repeat. And that’s scary. But it’s good. And so it’s like the more you can optimize the honesty and what you can help people with, and you’re continuing growing, no matter where you’re at in your journey, building products, starting from nothing, you will make it to where you want to be by just focusing, or you won’t make it to where you want to be by not focusing on it.

Chris Badgett: I like that. And over time, you build trust because you’re honest. The experience of working with you is great. They know that when you’re like, I’m 80 percent on this one, but I got to figure this 20 percent out. They learn to trust that, that your ability to figure it out. And That’s awesome.

This has been a great chat, Will. I really appreciate it. You can reach out to Will at WPCourseGuide. com. Do you have any other final words for the people or other ways they can connect with you?

Will Middleton: I think the way you said to connect with me is the perfect way to connect with me. I think that if you’re listening to this podcast, then you know the moment to start is now.

Chris Badgett: Thank you for coming on the show. We’ll have to do another update in another eight years and see what you’re doing. Cause like I said, you just have a, you’ve demonstrated tremendous growth and just continuous improvement and just you’re basically like a learning machine and like a problem solving guy that does great work with people.

So it’s great to be with you on the journey. Thanks for coming on the show.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post How to Create a One Person eLearning Web Developer Business in Your Twenties appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Christian Taylor from Craylor Academy discuss his path to YouTube, which began as a pastime when he was roughly ten years old. Christian describes his present arrangement as a primarily single creator who receives help from two independent contractors, a creative director and a video editor. He discuss about Monetizing YouTube channel with online courses.

Christian methods of monetizing YouTube are sponsorships, affiliate links, and ad money. In addition, he is investigating course development; he started a free course to establish his platform and is thinking about offering paid courses in the future. But because courses must be updated frequently, particularly with regard to technology-based material, he finds the process more difficult.

The discussion then turns to why Christian decided to build his course platform with WordPress and LifterLMS rather than hosted SaaS options like Teachable or Kajabi. Christian appreciates WordPress’s flexibility and control, particularly with relation to price, data ownership, and independence from a single provider. He likes that WordPress is open-source, so he can move his content around with ease if needed and stay independent of possible platform changes or shutdowns.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Christian Taylor. He’s a YouTuber. You can find him at Craylor made on YouTube. He’s also a course creator, which you can find his work over there at Craylor dot Academy. Welcome to the show, Christian.

Christian Taylor: Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Badgett: I’m really excited to talk to you because you make such good videos, your YouTube channel successful, I think with almost 50, 000 subscribers, something like that. Some of your I was looking at some of your most popular videos that have over 400, 000 views, and I love how engaging your content is. It was fun to run across you at a WordCamp for the first time, but I’m excited to get into it.

A lot of course creators either come out of YouTube. Or they want to get into YouTube because they know they want to do some content marketing that way, maybe generate other streams of income, but let’s just start at a high level. You’re a YouTuber first and foremost, I think you probably categorize yourself as a creator.

Tell us about that moment in time and life 10 years ago or whenever it was. Where you decided I want to be a YouTuber. I have kids like the most, the things people want to be when they grow up as a YouTuber, you’re doing it successfully. What was the genesis of that for you?

Christian Taylor: Yeah, that’s a great question.

So creating videos has always been a hobby for me, a passion from Pretty much about 10 years old, I think around then is when I started playing around with video and it was really about learning to edit. When I started, I was fascinated by the idea of using windows movie maker. My parents had this big, like chunky desktop super low power.

But it had windows movie maker on it. And I remember there was one day I went to the library, checked out a book, and I had this little Kodak point and shoot, and I took pictures of all the pages. And made a slideshow of the book in windows movie maker and looking back on it. It’s hilarious. It’s like the pages were reflecting the flash.

So you couldn’t even see what was on the page really. And like, why would you photograph a book like that and make a slideshow? But for me, it was just capturing content and having something to edit in windows movie maker and learning about that process. And then I was hooked. I remember one year for Christmas, I got an iPod Nano and it was one of the few that had a camera on it, terrible quality.

It must’ve been probably 480 P it could record about five minutes of video at once before you’d have to copy it, delete it, start over. I made it work. I’d record for five minutes, copy it. Record another five minutes. And I know at the time it was really about me learning editing. I started getting into a little bit of motion graphics, text just learning how the software’s all worked.

And then as I started watching other creators on YouTube really inspired me. Probably when I was like 12, 13 years old just being like, Hey, I want to do what they’re doing. So YouTube has been a hobby for me most of my life, but. I don’t know that I expected it to become a full time job. It was more just a passion, something I love doing.

And right about the time I graduated high school, that’s when it coincidentally became a full time job. So I was very fortunate with the timing. YouTube is all I know since I’ve been doing it for over half of my life. So for context, I’m 22 years old. If that gives you an idea of like timeframe and all that, but yeah, that’s that’s what got me started.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You sound like Mr. Beast a little bit, like it’s, you’ve been doing it so long. It’s half your life started young. That’s incredible. I’m like you in the sense that I was always into video cameras and stuff. I even used to carry my dad’s VHS, big shoe box, size camcorder around, and then the cameras got better and smaller.

And it’s amazing the tools that people have today, but sometimes video just calls people. And I don’t know why that is, but I had that same calling. At a really young age. We’ll get more into like how you evolved, but let’s just give people, you start a snapshot of where you are now. You started at 12, you’re 22.

Now it’s been 10 years. What does your like YouTube business look like? Are you like a solopreneur? Do you have people that help? How do you monetize and have this career? What’s the current state today?

Christian Taylor: Yeah. So I’m mostly a solopreneur. I do have two freelancers that helped me. I’ve got an editor and that’s been a more recent addition, but love not having to edit my content anymore, which is a little ironic because I know I just said I started with a passion for editing, but we can drill into that later if you want.

But freelance editor. I’ve also got a creative director that helps part-time with ideation, brainstorming, just working with the packaging of videos, the title, the thumbnail. He also makes the thumbnails as well. But I would still consider myself mostly a solo creator. And as far as monetization there’s, a couple of different ways I do that through YouTube.

Obviously I think most people know about the YouTube ads that play before you watch a video, the 15 second ads, or now Google is getting more and more annoying and they’ll play two ads back to back before content starts, but that’s one revenue stream. And YouTube pays creators a 55 percent cut of that ad revenue.

So that one’s nice. It’s not very reliable. It’s all over the place, but it’s nice in that you don’t really have to do anything but get views and YouTube just takes care of the rest. So that’s one revenue stream. Another one for me is affiliate links. So someone watches the video, they like what I talk about.

They buy the product. I get a commission. I, think most of your audience would know what affiliate links are, but I always explain it when people ask how I monetize, cause some people aren’t familiar with the term, but YouTube ads, affiliate links, the third would be sponsorships. So companies just.

Working with me directly saying, Hey, we want to promote our product. We have a message we want to get out and paying for either an ad slot in the middle of a video where I read the ad or collaborating on a full dedicated video. So that’s how I’ve monetized YouTube. I am in the middle of working on diversifying a bit.

So for me, I think that’s getting more into courses. I just launched a free course, but that’s a way to build my course website, start getting a bit more comfortable with it. And hopefully a year down the road, two years down the road, max, I start watching some paid courses and. Growing some revenue there as well.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. We interviewed on this podcast many years ago. It’s one of my favorite episodes with Sean Cannell. Is that how you say? Yeah.

Christian Taylor: Oh, wow. Yeah. You’ve interviewed Sean.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Oh, that’s

Christian Taylor: incredible.

Chris Badgett: He’s a great guy. And I think he does a good job of YouTube channel and I should say channels cause he has a couple and.

He had has a signature course. I think he calls it the creator Academy or something like that. And I can’t remember. But it’s often, I’ve wondered why. I know a lot of YouTubers do courses, but why do you think it’s like, how do you feel about course creation? Versus making a video for the channel.

Like, how does that sit with you? Does it feel a lot harder? Is it, Hey, this is old hat. I know how to make videos or what’s your experience there.

Christian Taylor: Yeah, for me, it feels a lot harder. I’ve had a love hate relationship with the idea of making courses. In fact, while back, I think it was 2021. I decided, okay, I’m going to launch a course because this is the next thing to do.

And I don’t think I really wanted to launch a course, but I just felt this pressure of like, all right I’m doing everything I can on YouTube. I need to diversify. If I want to scale my business further, I need to launch another product. So I reluctantly launched a course and to push myself or motivate myself, I made maybe a quarter of the content.

And published it and started selling the course and did that model of Hey, I expect it to be done in a month or two. You can buy it at a cheaper price right now, if you’re willing to wait, like you already unlock access to some of the content, all of it’s coming in two months. And then I just got super overwhelmed by having to deliver on that promise.

So in the end, I just refunded everyone and said, nevermind sorry, I ever brought it up. I’m not launching a course. And so I think for me, The idea of creating a course is a little bit scary because of the obligation to support it long term. So any course that I would make would likely be based on software like WordPress doing a tutorial.

And I think If I make a YouTube video, I put the video out and it’s done. And if someone watches a tutorial on WordPress four years later, they’re going to understand there might be things about this tutorial that are outdated. Some of the screens may not look the same. It may be completely irrelevant altogether.

If I make a course on WordPress, especially if I’m selling it, I then feel like I’m on the hook because courses have that lifetime access model, most of them, of Creating this monster that I have to keep updating every year I have to re record all the videos because the UI changes or something changes.

So I’m a little, I’m really interested in like the subscription model for software based courses, because I think that might be a little bit more fair on the compensation side, but yeah, long story short, I definitely find creating courses more difficult than a YouTube video.

Chris Badgett: That makes sense. And because your YouTube videos are so polished and highly produced, I could feel the pressure that is for making like a 20 lesson course or whatever.

I love that you’ve launched a free course to get started using a free course to build an email list. I think particularly for a YouTuber to get the email address and really know who their people are. It’s been one of the largest drivers for us at Lifter LMS. We have a quick start course on the Lifter LMS Academy.

It’s free. I ran into the same problems that you did where the interface changes, WordPress changes. So I’ve reshotted about five times over the past 10 years. But I take the pressure off in the sense that I’m just showing you the 5 percent of the tool to get the most value and keep it really beginner focused.

And lately I actually, the last time we reshot it, I actually got some help from the team to record different lessons and stuff. So it wasn’t as much on me, but that is definitely a challenge with technology courses because things change and courses go out of the date. However, if you look on somewhere like Udemy, some of the top selling things over there about how to use technology.

So people people do figure it out, but it is a, you’re right. A big commitment. Tell me about the decision. YouTubers in general, aren’t necessarily like. WordPress people, even though it powers 42 percent of the internet or whatever, what draws you to WordPress and Lifter LMS to, publish your course, as opposed to something like Kajabi or Teachable.

I see a lot of YouTubers using things like Teachable. Particularly in the technology niche, if you’re good at technology WordPress gives you a lot more customizability and power and stuff. But like, why did you choose WordPress over a hosted SaaS solution for courses?

Christian Taylor: Yeah, there’s a couple of reasons for that.

One would be I make a lot of content on WordPress. So I, wanted to practice what I preach. I did think about using Kajabi or some of those other hosted tools, but I thought I, I just really want to practice what I preach here and show my audience that I’m using WordPress. And I guess if we step back and ask.

How did I even get into WordPress over other website builders? I think it’s, always been a cost thing since I started exploring technology when I was young, like 10, 11. I think I was like 11 when I got my first laptop and. Just started tinkering online with Wix and Squarespace and Weebly, just all these website builders.

Cause I, I always thought that was interesting. But the power that you can unlock with WordPress for a much lower cost than Other platforms. That was a big thing initially for me. So that sort of got me on the train of being used to using WordPress to build all my sites. And then when I was evaluating that decision for where to host my course of course Kajabi is expensive.

So that was definitely part of it. I look at the pricing table and cry every time, but I think it was more about In recent years, I’ve started to have some issues with Google, specifically the AdSense side of things on my channel. And just really get that sense of, I, I don’t want to be tied to a particular company more than I have to.

Like I, I hate being reliant on YouTube and Google for the core of my business. And I just don’t want some SAS company that could one go out of business abruptly say Hey we got acquired. We’re sun setting in three months. Your decision is either to be part of our new parent company. Like maybe there’s a pricing change there or something, or get out migrate everything, have fun.

See you later. So that, that’s a concern. The other concern, which to be honest, is not really a concern for me, but it’s still a core principle I’m passionate about is not having a company be able to say Hey, we don’t like you. We don’t like your content. We’re kicking you off of the platform.

So WordPress being open source really gave me that confidence that the worst thing that could happen with the second example is, One web host says, Hey, we don’t like you or Hey, we’re shutting down. And to me, it’s much easier to migrate a WordPress site to a different host than it is rebuild my course on some new platform.

So I think just having the technical flexibility, the lower cost and that full peace of mind that I have a lot more control over. My data, my site, my platform, those all kind of led me to using WordPress and LifterLMS.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Let’s go back to earlier in your story as you’re turning 18 or graduating high school or whatever, that age.

There’s a lot of pressure on young folks to go to college and you went full time YouTuber and pulled it off. What was that time period? Like in terms of having the confidence to move forward and finances or at least having some signal that, Hey, this is working, I can afford to live and stuff like that.

Christian Taylor: Yeah. So you’re right. I definitely felt that pressure to go to college. I think most people do. And honestly, I think even the past two or three years, it’s becoming cool to some degree to not go to college. More people are starting to speak out about that idea. But even when I graduated high school, it was that assumption of.

Like you have to go to college if you’re going to be successful in life. And I always knew I didn’t want to go to college. I tinkered with the idea. I had this like plan B in my head. If I go to college, I’ll probably go for computer science. Cause I was also interested in becoming a developer at the time.

So I, just. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew I didn’t want to go to college. So my parents were very generous. They let my brother live at home free when he was going to college for four years. And they told me, Hey, you can live at home for free for the same four years.

As long as you’re being productive, like you’ve got to be. Working, doing something, as long as we can see that you’re being productive and doing something to further your career, we’ll give you that same opportunity. So I looked at it as, this is great. I have four years that I can not feel the pressure of overhead.

I don’t have high school anymore, so there’s no homework. That’s not tying me down. I can really hit the gas and go full speed ahead on YouTube. I was pretty confident that within those four years, I could make it full time. Cause right when I graduated, it was making just enough to be a decent part time side hustle.

I guess if someone was working a fast food job at that time and life, like for me, it was exceeding that. So it was like, okay this is. Not enough to be like a full time serious career yet, but more than I’d make it a fast food job, so I can’t complain. And really, it was within that first year that things Skyrocketed significantly.

And actually I, was able to buy my house and the, room I’m in now is technically the master bedroom, but for me, it’s like my studio. I was able to do that two years into that four year period. So it was a pretty quick progression of. Seeing things take off with revenue, just being able to save a ton of money for a down payment, start investing as a result of not having that overhead.

And yeah I, guess I just had the no plan B, no turning back mentality over that period.

Chris Badgett: I love that. And that’s such a great gift your parents gave you. And it’s the same thing as if a parent is going to pay for college. Yeah. If they provide the space for you to develop as an entrepreneur, as a creator for literally less money it’s, cool, but it’s like a, it’s a mindset change on what careers are and how they work.

And obviously the. The world is changing and opportunities are different and stuff like that. What going from doing better than fast food income or around their side hustle style. Can you pinpoint like one video or one strategy, or I think they probably a lot of things started to snowball at once, but what really helped you go from side hustle to homeowner?

Christian Taylor: Yeah, there were a couple of things there. One was, if you look at my channel, you’ll see. In the very early days, I was making whatever I wanted. So it, at the time it was a lot of what I thought were comedy sketches. I go back now and I’m like what, is this? But at the time I was like, Oh, this is hilarious.

I’m a comedian. Then I started to solidify my interest in tech, but it was. Consumer tech hardware. So I wanted to be the next Marquez Brownlee. That was my dream as a teenager was doing the iPhone reviews, the accessories, getting all the tech before it comes out with the press embargoes and all that.

And I started to figure out somewhere along the line that software content is a lot more profitable. And I didn’t just pivot because it was profitable. It was also something I was interested in. But I, at one point, I wanna say 2017, I experimented and made a video on the ble, the best place to buy a domain name, and that became the video that really took off as far as views and revenue to get me to that sort of part-time better than fast food income.

So I started to clue in that. Okay. Software is that’s what’s profitable. I can get views that way. Why am I spending all this money buying technology to review it? And I’m not making any money doing that. It’s way more competitive. Let me go all in on the software. So that was 2019 when I made that pivot and all of 2019, I started making a bunch of comparison videos on domain registrars, web hosting.

WordPress themes, just all sorts of different things. And I remember, I think it was about October, 2019, maybe a little earlier, maybe September, 2019, I got an email from a subscriber and he said, Hey, love your content. Have you ever thought of making a VPN comparison video? And I replied to him, I was probably like way too open and honest at the time.

Cause I just told him everything I was thinking. I was like, Hey, thanks for reaching out. That’s a great idea. Actually. I have thought of that. I’m interested in VPNs, but it’s not really my niche. I don’t do cybersecurity content, so I’m not going to make the video.

Chris Badgett: And by the way, this is the top performing video on his channel.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. So

Christian Taylor: don’t know that I would. Say it like that today, but I was just like super direct. So he replies and he goes, okay, yeah, like I completely understand where you’re coming from. My brother has a YouTube channel and his niche was skateboarding. And one time he made a video that was completely unrelated to skateboarding and it was the top performing video on his channel.

I don’t know. I just think you should reconsider. And I don’t know why I listened to this guy, but something in me was like, huh? Okay. Yeah. Maybe I should make a VPN comparison. And one of my struggles being an entrepreneur is I’m. I’m a visionary person to where I can sell myself on just about any idea.

And then I lose that pulse of, is this objectively a good idea or a bad idea? Like I can get excited about anything. So I convinced myself it was a good idea. Then it was like, yeah I’m, excited about this. I’m going to make the video. So I made it, I released it November, 2019. And it already started doing very well over the next three months.

So I already had considered it a success, but then when COVID happened, lockdowns hit March, 2020. The video absolutely blew up and I imagine it was just everyone starting to work from home. People thinking, Oh, I need a VPN and searching for it. I’m still to this day, scratching my head, trying to figure out like, why did it blow up then what happened?

Cause spoiler alert, the VPN comparison content is not really performing anymore. So I’m still like, You know what happened? Why did it do well in that period? I don’t really know. But that one video alone is, or was responsible for the majority of my financial success over that two year period of being able to invest save a down payment, just really get myself in that full-time income position.

Chris Badgett: A couple of quick questions on that. How long did it take you to go from idea to video published for the VPN video?

Christian Taylor: Probably about four weeks. Cause I, had decided I was going to make the video in September and I think I had a couple of videos I was already working on ahead of that. So I think I spent about a week reaching VPN companies, asking if they would provide test accounts allowed about a week for them all to get back to me.

And then probably two weeks of testing the VPNs, collecting data, speed tests, all that and then about a week for the actual video production and turn around.

Chris Badgett: Is that like an average for one of your videos, like about four weeks to go through that process or what’s it like now for. Idea to publish.

Christian Taylor: Now it’s much more organized.

So my, creative director and I will have monthly meetings where we plan out four videos and my content calendar is always two to three months ahead. So right after we have that meeting, it’ll be three months ahead. And then I make a month’s worth of content. It starts to get down to 2 months, and then we meet again at the top of the next month, and then it’s 3 months out.

As far as the actual ideation, knowing what content we’re making next, those are scheduled 3 months out. As far as Like actually starting on a video, sometimes I might start some of the research four to six weeks out if it’s some kind of comparison where I really need to give it time to evaluate a product, or if it’s a topic that I’m already very familiar with, it doesn’t really require testing or research ahead of time.

Sometimes I’m scripting the video 2 days before I shoot it. And we shoot videos two weeks before they come out. So I guess that would be anywhere from two weeks to six weeks, as far as pre production time.

Chris Badgett: Quick question there. Do you use a teleprompter or do you have like bullet points that you riff off of for the script or how do you do that part?

Christian Taylor: Very chaotic. I do not use a teleprompter, I used to, but I wanted to get away from that. Because I could always tell you can see yourself looking at the camera and your eyes are like bouncing around it. And I just was never fully happy with how that looked.

So I got away from that, but I’m a very long winded person. And when I script my content. No matter how much I try to just stick to basic bullet points, I write full sentences. So I end up writing a word for word script, and then I treat it like bullet points. I’ll just like glance down at my script, look at the next few sections.

You’re like, okay, that’s what I’m going to say. And then look at the camera and do that section. Most of the time I end up sticking to the script pretty closely, but I also try to remind myself, this is just a guide. I don’t have to follow this word for word because sometimes I’ll stress out about, did I say that right?

Did I get the right word? And unless I’m saying something that would make the technical terminology inaccurate, would like somehow make the statement untrue I, try to give myself that flexibility and say, I don’t have to stick to it. Word for word.

Chris Badgett: That’s a pro tip right there, where correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re like, you have your script outline, you do a sentence or a paragraph or a segment and then you look down.

And then you look back, re engage for the next section. And then you just edit that stuff out in the post production and it’s, it makes a great video and you maintain the eye contact or attention with all that editing, but you don’t have to like edit as you go.

Christian Taylor: Absolutely. Yeah. And one of the biggest tips that I can give that’s worked for me is I will always record something in sections until I’m happy with it, And I at least make sure that the first sentence I say is the same every time.

So I don’t edit my videos anymore, but when I did edit, it was really easy for me to quickly go through that footage and I would just go to the last time that I say something. So I would, I just keep re recording a section until I’m happy. The last one I know is the one that I’m happy with. Cause that’s the one where I just stopped and moved on to the next one.

So if I’m saying like next let’s talk about pricing. If that’s the top of a section and I record several paragraphs after that, I’ll just skip in my timeline when I’m editing till I stopped hearing next let’s, talk about pricing and then I know, okay, that’s the one delete everything before it then I’m not like watching six different takes going.

Okay. When do I need to make this cut? It’s just a lot more evident and speeds up the A roll edit quite a bit.

Chris Badgett: Just for inspiration and just reality check. How many videos did you make approximately before the VPN video until you struck pay dirt or really had a, takeoff success? Oh,

Christian Taylor: how many years?

How much? Yeah. So that was 2019. I started my channel in. I would say the first probably three years of my channel, it was a very loose hobby. Like I had no upload schedule. So I’m not sure if I’d really count that time. Cause I was still just figuring out if that’s something I wanted to do more.

So if you factor out those three years, that would be, what is that 2014 Yeah, so like 2014 to 2019, that five year period of just making consistent content for most of that five years, I was uploading once a week, definitely from 2019. And now I’ve been uploading just about weekly with a couple exceptions.

So it was probably four to five years and I would guess. At least 300 videos that I made before I really started to see that traction.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Awesome. Tell us about your audience or like your avatar, your ideal learner or subscriber. What are they like? Who are you making these videos for?

Christian Taylor: That’s been a, an ongoing debate for quite some time, but I believe from the polls I’ve run and the people in my audience I’ve talked to, I’ve It seems to be a mix of both small business owners and tech enthusiasts, which is a weird mix, but half of it is these small business owners, like freelancers, local think like bakeries, landscapers business owners that.

Maybe don’t have the resources to hire someone to build their website or they’re like, I need a custom email. I don’t really know what to do. They find my content and they learn about how to build their website, how to get a custom email. The tools that they should be using, and they may not necessarily be that passionate about tech or even really care about tech.

It’s almost a necessity to them of, I have to do this DIY because I can’t afford to hire someone right now. So that’s probably half of the audience. The other half would be tech enthusiasts that just like geeking out about comparing different tools. And it’s been interesting for me to capture both of those audiences where both the small business owner can walk away from a web hosting comparison and say, thank you so much.

Like you, you really helped break it down for me. I feel good about the web hosts that I chose because of your video and the tech enthusiasts can go I think they can see like the, internal geekery that I have. So they know that even if I maybe don’t go super in depth on a particular section of the video that like, maybe they would go a little deeper on.

They still respect my opinion. They think it’s interesting to know what I think about different products and services. I’d guess that’s the core of my audience and what my avatars look like, but I know it’s two very different crowds.

Chris Badgett: How do you make a good comparison video? I was impressed when you said earlier, like with the VPNs, you did a bunch of research and looked at things, but if you’re comparing like WordPress plugins or themes or hosting companies or domain name registrars, What’s the key to making good comparison content?

Cause a lot of people go to YouTube to be like, help me figure out which tool I’m, solution aware. And then there’s these products. How do I pick one? How do you make good content in a comparison?

Christian Taylor: My ideology has always been approach it with a consumer first mindset. There’s way too much comparison content that treats it like a spec sheet.

It’s just, Oh, we went, yeah, we went to the pricing table and this company gives you this much storage. And this company gives you this much and blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s like anyone can go to the landing page and make those comparisons. So I don’t find that very useful. My mindset has been really put myself in the shoes of the consumer.

And that often includes. The setup process of a tool. So what are they going to experience from day one? The actual usage of the tool customer service. That’s a big one that I’m passionate about as well is when I’m testing a web host, I’ll act dumb and reach out to their customer service and be like, how do I migrate my site?

Or like, how do I connect my domain? And then they’ll Oh, point it to our name servers. Oh, what is a name server? I don’t know these terms. So just really trying to imagine what would the average user be doing here and what experience would they have? And there could be a case where a host has really poor responses with customer support.

They’re just not helpful at all. And for me, that may not be an issue because I’m relatively tech savvy, so I could be like, Hey, I know what they mean. I know what they’re trying to say. Or I don’t even need their help to begin with because I’m pretty self sufficient with going in the panel, doing what I need to.

I can also be objective and see the average consumer would be really frustrated. They would be confused. They would be. At the point of wanting a refund, just being like, I I don’t understand, like they’re, not being any help. I’m so lost. So by really putting myself in the shoes of the consumer, that’s helpful.

The other thing I would say is I’ve tried to cut out. Any part of the comparison that is redundant as far as features. So if every web host has 99. 9 percent uptime, I’m not going to waste time being like all naming out five different web hosts, they all have 99. 9 percent uptime because I feel it becomes irrelevant if they all have it.

I’ve approached my research and scripting from the basis of point out the differences rather than the similarities. And people can figure out what the similarities are, or that kind of becomes obvious when you’re doing a little bit of research, looking at all the landing pages.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Tangentially related to that, how did you overcome imposter syndrome, i. e. fear of being on camera is 1 aspect. When you’re doing comparison posts if it’s a giant company, like Chrome versus opera, another one of your top performing videos, it’s like a big faceless org, but comparison content, you maybe you’re talking about smaller companies and stuff like that, and maybe you’re like, oh, they might not like my video.

And, or I know some people that work there, whatever. How do you get through all that imposter syndrome and just confidence in having an opinion on something on the internet?

Christian Taylor: For the being on camera side, I think it’s just many years of doing it. I, don’t think there was ever a time in my life that I felt really nervous on camera, but.

Definitely when I started out, it was a little bit more awkward, a little bit uncomfortable, but I think just doing it for so long, I became more and more comfortable on camera. And that’s never really been a big issue for me to overcome, which I know that’s not the case for everyone, but I guess I was somewhat natural at it from day one.

Now, as far as Being worried about offending companies. I think I, I also started making comparisons before I was at the stage in life of understanding, like networking and humans behind stuff. Obviously like I didn’t think robots made stuff, but I, just didn’t quite get that yet. And I think that actually worked out to my advantage because that allowed me to just be brutally honest about what I thought with the product.

And then. Getting to that place later in life of being like, Oh, there’s real people behind these products and now I have these relationships, honestly, that didn’t happen for me until about three years ago, that’s when I first started going to events and meeting people. And sometimes meeting team members at directly competing products and being like, wow, they’re great people.

They’re nice, they’re great people and they’re nice. Now, this is weird because I feel like I’m, pitting the 2 companies against each other. I’ve learned that if a company is worth working with, having a relationship with, they’re going to be open to honest feedback and they’re, going to want that.

And if they get upset by something you say they, disown you. They’re like, ah we want nothing to do with you then. I probably don’t care to work with them anyway. So I’m fine burning that bridge. I, have tried to be a little bit more careful as the years have gone on to make sure that everything I say is true.

I don’t want to accuse a company of something that’s not true. Or pick on them just to pick on them. I’ve done that a little bit in the past. You can probably see in my top videos, there’s one particular company I’ve never been fond of. But yeah, I think just realizing, okay, if a company is worth working with, they’re going to be open to that feedback.

And I also tell companies, Hey. You can always sponsor content like, okay, qualifier here. Cause I don’t want anyone to think I’m like a sellout or something. I will only work with a company on a sponsored capacity. If their product is good enough that I can recommend it in some way, but for. No product is 100 percent perfect.

So for every product, I’ve got good things and bad things to say. So if a company has already been vetted as a product that I could recommend for certain people, and they’re like, Hey, how can we get content on your channel? That is Just presenting our product in a positive light. Then I tell them you can sponsor some content if you want, because that gives you the control to say, Hey, we’re paying you to share the message about our product, and then it’s going to be presented more from a brand awareness perspective of, Hey, I want to talk about the sponsor of today’s video.

Here’s all the positive things instead of. Hey, you’re in an organic comparison and you’re getting free press, but that’s going to include both the good and the bad.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. As a podcaster, I try not to ask two questions at once, but just to set it up, if somebody wants to make money online from YouTube on one side, let’s imagine, and I’m speaking to like the course creator audience here.

One person like wants to get into courses, but they actually want to start with a YouTube channel and figure out how to monetize it. Practice being on camera. Really monetize the YouTube channel. So that’s like question one advice to get started in terms of monetization and what to focus on first.

And on the other side, you have people that have already created a course. Or a coaching program or a membership site. And they’re like, I want to do marketing on YouTube. I still want to make money online, but I want to get people on YouTube over to my to my website for my courses and coaching and community and all that stuff.

So what would you advise those two different segments in terms of getting started with YouTube fastest path to revenue monetization traffic? It’s a big question. I know.

Christian Taylor: Yeah. For that first person, I would push back just a little bit. If whenever someone comes to me and says, Hey, I want to start a YouTube channel.

I want to do this for a living. What advice will you give me? I push back and say, that’s great. Like I’m all for it. I love what I do, I want other people to do the same thing and enjoy it. I would only get into this if you’re willing to commit to it for two to three years and not make a sense. If you can put up with that, great.

Then I’ll give you some advice. If not, if you’re looking for some way to fast track and Oh, there’s gotta be some magic formula where in six months I can be profitable on my channel. Don’t do it. You’re just going to waste three months of your life. You’re going to get frustrated and quit. And I’ve seen that cycle so many times with beginners where they get this kick of inspiration.

They make content for three months and they say, Oh, no one watched my stuff. I didn’t make any money. Yeah, you did it for three months. So Mr. Beast always says, make your first hundred videos before you ever judge analytics revenue. Anything like you don’t have a license to judge that or say, oh, it didn’t work until you’ve made a hundred videos.

So that’s the preface. Once you’re past that and you say, okay, I’m willing to make that commitment. I’m in it for the long run. It really is just about repetition and. Not being afraid to experiment heavily with both topics in formats. A lot of creators, new creators think they have to find a niche from day one.

And like they, they have to be tied down to this one specific strategy. And I think that can be. hurting them more than helping them because they’re not allowing the freedom to explore to find the thing that actually works. Like for me I, pivoted a lot over my YouTube journey and found something that really worked well.

But if I had been really stuck from day one, like imagine I started doing comedy content and that’s. All I ever did, because in my head, I was like, that’s my niche niche down, everyone tells you niche down. So I have to be fixated on that. And that’s going to be the secret to growing. My channel is sticking with that.

I definitely wouldn’t be where I am today. So yes, it is important to niche down at some point, once you start getting traction and say, okay, this is a path I’m comfortable committing to, but when you’re making those first hundred videos. Just explore, make videos on content that you’re passionate about.

Try different things. If you want to make something that’s completely different from anything you’ve ever made, as far as topic, do it, try it out. Maybe it does really well. And maybe you decide. Hey this is something that I want to stick to because once you find something that works, you start making views, you start getting some traction.

The revenue will come with it naturally through both AdSense. If you’re talking about products, affiliate links honestly, like the, only practical tip. I could give as far as making revenue would be put affiliate links in your content from day zero. I slept on that for way too long. And I wish I had started putting them in my content earlier.

Cause you never know when a video is going to take off. So don’t wait till you’re getting views to sign up for affiliate programs. They’re super easy to get into most of them, at least sign up from day one, put affiliate links in your content. As you grow, if you’re interested in getting into sponsorships, I would look into Justin Moore.

I love his content. He’s the sponsorship coach guru, has his own course as well. Of course who doesn’t? That’s a guru. But I’ve learned a lot from Justin as far as Negotiating with brands, landing bigger brand deals, stuff that’s a bit more sustainable rather than the one off content pieces that are like that’s what I’ve done for the past couple of years before finding Justin’s content is like one video here for a brand, one video there, just very all over the place.

So definitely recommend Justin Moore’s content and also not thinking you need a hundred thousand subscribers or a million subscribers to make money. That’s one encouragement that I would give a beginner is you can monetize earlier, depending on the niche that you’re in. Some are more profitable than others at the small channel level, but I really was able to start seriously monetizing around 10, 000 subscribers.

And I think that can be true for a lot of channels. The YouTube ad revenue can even start at a thousand subscribers. So stick with it for the long run. Explore your interests. Don’t be afraid to try a bunch of things till you find something that works. Then the monetization falls into place. Now, for that second person, the course creator that wants to use YouTube as a lead gen strategy, I would just shoot for search on YouTube.

If you already know SEO strategies, Choosing a focus keyword, optimizing your title and description for those keywords. If you’re comfortable optimizing a blog post for SEO, it’s a very similar strategy on YouTube. There’s a couple of tools out there like TubeBuddy and vidIQ that you can use to analyze your title and description and say you’re doing well, or you need more keywords, but.

I think when you aim for search, you’re going to capture that audience who’s ready to make a purchase decision. They’re ready to solve a problem. If they’re searching, how do I build a WordPress site? And your video comes up, they watch it. They go, this guy knows what he’s talking about. I want to enroll in his course.

That’s probably a more valuable lead gen strategy than trying to do the sensational Mr. Beast type content. I built a hundred WordPress sites in a hundred hours, shocked face in the thumbnail you can try to go the more entertaining route, but. I found that it just doesn’t convert as well with educational content.

Chris Badgett: Solid advice. Really appreciate that. Last question, Christian, what’s your vision for your academy at Craylor dot Academy? I’m asking like, it seems like there’s a fork in the road. Some YouTubers that monetize with courses create a signature course. It’s like their main thing. And it’s just and maybe they redo it every couple of years or whatever, or.

They do a lot of like mini courses or a membership with okay. This is a focus, like how to build a yoga website, yoga studio website with cadence course. And then there’s another course about how to build a restaurant site with online ordering. And it’s, they’re like these many courses. Are you more signature course guy, or do you envision like.

A lot of courses.

Christian Taylor: I see myself going the mini course route. And furthermore, I even see a world in which I treat my website almost like its own YouTube and maybe launch a membership because there’s oftentimes people in my audience will ask, Hey, can you make a tutorial about. Insert random niche item.

I don’t know, like how do I set up email hosting with this very specific email host? And I think to myself, okay I could sit down and start screen recording and make that video and probably 20 minutes. But if I upload that video to my channel, it’s going to bomb. It’s going to drag everything down.

It’s way too niche, It’s it’s not going to get enough views. And if I produce that video to the level that I do content on my channel. It’s not going to be a 20 minute process. It’s going to then blow up into a two to six week process. So I’ve, been on this thread of I want to help my audience.

When someone asks that I would like to sit in front of my computer and just record a quick 20 minute video and something that would be highly valuable to them. But I can’t upload it to my YouTube channel. So I just don’t make it, but in the future, I would love to have some kind of membership program where people can join and I can say Hey, you’re in the 10 a month membership program.

Cool. I’ll make a video. I’ll put it on my website. Hope it helps. And then there’s they’re getting value out of it. Maybe it helps solve a problem that they were feeling overwhelmed by. For me, it’s something that I can justify because I’ve got this base of members that are paying to be part of the site.

And I don’t have this pressure of the YouTube algorithm of if I make a video and it doesn’t perform, I’m damaging my channel in a sense. I don’t really have to care about that cause it’s my own website. So if the video gets 10 views and helps 10 people, then great.

Chris Badgett: Nice. I love that. That’s definitely a pro tip and I hear it throughout your story that, and this is the story of lifter LMS as well.

The audience literally pulls the product out of you. And that’s, a great way to think about a membership. Just take common questions and make many courses or tutorials for those people. You can’t not be successful that way when they’re literally asking for it, particularly when there’s several, you’ve heard the question so many times.

You’re like, I think I need to make that email hosting video. I love that. That’s Christian Taylor subscribe to his YouTube channel. That’s Craylor made. And also check out his Academy at Craylor dot Academy. And thanks for coming on the show, Christian. We really appreciate it. Keep up the great work and it’s great to be with you on the journey.

Is there anywhere else you want to send people or any final words that you’d like to say?

Christian Taylor: Just thanks for having me. And the craylor made. com is probably the best place to go to find links to my channel, the Academy, everything. And I’ll just spell it out. It is C R A Y L O R Craylor. I only spell it because people often ask me like what, are you saying?

Or how do I spell that? So for all the audio listeners out there, you go. But yeah, thanks for having me. I’ve. Really enjoyed our conversation.

Chris Badgett: Thanks Christian. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode.

And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post How to Monetize Your YouTube Channel with Online Courses with Christian Taylor appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Mihail Stoychev explains that NitroPack began in 2013 with a focus on optimizing websites for the OpenCart platform.

Mihail Stoychev is the co-founder of NitroPack, a company focused on website optimization. The spark was a request from a big e-commerce business that was losing customers owing to sluggish website performance. Recognizing the necessity, they created an early plugin for image optimization and simple caching, resulting in a considerable increase in site loading speed.

The term “NitroPack” was inspired by the notion of speed in the “Fast and Furious” films, in which hitting a button reveals hidden power. NitroPack expanded over time to include over 35 optimization algorithms in a single service. They switched to WordPress, the largest platform, with the goal of making website optimization easier and more accessible.

NitroPack is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that allows you to control optimizations with a single button push after installation. They stress simplicity and usability for non-technical people, with the goal of removing complexity from the optimization process.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Michel from Nitro Pack. That’s it. Nitro Pack. I love McHale’s mission to make the internet faster. We’re going to get into what NitroPack is, how to speed up your website and a little bit of McHale’s story, which is awesome.

But first welcome to the show, Mihail.

Mihail Stoychev: Pleasure. Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Badgett: I’m, excited to chat with you today. Everybody wants a fast website. Everybody there’s so many, there’s a lot of different web hosts in the WordPress community and also different setups and plugins and different types of websites.

But this episode is about for people building learning management system websites, they all want a fast website. Let’s start at just a super high level. How, Mikhail, do you make the internet faster?

Mihail Stoychev: Thanks. That’s a great question to start with, Chris. Actually if I have to think as to how did we start NitroPack?

So first of all, we started NitroPack back in 2013 for another great open source platform that was Going after e commerce merchants back in the days. It’s called open cart. I think they’re still running well, so we started nitro pack in 2013 that was two years after we created our first plug in for open cart and We had a pretty big merchant from the Middle East and they were absolutely horrified and terrified by how many customers are actually churning and dropping because their website was not performing well enough.

So they came to us and said, Hey guys we have this huge problem. Is there a solution that you can figure out for us? So back in the day, so we were junior entrepreneurs it was your number two of our journey. So we started digging around and of course we will answer. Yes, of course.

We’re experts into this. So we figured out a way that we can actually optimize images, which was one of the. challenges. And back in the days, we didn’t have the amazing formats that we have today, which compress a lot of data. And back in the days, the internet was nowhere as good as what we are seeing as the norm today.

So what we did is we created this initial version of our plugin. And since we really created a 50% improving their site loading speed it was back in the times where fast and furious were just going very hard and those super nice racy cars, they will have a special hidden power that exerts you press like a red button and then you go.

And that was called nitro. So they were using nitrogen. And since initially what we developed back then was a collection of different features. We decided to call it nitro as in fast and then pack. Okay. So we started with image optimization and some basic caching. And today we have over 35 three, five different techniques that we bundled together and that we serve as nitro pack and our Initial thoughts when we decided to go after WordPress and deliver this to WordPress was open car is not big enough to have a massive impact.

We were helping tens of thousands of merchants, but we were like, it will be logical to go after the biggest. So the biggest the biggest markets back in the days I think it’s still today is WordPress. So the market share is just over 40 percent of the internet, which is crazy. Shout out to Matt and everyone else who worked on this absolutely stunning project.

And we made nitro pack. In a completely different way. So we decided that NitroPack should be a software as a service and that all the optimizations should be controlled by a single button. Remember the reference I did with the speed up. So what we did is essentially you install the plugin, you enable it, you press a button, which is selecting your mode, like the shift of the car.

You go into drive and then you can choose port. Comfort or economy. So once you install nitro pack, you select your mode, then press a button and you’re off to a good start. So on the back, we will do all types of settings, which we believe are good enough and stable enough for your website.

And we, the reason why we took this approach is that we believe that most of the folks want the complexity out of their life. And while they’re very tech savvy guys who want to go and tinker with the settings, the majority of the people who want to. You know run their own blog or go into a different type of a Entrepreneurship journey won’t as little of technical challenges as possible So we got inspired by this You know as minimalistic as possible as easy to use as possible.

And I think this is something that we’re keeping Today, as our cradle on how we’re building things and how we want people to perceive our our solution.

Chris Badgett: That’s

Mihail Stoychev: awesome.

Chris Badgett: I just keep getting this image of nitro pack is like the Vin Diesel fast and furious. He just has to press one button and then it’s off to the races.

Yeah

Mihail Stoychev: Making it a little bit making it a little bit simpler than it is really. And the, tech team probe wouldn’t, like this as they put so much effort into developing it, but listen, the user has to be able to press buttons and see value. And this is what we’re up to.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. 2013. That’s actually when Lifter LMS started and here we are You know, many years later over a decade or whatever, and it’s amazing when you stay married to 1 problem, like speed up the website for us is teach online. And it’s amazing what you can accomplish over all those years and all those learnings.

And. So congratulations on that, and I know you and it’s cool to come from outside. So you mentioned coming from the open car community and then seeing the opportunity in WordPress. And I know you’ve done some stuff with Shopify as well, and you get to take all that learning and just.

Continuously improve the product and the user experience, making the complex simple, which is like a great path to be on.

Mihail Stoychev: Yes. First of all I, now it’s a pure coincidence, though. I’m so happy. We started our, businesses around the same time. And I couldn’t agree more. I think one of the beautiful things about being able to develop for different platforms.

Is that you’re able to see the good and shiny things about them and the not so good and shiny things about them. And then at the end of the day, share with the community. So whatever we learned in open card was very beneficial for us to start on Shopify and whatever mistakes and things we headed in open card, we found less and less on Shopify.

And now we’re in the opposite situation. So we’re seeing a lot of things which are way better in WordPress than in Shopify. And it’s so empowering to be able to share the good stuff that we took out of Shopify as a platform and see which ones are applicable for the WordPress community.

And I think just like when you go and visit different cities and different countries, you enrich your culture. In the same way we enrich our technical knowledge and our platform knowledge and we can get all the jewels put them into work and hopefully be able to create a good product that’s users will be able to enjoy and if they enjoy, they’ll go and they’ll recommend it to some of their friends.

And if they don’t enjoy it they can go to some of the other alternative solutions. Like I said before, our mission is to make the Internet faster. So the more people can plunge and see what the difference is from a performance website versus a non performance website, not only from user experience standpoint, But at the same time of churn rates, at the same time of SEO ranking, as long as they have are using something we’re happy.

Our mission is complete. Whether they go to us we would love for them to come to us, but it’s it’s a free it’s a free market. And there are other great solutions that I want to give a shout out and respect to. As long as you’re doing something performing a performance base for your website, as long as you’re looking into Core Web Vitals, as long as you score good on page speed for mobile, if the majority of your user base is coming on mobile, or, Vice versa.

If they come from desktop, then I think you’re off to a good start.

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s, awesome. One of the things about WordPress is the community aspect, like you mentioned. And I think we’re in agreement here that part of being a member of the WordPress community is about contribution. And you have a free NitroPack plan and a free NitroPack plugin.

Can you tell us, which I think is great, and I’m a big fan of the freemium model. How does how do people get into it and get started and just tell us more about what’s, available for free?

Mihail Stoychev: Sure. So you go to wordpress. org or directly to nitropac. io or nitropac. com. You go and you hit pricing, or if you go to the org, you just have to download the plugin.

You quickly create an account and you’re off to a flying start. We’ll ask you, which plan would you like to take? Of course, freeze the default one. Be our guest to try before you buy. And when I’m talking about the free plan, this doesn’t mean that it’s a free trial. It’s a forever. It’s a proper forever free plan.

So as long as you don’t reach the quota, which is number of page views or CDN. Then you’re off to a flying start. You can use it forever. We have customers using us for what is it? Four years now since we launched in 2019 for WordPress and we don’t want to bother them with upgrading if it’s Suiting the size of their business.

If they’re happy with the performance, then we don’t want to sell ice to the Eskimo. So we want to go after the customers that we believe we really can make a difference. And of course, with more page views with a different mission critical businesses that they might have, for instance, they can be a big publisher or they can be a big publisher.

software as a service company, or they can be like someone on the verticals a specific WordPress website, which is very, competitive in the industry that they’re running. Let’s say plumbing, for instance, I’m just, or someone going for puppy food. So if they really need this extra boost and extra difference, then we would always recommend them to go with one of the paid plans.

Yes. And all of those come with a 14 day free trial and a money back guarantee. During those 14 days, they can see the difference. We can promise them that there will be a difference. And to take a step back, what we actually offer is a base layer. So over those past couple of years, we were able to select I would say the most necessary features for you to be successful with the business.

And we’re giving those out for free. Again, part of our pricing strategy is being able to differentiate based on page views and based on CDN. So we’re starting with, I would say, a myriad of different features that you’ll be able to enjoy for free, like different caching mechanism, minifications. And I would say one of the main differences of NitroPack when it comes to all of our competitors around is that whatever version you choose, you always get a free CDN and you always get.

A free tool that optimizes your images. So there are plenty of ways that different companies market this. I would say that more often than not, those would be two services you have to buy on top. But with us, since it’s a pack and since it’s a nitro pack, you get everything in the in, in one single foot.

In one basket. So at the end of the day again, our mission is to be able to provide you with a good base layer and a good base there for us means a good grade of CDN and really powerful image and gift and video facades, optimization features. And we believe that this is going to be able to not only boost your score, but increase your chances of essentially passing Core Web Vitals and putting your business at a much higher SEO position that initially you came with.

I don’t know if this answers your question, but this is like my, answer to what it comes with as as default features.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Awesome. Those of you out there listening and watching, go try out nitro pack, try out the free plugin, sign up for a free plan. And that’s an incredible amount of value you’re providing for free.

I’m a big fan of supporting the startup when their business starts to get more page views or traffic and they’re ready to then it’s time to perhaps upgrade to a plan, but while you’re validating and you just want a fast website and you’re, just speeding things up and getting started.

It’s that’s a great contribution you’re making there. You mentioned earlier, like that speed helps reduce churn. But there’s a lot of, I think it’s important for people to know why does speed matter? Could you unpack that a little bit? What do you get when your website is much faster, particularly as a business owner or somebody teaching online?

Mihail Stoychev: Yeah, sure. Just going back to our initial story We, as everyone else in the industry, just decided that if you’re able to bring and show something fast, then the user will be more likely to make a decision of whether they like it or not. Whatever website you had, just being able to make it load as fast as possible and all of the content to be available would essentially be a deciding point of whether the user will stay and consume and the amount of pages that are they going to open subsequently or not.

Afterwards, Google were like, all right it’s great that your site loads fast. It’s great that you have a high score on this. synthetic lab test which is not how the real users are actually experiencing your website. So they came up with a concept called Core Web Vitals, which is once the website is loaded, how your users are interacting with the websites.

And then they will break it down into did the content load fast enough? Did any of the content move or flicker? Is everything on the page the way that it should be? And is there anything else that’s preventing the website from loading as good and as efficient as possible so the user can have as good and positive experience as possible?

So we would measure the amount of pages that they would see once they, Are on the website. And of course, the way that Google measures this is via their chrome browser. So all of the chromium browsers are essentially reporting data back to them as to how users are experiencing their website and Google have a strong conviction that if you pass Core Web Vitals, you’re more likely to retain this user and to take them through the funnel, whatever it can be.

Sign on flow or buying this purchase or reading this next article or calling via contact page, whatever. So the way that we can compare today how solution A is ranking against solution B is there is this thing called Google Data Studio where they take all of the folks That we have sufficient Core Web Vitals data for.

So if you’re a very small store, it wouldn’t make sense for Google to collect data because you don’t have any traffic. If you don’t have any traffic you might have a very fast website, but if no one has heard about you You’re are not the main pain on the map. So once you get sufficient amount of traffic on your website, what you actually do is little by little, Google starts collecting data as to how your real users are essentially experiencing your website.

And all of this data runs not only the platforms, WordPress, OpenCart, Magento, Drupal, yada yada, hosted as well. BigCommerce, Shopify, but they also rank different hosting providers. Again, we would start from hosting A to hosting Z, and then they would start and rank also speed optimization tools like ours.

The goal is to give a map, a 360 map I would say, is cool. is with Google on this mission to make the internet faster, who is performing the best. And at the end of the day, the big price you don’t get like golden you to play if you have optimized X amount of websites. But what you have done is essentially giving Google enough data.

And telling them, Hey, listen, we’re doing something right. Those folks, after they consume our solution, are experiencing the websites way faster. And as a result of this, we’re bringing ABNC to this brand. And we have a lot of data of some of our larger customers. Which shows exactly how a bit of a improvement in the load speed, a bit of a, so the LCP largest contentful paint.

So a little bit improvement onto this, a little bit improvement onto the IMP. And there are actually six metrics in the Core Web Vitals. There are three and then three more, sorry. So six in total. As long as we improve and bring improvement to those Core Web Vitals metrics and If you pass two of them, you fail, you have to pass three of them in order to fail, which means you have to perform 70 percent or better.

So we took, we take always the 75th percentile as a gauge. And luckily for us, and thanks to the hard work of the engineering team NitroPak today is at the top of this report for the good stuff and at the bottom of this report for the bad stuff. For instance, a good stuff is how many websites using NitroPack would essentially pass Core Web Vitals.

Versus competitors, how slow the page will load and how quickly the time to first bite will load essentially. So there are different types of metrics that pretty much measure this. And I can say that this is a good enough cue and Google have confirmed it that recently this became one of the good ranking factors when deciding which site will go.

Bob whenever someone is performing a search and getting the blue links out of a Google search.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s, awesome. Congratulations on, that. Tell us a little bit about, let’s imagine we’re talking to somebody who’s Not super technical. They have a WordPress site and they want to get a baseline of how they’re performing now in terms of speed, what should they do?

Mihail Stoychev: So the easiest thing that they can do is go to Google page speeds and just entered their websites, get a view of how fast they’re performing, get a view of actually. Whether they pass core web vitals or not. So whenever you’re seeing a score there again, this is a lab test. Lab test means that a server somewhere is simulating a user going to your website.

It actually doesn’t mean a lot. So the real deal in our sector is how the real users, so your users are experiencing your website And not how a lab test performs So don’t fall into gauging and measuring number a versus number b because it doesn’t have Absolutely, or it has very little effect to your overall performance and there are plenty of ways that you can inflate or fake this score, so I would say Just see your Core Web Vitals metrics.

Make sure that those metrics are good. And then I would say install NitroPack, install another tool. If you want to compare us, see which one brings you a better bang for the buck and a better score. And at the end of the day, you can make your decision, which one to choose for your performance.

Optimization strategy. I just want to say that unlike other things, those are not great to mix and match. So don’t try to create a cocktail of, I’ll use a little bit of this plugin, a little bit of that plugin, There are plenty of good solutions around the market that go for very budget price.

And if you’re serious about your business, you can consider some of the paid plans. And I think that this is where you would see the most value. Especially if you’re a revenue generating business and even a 0. 1 second improvement of any of the factors can bring you way more than you imagine that you’re living on the table right now.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s educate folks a little bit on speed and let me see how I’m going to frame this question, but. Who’s responsible for speed? Is it like plugins? Is it WordPress, Is it web hosts? And is it speed optimization tools? Like nitro pack? I think the answer is we all are, but help people understand help people understand what WordPress is doing for speed, what web hosts are doing for speed, what plugins do for speed and what NitroPack does for speed.

You mentioned the CDN, the image optimization, and there’s literally 35 different levers you’re, pulling to speed up the website. Give us a tour across those different categories and how they impact speed in terms of plugins, WordPress, hosting, NitroPack.

Mihail Stoychev: Sure. So I would say the biggest impact that you can have.

For WordPress, in my opinion, is WordPress itself. This is why they have a performance team. And this is why they’re working really, hard in order to make WordPress faster for everyone else. We see that this is a topic in the latest conferences as well. And we couldn’t be happier for it.

Because, again, this is part of our mission. It’s part of Google’s mission. And this is pretty awesome. From there on, we obviously have the hosting providers. I think most of them provide some level of optimizations. Usually what they will do is the so called backend or server side optimizations.

And this is great. Some, hosting providers even have even have solutions and they have servers, which are, for instance, Lightspeed is a good example that you get the Lightspeed servers. Then on top of that, you can have their. their solution as well, which works good. But where we excel is we don’t touch the back end.

We don’t touch the database. We don’t play with it at all. It’s very dangerous. We don’t want to be blamed for screwing up something like that. So we would only work on the front end. And we believe that this is where we can make the biggest difference for. We believe that already the majority of the hosting providers have some form of caching.

They have some layer of optimizations going on in the back, and they serve a good purpose. So they’re a good ground. WordPress, good going great. Hosting providers, good going great. Someone going great squared. And then I would say that optimization Performance plugins like ours. What we do is we come and we actually deploy the final and most important step.

The one that really, makes the difference from good to great as the book is. So what we Really in power on is those optimizations which are safe, which pretty much speed of the front end, which actually improve the experience because the user at the end of the day is interacting with your front end.

And yes, some queries might be slow. Yes, some buttons might be loading a little bit slower might, have huge requests that go back to the server. But I think in modern, Website building. We see this less and less often. So we believe the biggest impact can be done on the front end. This was part of our DNA from the get go whenever we started the company and Up until today and for the future, I would say that we wouldn’t be interested into tinkering whatsoever with database or doing any sort of server side optimizations.

Rather than that, we would like to focus and stay on the front end and we would like to continue being the best inbreed at that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s ask about hosting because I get this question all the time, and I’m sure you do too, but we’re not hosting companies, but people ask for a recommendation, particularly concerned about speed and performance.

And different website builders have different budgets and the website maybe isn’t making any money or what we’ll never make money. It’s more content, but then some people have a robust store or LMS or whatever, and I’m not asking for to name names or anything, but how do you think about.

advising somebody on a hosting solution from like the shared hosting, the most economical stuff the, kind of mid middle of the road manage WordPress hosting. And then there’s like really expensive high end plans. Where, should somebody start if they’re genuinely concerned about speed?

Mihail Stoychev: So you, pointed it into the right direction.

Obviously, if you’re A weekend warrior or someone that tries something as a side hustle. I would say try to be as budgeted as possible. So there are always great deals on the long tail side of the costing providers. Pretty much for a few bucks a month, you can get a decent posting and that would be fine.

If you’re still trying to figure things out, there is no need to go ballistic and spend your budget on a hosting provider. Maybe some people will hate me for saying this, but in my opinion, you can make a much larger impression by making a decent website. And also let’s not forget how much money you have to spend in order to drive.

Leads to the top of the funnel. In my opinion, I would run hostings as Very good. I would say that probably 80 percent of the business of every single hosting I talk to is running WordPress. So by the time I think that the competition there is pretty fierce for anyone to be left out in a mediocrity.

So I think whenever you have a strong and and very resilient competition, you have great companies being born. I would start with shared hosting or with something cheaper than I would graduate. So make sure the hosting that you choose can actually, you can grow with it. I’m pretty sure the majority of them, you can, and then if you’re it’s important where the servers are, I would say the majority of the hosting providers now, nowadays are using cloud for all this, so they’re distributed and accessible from anywhere.

But in the end of the day you have to also try to see what other folks are doing. You have to see what type of Solutions the hosting provides. So a lot of hostings are building equal systems around themselves. And within those equal systems, you have quick installs from anywhere in their panels.

For instance, we where we work with any hosting around. So we’re compatible with all the postings in the wordpress equal system. But we have direct integrations with a few ones. The main name drop I’m going to use this Dow EP engine. We work with them for the past four or five months, and we already are sharing a pretty good amount of customers that are enjoying a very fast page speed.

Ever since we created a solution for hosting providers, services which we call NitroPack OneClick. Essentially, we were able to onboard a few more hosting providers. It’s not like you cannot install us if you’re not part of this program, but if you are, then a user will be able to access NitroPack within a single click of a button.

Again, talking about ease of use, I just think it’s the right way to go. At the end of the day, we are slaves to our user base and to our customers. And we need to work our asses off to make their life as easy as possible. And so they trust us with their money. I would say posting go whenever your heart is.

And if you if you’re in doubt you can just test a few, just like with everything else.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. You’re obviously obsessed, Mikhail, with Speeding up websites and you’ve been doing it for a long time. And you, have this strong mission to make the internet faster.

Tell us what in your crystal ball for the future and how nitro packs going to continue to, innovate and WordPress. What do you see in your crystal ball for speeding up the internet?

Mihail Stoychev: That’s a great question. Essentially. What we’re doing today is again, focusing on front end optimizations.

So for us, we want to find more ways that the users can interact in a predictable and fast way with their websites. This is the number one priority. Another strong domain for us is essentially being able to gauge what is the real user value of browsing the website. Again, we were talking about lab tests, about synthetic tests, and then we’re talking about how the real users are essentially experiencing the website.

And what and how does this relate to exactly the service that we’re bringing to the table? So not like going. Yo, come to our website. Okay, you installed the plugin, now go and do a test, then come back, then see what’s wrong. But being able to provide a 360 picture of where your website is, where it used to be before, how good it is now, how many interactions did we help with, how many of those were prolific, let’s say, and reach the final goal.

By the way, what’s the goal? How is the user experience? How is the different use case going to differentiate from, let’s say a publisher to an e commerce website to let’s say a platform, which is on a mission to transform education and help users create educational content. So all of those are different use cases and what we’re trying to create is.

A very simple way for us to essentially show exactly where helping, who are we helping to and if there are problems, how those problems can be pinpointed and addressed with a single click of a button so that you excel and you’re successful Way ahead of your competition. So my dream would be for someone let’s, say, not just starting out because that will be unrealistic, but let’s say a small and medium enterprise.

To be able to do something better than this fortune 500 company, not having this big budget, just being able to use this as like a gorilla secret if type of a tool and being able to win. So being able to arm the, let’s say growing up guys into believing that they can compete with the big wells in the blue ocean.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. I love that. Yeah. I feel the same way about helping the little person or the startup succeed. If somebody has questions, this has been a great conversation and they want to explore NitroPak or connect with you or your team. What’s the best way for people to connect with NitroPak?

Mihail Stoychev: So they can connect with NitroPak by going to our website.

Again I don’t know if I mentioned this, we do have 24 seven support. If they want to reach out to me, I’m always available on LinkedIn or they can email me. I’m at if you see my first name, it’s Michail. So I’m at michail. nitrofac. io. So if you have any particular questions, you can reach out there.

We have a Facebook page. We also are on Twitter. One of the few European companies trying to be on Twitter. So we, we, try to be as as, as open and available as possible. And either me or someone from the team would be able to to, get your questions answered.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you for coming on the show, Mihael.

I really appreciate it. I want to encourage you out there listening or watching to go install the free nitro pack plugin. And really don’t wait to speed up your website because only good, things come from doing that, but thank you Mihail for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.

Mihail Stoychev: Thank you, Chris. Thanks for having me.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post How to Increase Your Website Speed with NitroPack appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Kurt Von Ahnen delves into the intricate process of migrating from traditional SCORM-based learning systems to more agile platforms like WordPress integrated with LifterLMS.

Kurt is a LifterLMS user and LifterLMS expert. His expertise includes handling SCORM content and migration initiatives, in addition to dealing with platforms such as WordPress and Lifter LMS. He describes the difficulty of balancing large expenditures on historical SCORM material with the requirement for modernization, emphasizing the unwillingness to throw away priceless assets.

Kurt suggests doable migration tactics including separating out older information into legacy repositories and reusing content by exporting it in web-compatible forms. He emphasizes WordPress’s adaptability by explaining the several ways that SCORM material may be displayed inside the WordPress environment, such as embedding, lightboxes, and independent tabs.

Kurt’s observations essentially highlight the need of strategic preparation and utilizing WordPress’s features to enable a smooth transfer to contemporary learning management systems.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. It’s Kurt Von Ahnen. He’s back on the show and Kurt works with us here at LifterLMS. And he also has an agency specializing in learning site builds. Today, we’re going to be talking about how to upload and track SCORM content using WordPress with Lifter LMS.

This is going to be a discussion, particularly if you have a. Big catalog of SCORM learning material that you’ve been building at your company over the years and how to get onto a modern, more affordable, more powerful WordPress based learning management system with Lifter LMS. We’re going to dive into it today, but first welcome back on the show, Kurt.

Thanks, Chris. It’s good to be here, man. It’s always fun to work with you. I’m excited to dive into it with you. We’ve been getting more and more inquiries about SCORM content and working with it, with LifterLMS. And I wanted to make some content together to help people that are looking at a move to understand the key variables of what to consider when LMS, like LifterLMS, but let’s start with.

What’s the biggest challenge somebody has when they’re thinking about the move? Let’s say they’re an enterprise. They’ve got tons of money invested in the SCORM content library, and they’re trying to figure they want to modernize, maybe they’re having security issues on their old system. They want to get to something in the, that’s a lot easier to run and, scale and own the asset of the learning management system website itself.

What should they consider right off the bat?

Kurt Von Ahnen: I think one of the biggest things to consider as we have this discussion and we think about who the actual audience is, Chris, I think of these enterprise type businesses that are large in scale compared to what you and I usually think about with presidents and vice presidents and committees and all of these.

Departments and divisions. And when you look at the size of these organizations, typically the training departments been left behind. It’s an afterthought and it’s you say it out loud and people say, oh, that’s not true. But it is companies generally focus on sales. Marketing and they’ll say sales is what drives the business.

And the way that they scale their internal staff is based on the actual sales and revenue and all that stuff that comes in through the front end of the business. So in a lot of cases scorned 20 years old. And so they may have made that decision two decades ago and invested a ton of money and assets in that direction.

So I think one of the biggest obstacles. To your question is, Oh my goodness. Like, how are you the vice president or the president of this big corporation? And you’re about to say, Hey, go ahead and push the delete button on that 1. 6 million file over there. It’s just not, it’s not a reasonable ask and it’s, really hard to get them to, when I say get them talk to these types of enterprise clients into using a different learning process, a different educational builder.

So they, a lot of them will stick with the SCORM generating tools because they made that decision so long ago and they’ve invested greatly in it. And I think that’s the biggest obstacle because after that, they become convinced over time. That they need a special website that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain and host, and it just becomes this never ending black hole of spending that a lot of these companies get locked into.

And then when I started with Lifter LMS, we used to get 1 or 2. Queries a month about SCORM and now we’re getting these questions every week. So I think there’s like this giant awakening. I think the timing is really good to hit the subject matter. And LFTRLMS is definitely a great place to put your SCORM and keep your legacy content alive.

Chris Badgett: Why do you think people are with, whether they’re an enterprise and it’s a training thing for their, SCORM content, or maybe it’s a curriculum provider of some kind with a catalog that they license out? They’re clearly already looking at WordPress and tools like Lifter LMS to make the move. Why do you, so they’re already interested.

They’re, it’s not about convincing them to Hey, check us out this alternative option. They’re already looking. Why do you think that is?

Kurt Von Ahnen: I’m just going to be blunt cost my corporate training background, Chris when you and I first started working together, I was amazed at what I could build in WordPress as far as capability and scaling went.

And I think a lot of people at that time, because we’re going back more than half a decade. A lot of people didn’t think of WordPress in those terms. We thought of WordPress in terms of like brochure websites or the independent course creator or the new startup or the entrepreneur.

And. I think the more that we began to recognize that you can scale in WordPress and you, can bring that content over. I think the more we recognized it, the more other people started to wake up and recognize it too. So we’re starting to see people look for the option. I can’t tell you how, much money people spend corporately on this type of, endeavor.

It’s Always a six figure conversation. Every time you sit in the conference room and have a talk or a meeting about it. And when you get into WordPress, you’re having talks about tens of thousands of dollars instead of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that changes the whole scope of the project.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And I think that’s interesting. Sometimes it’s just the extreme affordability of WordPress and lifter LMS, and even professional agencies like yourself at Manana web dev studios, we’ve worked on with some SCORM. Projects in a way, sometimes in sales, it’s like this thing is so cheap. It can’t work.

Even if I bring in this agency and stuff, it’s still way under the old way of doing things. But I think you’re right. There is an awakening there. And I want to provide a little context in terms of what WordPress is and what. A learning management system on WordPress does. And I actually got this insight from a SCORM and XAPI expert who said, do you realize that you don’t just have an LMS with Lifter LMS, you have an LCMS.

And I was like what does that mean? WordPress is a content management system or CMS. Lifter is a learning management system. LMS. But what, when you put all this together, you have a learning content management system. It’s not just about putting e learning in an LMS. You can do that.

And that’s what we’re talking about today in terms of uploading and SCORM and tracking the your, users and getting all the reporting and everything, but WordPress itself, anything on the internet, you can create that type of content and WordPress natively. Or embed it from another service or tool or file library or whatever.

But I think that’s like a key thing you have to get is this is, you could use a WordPress LMS, like Lifter LMS without a separate e learning authoring tool, because you can create all the learning content, the videos, the quizzes, everything directly with Lifter LMS and WordPress. But we have an issue here, which is if we spent two decades investing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in this catalog of SCORM content, we’re like, I’ve heard this in talking to people transitioning SCORM to WordPress is they say that’s cool.

I want to do the new way of doing things going forward. But I’m not ready to just disregard all this other work and convert all these SCORM content into web content. So there’s that’s a challenge. So how do we deal with that? What do you recommend?

Kurt Von Ahnen: My strong suit when I talk to people, Chris is just problem solving.

Each whenever I consult with a company, each one has a unique use case, right? So what a lot of people don’t recognize is when they make SCORM content, if they use a course authoring tool like Rise or Articulate 360 or one of these, what they’re high dollar tools too, right? Articulate 360, last time I checked was like 3, 000 a year for individual license.

So if you’ve got a team of five people in your company using this thing, you’re already out 15, 000 for the year just for software to make the courses. So just you have to keep that economic scale in mind when you think about all this stuff. But a lot of people don’t recognize that when they export the scorn package, it’s exportable in multiple ways.

And this is where I think a lot of companies made a big mistake. They subcontracted. Some instructional developer to make their scorn package and they got a zip file that they could put into their custom LMS and it worked, but they never kept the original authoring files to alter or to re edit or republish or update content and that stuff.

Tends to get lost over the years. And so these different SCORM authoring tools have the ability to export the material to display on the web, like directly. So a lot of people with SCORM authoring tools, they’ll say, Oh this doesn’t work with SCORM. And it’s wait a minute. You can, if you still have it, you can export that package to be displayable on the web.

So you can say export that as an HTML file, export that used to be able to export them as flash back in the day, but export as an HTML file or export as a zip file or export as, so you have the options. So that’s one thing. If you have the original files, you can repurpose that content, republish it and use it on a standard website.

The other thing that you can do, and this is what I did at Suzuki. When I worked at Suzuki, Suzuki had this amazing catalog of SCORM content. And it went like way back, like just quite honestly, millions of dollars of content. But it was old. It was really old. And to try and get a new technician coming into the field, like to say in order to be certified, you have to know how to work on a 1978 GS 1000.

That’s not realistic anyway. So when I redesigned the learning platform for Suzuki and that interface for students, we took everything that was three years and newer. We put that on our new interface. Then everything that was four years and older, I put into a legacy kind of repository. I was like, we didn’t waste it.

We didn’t hit the lead. We didn’t, it didn’t to the vice presidents and presidents. It didn’t feel like we were throwing away their investment. But we took all of that content and we literally just dumped it into a repository that was accessible by a search link and people could always pull that, resource up, but we didn’t have it on our forward facing learning site, cluttering up the works for the new technicians.

And in a lot of cases. When I consult with a company, especially a large company with a large library of content, that discussion has to happen where you’re like, Hey, let’s just be real. Nobody needs to learn about Lotus 1, 2, 3 anymore. No one needs to learn about Netscape. So let’s take that old content out.

And if you want to save it somewhere, make it accessible somewhere, we can do that. But let’s focus on what the needs are today. And how we’re going to keep you modern and light moving forward.

Chris Badgett: Those are great points. Yeah. Migration of learning management system isn’t necessarily, it doesn’t have to be a switch you flip where you just turn it on.

There can be a period where you have your legacy platform, you’re building out the new platform. You’re moving users over new people are coming to the new platform only. You’ve still got the back catalog if you need it. Let’s talk about taking the SCORM content and putting it onto the WordPress website.

There’s tools like GrassBlade, LRS. There’s other ones out there as well. So this is not like a new problem. People have been working on this for a long time. Grass blade as an example, directly integrates with Lifter LMS. So when they complete the SCORM package, it completes the lesson, feeds into the reporting and so on.

So if your goal is just to take what you have and move it all over, you can. But tell us more your, what people should think about or understand around just putting the SCORM content on WordPress. And I know there’s you taught me some things about, Hey, we’ve got light boxes. We’ve got opening a link over here.

We’ve got. Embed in the page and there’s all these you have a lot of options and it can look really good.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Oh, then that’s the other strange part. Just as I said, a lot of people in the corporate space aren’t aware of all the export options and their course authoring tools. A lot of them aren’t aware that SCORM can appear.

Almost any way that you choose for it too. I, say that in a way. I try I, wish I could say that better. We rewind, redo, . You have options when you put it into a WordPress website that you don’t natively think about if you normally work with scorm. So if you have one of those corporate websites where SCORM pops up and it’s like a popup on the page and it’s its own little box.

That’s called the light box option. So a lot of custom LMSs are just built with that light box option. So every time someone is managing the LMS for the company, they upload the zip file, and then they go to review those zip file or the page, and it just pops up like a light box. And so for the instructional designer, they come over time to just think that’s the way SCORM works.

You know what I mean? Like it just becomes that’s the method, but in reality, it’s content. And you mentioned it earlier it’s a content management system. So how do you want to display that content? Do you want to embed it in a page and have it work inside the page, like page content, but it stays interactive.

So if you have buttons to push or options or Moving images or quizzing as part of your SCORM package, it still operates, but all within that embedded part of the page, you can do that. You can do the standard light box option where you have that standard kind of launch button or some kind of trigger on the page that launches the light box.

But my favorite option, Chris and I think this was a surprise when you and I were doing a demo with web dev studios recently you can have it open in a separate tab and then that SCORM content. It becomes well, and this is just me. It’s my favorite way of doing it because it makes the SCORM content feel like it’s like living and breathing inside the site.

It fills the whole tab of the page, It seems more modern. It seems it’s more responsive because when it’s in there and you look at like on tablet or mobile, it seems to size better. I just, I really enjoy that option. And a lot of people don’t recognize that’s there. One of the ops obstacles, and you mentioned this is you mentioned grass blade or other tools.

And so people start thinking, Oh man, I got to add more tools. I got to that’s a subscription that’s 99 a year. That’s 150 a year. And, but in the grand scheme of things, we already talked about these projects costing over six figures every year to maintain and manage. And now we’re talking about an extra tool that costs 150 a year.

So I don’t even really give that credit. It’s yeah, you have WordPress, you get Lifter LMS, you put in grass blade and it just, And I’ve tried a handful of other different tools and you can get them to work, but I found the most consistent so far for me has been using grass blade in the grass blade.

LRS.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s great. And I like that. You mentioned the content just to put if you work at a company and you have a bunch of SCORM content, know that WordPress as a content management system has been around for 20 years. Lifter LMS has been around for 10 years. We’re really good at content. And for us, SCORM is just another type of content and it’s not a video.

It may have video elements and so on, but text images, interactive stuff videos, audios, PDFs, PowerPoints, all these things are just types of content that WordPress has been dealing with and Lifter LMS has been dealing with for decades. That should hopefully put people at ease. In terms of score, SCORM is just another kind of content that we play with in this ecosystem and make work for learning needs.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah

It’s,

unique, but just to jump in a bit, I remember when I got the job with Suzuki, right? This is like a story that’s. Not related, but I was a power sports person and the Marine people, cause it’s a there’s Marine automotive and motorcycle and the Marine people would always say, oh our outboards are so technical.

Our outboards are so technical. And then when I went to Japan for the training and they pulled the cover off of one of the. Outboard motors because I had to work on it. I was like, that’s it. It’s an engine on a stick. That’s not overly technical. If I can take apart a motorcycle, I can take apart that.

It looks like an engine out of your Volkswagen shoved on top of a stick. And I know that I have a tendency to oversimplify things. But what I just described with that Suzuki experience is what happens in our world with content management versus SCORM people in the SCORM world, because that course authoring software has lots of hoops and things to jump through to make the end product.

They come out of that experience and they go, Oh SCORM is just so technical. I don’t think it would work in a WordPress website. And it’s like. Why do you think WordPress is different from anything else that shows up on the internet? Other than the fact that you own it and it’s open source and all those things.

But to you and I, like you just said, it’s just content. Once it’s authored, it’s content. It’s like you can edit a video with your iPhone or you can edit your video with Adobe premiere plus. It’s exponentially more complicated, but when the video is done, you’re just embedding a video in your website.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, a hundred percent. And another thing that comes up is scale, like training organizations or big corporations that have training needs. They want to make sure it can scale. Just to give you an idea of some of the organizations that use WordPress, we have NASA, we have Taylor Swift. We have the United States government, and there’s many, more WordPress powers around 45 percent of the internet.

And a lot of sites are small business sites or whatever, but there’s a lot of enterprise WordPress, very high traffic, very big needs on the hosting or the server for resources or interactivity and concurrent logins. and things like that. So this is not a new issue, but I think WordPress has a like a perception problem.

Oh, that’s a blogging software. It’s it is, but that’s 5 percent of the features and it can scale to the largest newspapers in the world. If you’re just talking about blogging or articles but it can also scale as LMS, it can scale in e commerce. There’s very large. e commerce sites on the internet powered by WordPress that have a lot of needs.

So anything else you would add on to scale?

Kurt Von Ahnen: The, biggest, the absolute biggest component of e learning for a lot of these enterprise organizations is scaling. So you mentioned scaling, but you’re talking about scaling the amount of users or bandwidth or maybe security, or we’re thinking in those terms, but in the SCORM world, when you have a custom built learning management system, the providers that provide these custom websites at these huge dollar amounts, they have, costs that are based on active enrollment, right? And so if I’ve got up to 500 students, maybe it’s this much money. If I’ve got over a thousand students, if I have over 2000 students. And so once you start growing your enterprise to where you have 2, 500 active students, Chris you’re, spending as much on the per student licensing as you are for the original hosting and maintenance of the site.

It’s, just the way that they. License the product for you to use to teach your, circle, your community. That pricing model is really outdated. We’re going back 15, 20 years when they started putting these things together, but those pricing models in those custom LMS verticals of the internet, they haven’t changed and so when you transfer over to the WordPress model and you look at a tool like Lifter LMS.

A common question we get from people switching their SCORM into WordPress will say how many students can I enroll in my courses? And, we’re confused. We go, As many as you want, how many you got?

Chris Badgett: And how much more does it cost per student? Nothing. I think this is why people are coming over as they’re realizing that whether they’re using a hosted LMS Canva and talent LMS, and you, could probably rattle off some more names.

Oh,

Kurt Von Ahnen: SumTotal, Bridge, LearnUpon all of those that I still remember. I think they all still charge based on active user counts and licensing per user.

Chris Badgett: And, Lifter LMS has none of that. It’s there’s no limit on number of courses, number of instructors, number of students, number of admin users, or all these different user roles on your site.

If you’re selling access to your SCORM content there’s no, you’re not getting we’re not charging you more for that. So it’s, I think it’s that unlimited nature and people are getting used to that or they’re starting to discover like, Oh, I don’t need to pay 30, 40, a hundred thousand dollars a month for an LMS when I could buy LFTR LMS, everything I need.

For 1500 bucks, which also comes with unlimited sites, number of websites you can use it on. And you can even get a lifetime license and never have to pay LFTR again and fix your costs. So when we talk about scale, LFTR LMS and WordPress are infinitely scalable out of the box. Your web hosting is where there is some scaling costs, but even that is far more affordable than the traditional way of doing things.

And there’s great companies out there. Convessio is one that comes pops to the top of my head. We just did a blog post with them about scaling and there’s, a lot of great. Web hosts that people like NASA, the United States government and Taylor Swift use, and it’s fine. And it’s still like way, cheaper than the old way.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. Yeah. And when you mentioned those famous people, it’s like when I was talking to Vic Dorfman about that project we’re working on, he was like, oh yeah, we have the website for the beast. And you think about the millions of users that follow that cat and you go, man, that’s there might be more people going to that website than the NASA site.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the scale concern it’s, basically handled, get the best software. If you’re all mess is the best in the WordPress learning management system ecosystem, there are several great there’s literally hundreds of web hosts out there, but if you’re a large organization, there’s a short list of probably about 10 of the top for that do the large sites and make sure it’s just a seamless, easy experience with a hundred percent uptime and all that kind of stuff.

Kurt Von Ahnen: And that’s, let’s just do the plug while we’re here. If you go to liftorlms. com right at the top menu is the recommended resources and you can go to recommended resources. And there’s a list of themes and hosts and tools and everything in there for people that are just checking it out.

Chris Badgett: Let’s, think about sometimes with WordPress and Lifter LMS as an example, when it comes to a big company adopting. It seems like there’s usually an evangelist within the company and innovator. Maybe it’s the, C the CEO or the owner is trying to cut costs. It’s a technical person who’s Hey, we really need to modernize our tech stack.

Maybe it’s an instructional designer. Who’s you know what these. I want to try to do something with native web content using WordPress. They do everything our e learning authoring tool does. Maybe we should look at this. How do you help somebody who is excited about this kind of sell it to their organization in terms of, could be a technical person, could be a person who’s keeping track of the money and expenses that could be an instructional designer, it could be.

A teacher, like how do we get everybody on board and excited about the opportunity here?

Kurt Von Ahnen: This takes me back. I think it was four or five years ago. You and I did a podcast and you were like, how did you get WordPress into Suzuki? And I was like, I didn’t ask for permission. I just did it.

Chris Badgett: They just wanted the outcome, right?

They just wanted a solution. You found the best. Most economical solution made it happen.

Kurt Von Ahnen: And then when you show it to them, like you put it up on the screen in the conference room you put it up on the big screen and they go, Oh, this is nice. When did you make this? I made it last weekend.

How much did it cost? Nothing so far. Oh, we like it. We like it. So the best advice for people in the learning space, honestly, Dude, sign up for the dollar demo, right? You get yourself a dollar demo. It’s good for 30 days. You go in, you put in the company logo, it, the rest of the sites populated with content and you get used to seeing where things are.

This is groups, this is forums. This is that. Cause the demo has all those. Premium tools on it. And then maybe you, look at maybe putting grass blade onto it, if you really have to show off the scorn, you put grass blade into that demo site that you’ve got for 30 days. Anyway, schedule a meeting with your VP or your director of it get them in a room, shut the door.

And go, Hey, I did some quick research and I see that we’re paying our, current provider 497, 000 this year for our e learning platform. I can build us a duplicate of that learning platform with extra features, right? For 58, 000 and, don’t worry about my salary. Cause I’m already on the clock.

And it’s really hard for somebody in corporate to go, wait, I can say 400, 000 this afternoon,

Chris Badgett: you

Kurt Von Ahnen: know, and say, no, they’ll at least let you explore.

Chris Badgett: And just to empower, if you’re watching this and you are in one of these organizations, you’re interested in SCORM as a training arm of your company, or as a curriculum provider, and you want to look at the WordPress and Lifter LMS.

We have a detailed blog post on our blog. Just Google Lifter LMS blog SCORM. You’ll find it. We have other videos on our YouTube channel about working with this content. We have the dollar demo, so you can start playing with it and see what it’s like to work with a learning management system and WordPress.

And you can build up a proof of concept, like you’re saying with GrassBlade and even just reach out to us. If, you’re looking for a demo, we host live calls typically on Thursdays where we can just open up and show you what you’re looking for with a screen share. There’s a ton of resources here that are visual that you can read about.

That you can view on a video, get a live demo, get a sandbox trial test site to test. You’ve just got options here. So this is a podcast. So we’re talking a lot, but I just want you to know there’s all these other resources to help you make this decision and move forward.

Kurt Von Ahnen: And at the risk of patting myself on the back.

A lot of enterprise clients aren’t looking to have a new project in house. They just aren’t so they’re thinking I can’t give up my provider. I can’t give up having a reliable, sustainable source outside of the office to do this. Lifter LMS has a whole list of vetted.

Experts I’m on the list web dev studios for enterprise work is fantastic. Codable is an option. There’s just a ton of experts available through the LFTR LMS ecosphere that can help you with these kinds of projects. And I know that Manjana Nomas is always open to this kind of stuff.

That’s right in our alley.

Chris Badgett: Absolutely. And it’s a skill set to really have that knowledge of SCORM, corporate, WordPress, Lifter LMS, hosting, when you host your own website, and yeah it’s, there are peop one of the great things about WordPress is the community of people. Agencies and people that can help support your project.

So if your concern is like in your mind, you’re thinking like, I don’t know if my it person can do this. I talked to them and they’ve never heard of WordPress or they haven’t used it. And in a couple of years you can hire, bring somebody outside to build it and you own the asset. It’s your website. You’re just bringing in somebody who’s an expert at all these layers.

Has the overlap with WordPress, SCORM and LFTR LMS and hosting and can really fulfill the project for you and potentially train your team so that they’re one of the cool things about WordPress is it’s empowering. Once people learn how to drive it and you learn how to create a course in LFTR LMS and put your SCORM content in there, go native and WordPress.

It empowers your instructional designers or your content people to, you’re not going to be caught infinitely outsourcing. Or hiring agencies, unless you want to, you can do that, but you can also upskill your team in house.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. And most providers would offer some kind of tutorial or training service to show you how to use the platform once it’s built anyway, and that’s part of the deal.

When you, mentioned an interesting thing, and I want to make sure people don’t get confused or think it’s not possible. So you were saying you could upload SCORM or you could do work in the native course builder kind of environment, right? So the native course builder in Lyft or LMS allows you to put in text, video, pictures, any kind of file, PDF, PowerPoint.

You can just. Cram, anything that works on the web, like Chris said, can go in there, but don’t think that you’re limited. Don’t think you either have a SCORM LMS or a native LMS. That content can be completely hybrid. And what’s really cool is, let’s say you have multiple SCORM pieces and you’re used to your system only playing one SCORM package per page, With Lifter LMS, you can actually stack those SCORM packages in the same page.

Like someone could literally go chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, chapter four, or however you label yours, modules or whatever. Sometimes our lingo is different, but the overall features and benefits. Are of the same theory, right? So we have a course hierarchy with lessons and courses and sections and memberships, which for you, you might think in terms of modules, pages, and chapters, but we’ll figure all that out.

We’ve got people at Lyft Rail MS that can help you line up your lingo and make sure that everything matches up for you.

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s a good point. I want to encourage you if you’re watching this and you have more questions. You can always email us at Lyft or LMS. You can find that wherever, if you’re watching this on YouTube, you can drop a comment down below.

We have a community calendar on our website that you can find on the main menu that has our live events. If you want to come and ask personalized questions as you. Evaluate Lifter LMS and WordPress for your LMS. We’re here for you. And there’s a whole community, like we’ve mentioned of like agencies, Curt’s agency, which is separate from Lifter LMS, Mañana No Más.

If you’re looking for that person to come in and build it out help you develop a proof of concept, even to sell whoever needs to sell, like there’s talented people out there that knows the hybrid tech stack here. And I love what you said about. Clarifying that WordPress is a content management system.

Lift lifters, learning management system, that content can mix and match and be as variable as complex or as simple as you want. So there’s really no limit to the customizability there. And you get to own the asset that you create with your own learning platform, which is. Super valuable, especially in today’s world where you don’t want to get caught just renting access to everything.

And you don’t actually own the asset, particularly as a curriculum provider. You want to build your, asset and your content is just a part of the asset, but the platform. Is really valuable. One thing we’ve seen people doing with SCORM and WordPress and Lifter LMS is they’re like, I want to have multiple websites for different clients.

That’s all possible too. And again, this goes back to the unlimited thing with Lifter LMS, with our top license, it’s unlimited sites. So you’re not going to get charged anymore. You can just build one for this division or this state or this client. And you can work with your like core content.

There’s course importing and exporting and. There’s all kinds of stuff you can do to do a really large multi multiple website thing if you want to, or you can keep it all in one. It’s completely flexible.

Kurt Von Ahnen: One last thing, when we talk about enterprise projects and SCORM sites, and you touched on this, Chris, but I want to make sure we’re clear.

A lot of these companies have. A dedicated CRM tool, then they have their learning management tool, then they have a sales and marketing website, and then they have an inventory site. That’s on an S 400 server somewhere. They have all that stuff and. If they start with moving the training content over and they get that proof of concept working in that WordPress space, that WordPress site has the ability to adapt or adopt the other requirements.

So you can begin to say, Hey, what would it look like to migrate our CRM into that page? Into that page. Into that setting. So then you get rid of that tool that’s costing you thousands of dollars a month. And now you’re running something in your site. Hey, can I run inventory? There’s e commerce tools and all kinds of things that support inventory actions.

So you can go, okay now we can start supporting our inventory inside the site. Then you start looking at your other things. Before you know it, you’ve been able to streamline your whole tech stack. Now I T people are going, Hey, dude, I need my job. But realistically, you can consolidate these things in the one central kind of tool.

And some people might say, Hey, if it’s a real enterprise project, I still want to keep things separate on subdomains, or I want to there’s, different strategies for different companies and use cases are always different. But I find a lot of midsize companies do really good with just consolidating everything, simplifying everything.

And then giving all of their employees, all of their internal users, the ability to take their actions inside that site and use it as the communication portal for the whole company.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s awesome. And that’s just, that’s a great way to paint the picture of what an in state could be. You could end up there.

But all you have to do in the short term is take the first step, get a proof of concept focus on the LMS. You don’t have to kill your back catalog. Like we discussed and you can move forward. You don’t necessarily, you can start your new LMS and get going while maintaining the legacy one.

You have a lot of options. It’s all about just moving forward with the right people, the right tools. The right vision you have in your company and clearly communicating what you want. Cause this is an opportunity for innovation where workflows can be improved. Things can be automated. Tooling can be upgraded while also saving a ton of money.

So it’s a, it was a good conversation. Curt, I want to thank you for coming back on the show. Did you have a final thought there?

Kurt Von Ahnen: No, I was going to apologize for getting off track. Cause I get excited.

Chris Badgett: That’s not off track. I think that’s perfect. Cause that’s the ultimate vision of not only are you cutting your costs, consolidating tools, modernizing your tech stack Upscaling your organization and modernizing it, but that’s all like a a golden path that you can just start walking towards, but I think that’s the important part is begin with the end in mind and just start, walking.

Cause if you’re, and I think that’s what people are doing. That’s why they’re looking at these tools. Cause they’re like, I want to move in this direction. I’m not sure what the first step is. It’s seen, we have like decades of like legacy decisions and content here. So I get that it’s a little bit overwhelming, but all you have to do is start and if you’re investigating and you’re watching this video, you’re already on the path.

Just take the next step. Reach out to us at Lifter LMS with questions. Come to our live calls. You can ping Kurt over directly at his agency, Mañana No Más. And we’re excited. We’ve been doing this for a long time. We’re not going anywhere. WordPress isn’t going anywhere. Our mission is to lift up others through education.

So we’re just here. This is what we do education, whether that’s in a company or lots of different ways that education is done. And we’re democratizing that we’re making it more affordable. We’re making it easier and more to use more powerful, more customizable. We get to benefit from the WordPress ecosystem, which isn’t like one company.

It’s like literally because it powers 42 percent of the internet. There’s literally like hundreds of thousands of professionals who build tools and have services and agencies that can help you. So that’s what it’s all about. Thank you, Kurt, for coming back on the show. Really appreciate it. I know you get passionate about online education and solving business problems at scale.

So it’s, really fun to have this discussion today. Thank you so much for coming on.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Ah, thanks for having me, man. It was great.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post Upload and Track SCORM Content in WordPress with LifterLMS appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Zack Katz shares a comprehensive overview of GravityView and its associated plugins developed by GravityKit. Also he shares how to create a app for your LifterLMS website with GravityView.

Zack Katz is the founder of GravityKit. He is a prominent figure in the WordPress community. In this episode, He highlights how Gravity Forms can be used for more than just standard contact forms; they can also be used as entry points for other kinds of apps on a website.

Zack also emphasizes the contribution GravityKit makes to the functionality of Gravity Forms by way of plugins such as GravityView, GravityCalendar, GravityCharts, GravityMath, and others. Gravity Forms data may be efficiently organized, migrated, edited, and visualized by users with the help of these plugins.

GravityView makes it easier for form submission data to be shown on the student dashboard or LMS website, allowing for functions like report viewing, submission grading, and score summaries. Zack also covers practical uses for Gravity Forms and related plugins, such creating expert or instructor directories, exhibiting user-generated content, organizing event calendars, and automating processes like vacation requests.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Zach Katz from Gravitykit. com. We’re going to be talking today about how to use GravityView, which is a product that GravityKit makes that deeply integrates with LifterLMS so that you can display submission form data in the student dashboard and in other parts of your LMS website.

We’ll get into all that. We’re also going to do a live demo of that, but first welcome back on the show. Zach.

Zack Katz: Thanks Chris. And thanks for having me.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s good to chat with you again. I’m a huge fan of Gravity Forms and GravityView. Let’s start with some basics for people, because I know in my journey, It took me a while to realize that the internet is mostly powered by forms and what that actually means.

And then that’s only half the story, collecting data through forms. Then you might want to use display that data somewhere. So take us down to the fundamentals and talk to us about Gravity Forms and then visualizing data,

Zack Katz: right? So Gravity Forms, best WordPress form out there. Sorry, everybody else, but you’re not as good as Gravity Forms.

I’m coming in hot Chris. Gravity Forms is the best way to create little miniature applications. So forms aren’t just. contact forms anymore. There are really entry points to applications and to jobs to be done for your business. So a form could be a checkout form. If you wanted to sell something, a form could be a student article submission for, their end of year project.

And all these different entry points currently sit in Gravity Forms, and you can connect it up to other places. If you have Gravity Forms add ons, you can get an email with attachments. You can submit it to Google Sheets and stuff like that. But what GravityKit does is we try to take all that Gravity Forms data on your website so that you can create applications for yourself to make your flow work the way you want it to.

Students submit reports, and the teachers log on to your own website. The teachers have can create, you can create views for the teachers to view reports of their own students, grade the submissions right there, view charts of submissions over time, summarize the scores, like all this types of stuff is possible inside your website using Gravity Forms and GravityKit.

And we try to take whatever you’re trying to do for your business. There’s so many different flows that are available to be converted from something where you need to go somewhere else. To, process a an assignment process a log. And instead we can take that internally and you can create powerful integrations with other tools like Lister LMS and create dashboards for your own data that facilitates people in the organization and outside.

You can have it be internal only private to you, or you can have it be public, have people be able to browse this data publicly as well.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s awesome. And I’m a GravityKit and Gravity Forms user. I’ve been using Gravity Forms for over 10 years. And two of the ways we use it on the LifterLMS website is we have an experts program where people ask us all the time to refer them to freelancers and agency folks.

That have experience and skills with LifterLMS. So we created an experts program. If somebody wants to get that business and generate client leads from LifterLMS, they go through our little application form and a lot of the data that they’re submitting, like their profile picture, links to their website, their contact information and stuff like that.

GravityView, once we approve the submission, then turns it around and publishes all those experts in a directory. And we actually have it on randomized order so that the order of people that show up is always random. That way somebody who, joined a long time ago doesn’t just end up always at the bottom and alpha, alphabetizing isn’t always fair.

So we, we use the random feature. And we do something really similar with pictures that people submit and website links of websites, they’re proud that they’ve built with lifter LMS. We call that a showcase. It’s also randomized and it allows us to create user generated content by our users that we can then approve and display on our website.

And I just want to put another for the LMS user out there. We get a lot of people who want to build. a Udemy clone or a course marketplace or certify certain professionals. And these are places where a directory becomes comes in handy where if somebody wants to teach on your LMS platform, they can submit an application form.

And with all the details you need that later displays on a like an instructor’s page that has all the people or all the people that were certified to this program. Really, the options are completely limitless and what I’m most excited about is it takes away, you can build all that kind of content from scratch using WordPress or page builders.

But if users just have the stuff and you’ve got the layout set you’re, literally automating so much quote, busy work, building out like a nice looking page of teachers or certified professionals or businesses or so many different ways to use it.

Zack Katz: Yeah. And one of the things we offer is GravityCalendar, which is a way to display Gravity Form entries on a calendar.

And that creates a calendar feed that you can subscribe to on your apple calendar app, for example, or Google calendar. So for one way that you could use this is for teachers to submit events for a school and the school could have a form where you teach to submit events and all these teachers, once it gets approved.

Can submit their own events to the school, people can subscribe to the school calendar, and voila, it takes care of it all with, just with Gravity Forms and GravityCalendar, you can bypass so much complexity and have teacher, give teachers the power, and administrators have an easy time setting up the functionality.

And then you can embed a calendar on a page that shows upcoming events you can click into it and see You can embed GravityView views inside the calendar itself to show people who have signed up for different events. It, you can build out applications one step at a time, drag and drop, no code required.

It’s really powerful for educators. And we have a ton of people who are using GravityView and our other tools for educational purposes.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You just gave me another project by the way, cause we have a community calendar at LifterLMS. com and what you just described is way better than how ours works and in our case, like different team members need to add events to a calendar that the public needs to subscribe to and all that, and that is That’s really cool.

I’m going to have to dig in on that one.

Zack Katz: And I have a we have a team vacation calendar that we have internally that people submit vacation requests and I subscribe to that on my Apple calendar so I can see what team members are taking off on the weeks coming up. We, love that functionality as well.

Chris Badgett: Perfect. Perfect. Let’s double click and go a little deeper on what you were just talking about in terms of. view is one product within GravityKit. Can you just describe and explain the main products in the suite that makes up GravityKit? Sure.

Zack Katz: We have a bunch. Our goal is to allow the, allow you to view, export, edit organize, migrate all your Gravity Forms data.

We have different ways to view your data like GravityView and GravityCalendar and GravityCharts that we have an easy way to create charts from Gravity Forms data. So if you Will also I’ll show you that later in this broadcast But we have you can embed a chart inside lifter now with this new GravityView integration we also have GravityMath to do calculations like advanced summing, dividing, like all sorts of algebra with your Gravity Forms data and arbitrary numbers.

So if you ever need to do calculations with Gravity Forms, that’s the way to go. And we have easy ways to import and export using Gravity, import and Gravity, export and Gravity migrate to move. If you have multiple sites writing a whole bunch of Gravity form stuff, and it’s frustrating to have to recreate it on each site, we bundle it up into one thing and you can migrate it all at once.

That makes it really easy. Then bulk actions with Gravity actions. If you need a way to see all the changes that you’ve made over time, like track changes, but for Gravity Forms, we have Gravity revisions. And then if you need to make easy changes to your data, gravity edit. So Chris, we’ve got a lot of add ons, but they really come together.

We’ve created each one of these add ons because we’ve identified a need that our customers have for an additional. important part of their toolkit that they don’t have. So we built an out on and now they all work together really nicely. And we find that people can create incredible applications that power entire websites that some of these replaced their software that they said they were paying 120, 000 a year.

For this software, for this custom education software, they’ve built out some,GravityView that do this functionality instead. That type of power powered by your own website data you own and control. That’s what you get with Gravity Forms and GravityKit. Awesome.

Chris Badgett: And you, have some fans live with us here today.

James Tryon says, hi, Hashim says he loves that GravityView original theme song. Yeah, Zach and his team. There’s a lot of great creativity and the way they do their marketing and branding is awesome. So definitely go check out GravityKit. com and you’ll see what I’m talking about. One just kind of base level question.

If somebody is new to this and I realized this with lift your LMS as well. Is it takes a moment sometimes for somebody to understand the difference between a website and an application, like with Lifter LMS, you’re actually building a web application. Yes, it’s a website, but it’s an application that does all these things, but maybe you can help me describe, help somebody grasp that concept of what makes an application different from just a website.

Zack Katz: Let me come up with a metaphor on the spot. You can have a house is your website and then you can bring running motor into your house systems. Yeah. So like you, there are multiple systems inside your house your furnace and that could be an application in your house, which is your website and your house can contain multiple systems.

Maybe that’s a metaphor. I like that.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Cause it’s really going beyond just content management, which in itself is an application, but the It’s not a static website. You’re building like learning management systems, directories, some e commerce application using Gravity Forms and Stripe or whatever.

So it’s really amazing what you can build on a WordPress site.

Zack Katz: Yeah. And if you see people advertising a feature that can like an LMS, for example, that’s an application, like not that an LMS is a feature, it has many features, but Your, site can run multiple applications at the same time.

Chris Badgett: Kind of like your phone and all the apps. Chris, that’s a much better metaphor. Yeah. I didn’t even think of that example until we talked about it. That’s how we learn in community, as they say. So one of the cool things that you’ve done with your LifterLMS GravityView integration, Lifter LMS has a concept called a student dashboard.

Student dashboard. And in that dashboard, a user has their own unique view of the courses they’re enrolled in, their progress, their grades, their order history, if they’re making purchases. And there are certificates and all kinds of things. But now you’ve integrated GravityView into the student dashboard.

And before going into that you can display GravityView anywhere you want on your website. Can you talk like with shortcodes and stuff? Can you tell us how, just the basics of to get a view somewhere on your website.

Zack Katz: Sure. Yeah.

To create a view, you have a preexisting Gravity Forms form that collects the data, and then you create a view from that data where you drag and drop the fields that you want to display.

And say, if you have a contact form with name, email, phone address, but you only want to display somebody’s name. And if you want to, if you click the name, then it goes into a full profile. That is something that you set up with GravityView And so those, once you create a layout of fields that you want to display, you save it and you can embed it on a post or a page using a shortcode or a block, or you can also just link to it directly where it’s a custom post type of people know what that is.

It’s like a post or a page. but often people choose to embed it in existing content. So embedding it in existing pages and that you can do no problem. But what we were finding is that people wanted to have this data for the currently logged in user. They wanted to show only that logged in users data inside Lifter LMS.

So they could say I have this person who uses Lifter who submitted a bunch of school reports, for example. But. there isn’t a way to display GravityView inside Lifter without customizing it. And so what we did is we developed this integration where you can choose the display to display multiple views if you want inside a LifterLMS student dashboard.

where you can choose to display the current user, current logged in users entries. You can display the role of the current logged in user. So if somebody is a teacher or if somebody is a student, you can choose to display different data based on their role. You can customize it however you want now with GravityView having its own tab and you can rename the tab as however you like.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s, jump into a demo. Cause I know we’re throwing around a lot of jargon and words and stuff here. What if if you’re watching, I just want to encourage you to, go over, or I’m sorry, if you’re listening in your earbuds and the podcast app for this segment of the episode, I encourage you to go to our YouTube channel and just look up GravityView Zach Katz.

Podcast. You’ll find it. And and you’ll be able to see what we’re talking about here. But if you want to guide us through a demos act, that’d be great. And and we’ll and do your best to, do it in a way that if somebody’s just listening, they’ll pick up what you’re laying down.

Zack Katz: Yeah. That sounds good.

All right. I am now selecting my screen to be shared.

All right, we good? Yeah, we’re good. All right. I am showing my website. Actually, we’re

Chris Badgett: We’re getting the stream yard from your share. I think you shared the wrong tab. Let me know. Okay. Stop screen.

Zack Katz: Sorry about that.

Chris Badgett: It’s all right. It’s live. This, we always have little hiccups with live technology.

Zack Katz: All right. I’m showing my entire screen this time. Can you see that?

Chris Badgett: Let me put it up on the screen and as we’re recording, I can hear my wife firing up the chainsaw outside. So that hopefully that’s not coming through. But if it gets really loud, let me know. But yeah, we’ve got we’ve got a chart GravityKit website and a chart up.

Is that the right screen? Yep,

Zack Katz: that’s

Chris Badgett: the right screen. Cool.

Zack Katz: So I have a Lifter LMS site. Lifter LMS is running. I have multiple courses that I’m displaying and one of the courses that I have subscribed to that I have enrolled in is a seven week fitness challenge. And in Lifter LMS you can embed a form inside each of the courses.

And we have done that so that you can In this one week, for example we have a form that says log your workouts for this week and the form has a date field, a day of the week, a length of the workout in minutes, workout type, strength training, cardio, yoga, Pilates, describe your workout, how did you feel?

So this is activity tracker. And As you can, as you continue throughout the course, you would submit your workouts for the lesson and you go to the next lesson. So each of these submissions then becomes a, an entry in Gravity Forms. And we want to display those entries for each student and embed those inside their LifterLMS student dashboard.

So I’ve created a view to show that data where I have embedded a chart and I’ll show you how to create that. I’ve embedded two different actual, two different types of charts. And I’ve want to show the day of the week, the length of the workout types. And these are all fields inside GravityView, configurator, where I can add different fields to show different content.

I saved that view, and then I chose to go to Lifter LMS settings, the integrations tab, and there’s a new option here that says GravityView. So this is the GravityView integration that appears when you have GravityView installed and activated. You’ll see it under Lifter LMS settings, integrations, and click GravityView, and you can see that you get to enable and disable the integration.

Choose the name of the menu in the Lifter LMS student dashboard. You can change the endpoint slug. So if you want the URL to be different, so you can say slash my hyphen workouts, which is a nice thing you can customize. And then you can also change you can choose which views to display inside your LifterLMS dashboard.

Right now I’ve chosen only to display the workout log. I’m clicking now to show the tab in LifterLMS, where you have a dashboard for the courses that you’re currently enrolled in. And there’s a new menu item in Lifter LMS, it’s called workout log. It shows a dashboard that you, that we just created in GravityView.

And this is all powered by the data for the current user in terms of their workouts that they’ve submitted inside Lifter LMS itself. So you can see a chart, a bar chart of workout minutes per day. You can see a pie chart showing different workout sessions workouts by types of like strength, training, yoga, Pilates, cardio.

And also there’s a table of workouts that have been logged showing organized by date and you can click into those and right inside left or LMS student dashboard. You can see each of the entries. that you’ve submitted and you can give your users the ability to edit their own entries.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post How to Build an eLearning App Without Coding Using Gravity View appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Alex shares information on Siren Affiliates, a platform made to enable collaborations outside of conventional affiliate networks.

Alex Standiford is owner of Siren Affiliates. He highlights how adaptable Siren Affiliates is, able to work with a variety of collaboration models outside of affiliate marketing. It facilitates content programs, for example, in which partners produce material directly on the platform to impact visitor engagement and generate revenue depending on particular criteria, such as views or interactions.

Alex talks about the value of creating dashboards that are easy to understand, customized for each partner’s position, and tightly integrated with current systems like WooCommerce or LifterLMS. Through this connectivity, partners are guaranteed to have easy access to pertinent performance data without having to deal with intricate back-end processes.

Last but not least, he stresses the significance of beginning small when introducing a platform of this kind, first interacting with a chosen set of partners to obtain input and improve the offering.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special repeat guest. His name is Alex Standiford. He’s from siren affiliates. You can find that at siren affiliates. com. This is a product that’s coming out or has just come out. For affiliates and all kinds of innovation around what partnerships are and how to leverage them on your WooCommerce and your learning site.

It’s, super exciting. Just all the innovation and Alex’s thoughts around creating effective incentivized partnerships, but first welcome back on the show, Alex.

Alex Standiford: Hey, Chris, I’m glad to be here. It’s been a minute. I’ve the weather is a little different than it was last time.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s a little different.

What you’re building here with siren affiliates is really at the heart of online business. In the sense that we, as creators, we make things, we sell things, we create digital products or physical products, content, we’re creators. So anybody listening to this episode, if you’re watching us they have a desire to create, but then what happens with the artist, the creator, is they have to sell and then they do as best as they can, but then they want to look for partnerships and they want help with content and they want technology to be able to facilitate or help facilitate all those relationships and contributions.

So I’m super pumped about siren affiliates. At a high level or sorry. Yeah. Siren affiliates. com. I checked myself because you’ve often said in our conversations, it’s not just affiliate. There’s more going on here. So give us that broad, high level view of your vision for siren affiliates.

Alex Standiford: Yeah. Okay, great.

You’re right. It was with great difficulty. I had to go with siren affiliates because I just couldn’t think of a term that people would instantly latch onto, right? It’s the de facto online partnership that people think about in this context. So siren affiliates is an affiliate platform.

But unlike your typical 1, it doesn’t look at an affiliate program as the only program you can possibly create an affiliate program is 1 of many different types of programs that you can make as long as you can track. As long as you can measure a person’s performance, you can pay them based on that performance.

So I think of it as a pay for performance platform more than anything. I’ll give you, I’ll give you a more solid exam, a couple of solid examples here. An affiliate program is one, right? So you pay, you have a special affiliate link that an influencer or maybe some kind of content creator, whatever they are, they have a link that they give to their people.

You’ve heard these, right? Like use coupon code, blah, blah, blah at the checkout. They want that because they want to get credit for those sales. But what if I am a content? What if I want to have people write content on my own site instead of their site? So I could maybe create something like a content program where you publish content through my site instead of your own.

Maybe, you’re finding people who don’t have an audience or something like that, but they’re good writers and you just need content on your site. So you could create a writing program where anytime somebody visits that specific post, maybe that’s a trackable event, right? Somebody visited this specific post, so you can associate that person with that visit and then turn that into a sale or into a referral or something like that, just like you did with the influencer or the content creator that’s outside of your site.

So that would be a whole different program that could work in addition to an affiliate program. So you could potentially stack. Different programs together, or mix them together in different ways. Another possible option could be something like this is this is right up your alley. Of course, creation set up.

Maybe maybe you wanted to create a a learning site that is built by several course creators, and maybe you want to manage all these course creators. And help them provide them with a platform to publish their content. It would be Siren makes it, will make it possible to set it up so that those people can earn a percentage of your profits based on their courses performance.

Maybe it’s based on the number of people who complete the complete courses. It could be based on how many minutes people spend watching those videos. It could be. Based on anything. If it’s measurable within say lifter it would be integrated in a way that you can track that and reward those people directly.

Chris Badgett: That’s really cool. One of the most popular videos on our YouTube channel is how to build a Udemy clone, and you’re essentially saying if you want to do that this is siren affiliates. It’s the best I’ve ever seen and how you’re laying it out to manage all that. Cause it sounds easy. Oh, I want a website like you did me, but there’s a lot going on there and you take it, you always take it even further, like not just revenue share, but how do we get those creators on our platform, helping bring traffic, pay for performance on that.

Create content, pay for performance on that. And what is the conversion? It’s not just a sale. Like you said, it could be a view or a time on the side or whatever. There’s like lots of options there.

Alex Standiford: Yeah, exactly.

Chris Badgett: Tell us, you’re also innovating around, we were talking about money, like affiliate commission or incentives.

But you’re also thinking about award awarding partners with things like credits or cash, tell us how you envision the reward program or the award program.

Alex Standiford: Yeah. So any given affiliate or any given reward program pay for performance program at all, is. It really is broken down into a few things, right?

It’s broken down into what is the thing you’re tracking? How many, how much is that thing worth? So if you have a visit, that’s worth maybe let’s back to that blog example. Maybe a blogger writes a post. Maybe a visit is worth 1 point and maybe a comment is worth like 10, right? So you’re able to like, track multiple things and assign a value to those things.

And based on that value, you can then determine what the payout is. But the payout doesn’t have to be money. It could be store credit. It could be cash, right? It could be high fives whatever works for you. Maybe you have some kind of internal system where you are like a big company or something like that.

And you have a support setup like this. I see this a lot for like bigger corporate companies where They have an internal reward program, where if you have so many points, you can go and spend that on a 25 Starbucks card or something like that, right? This system could also work with those internal teams, like a support team.

You could set up a program where there’s a specific pool of points that your team can earn based on their respective performance. Whoever gets the most good high reviews or the best feedback or the satisfaction rates high, or maybe it’s based on the number of sales. They the people they convert or something like that in those sales.

There’s so many different ways that this can be approached. Not even just in terms of you do a thing, I give you a dollar. It can be. You do a thing and I give you store credit. I give you some other currency. It can be anything.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s, super cool. Talk to us about the dashboard experience and, also you’re, launching this with a focus on WooCommerce.

So WooCommerce has a dashboard, but the, whole. Affiliate or partner program. It needs its own dashboard stuff. So what’s going to be possible there?

Alex Standiford: Yeah. That’s actually going to depend a lot on the integrations. My goal with this is to make it so that the collaborators, I call them collaborators, affiliates, or whatever you want to call them, right?

The, your partners. Is to provide them with an interface where they can have. Clarity and on the statistics that they need, but depending on what integration you’re using, that can vary. An affiliate doesn’t necessarily need to see their list of courses. But they, because they don’t have any, but they do need to know how many people have.

Visited the site as a result of their link, how many people have converted and all kinds of other statistics. And affiliates. Okay. Dashboard might look completely different than a course creators dashboard. And I am setting this up so that the dashboard will integrate deeply with those different things with the expectation that.

You won’t even have to those people don’t even necessarily have to see the WordPress dashboard at all. With lifter, for example, 1 of the, 1 of the simple the clear ones is for a course creator program. You can the, affiliate dashboard would include a list of their courses that they have and then they would have the opportunity to view that course or edit that course.

And once they click edit, that would take them into the the, LMS lifted LMS is course editor. For their content.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I know people get really focused around affiliate programs in terms of following the money. Can you give us a little more, like how it would work? Like, how would, what are some ways you could set up the money flow, particularly in the Udemy clone example, what are some options around how that works?

Alex Standiford: Okay. So One of the challenges, one of the, years that I’ve had whenever I’ve built programs like this, because like, all of this is coming from a decades worth of knowledge for me building these programs in my own agency. I didn’t have the software to do it. I was modifying existing affiliate solutions to make this work.

But one of my biggest fears was always. Now, I never wanted to decouple the money that’s coming in from the money that goes out, right? Because you don’t want to accidentally owe more money than you’re paying out. So there’s a little bit of a danger there, right? Because if you have an affiliate program and maybe you’re paying like 40 percent on that and a content program, and it’s maybe it’s paying 40%, these are really high percentages.

I’m just giving you an example. And then maybe you also have a sales program that’s like separate from your affiliate program. And it’s also 40%. If all three of those can stack, you’re paying 120%. You’re going to end up losing money on that. So you have to be thoughtful about the, out in the end.

And in order to solve that, I’ve created different ways to allow people to, make the payout methodologies work. So you can obviously do a percentage, right? You can also do a fixed amount, just like you can with any other affiliate program. But there’s two other ones that I’m really excited about. One of them is they’re both profit shares.

So one’s a weighted profit share and one’s a basic profit share. And this is literally what you’d companies like Udemy is doing. They, if you go and you look at their terms, they literally say, we take all of our profits and we take 25 percent of that. And we give it to all of course creators that money is the pool that is available among all course creators.

And the amount you get for that is based on how much your performance, right? How much traffic you’ve driven. So this is literally just doing that exact thing. So you can create a weighted profit share where you say. This month, my, my memberships earned me a thousand dollars or something like that.

I am paying out 25 percent of that amount to all of my course creators. So I would have a 250 pool available to all of them. And it’s just based on how much. How their performances, right? I was saying earlier, a comment or a visit was like, worth 1 point or 5 points. You could translate that into course content with every time a student completes 1 of their courses.

They get a few points or something like that, and maybe it’s every time a video is completely viewed or 80 percent viewed or something like that. Maybe it’s like a 10th of a point for every like minute watched or something like that. There’s, you can create this holistic way to measure the health and the effectiveness of a course creator around multiple different statistics, not just 1 and then use that in combination with the different payout methodologies.

That allows you to make sure that you are not only paying them based on their performance, but also making sure you’re not inadvertently paying out more than you’re bringing in.

Chris Badgett: That makes sense. Very cool. Yeah. It’s, like creating a course. Like you really have to do some. Design time and structure time and make sure you build, you think through all the cases, like what, if somebody is an affiliate, a creator and all these different things, what challenge I see in the space, or it’s more of an observation is that there are affiliates that are classic affiliates.

They may not even be a user of your product. They’re trying to make money online through affiliate marketing. And some like at Lifter LMS as an example, selling software we have some affiliates like I just described, but then there’s also some of our users become affiliates to develop another income stream.

And then there’s this. Other thing where somebody just, it would be called a referral program where maybe they get some points or credits based on their referrals, but they’re actually not that interested in affiliate marketing. They just want to refer it’s like the same folks who would leave you a five star review on a review site,

Alex Standiford: your biggest fans.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, but they’re just not really interested in becoming affiliate marketing or becoming affiliate marketers. As I think through having an option for everybody, maybe somebody just wants to write content for your blog and they have a different thing or motivation. And then maybe you have that power user that wants to do all of that.

A super fan. How do you think through, or what would your advice be in terms of as a platform creator educating people about all your different programs and Basically, it’s one thing to build the programs. It’s another, the pay for performance programs. It’s another to get people really using it. And yeah.

So what are your thoughts around that?

Alex Standiford: So I actually did an email series. I have an email series that’s related to this, but basically I, whenever I’m starting a program and I’m going to do exactly this with siren, I’m starting. Small and private, you have to treat this almost in the same way.

You treat a product launch, right? You’re in a lot of ways. This is a product launch. You’re launching an offering to the public. You have to treat it like that. Do you know what I mean? So you, start with your existing contact list, your existing contacts and you, start. Trying to find interest engage how much how many people would potentially sign up for something like that.

Obviously, you want to have something prepared ahead of time, but you wouldn’t just email your entire list with a program without you wouldn’t email your entire list. That you have a course that’s ready if you never looked at the course or made sure it worked. So why would you do that with a program like this?

So you would want to test it a little bit. Make sure it’s working. Make sure it’s effective. Make sure it’s. Helping, and in order to do that, you you want to do almost like a private. Smaller launch where you have. Maybe you’re testing it out with 10 or so people that you think are really going to be a great fit for this and you start there.

You work with them very closely. You have meetings. You get feedback. You talk to them and you work with them to succeed. And with all of that information, you now have, you’re now going to be properly equipped to actually be able to, others succeed at a bigger scale. So once you have that initial logic and then initial information, you can educate at scale.

Even if it’s a court, it could literally be a course, right? It could actually just be a course on how to sell your product. But it, the important part is you have to look at these people as partners. And like customers, and you were in a lot of ways, their coach, right there, you’re helping them succeed.

They’re not helping you succeed. And once you flip that mindset, and you think about it like that, it really changes things. There’s a lot of people out. There’s a lot of affiliate programs out there that. All they ever talk about is how do you get 100 affiliates? How do you get 1000 affiliates?

And almost every time I’ve ever spoken with somebody who has an affiliate program that’s actually bringing in a meaningful amount of money, they will always tell you. Oh, yeah, like 90 percent of it comes from a handful of my affiliates and the rest of them don’t really do much. So why are you worried about getting 100 affiliates when really all you need is 10 really good ones.

So start there, start finding the really good engaged ones, run with them, work with them, figure out what’s working for them and for you, and then try to scale that up to set up success for everybody else.

Chris Badgett: I think at Lifter LMS we have around 1500 affiliates and just to confirm what you were saying about 30 of them really move the needle.

Yeah. So why not just focus on the 30 not exclude people, but like when you think about it, think about quality over quantity.

Alex Standiford: Yeah. And even dig into meeting with them and talking with them and treating them. As like super affiliates partners. Exactly.

Chris Badgett: I also agree with what you said about the courses. Like we actually, I think we’re about 60 days into a new free course we made on our left rail mess Academy about how to become an affiliate, understand it. These are the players. This is how it works. This is how to join a program. This is how to promote and actually investing in training your people to be good partners is a really good idea.

One of the areas I got into trouble. Earlier on as a course creator, essentially building a Udemy clone, I had a organic gardening and permaculture site, and I would partner with these. This is before Lifter LMS. I would partner with these some really amazing experts. People would fly all over the world to see these people talk.

And. And I would show up with my video camera or hire a videographer, like basically record the content, do the add them to the website, do all the tech stuff, promote it. As a bootstrapped entrepreneur, one of the ways that I was able to do that with very little resources is I gave away, I just kept it simple and did like a 50, 50 partnership.

On the revenue through those programs, and there was an affiliate program on top of all that as well. But what I found over time is that the partnership ended up being skewed in the sense that, of course, they’re the experts content was really valuable and important and key. But I was doing all these, this work ongoing for marketing and growing and maintaining the platform and administration and all that stuff.

So you mentioned it before, but I just wanted to dig in a little bit. Do you, in your time in the industry, what do you see as like good partnership percentages? And I know that’s an, it depends answer, but I think the classic question is. If I do an affiliate program, what should my percentage to affiliates be?

Do you have any advice around that?

Alex Standiford: Do that for me, I based that entirely on my profit margin.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Alex Standiford: And how many different programs I want to have and the different roles that I want to create in my business. Because I really, that’s what I see this as I see these partnerships as. An encapsulation of a role in my business, right?

So the sales program is for myself, the sales people that I want to have in my business the, content writers has a program. I’m actually going to do a bug bounty program in siren. That’s for developers. Like my, a lot of my solution for hiring and outsourcing development. Is going to be through siren using a program.

It’s programs all the way down. But the for me the, rate to charge depends. Of course, it depends on what your competitors are charging and what they’re offering and all of that stuff. But it also depends on what your profit margin is, right? So if you’re. If your margin is 50% or something higher like that, then you can probably get away with doing as much as 30 percent of that going into your affiliate rate or something like that.

But if you’ve got like a 10 percent or lower rate, which I’m sure most of your customers don’t have because they probably don’t have a lot of overhead because it’s a digital product. Then you’ve got to look at lower, really low rates. And actually at that point, it might be hard to even compete and create a competitive affiliate program.

But that doesn’t mean that just means that an affiliate program may not be right for your specific business. That doesn’t mean that other programs aren’t right. It’s just, you have to like reframe what are your partnerships? What are the things that you need in your business? So if you looked at your Company structure, even if you are just a single solopreneur, or maybe it’s just you and a partner you look at what are all of the roles in the business and every 1 of those has an offer.

Probably has an opportunity. Not all of them, but most of them have an opportunity that they can be done either as an with an employee. With a freelancer or with a program that somehow incentivizes people to do it. The program may not 100 percent replace an employee or something like that. But for me as a solopreneur, if I can get two thirds or even a third of my content on my site written by somebody else who’s being paid based on their performance that’s, a big deal, right?

I’m, able to cut back on how much time I’m spending on this Without necessarily spending more money on it today.

Chris Badgett: I love that. That’s a really good reframe to think of it as a team member, independent contractor, and literally in the U S and this is not tax or legal advice. You, if an affiliate makes over 600 a year you’re, that’s an independent contractor, 10 99 form that has to be filed and stuff like that.

But yeah, thinking about it as a team makes a lot of sense. And pay for performance is a powerful way to create a great product or service. Because instead of the team member or partner having the mindset of I have a job, this is how much I make every two weeks or a year. It’s I get paid on results.

And that’s why like real estate agents as an example, have a commission that they make if they sell the house. And that’s, we see this a lot in sales, but it can go to other places as well, which is one of the amazing things that’s so innovative. With siren affiliates tell us more about pay for performance, like some other ideas for people.

Alex Standiford: Sure. And the

Chris Badgett: impact of it.

Alex Standiford: And also it doesn’t have to be 100 percent that, right? So you could, this could also be something that augments a an existing, like employee or something like that. So maybe you have a

Chris Badgett: Bonus Exactly.

Alex Standiford: Yeah, precisely. You can use it to incentivize People for those kinds of things.

And I don’t necessarily know if it would help you get a better rate or anything like that, but it certainly is. There to help incentivize people. If you’re trying to, if you’re at a point where you are trying to, if there’s like a specific number or some kind of specific statistic that you really need to work on, maybe your churn rate is really bad or, something like that, like in software, that’s what we deal with right now.

I guess you’re guys, your customers do as well, right? They have to deal with churn because they have memberships. So you can look at that and say, what do we need to do to fix that? To improve this, right? And one of the things you can do is build a program, around that for the people who can actually make change in that regard.

So you can, instead of spending money on more marketing and exclusively on more marketing and more things like that to improve that you can take that and then reinvest in your own people and not and it’s a win because not only are you giving them something to focus on and something to a motivation, but you’re also You’re instead of taking that money and then giving it to some other company or some other entity, you’re keeping it in house, right?

You’re not you personally aren’t getting that money, but I think it’s cool to be able to improve the welfare of the people who work with me by directly giving them. A reward for having an improved impact on the things I care about.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s, dig in a little more on WooCommerce specifically.

WooCommerce is, there’s a lot of sites out there that use it. There’s a lot of them that want more sales and maybe you want help creating products and programs. What could a WooCommerce user do regardless of whether they’re using an LMS or not?

Alex Standiford: Woo. The there’s the affiliate program.

Of course, there’s also the sales program, which this is interesting because it is different than an affiliate program in my head. Whenever I say sales program, I’m thinking more of the traditional sales person, right? The person who actually reaches does like the outreach and things like that.

They’re usually the closers right there. They’re the ones that actually complete the conversion or something like that. Particularly if you’re selling like higher priced things. A salesperson can make a lot of sense, even if they’re working in conjunction with an influencer or a, content creator, I keep saying influencer cause it’s anyway.

So maybe the content creators are bringing the people to the site and then that is somehow setting up some kind of flow elite, it’s just coming in as a lead. And then the salesperson takes that lead and they’re able to you To convert that. And if that salesperson converts that sale, they get a cut.

And the person who actually made the original referral also gets their cut too. So what’s really interesting about that to me is, and that’s distinctly unique about Siren and the dynamic of creating multi platforms like this, is those two people now have a vested interest in working together. So instead of it being affiliate, an affiliate program, which is inherently competitive imagine a scenario where two affiliates.

Can actually work together that it doesn’t exist because of the very nature of the fact that there must always only be one winner In every affiliate program that is not true with siren You can have a salesperson who helps you close You can have an influencer who brings in the traffic and they both get their own credit and what’s really interesting is even with that from a woocommerce standpoint is You can actually set up an affiliate program so that multiple affiliates From the same program, get credit so you can set it up so that instead of only the last affiliate who for the traffic gets all the money you can set it up to where the last one gets half of it.

And then the person after that gets 25 percent and the person after that gets 12 and a half. And it goes down. You can divide it evenly among them. With that kind of stuff and with the ability to make it to where multiple people can actually earn commissions from this. You’re setting it up so that these people can actually collaborate and just imagine the possibilities of having two influencer type people who have big audiences that don’t necessarily overlap, or they collaborate together to create some kind of specific funnel that allows them both to be able to end up bringing in more than they would have otherwise been able to do on their own.

Chris Badgett: Man you’re the guy for this. Just, I love how clear your thinking is like nerding out on last touch attribution and an affiliate marketing. And the problems with that and making it more collaborative and share the wealth kind of multi partner approach is really cool. It’s really innovative and it’s really strong.

And I love seeing the innovation that you have here. So go to siren affiliates. com join the email list if it’s out go ahead and buy your copy today and start innovating and growing your revenue and your partner community. What other final words for the people do you have Alex and, how else can people connect and learn more about siren affiliates?

Alex Standiford: I can I’m, in the, Littler LMS communities too, so I’m, in your spaces. I’m around there. So if. I happen to see any questions related to this. I’ll probably just jump in and answer. But in addition to that, you can find me. At Alex Stanford dot com, and you can message me directly on there with any questions.

There’s also a chat bubble on siren affiliates. If you have any questions, you can post them on there. And please, by all means, I welcome and want questions. I want to hear. What people think of this, because there is some novelty in this, right? There’s a lot of things. There’s new concepts and new innovations.

And I, I really am interested to hear and what people are what’s exciting people about this kind of technology and what kind of things they would like to see more of. And I’m in a very, and especially if you sign up for that, the email list to get early access to this. You’re going to get early access to it, but you’re also going to be on the ground floor with me on this where we’re able to you’re going to be able to really directly influence some of my.

Decisions on how I proceed with this.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So talk to Alex and I just want to affirm what he’s saying there. Alex interviewed me and some of the team, I think three times, like really digging into the course creator, the membership, the course marketplace, challenges in the space. And as a guy who’s been around a lot of product founders and stuff, the best ones do that sort of thing.

Who’s ever, whoever’s closest to the customer wins, as they say. And you’ve definitely demonstrated that through the whole journey of siren affiliates. So go to siren affiliates. com. We’ll have Alex back on, we’ll do a live webinar when the Lifter integration rolls out. I know the WooCommerce integration is rolling out first, and there’s a lot of WooCommerce users out there watching and listening to this, so get ready.

It’s almost here. And it may already be out. Just go to siren affiliates. com. Thanks for coming on the show, Alex. Go check out our other episode with Alex. And head on over to siren affiliates. com. And I can’t wait to reconnect down the road and explore this further and be a user of siren affiliates, myself.

Alex Standiford: Look forward to it.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post Maximize Course and Coaching Revenue Through Partnerships with Siren Affiliates appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Kay Peacey discusses her knowledge and perspectives on creating and managing the Active Campaign Academy, an online learning environment that teaches users how to make the most of the Active Campaign marketing automation platform. Also she shares about the Masterclass presentation.

Kay Peacey is an Entrepreneur and educator. She is from Active Campaign. Her experience in education led her to naturally gravitate into teaching, even though she began her career as an Active Campaign consultant.

About two and a half years ago, Kay made the decision to launch a membership-based Academy in place of regular classes. She can support small teams using Active Campaign globally thanks to this membership model.

She finds it fascinating that companies of all sizes, from one-person operations to multinational conglomerates, frequently confront comparable difficulties and need comparable training and direction. Kay stresses the value of having autonomous instructors and technological platform specialists.

Kay lists Lifter LMS, Divi for WordPress websites, WP Fusion for connectors, WooCommerce subscriptions for pricing. And Circle for community involvement as part of her tech stack. Kay concludes by outlining the elements of her educational program at the Active Campaign Academy, which consists of live calls (office hours), resources, courses, and a community platform.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. She’s back on the show. It’s KPC creator of active campaign Academy. We use active campaign at Lifter LMS, and I’ve learned countless things from Kay. She’s literally probably the most power user of active campaign in the world.

She’s an educator, she’s built an online education. Business around her active campaign knowledge and helping business owners and active campaign users get into the tool, grow, scale, automate. Welcome back to the show. Okay.

Kay Peacey: Oh, thank you for having me back again, Chris. It’s just such a pleasure sharing the journey with you.

It really is. Thank you.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s so great to have you always love our conversations for those who don’t know what it is. Can you describe what? You’ve built with active campaign Academy, which you can go find over at Kay’s website, slick business. co.

Kay Peacey: Yeah. I started out some years ago doing consultancy in active campaign and found that most of the time I was actually teaching people because we all like to be in control.

We want to be in the driving seat of the powerful tech that we own. And. Because I have teaching skills. I started out as a math teacher for teenagers way back in the day. So I have the teaching skills and it seemed to me like a very natural fit to fill that gap when nobody was really leading the way on how do I use this incredible marketing tech email automation platform, active campaign.

And so I decided rather than going down the courses route, because I love courses, but tech like active campaign, that is a big landscape. There’s a lot in there. My feeling was very much that it needed to be a membership. And so I created the active campaign Academy around two and a half years ago, and we’ve been serving members ever since we serve small teams from all over the world.

And. One of the chief pleasures I have with it is that the literally the only thing they truly have in common is that they all use this one piece of tech, which is active campaign and the, what it’s fascinating to me, the commonalities that occur from a tiny one person business right up to a big global corporation actually need the answers to the same questions and the same teaching the same nurturing.

It’s just, it’s a great way to spend my time and it’s made me very happy. And I hope it’s made other people very happy as well.

Chris Badgett: I’m sure it has. I’ve been in your community and I’ve seen people getting their challenges solved and, growing their business. One of the things I’ve noticed after over a decade in the online education space is that with software particularly, it’s often not the software company itself that makes the best education.

There’s a very old episode of LMS cast where I interviewed a guy that I forget his name, but they, he teaches how to use a book writing and publishing tool called Scrivener. He doesn’t work at Scrivener and he, Has done a fantastic education business of his own, and he teaches Scribner better than you can learn on the Scribner website.

Kay Peacey: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And I’ve, so just for anybody out there who’s trying to figure out a course topic, if you’re a power user of a tool, do it. And even I, hope somebody out there, there are people that train people how to make use Lifter LMS. There’s people that have YouTube tutorials that are better than ours, and that’s just, yeah.

The power of community around a tool, but any other thoughts on that?

Kay Peacey: I’m so, with you on that. And I, actually, it’s one of my soap boxes because my feeling is over time. I see it again and again, where customers of a tech platform will go and ask tech support of that platform to help them with something that is actually strategic or that involves other tools in their ecosystem that are outside of that tech company’s responsibility.

See. And or beyond their remit to solve my feeling is that as customers, as consumers, we often ask too much of the companies who are providing the tech because their job is already huge. They have to dream it up, build it, maintain it, service it, make sure all the buttons are working and deliver it in real time to thousands of customers every day.

Their job is not to teach you how to take this Ferrari tech machine. and go pull a wheelie down the highway. That’s not what they’re for. They are there to build the machinery. To sell it in the market, to service their customers and make sure the billing works. They have so much else to do, right? They’re not there to tell you how to use it to grow your business.

That’s what I think. You can see I got a bit soapboxy there. So anyway, in a nutshell, the Ferrari showroom is not the place where you go to learn how to speed your Ferrari down the motorway. You have to have a driving instructor. And if you’re really smart, you get an advanced driving instructor who really knows what they’re doing and knows how to teach you to drive better.

And that’s where someone like me comes in.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Just to reiterate. Like business owners have used lots of different tools and you can’t expect like one of those tools to have the answers about how to integrate everything together. They, try, but the best expert, like you said, as a driving instructor who not only understands the car, they understand the road, they understand the rules of the road.

And whatever they understand how to get gas and all the other things you’re going to need to interact with to drive, right?

Kay Peacey: Yeah. And also I think who’s in a position where they’re independent enough to say, actually, this particular bit of tech isn’t the right tool to do this thing that you’re trying to do.

Yes, theoretically we could do it, but it’s a round peg in a square hole. So actually let’s join it up to this other thing. That’s going to do a great job of solving that problem in your business.

Chris Badgett: And

Kay Peacey: there’s this very human element that you need to have there of being able to understand the real question that someone’s asking you or the problem that they are looking to solve, which is often not the question they ask.

And I’d also argue that tech support teams do not have the time to, to spend with you on that. They don’t have time to get to know you over time to get to know the tech stack in your business and what skills you have in your team, what budget you have in your team. There is so much going on there, right?

To find how should I do this one thing? You need a human who knows you and understands you and has with whom you have a relationship and you can trust them. That’s big ask for a support desk. That’s not fair to put that on them.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s, a great point. And we’re going to get into the main segment of this show, which is how Kay grew her audience by 60 percent doing a masterclass.

But before we do that, I want to just get a little more context for people out there watching and listening. So with your online education platform, what are the main tools in your tech stack? Since we’re talking about using different tools to make it come together. So you teach online through a membership.

What are the key components of your tech stack?

Kay Peacey: I love this question so much. Lifter LMS obviously has been with me right from the start from when I made my very first free training, which is called accelerated active campaign. And that is still available for free. And it’s like core active campaign know how that you just got to have.

So lift has been with me right from the start. On top of that, I use a Divi to make my WordPress websites with WP Fusion, which is the secret source of everything. And that ties up WooCommerce subscriptions, which is how I’m running the billing and things. It, I have two domains that talk to each other through ActiveCampaign, and then we run our community on the Circle platform, which I’m extremely happy with.

I know there are lots of options for community. I have found that The Circle platform has really served our particular way of doing things, which is we deliver a lot of technical stuff in a short space of time and Circle has unleashed us to be really fluent and fast solving problems just day to day.

So I’ve really enjoyed bringing that into the tech stack. It’s, just, it’s a dream team. You put them together.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Yeah. And let’s talk about another stack, which is the offer stack. So when somebody joins active campaign Academy, like what is the package of the learning offer? What do they get?

Kay Peacey: Yeah, cool. Okay. So they get courses, resources, calls, and community. And so the courses of the standalone they, pull together as a coherent learning unit, and that’s what I’m doing in lifter every time. The resources is the stuff that tends to live in the circle community. And that’s more like short tutorials that answer a very specific question, or it’s a screen grab with annotation.

We run office hours, calls twice a week, every single week. And that’s the, ask me anything. And it really is. Those are amazing because you can ask me literally anything related, even tangentially to active campaign. And we can answer it right there. And then it’s super powerful. I love that bit. And then the community where we’re just hanging out together and it acts as a kind of a library as well as a place we can chat, share news, announce stuff, the whole package together is it pulls together very, nicely.

And we have two levels of membership as well. We have an essential level and an advanced level, and that comes back to the fact that active campaign has this big range within it, you can be on a plan, which is incredibly capable on a lower budget, right up to enterprise where they’ve got huge teams. So we actually put a split in the middle so that our more starter users are not going to get completely overwhelmed by hearing about webhooks and API calls and all that crazy stuff that they just do not need to know.

Chris Badgett: I love that. So like beginner and advanced levels, two, two plans to choose from. It’s not over complicated, quick side question you brought up and I’ve watched you execute well, which is I see a lot of education entrepreneurs have a desire or a dream to build community. You’ve built. Built community successfully.

People show up to your calls. You’re asking me any things I’ve interacted in your community with other users and stuff like that. What do you think makes your community work? Cause sometimes people build a community and it doesn’t work. It obviously takes like actual management plan, time investment and stuff, but why does your community work?

As part of your education offer.

Kay Peacey: That’s such a thought provoking question. I was heavily into community from the very beginning because the first place I started to connect well with other active campaign users was in their Facebook global group as a community. And so it became very visible in there and connected with people.

I then started my own Facebook group where I had ownership of it and I could lead on the tone. I’m a strong believer in we set the tone for the communities that are under our leadership, and it’s our responsibility to look after those people. And right from the beginning of that, that my open face group, so that’s not even my paid offer.

That’s an open group. We have led with value, integrity, and just being really human. We have never allowed the spam bots in there. Nobody disses anyone. You’re not even really allowed to dis active campaign. Like you can criticize it and say this bit is a bit sucky right now, but we’re not in there to be negative about the world.

So we set the tone. And that tone then for me carried into my private community. When we moved to the paid membership, that tone was already established because our founding members had all seen how, we are in the world. What are our values? How do we interact with humans that was already in place.

And so we had a really wonderful call from when we launched the academy. We had about 125 founder members. And so our membership community had that lovely tone right from the start and honestly, I cannot tell you how much I value

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s a little master class on building culture and community And I love how you got your first, users off of the facebook group that you own But you were helping in other groups as well demonstrating your expertise

Kay Peacey: and I still do that I’m a super user in that active campaign global community.

I probably answer four to five questions in there every single day You And honestly, I’m obsessed with active campaigns. So I’m doing this like I’m on the sofa having a cup of tea in the evening and watching TV with my kid. I might be answering your question at the same time because that’s where I live.

And as a subject matter expert, that’s I think that’s what we do as educators. We, That’s going to sound really cliched, but we do live to serve. That’s how we get our kicks. All right. So selfishly I’m doing it because I like the feeling of, ah, I just solved that person’s problem. Look at that.

That’s cool.

Chris Badgett: I love that. That is part of wearing the expert hat is you actually have to love and be passionate about. Your subject matter expertise, just because you spot an opportunity somewhere doesn’t mean you should build an education company around it. You really have to live and breathe it and enjoy it.

Kay Peacey: Yeah, I don’t think you could, I don’t think you could do it to this level of expertise and it’s like immersive. Immersive expertise and know how and, the, and it requires, and I’m going to use the word love. It does require love to lavish that level of attention and care on your learners. But for me, that’s what fuels me.

It fills me up every day.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And love requires commitment. And like you said, every day helping out and serving.

Kay Peacey: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Shifting gears, the number one or one of the top questions we get from people building membership sites, courses, coaching programs. So how do I get clients? How do I get customers?

You re recently did a masterclass that grew your community by 60%. Can you tell us first what the masterclass is?

Kay Peacey: The masterclass was called be your own, how to be your own active campaign superhero. So the kernel of the idea is something again, that I feel very passionate and very certain about, which is that any person can.

Be the master of their own tech and learn to drive the active campaign Ferrari. You do need some teaching. You need someone to point you in the right direction and tell you what’s possible. The biggest thing I always hear is you don’t even know what you don’t know about active campaign until someone unlocks it for you.

So I wanted to showcase in a very powerful way, but in a short space of time, and I wanted to establish Us as the, accepted leadership, the voice in active campaign education. So the masterclass came out of a desire to do that. And what we did was we cherry picked four things that could be done on any active campaign plan from light all the way up to enterprise that would make you more money in a very short space of time, because that’s what every single business needs, including mine.

We also need to make money. The passion is great, loving it. That’s great, but it also needs to make revenue. So we focused it in very tightly on make more money in less time. And we chose an item from each of the four stages of the customer journey from brand new customer to a hot lead. Now they’re a customer.

And then what happens at the end of the journey when they’re just moving on from your world as well. And pulled out four processes and what I did in the masterclass, we delivered it three times across different time zones. We called in all our partners to help us promote the masterclass. That was the first time we’d done that.

It was the first time we’d really had the confidence to say we’re doing this. It is going to be killer good. Get your people here. And here’s our affiliate link that you can share with them as well. So we really called in that support and community around us as a business and, me as a business person.

And the show up rate was incredible when we did the webinar, it was like a 55%. Show up right to the master classes. And I was just so happy with that. We got a huge reaction to it and people were very excited just to hear. There are these very simple ways that you can explain in 10 minutes that you can use active campaign to make more money in less time.

So that was the class. We showcased those four things.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And can you give us any like metrics or just quantitative data about like how the masterclass went? You said 60% like anything else you can, you’d feel like sharing?

Kay Peacey: Yeah we had, I think we had a target of registering 300 people for it.

So we looked at the statistics from when we launched. Originally with a much smaller audience overall, and extrapolated that into our audience as it is now and the reach that we have now through our partnership. So we were aiming for 300 people to register and we got, I think, almost 400 registered. So we were exceeding that target.

Our target overall, the big goal was to increase revenue into the membership. And we needed that so that we could focus on doing more growth activity and serve more people because we’re not reaching everyone out there who needs active campaigning help that would benefit from us So we need to be more visible to do that.

We need more revenue. So the target was to boost the revenue I think by 50 We then worked really hard on getting the people who registered to show up to the webinar And for that we leaned heavily on a very You Coherent combination of social channels, posting and emails that were going out with a countdown timer, really creating that you are going to show up to this and here is what you’re going to get from it.

I am going to be teaching these things live. We were sharing testimonials. We just threw everything at it, but in a really coherent way where we hit up all of the problem points that we know that people have in active campaign, our messaging, Was very clear. Everyone can learn to do these things in active campaign.

Come along to the masterclass. We’re going to show you how to do four of them to make more money in less time at the four stages of the customer journey. Come along and see what the conversion rate off of the back, off of the back of that was just ridiculous. 16%, 16 percent of people who attended that masterclass immediately bought.

Bought a membership and we typically keep them as members for around six months. Many of them stay for upwards of two years. We’ve still got some of our founder and beta members are still with us so that turns into quite a lot of revenue and more importantly than that, it turns into helping an awful lot of people.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s amazing. Tell us a little bit more about how you prepared for the masterclass and how long did that take and what did you put together and how’d you keep figuring out all your partners and all that stuff?

Kay Peacey: Okay, that’s a great question. I had a lot of help from Melissa Love, who I know you’re familiar with already.

Because she’s a close business friend of mine and she lives just down the hill. So we can literally go sit on the bench down by the Harbor and she can calm my fears. And actually Melissa was the one who made me set the date because left to my own devices, I would probably have been here thinking I really should do a masterclass and get some more members in because we’re really good at this, but I might not have done it.

I needed a push and Melissa gave me the push. So we set a deadline and then it was a countdown from there. I think I had a six week run in from deciding the date and we published the dates to figure it out. Sorry. Say that again.

Chris Badgett: Six weeks to figure it out and yeah. Yeah, that’s good. That’s not too long or too short.

That’s. It was

Kay Peacey: enough. And for me, it was based on knowing myself better than when we first launched. I know the amount of pressure that I can cope with, the amount of time and space I need in which to be able to do my best work. But also I know that I do need a time pressure. Because otherwise it won’t get done.

So as soon as we’d set the date, we put it out there. And once people have put their name down and said, I want to come to this, which they did very, quickly, we had a wait list or, a show a hand razor, list, and that just got piled on very, quickly. And I, need that in my world to fuel me up to be like, okay, I’ve said, I’m going to do this and all these people have said they would like that.

Okay, now we’re going to do it and we’re going to deliver. And once I’m on the path, I deliver. I, my execution’s really good. So we had an air table. I don’t know if you’re an air table user, Chris, I’m a huge fan of it. Yeah. So I use that to organize everything that’s in my head. So we planned out the stages from belief, believing that you can work active campaign evidence that we’ve already taught people how to use active campaign, helping people desire the things that we wanted to deliver in the masterclass.

Doing the countdown, showing the testimonials, lots of evidence and proof that we are the masters at this. And usually you don’t want to miss this masterclass. And then, yeah, I think prepping the, content of the masterclass itself, that was amazing. That was one of those opportunities as a teacher, as an educator that you just, you can dive into it like whole body.

I am all in on this one. It was a great piece of work, very carefully crafted to 10 minutes. And it was leaning into teaching the what, are we doing? Why are we doing it? But of course it was missing the element of exactly how would you do that? Like exactly. So we talked about active campaign features that were necessary to put together for it.

So we would say something like, Oh, and we would use a saved response. We would use a form and a pre fill throwing in all these words. That’s the driver then to get the conversion is, and we are going to teach this in the academy coming up in the next few weeks. And that was the real conversion moment, I think, was we showed that it is possible to use Active Campaign to make more money in less time, right across your customer journey in these four very specific ways.

We talked about the elements that you would need to put together to do that. And then we invited people to join the Active Campaign Academy to come and do that with us right away, immediately. And then in the Academy, the course is there. We have four courses teaching those four things and the results we get from those are extraordinary, really impressive.

Chris Badgett: So did you have those courses already ready before you did the training or they came after like you taught them

Kay Peacey: live? They came a little bit after. I I, it was a balance because I would have loved to get them taught. I would have loved to get them ready before the masterclass, but it just wasn’t possible in that timeframe.

And what I’ve learned as an educator is that. The teaching is better if I can talk about it first with people, see their response to it, listen to the questions that they ask, and then the job of the training, the specific course, needs to have all of those elements in it. So I often find that if I talk about something and have a bit of a delay while we chew it over and then make the training is better.

Yeah, that’s

Chris Badgett: awesome. So we did

Kay Peacey: some swift tutorials to get people who really wanted to just crack on and who already had the skills. We were like, okay, this is how you would put it together. Here’s the map. But then the courses with all the step by step detail took a little longer.

Chris Badgett: Can you share just high level, even if somebody’s not using active campaign, just the concept of one of the stages of the customer journey?

What’s an example, one of those?

Kay Peacey: Yeah, sure. One of the ones that landed really beautifully with so many people. And it’s based on a strategy that we developed for ourselves. I call it first look fandom because I like a bit of alliteration you’ve got to give it a good, give it a cool name.

So first look fandom is for the very first step of the customer journey. Someone has just found you and Oh my God, here’s Chris Badgett. He knows all about lifter. I love him. I’m going to fill out the opt in form. And get on the mailing list here for Lyft at LMS. And there’s always a burning reason.

Someone does that. They always have some question that’s in their mind, some problem that they want solving that they think you have the answer to. So here’s the sneaky move for first look fandom. And this, by the way, converts 10 percent of those brand new first look leads into buyers with one click. 10 percent of them convert to buyers with one email in the space of a week.

It’s, extraordinary. So here’s the trick. They’ve just filled out your opt in form for this person. They’ve just coming into your world on the thank you page where normally you might say, thank you for submitting the form, or maybe you’ve gone a little bit further and you’ve got some links and a picture of you great instead of that, or as well as that you put in an open question field.

They don’t have to fill in their email again. You just ask them a question, say, Oh, while you’re here, tell me what, is your most burning question about XYZ right now? And you don’t have to promise to answer it. Just ask the question. 80 percent of people who fill out the opt in form will likely fill out that burning question.

And hit submit. So immediately you have got gold on your hands because now what their burning question is for 80 percent of your people, the second they land into your world, every marketer’s dream, right? And then it gets better. What you do is you stash that stuff wherever you. Keep it, you can stash it somewhere, get it to pass in front of your eyeballs so that you notice what people are saying.

So you’re learning all the time. You have to learn from your, potential customers, and then you cherry pick the ones that you have the answer to in your existing services and you give them a personal reply very quickly. And there are tools in active campaign. There are features of active campaign that make this extremely fast and fluent to do.

That’s the bit I teach in the academy, right? I, we can talk about the strategy, the actual mechanics of putting that together so that it works really fluently and fast for you in active campaign. There’s some subtle stuff going on there, but once it’s built, you have a system where every single lead is invited to ask you their burning question, open text, and boy, oh boy, they tell you stuff in there.

It is enlightening. Then they, you have them pass in front of your eyeballs. You pick a few of them every week. It takes two minutes maximum to answer one of those burning questions. If you have your tech set up properly, you dispatch the answer and 10 percent of them will convert to a buy within a week.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s awesome. And now that you’re saying that, I remember that from your presentation and that’s it’s pure gold. I remember. Your presentation, let’s talk about the actual masterclass. I’m remembering like a vertical slide thing that was scrolling or something. Can you tell us a little bit, and it was very well designed and your, presentation was just tight, but what, was that tool you were using and tell us about how you structured the actual

Kay Peacey: presentation.

I love that you asked that because that, so that tool, it’s a, it’s actually like a whiteboarding tool and it’s called miller note.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Kay Peacey: Millernote. And the original story of Millernote for me is I hate slides. Yeah. I loathe them. My design eye is just shockingly bad. It’s awful. And I’m, just chuckling at the fact that he just said it was really well presented because it’s incredibly difficult to put together visuals that don’t look like a 10 year old child.

On a bad day did them. So Miller notes is my solution to that. It has a nice soothing color background in our brand colors. And the actual items that I put on there, there’s very little formatting choice on there. So I can’t wreck it. I just need to make sure it all lines up vertically. And then while I’m on, while I’m doing my presentation, I use e cam, which is a wonderful bit of tech e cam films me and puts me in front of Half of the presentation.

So I’m right there on screen. It’s like putting yourself into your presentation, which I really love because I talk with my hands. You may have noticed that there’s a lot of hand waving and expression going on, and that’s really important. And with the, by having Milanote beside me and I’ve got my scroll wheel, so I can scroll through it exactly the pace I want to, I can literally point at the things that I’m talking about and it just works for me.

So I developed it purely because I am terrible at slides and I hate them. So it was an avoidance strategy that somehow turned into something that actually looks really nice and a lot of people ask about.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. I remember too, from your masterclass, there was a lot of engagement in the chat. Like how, would you advise somebody who’s doing a masterclass to really make it interactive and immersive and get people, get the community talking?

Kay Peacey: Great question. First of all, I had a head start because we have a very engaged community already. And that comes back to our earlier, your earlier question around the Facebook groups. We have fostered that for years. We go out of our way to connect personally with people that first look fandom thing that involves me personally, emailing people who’ve just signed up to my email list.

So we have a very connected community already, and you can’t magic that up. Just for a one off masterclass. That’s not going to happen. What we did was we primed the pump by specifically asking our, existing academy members to come to the live webinar and to support us. And I was completely honest about it.

I was like, I’m going to be absolutely petrified. I would love to see some friendly faces in there to make me feel better. can you come and give me a wave in the chat? And that’s true. Seeing those familiar names in the chat was for my benefit, really. And we also had a couple of team members who were entirely dedicated to watching the chat, grabbing screenshots of great things that were people were saying that was a smart move, by the way, have someone in your team ready to grab.

Something brilliant that someone says about your presentation from the chat. We use that the next day on social posts, and that drove a whole ton more signups into the second and third runs of the same webinar. Very good strategy. So their job was to do engaging with people as well, because if you’re delivering the presentation, you can’t be talking in the chat.

You can’t even be looking at it.

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s good stuff there. I know some people at the end of a master class or a webinar get a little bit of cold feet around transitioning to the pitch or making the sale. What did you do at the end to really position the offer? Maybe you did it not just at the end.

Like, how did you quote sell from the master class?

Kay Peacey: Good question. I’m trying to remember. We definitely had a spin to win.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Kay Peacey: So that was, so our spin to win, I think came after the pitch. So the spin to win is something I love to roll out just because it’s really good fun. We do a spin to win, put everyone’s names on the wheel and one.

Two or three winners, whatever we’re doing, we’ll get a one to one session with me, which you literally cannot buy. I do not do those. So that’s an, that actually, now I come to think of it, that’s our incentive for getting members to turn up live. Cause we were like you, can join this draw as well. If you win that’s yours.

One to one for an hour with me. You can’t get that anywhere else. And that happens

Chris Badgett: at the very end. Yeah, we do that

Kay Peacey: at the very, we do it before the Q and A. So the structure was intro, Presentation, then into a pitch section, then the spin to win, then Q& A. And our sticker, our rate of people sticking around was really good.

We’re very happy with that. I think the pitch, I don’t find the pitching to be a problem anymore, because I think I finally got comfortable with that notion that if I don’t tell people what we do and how we can help them. They’re not going to buy it and then they’re not going to get the help and they’re not going to get the good things for their business.

And I don’t feel, I don’t feel bad about saying that anymore. I feel like something shifted in me this year to be absolutely fine with saying we are the best in the world. I am the best person in the world to teach you active campaign. This is where you can buy my services. This is how much it’s going to cost.

You can buy monthly so you don’t have to be committed for a long period of time. It doesn’t have to cost you a scary amount of money like a consultant and we see a lot of people spending crazy sums on consultancy and then coming out of it worse than they were before. This is an alternative.

Here is how you can try us out. We do a refund guarantee, so there’s no pressure selling. Yeah, I just, I feel very strongly that what we offer is really, good. And I’m happy to talk about that now.

Chris Badgett: I love that. The first sale you make is to yourself. And if you really believe in your product and your mission, selling gets really easy because you’re just, you almost feel obligated because you want to serve and help all these people.

So yeah,

Kay Peacey: absolutely. And Melissa used to call me about it all the time. She would call me on it and be like, what? Nobody’s buying that thing you never told them about. Go figure. I should probably talk about this more. And I think another tipping for me was the valid tipping point for me was the validation that I got from around this time last year when ActiveCampaign created their first customer advisory board.

And I was their first call to be on that. I, have stature and status within the ActiveCampaign community. I have the respect and value from ActiveCampaign themselves. Invite me into their world to help them with how to serve their customers better, how to make the platform better, how to engage better with users, how to teach active campaign.

If they’re asking me, then I need to get over myself and stop being weird about saying, this is what we do. Here’s where you can buy it. It will cost you this much. And it’s really good.

Chris Badgett: I just want to highlight that strategy of a customer advisory board. This is commonly known in software businesses where you have some of your users and customers that you meet with on an ongoing basis or kind of group in a little community where you.

Open mindedly listen to their feedback, ask for help and stuff like that. I think more course creators, coaches, and education entrepreneurs could do that strategy because you don’t have to figure everything else out by yourself on how to make your offer better. Or the customer experience better. And when you find those customers and users or students or members that you love working with, and you’d like to get more of them by talking to them, you remove a lot of friction and get a lot of good ideas.

It doesn’t mean you can act on everything they want or recommend or agree with everything, but it’s such a valuable resource to listen and get feedback in that way.

Kay Peacey: So much. So much. And hearing you say that takes me back to when we were in when we were in our beta phase for the Active Campaign Academy, which was about two and a half years ago, and I invited 13 people to come in as beta members.

On their, contribution to the form that the academy takes is just enormous, absolutely enormous. It was the, structure that we have now of the calls, the community, whole courses, and specifically lots of little tutorials that are done in a fluent, fast fashion, that whole structure came from listening to what they needed and when they needed it and what, how they wanted to consume it.

It all came from them.

Chris Badgett: Pure gold right there.

Kay Peacey: Sorry, I’m just going to say one more thing, which is that you have to let go of your vanity as an educator. You have to let go of that feeling that you, know better than them about how to do this. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Great business isn’t built in a vacuum for sure.

Last question for you, Kay. So you ran your masterclass. What’s your plan for the future? And what would you advise people? Is this something that you do once a year, twice a year, four times a year? What do you think you’ll do going forward? And what would you recommend to people?

Kay Peacey: Okay. I think doing for me, it’s going to be annual at the moment.

I have some disability issues, I have family to raise, I have limited energy for me and I think once a year feels right. I’m certainly not going to leave it two years again. It’s going to be once a year because it rejuvenated the business and it establishes our place very publicly of we own this space.

You need to be here. I definitely want to be doing that once a year. I think probably we all should in terms of in between that, we are working towards sales cycles where we will have focus topics within the membership. We’re going to do that because it serves our existing members primarily.

But we’ll also act as a sales driver. So for example, right now we are having a very big member mission about deliverability, everybody’s favorite, sexy subject, email authentication, deliverability, engagement, and re engagement. And this is feeling really good for us because it drives things in three different places.

It drives our members to stay and to consume content because they can see exactly what they’re doing. And if everyone’s. Doing the same thing at the same time that builds your sense of community. That is a driver on sales because people who’ve been sitting on the fence or who left some time ago, this may now be the driver that gets them back in through the door because they can see us talking consistently about this thing, showing our expertise and giving them reasons to join the third one, which was my unexpected kicker was that it has made me.

Turn up and create the best courses I’ve created in a long time. Not that all my courses aren’t fabulous, but I just rocked one out on re engagement and it’s so good. I’m genuinely excited to get it out there. And if we hadn’t been doing this focus on deliverability and engagement, I don’t think I would have gotten around to doing it.

And I certainly don’t think it would have been as good as it is now. So it’s a push on all fronts, very healthy.

Chris Badgett: I think once a year makes sense, especially when you get partners involved, because the partner can only do so much and they have other things that have to do. But like once a year and you get a system and everybody’s happy, that’s becomes a, something you can just repeat in your business.

Kay Peacey: And we banked how we did it for that masterclass. We have stashed everything that we did. And I know that next time we’ve got the recipe there, we’re also going to turn that into a course. How do you automate a fantastic launch event or masterclass using ActiveCampaign? And then we’re going to evergreen a funnel that leads to that course.

Now, so there’s lots of repurposing you can do from that one event a year. I’m very confident that we will get a year’s worth of value from doing one big event. Cause it takes a lot out of me. I think I can only really do that full on once a year.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Kay, this has been a masterclass and in marketing and sales and just doing great work as an education entrepreneur.

Thank you for coming on the show. I want to encourage you out there listening to go to slickbusiness. co check out active campaign Academy. If you’re looking to increase your automation capabilities and, really leverage a powerful CRM, check that out. If you don’t have a CRM yet, the what’s the quickest, what’s the free course called accelerated?

Accelerated action campaign. See, you did the alliteration, which I like to do too, because it’s Lifter LMS. So it helps people remember the name of your products and business. Any other ways for the people to connect with you or last parting words here, Kay?

Kay Peacey: I’m always delighted to, connect with people on LinkedIn, particularly fellow, fellow educators, people who are passionate about that learning experience and how we do better.

On that all the time as the technology moves, as we mature, how are we doing that? Anyone can come and connect with me on LinkedIn. And there’s also my Facebook group, which is called automate your business with active campaign. And that’s open to anyone, probably better if you’re a bit obsessed with active campaign.

But if you’re into email marketing, we talk a lot of that in there as well.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. That’s KPC slick business. co. Thanks so much for coming on back on the show. I can’t wait to do it again in another couple of years.

Kay Peacey: Thanks, Chris. Delighted to be here.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post Kay Increased Members in Her Membership by 60 Percent Using a Masterclass Presentation appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

Calvin emphasizes the significance of overcoming emotions of inadequacy and having a significant influence while offering insights into the transforming path of business as a spiritual quest. He discuss about coaches and course creators in this episode.

Calvin Correli, co-founder of Simplero. He provides entrepreneurs with useful tools and community assistance via Simplero’s integrated platform. He emphasizes how courses, coaches, and communities may help entrepreneurs on their path to become their second hero by offering them both spiritual and practical assistance.

Calvin provides ways for combining pre-recorded information with live coaching sessions and organized courses to provide a full learning experience. Calvin advocates for simplicity in systems and spirituality.

In addition, he talks on the need of continuous involvement in a community that is encouraging and adopts an iterative approach to coaching and content development, constantly refining his views based on questions posed by participants.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Calvin Corelli. He’s from simplero. com, which is an online platform for delivering coaching, consulting courses and building communities with a super sweet angle of being an all in one approach.

So you don’t end up with this software Frankenstein of all these different tools. Welcome back on the show, Calvin.

Calvin Correli: Thank you, Chris. It’s great to be here. Yeah, I really appreciate you having me back. We had a conversation. What was it like three years ago or something? And I’m super excited that you’re having me back for another chat.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I think this is going to be a good one. So Calvin and I have both been in this industry for about 10 years, basically helping people with something to share, to teach Calvin in our pre chat was describing it as like a second act. where somebody figures something out and they want to then take that knowledge and skills and experience and package it up and create a bigger impact and build a business around that with Simplero.

Let’s start there, Calvin. Tell us more about the this kind of perfect fit customer for Simplero and, really just this movement of people that. Maybe a little later in life, decide, you know what? I want to give back to those who are further back on the journey.

Calvin Correli: Yeah. So I’m inspired by Joseph Campbell’s story of the, hero’s journey, like the arc that, basically all myths from throughout history follow the same arc.

It was what inspired George Lucas to write star Wars based on the hero’s journey. And is this idea that You’re living your life. And then something happens that, that makes life as it used to be untenable. It doesn’t work anymore. Like you’re, like overweight. And I like your doctor says, you’re going to get a heart attack if you don’t do this, or you’re going to get diabetes or whatever it is, like something, something has to change, right?

Back against the wall. You need to figure out how to make some money. You may figure out how to make the money. And so we go on this journey. We, first refused to call everybody, refused to call though. Like I want to change, Oh God, then I don’t want it. And then we find a mentor and some helpers and there’s going to be some enemies and some fights, and then we go to the innermost cave of.

Battling our own demons and all that stuff. We come out, there’s more struggles and fights and more help. And then we return to where we came from. But now we have what he calls the elixir. We have the fountain of life. We have this like magic potion that we can use to help others because we figured out how to combat pre diabetes or.

Or being overweight or whatever it was, and we solved it for ourselves. And now we’re in a position where we can be the mentor to the next person. And I find, that most of the people that we work with are people of that sort. Now they have the elixir and they’re like, I got to share this thing.

Everybody in the world needs this. This is about most amazing thing ever. And then they’re like, why aren’t people just beating down my door to want this thing? And that’s when they realized. Oh crap, I need to go on another hero’s journey complete with another refusal of the call and another mentor and helpers and, enemies and opposers and going to the dark night of the soul and the innermost cave and all of that stuff to go to figure out how to actually get this to other people.

And that’s where we come in. We come in, we’re at that point where we help them on the second hero’s journey. They might already, have tried some things, right? They might have tried gluing together, like you said, nine different software platforms, email marketing and website and a shopping card and video hosting and membership site and community and affiliate tracking and surveys and, schedulers and funnel builders and like all of the things.

And they’re like, Oh

Chris Badgett: God.

Calvin Correli: complicated. So we help them on that journey on the technical side of things. And also on the, like the inner game thing, because it’s like 80, 90% it’s a, like the strategies and tactics and all that stuff is very important, but that’s. The least of it. It’s all about the mindset, the beliefs, the believing yourself, believing that you’re worthy of having a business of having a following, daring to be visible in the world, like all of those are all the things that people everybody, battles and myself included.

And so that’s why we do the software and we do the coaching for people.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Tell me more about the coaching side, as a software company with Simplero, how do you deliver the coaching? Is it part of the package? Is it like a value add, Is it an upsell? And then what does it actually look like?

Calvin Correli: It’s a separate program. And it’s not only for people who are using the software. It’s also for people who are not using the software though, like it’s. It’s most of the people are come from the software. Cause that’s the, majority of how we’ve marketed so far, but it’s really for people outside of some players as well.

And the, idea behind it is very simple. Being an entrepreneur is a spiritual journey. Every, every problem in business is a personal problem that happens to show up in business. And every personal problem is ultimately a spiritual problem. Like it’s, about who we are being in the world. Who what’s the truth about our nature?

And the reason I say spiritual problem is because What happens is that we all have this feeling deep inside in our personality that says I’m not enough. I’m not, I’m inadequate. Someone somehow, right? It’s whether it’s I’m not rich enough or successful enough or famous enough or skinny enough or fat enough or sexy enough or whatever it is, it’s I’m not enough.

And so we try to go into Personal development, teach me how to work out, teach me how to lose weight, teach me how to build a business, all those things, which is great. It’s very valuable, but we reach a point where we realize it’s never going to fill that void of feeling not enough because that lives at the personality level.

And that’s why when we go to the spiritual level, that’s where we can actually come to terms with the fact that we are already enough at a spiritual level and we’ll never feel enough at a personality level. And then we can operate from that energy. So, that’s the work. Like for me, it’s all about making it simple and it’s about bringing in this, like it’s the simple systems and then it’s the spirituality and it’s bringing the two together to actually get where we want to go.

And the coaching. So it’s, like I said, it’s an add on to, is an additional, like it’s a separate program, if you will. And and the format is. What I see as the most effective format in the market right now. And I am curious to hear what you see out there, but it is, we do a weekly group coaching call.

It’s 90 minutes where I present a framework upfront, 15, 20 minutes or something. Sometimes it takes a little bit longer, but I present a framework and then the rest of the time is open Q and a either about that framework or really about anything that people have. And so that 90 minutes is where we meet every week.

Same time every week. That’s where I get to meet people. They get to meet me and they get to meet each other. So by showing up vulnerably with a question on that call, other people on the call, see them, everybody’s cameras on. And then the recording lives in the community site portal forever.

And so over time we build up this catalog of, knowledge, right? Both the models and all the Q and A’s. And then we have a discussion forum online and. Alongside those recordings. And because people meet each other on the calls, now the community works a lot better. So is that like content together, the group calls with the community and with some content, we have some, pieces that are pre recorded in addition to the coaching calls, put all that together, that format works really well because people can support each other.

In the community get a lot of value they can meet you they can get direct answers to those questions and It’s because they can see each other and they get all the models and frameworks And it’s very efficient for you as the coach because you show up for 90 minutes a week and then maybe a few hours Throughout the week, where you engage with the community and answer some questions, etc And I have a person On my team that manages the whole program.

So I just essentially just show up for 90 minutes a week.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s awesome. I would agree with you just in my experience and what I’m seeing with users that mix of content, whether that’s courses or live coaching and, community and actual like real conversational coaching is that’s where the magic happens.

Yeah. The question I have for you. I usually don’t ask two questions at once as a podcaster, but they’re related. So I’ll ask them together one. If you’ve been doing it for a while. Don’t you sometimes get to the point where your body of work has, is covered the hero’s journey or all the stages and problems.

So that’s one. And then the other one just inverse to that is I’m sure you’ve found a few areas or specific models or problem areas that are red, hot, and very popular. I’m curious what those are.

Calvin Correli: Yeah. So to answer the first I haven’t gotten there yet. And I’ve also gone back to certain topics to give a fresh take on it, a fresh perspective based on what I’ve learned in the meantime or just to sharpen it with people.

So I think that’s Fine too. The what’s great about it too, is that the questions that people ask, give me inspiration for what else to cover. And so I will, if there’s like, all right, here’s something that I see a lot of people struggling with. I actually don’t have the answer.

Let me go out and research the answer and find the answer from some of the smartest people in the world that I happen to know. And then I bring them. Or, just from books or whatever research I do. And then I bring it to them and I’ll be like, Hey, this is something that I haven’t yet implemented, or I’m in the process of implementing.

So I don’t know, I can’t tell you about, I am not talking about this from my personal experience of what I’ve done. I’m saying, this is what I’ve gathered. Here’s where I’ve gathered it. Here’s why I believe that’s one of the best answers out there right now. Because of these people or what I’ve seen or heard or, this place in that place.

So I love that because it like, I, if I try to sit down and create content and come up with stuff like in a vacuum by myself, it never, ever works. It never works. What works is always. Meet people, answer their questions, listen to their questions, see where they’re at, figure out what they need, and then deliver that either in the moment, or I’ll give the best answer I have in the moment.

Then I’ll make a note and go back and research and go deeper next time. And your second question was, what are the hot topics right now?

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Favorite greatest hits.

Calvin Correli: So the. The model, this is something that, that I’m curious what you’re doing, but for, lead generation and conversion, right? Every business has three, three main parts.

You have the, you need to generate leads. People are interested, right? If you have a hot dog stand, it’s like the people who walk by or whatever, the potential prospect, right? Then you need to engage them in a conversation where you can have a chance of converting them. So sales So that’s when they’re step up and they’re interested.

I, you try to sell them a hot dog and maybe a soda as well. And should you want a pretzel with your hot dog or whatever upsells, whatever you have. And then delivery. So where you actually deliver the hot dog. Give them the hot dog. And then they hopefully eat and enjoy it. And it reminds me of it’s crazy.

I just, a book that I’ve read recently, which is on unreasonable hospitality. It’s freaking incredible. If you’ve ever read it we can double pick on that later. There’s a great hot dog story in there. Anyway, so. lead leads, conversions or sales and fulfillment leads tends to be the thing that everybody wants more of.

How do you get more leads or, and conversion to how do you convert those leads? But generally people want more leads, right? That’s the number one thing. And something that I’ve been struggling a lot with, like, how do you get good leads? You can do It’s basically like people talk about organic partner and paid.

Yeah. So organic is you put like SEO and SEO SEO is optimization, but SEO which I personally have always found excruciatingly boring, but. I know it works really well for some people, but then when you have chat dbt and Gemini and are we going to see a move away from search results and all that stuff.

So questions on that. And then there’s like posting organic content, which was great, like five, six years ago. And most of these platforms, mostly now it’s really hard. Yeah. Like real TikTok shorts are where you get the chances of distribution, but the games has gotten like a lot harder, So organic is difficult.

Partner can definitely work. Like that’s affiliate programs, referral programs of different kinds, partner programs. Ambassador programs. It’s definitely one of the things that have worked well for us, but we found it so far, it’s been tricky for us to really scale it. Like it does, it works well, but we don’t have a lot of levers to pull on it that we’ve been able to build, like acquiring new people or getting existing new partners or getting existing partners to promote more.

Hasn’t really done move the needle for us. Then there’s paid running ads. That is getting harder and harder as well. Like four years ago during, the pandemic. Everybody flocked to their computers and as we’re working on gangbusters, if it’s always been a game of that. You have to know what to do and how to do it.

You have to be a little bit smart, but like they generally worked really well. And then it’s just getting more and more expensive and more and more hard. Even back the whole reason that ClickFunnels exists is because of funnels, which is because like you couldn’t, you can no longer make the math work if you just ran ads to an offer.

And that was it. You need upsells in order to pay for the traffic in order to make the math work. And and, even with the most, the deepest, most advanced, most clever funnels, like it’s harder and harder. To make ads work. Russell did a podcast. Russell Bronson from ClickFunnels did a podcast end of December where he was like, I don’t know what to do.

I’m at Whitson. Like all our funnels are just not working as well anymore. And he was going to go hard on organic content as, the way to the, to To do it. Because if if you look at Alex, I’m always like what he’s done has been really, successful. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of effort.

You have to be really good at it, but it really works when you do it. So my conclusion is like a long answer to say my conclusion is that the best way to get attention these days. In general, and for me specifically is podcasts, which is why I’m here. So by going on podcasts, the right podcasts, of course but by going on podcasts, I get a chance to be in front of new people, new audience.

And those people that are attracted to like it, they end up spending like 45 minutes with me, which is fucking awesome versus an ad where they, or exactly where it’s five, 45 seconds or 60 seconds or whatever it is. Now they’re spending a lot of time with me. And then I’m going to invite people to then follow me on Instagram at Calvin Corelli on Instagram, go follow me there.

And then DM me if you DM me the words 10 K I’ll send you my super simple blueprint for how you can scale to 10 K a month as a coach, like the simplest possible. Path that I’ve come up with. So that’s my CTA. So now I’m getting people on Instagram, getting a DM and then on the DMS, I am going to spoiler alert.

I am going to chat with you and see if you’re fit to work with me either on some players as a client on some layer, or as a client on my co in my coaching programs and player Academy. And that’s. I found so far is the model that appeals the most to me. I’m not paying for ads. I’m actually getting to spend like 45 minutes an hour with someone that I like and that I care about.

And I talk about stuff that I care about for people who are interested enough to spend the time to, to listen to it. So that to me is the hot topic right now is like that combination of podcasts or like stages in general. So being can be in a physical stage, can be a summit, it can be whatever, but you’re on someone else’s stage talking now, and then you get people onto your social media.

I like Instagram a great chat DM platform. YouTube doesn’t have that. Facebook does. LinkedIn has a chat. So I like where we can actually. Converse with people. Cause that’s the, transaction happens in conversation, that conversion happens in conversation. Not it’s harder and harder to get like a landing page to work.

And so with this model, you don’t need funnels. You don’t need landing pages, you don’t need, any of that stuff. You can just over chat and roll people directly into your programs at 5k, 10 K, 20 K, 30 K. Like it’s there’s really no. Like you can enroll people into very high ticket programs over chat without a call without nothing else.

So that works really remarkably well. And so it’s that combination podcast to get new eyeballs, Instagram, or whatever your preferred social is to, nurture and convert those people. And that becomes a funnel, right? That becomes the funnel. That’s your podcast is your top of funnel. And then Instagram becomes your middle of funnel and your bottom of funnel.

So you don’t need. Yeah, no complicated software and tech and all that stuff.

Chris Badgett: I love that. And podcast too, gives you a lot of brand awareness. That’s not tracked. Like you don’t always know, but yeah, that’s still matters.

Calvin Correli: A hundred percent. It’s what’s in people’s heads. I remember a conversation I had with Gary Vaynerchuk years ago, where it was like, everybody else is like. So obsessed with the emails and the followers and they want to have all the, you’re like, I don’t care about that.

I just want to have that position in your mind, I want to have the, shelf space in your mind. So you’re going to look me up on Instagram whatever. Cause I like, I’m already in you and that’s that’s so powerful when you do that well.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And you mentioned the podcast 45 minutes, I’ve heard it called portable content of it.

I’ve been podcasting for 10 years. I started my podcast at the same time as Tim Ferriss. I’m just a lot less known, but the whole thing with portable content is you’re only competing with three things. Audio books and music and podcasts. Other podcasts. And

Calvin Correli: you also portable as in people listen to it while they’re walking or driving or whatnot, doing the

Chris Badgett: dishes, whatever.

And, you have that long time, like po at least probably the small podcast is like 12 minutes. A long one’s three hours. Yeah. So you, have a lot of attention without as much distraction as like on a screen per se. Yeah. So that’s for course creators and coaches in particular. I think podcasting is absolutely great because not only can you sharpen your expertise.

By interacting with other leaders in your field and representing the best interests of your client.

Calvin Correli: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: But you’re building that partnership relationship at the same time, where cross promotion, joint ventures or whatever can happen. Exactly. And that’s

Calvin Correli: a huge thing too. I’m glad you brought that up.

Cause yeah, like you and I being, on this chat together, like now we’re refreshing a relationship that has been dormant for a few years. And now Oh yeah. Chris is top of mind. Calvin’s top of mind. So. it’s really that opportunity for, relationship building is awesome.

And so my strategy is I have my own podcast as well. I don’t use that for new, for Legion, right? Because that’s not going to happen like that. If people are not going to I might, if I get really good at SEO, whatever, like people might search the park, Apple podcast directory and find my podcast, but probably not.

That’s more once they heard about me. On your show on LFTR LMS what, is the podcast called? I forgot

Chris Badgett: it’s LMS cast

Calvin Correli: on LMS cast. Once they found me, once they hear about me on LMS cast, they’re going to follow me on Instagram and then they might go try to look me up on YouTube or just podcast, and then they’re going to find my podcast and get spent, spend more time with me.

But my, that’s not even like the primary thing for my podcast is, number one, building relationships. So getting people on my podcast that I want to build a relationship with, that could be for potential referral partners, or it could be potential clients that I want to get in front of. And secondarily for content.

So we’ll take the content off of the. My podcast as well as this podcast, and then put that into what I call my content machine that then finds snackable bits that we can post as TikTok, YouTube shorts or reels, and also longer, like YouTube clips as well. And so those are the two purposes of my own podcast fulfills, but it’s not a lead gen tool.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. I, in my opinion, podcast is like the super, platform that can go a lot of places and do cross functional things. Totally. For the course creators and coaches out there, we’ll go ahead. You had another

Calvin Correli: thought. It’s just like when I started podcasting and I haven’t been super active, but I’m getting back into it now.

But when I started, I was really worried about but, I don’t have much traffic. It’s been, I think I’ve had one person ever that I asked to be on my podcast that were, was interested in that number. People don’t give a crap about how many downloads you have on your podcast. Generally, they’re just like, they want, they’re excited to chat with you and emailing people and saying, Hey, will you be on my podcast?

It’s such a better ask than, Hey, will you be a referral partner for me? Or do you want to like, can I sell you my software or my coaching program or my thing? My course, it’s a much better ask to say, Hey, do you want to be on a podcast? And then, Oh, by the way, now we can have a conversation.

Chris Badgett: I love that for, me.

Course creators and coaches who I know this is a hot button issue in our industry. So I wanted to ask your take on it, who have, who are wanting to do marketing. They’re getting that imposter syndrome of getting out on the stage, taking on the role of the mentor in, as in the hero’s journey framework for others.

And they’re like, who am I to be Gandalf or Obi Wan Kenobi or whatever that comes up. And then also just literally getting into creating information products and making video content videos and YouTube channels and take talks and all this, especially from your perspective as a spiritual teacher, how does one get moving and get past that imposter syndrome

Calvin Correli: by making it about them, not you.

When you’re like, Oh, I, who am I to, and I don’t have, and what it like, that’s you making it all about you. The more you can make it about serving other people that, that just totally goes away. Cause it’s not about you. It’s about them. So put your focus there. It’s actually my, my my first book is show up and serve for that reason, right?

Show up and serve, just show up and serve and not. Don’t be so focused on yourself. Focused on the difference that you can make for other people. It’s not even about so a hot topic along those lines are, you allowed to coach people on stuff that you haven’t yourself you haven’t.

Fully mastered yourself. And I think it’s fair. And I think like Gary Vaynerchuk likes to harp in on 22 year old life coaches. Dude, you haven’t fucking lived life. Get out of here. My take is that, that if you’re. If you’re on the path and you’re doing the work and you’re figuring stuff out, like you can even if you’re not, honestly, if you have the skills to actually help other people achieve their results, then go do it.

Just be honest about where you’re at. Forget the, like the fake like. all all those like fake private jet photos and, like fancy cars and all that bullshit. Forget all of that. It’s about you being just as, real with people as possible. One of my friends is Gay Hendricks is author of, the big leap and, many other books and been working on relationship, et cetera.

But he coached Michael Dell at Dell computers, for example, it’s not like he’s built a billion dollar. Tech company, right? It doesn’t have to, in order to successfully coach Michael Dell, because he knows how the mind works and knows to get Michael Dell to the, like, wherever Mike needs to go. I don’t know the details of their conversation.

I just know that they work together. So it’s not that you have to have the exact results. Is that you have what it takes to actually help people move forward in a genuine way. I think the trick is to, when we make it about ourselves Oh because I, like you’re, like, I need you to, for me to feel good, like about myself, like you become a proof that I’m like the bad ass, the bad guy the baller or something, right?

Like that whole like ego place, that’s where it gets a little bit tricky. You’re coming from a place of genuinely wanting to serve people, then go fricking serve those people. Like they, they need you. The other piece of that is like the further along you are, the harder it can sometimes be to remember what it felt like to be where you were like 10 years ago or something.

So when you’re closer to where your, clients are, you might actually be able to help them better.

Chris Badgett: I love that. You just gave me a new insight as a deep Joseph Campbell, study or myself, which is that the mentor like Gandalf, he didn’t get the ring. He helped Frodo get the ring. Morpheus didn’t stop the matrix.

He hadn’t done it, but he was a great mentor and guide for Neo to figure it out and find a way. The mentor is not necessarily a God. They’re just they just know how to bring the best out of people. That’s, a cool insight. Let’s talk about masterminds. I know that’s some of your users that’s in Plero or wanting to build masterminds as because they’d love community, but it can also be a powerful product that it can be life changing and really send a ripple of impact out into the world.

But how does one construct one of those?

Calvin Correli: Yeah, I mean masterminds is an interesting phenomenon, right? Cause it’s it feels so originally the idea came from Napoleon Hill. He writes about it in law of success. He writes about it in, in think and grow rich law of success. By the way, I only heard about fairly recently, like a couple of years ago and it’s Amazing.

You haven’t, if you read thing and grow rich, but you haven’t read law of success, I highly recommend getting into law of success is just incredible. Lays it out like very clearly. But so the idea of the mastermind is that you grab, gather a handful of people or a dozen people, whatever it is that have a shared outcome.

And we’re, working together towards that goal in our industry. Mastermind has been, morphed into this idea, Concept where it’s just like, we meet like three, four times a year maybe. And then there’s some coaching and then there’s some or not some coaching, really more, more content.

There’s some talks and then there’s some you can chat around the tables or in the breaks or whatnot. And then there’s an online component where you have the recordings from the live events, and then you’ve got a community where people can use each other. I have found that I think, honestly, that model maybe has peaked.

Because I think what people want and need are is like more, of the coaching, more of the relationship building. I’ve, what I’ve seen is that usually the online component isn’t working as well. For people in those programs, as in some other programs, I don’t know what you’ve seen. But I, really like that coaching format where someone is actually taking lead and saying, Hey, I’m on, I’m coaching and there’s a community where people can, use each other.

But I have a point of view. I have frameworks. I have a a direction here that I’m coaching people on because I think people come to you a lot because they want something that you have. They want to be like you in some way, and that’s what attracts people. And then you can help people with that.

But then. Really the bait and switches that you that a good coach will help people be themselves like they’re attracted to you because there’s some part of themselves that they have disowned that they’re seeing in you and they want some of that, which is awesome as you can help them reclaim that piece and then really.

Put the spotlight on them to be who they are, not be like you.

Chris Badgett: In my experience, I’ve I’m a huge fan of masterminding and I’m in some that have been going for four years meeting regularly and the best ones. They really, it’s not part of a product. It’s just people at a very similar spot with very similar goals, trying to do similar things, get together.

It’s outside of a product that doesn’t cost anything, It’s just a group of people. To me, that’s been.

Calvin Correli: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: The most sustainable and successful. I think when you try to productize that,

Calvin Correli: yeah,

Chris Badgett: I think you’re better off, like you’re saying, doing the courses and the coaching and then encouraging your members to form masterminds on their own, and that might, that can actually benefit your business by being a part of that connection and all that.

But it. It is tricky to turn it into a product that to have the long term benefits of a mastermind.

Calvin Correli: Yeah. The simple answer to your question is once you have five people, you have a group.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Calvin Correli: So, if you want to start a group, like a mastermind or group coaching program or whatever it is, once you have five people, you have something and then it’s just building from there and getting, success with those early people and making sure that they love it.

And then they refer their, friends to it because it’s so great. And then you build on that.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Let’s talk more broadly about the industry. What do you see in these past three years? Say if we go back to the early days of like online courses and internet marketing and like 2, 000 courses that were just videos with a bunch of bonuses.

Where are we at today? In terms of a better stack or this person called for the second act to do something, there’s all this overwhelm that comes with like tools and like what you’re actually offering. What would you advise that person to simplify and get focused and give them a frame to step into?

Calvin Correli: Yeah, I think that the whole. Like the concept of the value ladder, like you have something cheap and then something a little bit more expensive, a little more expensive, like that, that, like all those steps on that ladder is a little like outdated. We don’t need that the same way anymore. I think the people who come to you, like the leads are hottest when they come right in the door.

I think we’ve all been there where we, were searching something over the weekend and we looked at, and then we like reached out to someone on Instagram and got in the DMs or whatever the process was. And then. Like we didn’t hear back. And then by the time like Monday, Tuesday rolls around and we got a response, we couldn’t remember what was it?

Why was I like, really so keen on that? And then I forget so there’s like a halftime half life of, leads. And I think that the danger is like if you give people something like cheap and need to walk them up the value ladder, like the best clients are just going to go find someone else who will get them like what they really need at the point that they’re willing to pay, which is I hire probably and, give their money to that person.

So I think it’s more, what I’m seeing is like the, all the free social media content, marketing stuff, and the quality there keeps getting up, right? The bar keeps being raised for the quality of content that you need to put out there to be really heard and seen if you want to build a big brand and then So the free stuff and then a low ticket subscription, like for us, it’s the simpler or the software, but you’d also be like a low ticket 50, a hundred dollars, 150, maybe 200 a month community paid community.

And then a high ticket thing after that. So that could be more of like the eight, 10 K a year kind of thing. And then, or 15, 20 or something in that range, even 30, 60, and then you can go super high for Though one on one VIP experience, right? I’ve seen people charge two, 300, 000 for one on one coaching and a year kind of thing.

But so there’s still a value ladder of sorts, but it’s more like your cheap membership is really just a way to get to like your new lead nurture that you get paid for and what you want to do. And it’s helps you offset some of your. Advertising costs. There’s always going to be costs associated even with while you’re doing his podcast and still cost you money to do your time and all that stuff.

So it helps offset some of that. And then and, weed out the prospects that are not interested enough to pay you, like it could be as little as 10 bucks a month, right? Like it can be really low ticket, but it’s enough to get, have some skin in the game and say, Hey, these people are interested and now you can.

You can ascend people into your quote unquote real programs and then have that eight, 10, 15 K annual program as your main bread and butter business.

Chris Badgett: If you could wait, wave a magic wand, would you advise somebody to build, say, a lower cost recurring community first before building the high ticket program or opposite?

Opposite. Yeah.

Calvin Correli: Build the like eight, 10, 15 K a year program first, because that’s where you’re going to see. The most traction, the most value, you’re going to make the most money from doing that. And you’re going to prove that model works. And then you descend from that into, a cheaper membership later, but you, should be able to get just at least a handful of people in there.

without too much effort. And then, and you can lower the price on that and you can do it for free and say, Hey, I just need some case studies. The only, I’ll do it. It’s normally 10, 000 or 5, 000 or whatever it is, but I’ll do it for you for free. If you will promise that if you like it, offer me a testimonial and and, refer to her friends or something like that.

Because we want, we need to get started. We need some case studies. We need to show that we actually can deliver results for people. And so if you don’t have that, you can do that to get started.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. I’m sure you see this too. So I want to get your take is education, entrepreneur person, but also a spiritual person.

Sometimes there’s really talented people out there that have a lot of interest. Maybe they got really paid really well at their job doing X, Y, Z, but they hate it, but they’re actually really into like yoga and alternative healing or, and like some kind of fitness program. And they’re just, they can’t pick a topic or an avatar.

And they’re just like, they’re really excited about entrepreneurship and marketing and they want to do this thing. But their, topic and avatar selection is just a mess. What do they do?

Calvin Correli: Pick one for sure. Pick one and pick one that you know, and right? Someone that you would enjoy working with, whatever that avatar is that you.

That you, have to really love the clients that you work with. You have to love working with them. So that’s a given. And then if that still leaves multiple options, then I would pick the ones that are, have the most money to pay you or for whom, like for whom, what you can offer for them is.

Is value valuable to the extent that they want to pay a good money for it, that they have the money to pay you for it, and that you can close, you can find them, you can target them and you can enroll them fairly easily. So those are the factors, right? You want to be like high average price point fast time to close when people to easily identify and target those people.

And then really enjoy working with them.

Chris Badgett: Solid advice. And just to jump on the other side of from leads over sales to fulfillment, what is unreasonable hospitality? You peaked my interest earlier, so I got to find out what this

Calvin Correli: is. So it’s a book about 11 Madison park, which is a restaurant like right up there on, on the upper East.

That was the number one restaurant in the world for many years. And the book describes what they did to just. Over deliver on people’s expectations as patrons of this restaurant. And what I love about it, like it’s something that we at Simplero, we over invest in customer success.

And if something, if you look at our reviews online, almost all of them mentioned our customer support, our customer service, just cause we, really care and that just comes from me. Cause I just love great customer service. I hate receiving terrible customer service experience. I hate being like talked down to, or not heard properly. And there’s so much garbage customer service out there. So something that we really invest in. And so when I read that book, I was like, it was one of those things where three people were recommending that book within two days. It was like, okay, she’d probably read it.

I read it. And then now I’m getting the whole team to read it. Cause we’re already good at this. And I want to like just double, triple down on that. And so one of the examples in there. Is that the they would be so attentive to their guests. One of the waiters was overhearing some two couples that were visiting the city and they’d eaten at all the top restaurants in the city and they just had a great time and this is not, they didn’t share this with the waiter.

They just, the waiter happened to hear this and they’re like, their only regret was that they didn’t actually. Get to visit a New York city hot dog stand, like the total opposite end of the spectrum from all these gourmet restaurants. But they were just like, they just wanted to have that experience. And so the waiter hears it.

Runs out the door to the hot dog cart on the corner buys a New York hot dog for them brings it to the kitchen and has the chef prepare it. So he chops this hot dog into four pieces, puts them on separate plates and then does some like chef magic, garnishing, whatever. And then they serve that as like an extra surprise dish to the group and they’re just ecstatic over the moon.

And that level of just attention to people, to care, to just like running with it and like the chef in the story was like, what the fuck are you talking about? He’s no, Trust me. Like we’re doing this. And then they went through with it. I just love that. It was like a couple of other examples.

There was a when, people come show up at the restaurant, they’re Ready for their, for to T they will have looked up everybody who reserved a table, they’ll have looked them up on Google. If you have the photo on the internet somewhere, they’re going to find that photo. So when you step in the door, they greet you by name, right?

Half an hour, 45 minutes before your reservation comes up, they review those photos. So they’re ready for you by the time you come in the door. And as you’re entering, someone is signaling to. The, host, whether your table is ready or not. And so they don’t need to look at the computer. They can just say, Hey, like here, they can just take you to the bar to wait or take you directly to the table.

They don’t need like these, be with you the whole time when you’re at the table and they’re asking you, do you want still sparkling or tap water. They’re going to, the waiter that asks you is going to signal some hand signs behind his back. And then someone else comes in instantly, like just gives you the right water.

So it’s it’s just thinking things through like little details like that. That’s just. For me, I just for me, I love that. I love that stuff.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s amazing. It’s, and I just want to confirm, it’s definitely part of your brand. Like that care and that empathy and that great support. I have a friend near me.

Who’s a cook and a chef. He’s actually. Use some Plero and I remember him talking about your just the, vibe and the support and the experience of the company. And I’ve just noted that’s just no implanted in my brain with the brand of some players, like these guys go above and beyond and support and actually really care about their customers.

And the fact that you have the the coaching as well, it’s just an indication. Like we’re just, we’re not just trying to sell you software. We want you to be successful and remove blockages and stuff like that.

Calvin Correli: Yeah. And doing the coaching for me has been just remarkable. Like I see coaching. As a force multiplier, I get to be with my audience every week, experience exactly what they’re struggling with so that I can take I just ingrains my people, my avatar into my brain every single week.

And it aligns me with the people that I’m serving in such a deep way. It’s been really helpful for me, like really profound to do that. And it’s crazy because I was like for many years, I was so busy doing the software and so busy feeling like I was not worthy and imposter and all of the stuff that we all struggle with that I didn’t do the coaching.

And it was actually one of my friends that, that. Whom sidebar I met at a food truck in Washington Square Park over there some years ago, right at the beginning of COVID. He was the one that, that got me to do a coaching program. I’m so grateful because it’s been, yeah, game changer for me and for the company and for our people.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And it ties back into your last point, which was that. If you’re having trouble selecting a topic or an avatar or a niche, who do you want to spend time with? Because if you’re going to be really good, you’re going to be spending a lot of time with these people and you got to like them and get them and want to keep understanding and going deeper.

Calvin Correli: Yeah. And an added bonus for, me too, has been with this coaching program, I’m doing exactly what my clients are doing. I’m doing the same thing using the same software. Guess where Simplero Academy runs? Of course it runs in Simplero. Everything runs in Simplero. And so that’s why too, I like doing it externally as well.

So we’re not just doing, working with Simplero client, Simplero members, but also with people who are not on Simplero yet is really helpful because that. Is me doing the things that I like that my clients would be doing.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Calvin, thanks for coming back on the show. I really appreciate it.

He’s a simplero. com. He also has a personal website at calvincarelli. com. Is there any other way you mentioned mentioned again, the The, Instagram DM thing.

Calvin Correli: So follow me, go follow me on Instagram at Calvin Corelli, C A L V I N C O R E L I two R’s one L very confusing. Calvin Corelli at Instagram and then DM me the there’s 10 K and say that you came from, LMS cast the podcast.

Then I’ll, know that this is where you heard. You discovered me and then I’ll send you over the link to the like the video where I break down how to get to 10, 000 a month as a coach. And and then, yeah, see how, if we can support you either on some Blair or in similar Academy or just some other way.

Chris Badgett: Awesome, Calvin. Thanks for coming back on the show. We’ll have to do this again sometime.

Calvin Correli: All right. Appreciate it, Chris. Thank you.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post What’s Working Now For Coaches and Course Creators With Calvin Correli appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Miriam Castilla shares insights about wealth, abundance, and the relationship with money in the conversation.

Miriam Castilla works as a coach, speaker, and businesswoman. Her engineering education gives her a distinct viewpoint in the areas of plenty, wealth thinking, and money management. She uses her personal experience of being able to travel for four months out of the year without worrying about money to illustrate her definition of wealth and abundance—having options beyond money. Where money doesn’t limit what one can or cannot do.

She introduces her “Magnetic Money” group coaching program, which is intended for those with variable incomes or those who want to improve their money management. It focuses on combining energy and mentality with realistic financial techniques.

Miriam draws comparisons between the relationship with money and that with a significant other, emphasizing symptoms of an unhealthy relationship as avoidance, bad emotions, and dread related to money management.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest from the other side of the world down under in Australia. It’s Miriam Castilla. She’s from miriamcastilla. com, two L’s in Castilla. Welcome to the show, Miriam.

Miriam Castilla: Hello. Thank you very much for having me.

Chris Badgett: I’m really excited to get into it with you today.

We’re going to be talking about creating wealth mindset around money, abundance, entrepreneurship, your course creator journey. There’s a lot we’re going to get into. But let’s start with a question I’ve seen you ask in your videos, which is what does wealth and abundance mean to you?

Miriam Castilla: Oh, nice one. To me, it’s really all about choices and not having money be the thing that defines what I get to do.

So it’s actually about moving beyond money. And not even having to think about money. For example my husband and I now spend about four months of the year just traveling and not, thinking about money. So that’s what wealth and abundance means to me, having those kinds of choices.

Chris Badgett: Awesome.

Tell us a little bit about what magnetic money is.

Miriam Castilla: Okay. So magnetic money is a group coaching program Mainly for small business owners or really anyone with irregular income or who wants to try and figure out how to make their money work best for them. And the thing that we do there that’s really quite different to other money programs out there is we do what I call marrying the magical with the practical.

So we, we look at how do you organize and best manage your personal finances? Cause no one ever teaches us that stuff, especially when you have fluctuating income, what does that actually look like? What bank accounts do I need? What do I do with my money when it comes in? How do I decide?

What goes where? So we cover all of that and we cover the mindset side as well as the energetics the way you feel about your money.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I think we’re going to unpack a few of those things. Let’s start with an unhealthy relationship to money. What are some patterns, mindsets, behaviors with an unhealthy relationship with money and wealth and abundance in life?

Miriam Castilla: Yeah, so the word relationship I think is really key to helping people figure that out. Because what’s a sign of an unhealthy relationship with your significant other? It’s when you start avoiding each other, talking badly about each other behind each other’s back start having less than pleasant feelings towards the other person and maybe not always expressing those.

So it’s It’s the same with money and I say to people sometimes if money were a person in your life and they knew how you really felt and thought about them would they want to hang around you? And it’s, having that, if you notice yourself having that love, hate relationship with money you want more, but you feel let down by it, or you’re uncertain or uncomfortable even dealing with it managing it.

Sometimes people avoid looking at their banking all together because they just fear the worst. And when we actually finally do, they go, Oh. It’s actually quite okay, isn’t it? So I think if you mirror it to human relationships that quickly lets you establish whether it’s a healthy one or an unhealthy one.

Chris Badgett: I love that. Let’s go a little deeper into the magical or the energetic aspect. What is, tell us more about that, like energy around money and we’ve got the law of attraction and all that stuff. Take us as a guide through this world of. Energetics and money.

Miriam Castilla: Yeah it’s, an interesting area. So my background originally is as an engineer.

So this whole law of attraction thing, it took me a long time to get to a point where I thought, Oh no, it’s a real thing. And you can use. It’s all different language to describe it, but we all know people where money just flows to them easily. Everything goes really well. One thing leads to another and it’s like they’re blessed or something.

And then we all know people, or sometimes we feel like we are the people where it just It doesn’t matter how hard you seem to try. It’s just not wanting to flow. And so that’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about the energetics, because ultimately you want to be in a state where you do just allow that money to flow.

You basically become magnetic to it, which is why I called my program magnetic money. And so it comes down to sometimes the harder you try, the worse it gets. That’s because we start focusing on the lack of it and the frustration around it. So that’s when all those feelings around, Oh money’s driving me crazy dah, And you just start worrying and fearing. You can look at it from all these different levels, like even your brain will shut down and you’ll stop thinking clearly and you’ll stop being Solution focused and open to ideas and creativity and ways to move forward and energetically, you literally shut down.

So your focus is then on there’s not enough and hey, presto, that’s what you tend to then attract more of not enough. It’s not working whatever you focus on expands basically.

Chris Badgett: Tell us more about that. Like getting into the the attract attraction aspect of it. I remember I watched the movie, the secret when it first came out a long time ago and I was really into it and I’m, like it’s, it makes sense and I don’t know, I start seeing it everywhere, like your vibe attracts your tribe is a saying like what you put out there, usually more of that comes back to you, positive or negative.

What kind of behaviors and stuff can we do to really turn on that law of attraction or at least make it even more powerful than it is in our lives?

Miriam Castilla: Yeah, totally. So a little back story with the secret. When that came out, I was going through what I call my broke single mum phase, and I used to have it just playing all the time in my house.

My kids were going nuts. And one of the teachers I really loved on that was Mike Dooley. And I used, because he would just sum it all up by saying thoughts become things. Which is really the crux of the answer to your question. And I used to think, wow, that’s so simple. So cool. Imagine if one day I could teach something like this or work with someone like that.

And I actually do now. I’m part of Mike Dooley’s team and we actually deliver his infinite possibilities trainer program. Thoughts become things. And so what can we do? It’s, I think it’s if you want to sum it up, it’s about being clear on these desires without being so attached to them that we completely lock ourselves down and get in our own way.

And when it comes to money, it’s really about. Something as, it’s as simple as focus on the abundance that’s all around you and how much you enjoy it and how much more you want of it and all the cool things you can do with it. And it opens you up energetically to attracting more of it and to actually seeing and becoming aware of all the ways that can happen and what tends to happen for a lot of people.

And they don’t even realize it is because they want more money in their life. They are actually inadvertently focused on because it’s not enough. It comes down to what you focus on expands, but if you focus on the lack of money and that you want more because there’s not enough, that’s what you get more of.

And. You need to be able to turn that on its head and it does feel a little counterintuitive sometimes because by focusing on what you’ve already gotten, how much you love it and what it gives you, you actually then attract more of that energy. It’ll go more money to let you do more cool things. Does that make sense?

Chris Badgett: That does make sense. And I think just to maybe clarify it a little more, could you speak to how it works in personal relationships? So for example, if you want, if you’re looking for a life partner or you’re looking for more friends that lift you up instead of pull you down what would you need to do to attract those things?

Yeah.

Miriam Castilla: So you’ve got to be that thing first, right? If you want to attract really cool, fun people to hang around with, you’ve got to be one of them yourself. If you want to attract a really loving, caring partner, who’s got their act together and doesn’t come with a whole lot of baggage, let’s say, then you’ve got to figure out your own stuff and.

Be really grounded In yourself, if, and we all know this we tend to have like different places, different faces, same problem. And that’s because we’re bringing ourselves along and maybe we haven’t grown and evolved yet. So you’ve got to become the thing first to attract the thing. And it goes for relationships, friendships you can insert any topic, even down to health.

If you focus on your wellbeing and how much you appreciate it, Your body is going to start functioning better because number one, you’re not in a stress state and you start. Attracting more opportunities and good health into your life. So it works on every single level of life.

Chris Badgett: That’s, wonderful.

Zeroing in on that. If we look at a pattern that a lot of people end up in, especially when they’re first starting as an entrepreneur, particularly if they’re, let’s say in a more of a business niche Sometimes there’s a, there’s this advice of fake it till you make it kind of thing. But so how do we, with authenticity become what we want to be first, even if we’re not quite there yet with our business or our income or whatever it is, give us some nuanced advice there.

Miriam Castilla: So I think the fake it till you make it, it can be a little bit of a slippery slope because sometimes people feel like they need to pretend there’s something they’re not, and. It’s not really about that. It’s more about confidence that it’s all going to work out fine and really putting yourself in that space and into that energy.

And fake it till you make it is about being open to all the cool ways that can happen and actually training your nervous system and you’re literally laying down neural pathways that see that as your normal. I’m big on visualization because I’m also a hypnotherapist. And visualization is a wonderful way to condition your body to feeling success abundance, all those cool things.

You’re literally training your body chemistry and getting your body addicted to that state. And then you will naturally unconsciously keep seeking out more ways to make that happen. And also on the level of neural pathways, you’re laying that down and it becomes a routine track that you drank.

Brain travels down. So when you think about the future of your business and your goals, you see yourself accomplishing them, you see yourself achieving them. And it becomes an acceptable state. It becomes a first response. And then you naturally, unconsciously tend to act more and more in accordance with that.

So to me, that’s what Fake It Till You Make It is about. And it’s about really thinking about Believing in yourself, starting to see it starting to believe it and, elevating your self image. So I think a cool way to sum it up is I heard Bob Proctor long time ago say, you cannot outperform your own self image.

And that’s what it comes down to, right?

Chris Badgett: Wow. This is very good. I noticed on your website and for you out there, head on over to Miriam castilla. com money habit archetypes. What are those? And yeah, take us to school.

Miriam Castilla: Okay. So a lot of people will say, Oh, I seem to have all these money blocks or must have lots of limiting beliefs around money.

Now I’m fundamentally lazy and also I like to make things really simple. Rather than thinking about a million limiting beliefs that get in our way, if we actually go a level above that, it’s all just part of a greater story. So how do I know what this story is that I’ve programmed myself with?

Look at what you do with your money because that’s the ultimate expression and end result of whatever’s going on internally. So it’s, really simple at the end of the day, that the easiest starting point is to look at your general habit pattern around money and begin there and then work your way backwards.

So money habit archetypes are the way you, tend to naturally and unconsciously treat your money and I break it down to just 3 categories and then we go from there. And the 3 categories are overextender where there’s always more going out than coming in. Spender where it comes in and whoops, there she goes and accumulator, which is the person that no matter how much or how little comes in, they will manage to swirl some away.

And that’s their default programming. So that’s what the money habit, archetypes are all about.

Chris Badgett: Is the goal to like take the best parts of all three or just become an accumulator?

Miriam Castilla: No, look, the goal is not necessarily to become the goal is to become, to have a healthy money pattern. So my belief is I think the only one that’s really not going to serve anyone is the overextender because you’re going to keep going to more debt, but you can be a really healthy spender money habit archetype You know, you just living in the flow of abundance where money comes in and it goes out again, you spend it, you invest it, you give it away, whatever.

But it’s not coming from a place of because I don’t deserve to have my own. It’s coming from a place of there’s plenty for everyone. It might be a little bit of a utopian dream of mine that’s actually possible. I think for most people, it’s about becoming more of a healthy accumulator pattern and healing really the unhealthy belief systems that keep them stuck in an unhealthy pattern.

Because having said that most people think I need to be an accumulator. And the thing is that most of the people that are actually attracted to me and my work are accumulators. And what’s driving them is an unhealthy fear or belief that it’s still not enough and what I don’t want. To perpetuate is what I call broke millionaire syndrome, because there are plenty of people who’ve got loads of money and are really stressed about it.

So you don’t have to have loads of money to feel like a millionaire or even to live like a millionaire for that matter. So a healthy towards the accumulator kind of pattern, archetype and expression and relationship with money is the ultimate goal. Yes.

Chris Badgett: How did you in your life get this focus on money and abundance?

Like, where did the passion for this area of life develop for you and your story? For

Miriam Castilla: how long have we got Plenty of time.

So I think the lights went on for me around this. I went through a divorce, I mentioned my broke single mom, kind of period. And I went through a divorce and that was when I heavily got into the secret and really embraced that sort of spiritual side of life.

And I, dug really deep. But at the same time, I think being an engineer and Being half German and, all of that made me really take good care of my money as well. So I did it instinctively. Then the interesting thing is that what was born out of that period in my life was a business in finance.

And that meant that I got to see other people’s finances and where they were at. It was a really huge eye opener because the people who had large incomes were often the most stressed about money. Just because somebody had a great income didn’t mean that they were financially stable or were building their wealth.

Sometimes it was the people on quite modest incomes that actually had assets and that kind of financial stability. That was a huge eye opener where I thought, Oh, it’s not just me. And from there, I got really passionate about helping people understand that it’s what goes on in here as well as having the skills.

That you have to bring together at the end of the day, if you want to have a healthy relationship with money and actually not just have the money in the bank, but also feel great about it and feel like it’s enough and feel safe and secure. So that’s the short version of that story.

Chris Badgett: Very cool. Tell us the part of the story of becoming a course creator.

For example, I see on Udemy, you have over 4, 000 students over there. How did the okay, I’m really passionate about this topic to, I want to teach and I want to figure out how to put that on the internet. Where did that, how did that happen for you?

Miriam Castilla: So I initially started coaching people one on one and quickly realized You know, can only help me reach so many people and there’s only one of me.

And also I find that unnaturally I love teaching. I really love, maybe it’s because I love talking. And I don’t know, but I love teaching and I like breaking things down into simple actionable steps. I think that’s the engineering background. And so it just lent itself naturally to building a course and being able to reach more people.

And I think the other. Cool part not only does the course help you leverage yourself, your time build this beautiful leveraged income and reach a whole lot of people. It also helps those people find a community. And I think that’s a really important thing too. It’s not just me telling them something.

It’s them being able to interface and connect with other people on the same journey who they can maybe relate to even better than myself. Because often what happens as, the teacher who’s lived it and been through it all, sometimes you seem a little removed to the student. And so having somebody nearby who’s maybe just one step ahead of them is a really great thing.

And it just happened naturally. I think it just seemed like a no brainer to be honest, to build a course and just reach more people.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. On the course topic specifically and as it relates to becoming your most authentic, positive, abundant self. I see a lot of people get hung up on figuring out what to focus on, like what niche or what should I make my course about?

What part of. Creating an abundant life. Can you offer some advice around selecting your focus and your like your topic for your course or your website or your coaching program so that it’s in alignment and has the highest odds of success for that individual.

Miriam Castilla: I like that. You said the word.

in alignment because I think that’s really critical. A lot of people will create a course because they think it’s going to sell or it’s, just a very economic decision. And for some people that may work out okay, but I find most people who want to create their own courses are actually driven by something a little bit deeper.

They want to make an impact. They want to. make a difference in the world. And so tapping into that and the way that truly lights you up, I think is, really important. So it has to feel in alignment. There’s an exercise I take some of my VIP clients through called your unconscious core values.

And we do it using hypnosis so that we actually get past the, this is what I think should be important to me to, Oh, this is what is actually important to me. If I’m completely honest with. And it’s those things that naturally drive us internally. If we can tap into those, the things that just light us up, that we’re really passionate about, what’s going to happen is that we get, we forget about ourselves and we move beyond ourselves in creating the course in the marketing of the course in the showing up, it lets you tap into an energy that feels a bit more limitless where.

You can get your rant on when you talk about your topic and get really passionate. And I think if you just selecting a topic, because you’ve done your market research and it says that learning how to knit scarves in three different colors is the course. And then you go research and create a course I’m not going to say it can’t work, but I think if you really want to love your business and love everything you need to do to make it a success Choose the niche that you feel really passionate about where you do know your stuff and you know it’s going to make a difference as well and you can really get behind that.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Let’s, talk about getting results for clients and students. You’ve worked with a lot of clients and you’ve had students and readers and a bunch of people around your work there’s courses, there’s coaching, there’s community. What kind of pieces, if you could advise somebody who’s trying to help others with this in a specific area of life what, components make an effective program in your experience for the, in terms of learner results

Miriam Castilla: in terms of learner results, I think for me, it’s been a really interesting journey and I would actually say stay open and pay attention to what your people are saying, what the feedback is and what works for them, because I think every community Will be a little bit different, and it doesn’t mean that the large building blocks need to be different.

It’s more about how do I bring it all together? For example, in magnetic money, we’ve played with lots of different things, and I give myself permission to change it. So we will have practical workshops. I offer little 15 minute focus sessions. sessions with myself one on one, which not a lot of group course creators will do, but it works really well for my community because it’s not a full coaching session, but it’s just a quick check in.

Things like having accountability tends to work really well for my people. For others, it may not work well. So I think it’s really important to Be tuned in and not to lock yourself in too hard into those little ancillary pieces of the puzzle, but as far as the actual here’s the course log in, watch the modules.

The 1 thing that I think will work for everybody. Keep it simple, keep it short, break it down into little steps.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And I noticed you

Miriam Castilla: agreed with that.

Chris Badgett: Oh, I do. I love the first part you said actually about staying open. Cause these are human beings and yes, we’ve got technology between us, but ultimately it’s about a human connection and a transfer of knowledge and, then people are different.

And then you start seeing patterns of what works or where you can improve. And I love that you take the you offer some 15 minute one on ones and stuff like that, because I heard this saying once that. People like, how do you charge more or whatever? It’s really what people are paying for is access.

So there’s this website called masterclass where you can learn from all these famous people, but they’re not going to help you. They’re not around to help or anything. It’s just content. So that human connection is, super important also amongst the community of learners as well. So I, like your approach there.

Miriam Castilla: And I think as long as you stay in alignment and you stay in that positive energy that we’ve talked about, you, these ideas will come to you because I, don’t want to coach everybody one on one in my program. It would burn me out. Really fast, but this idea of, Oh, no, I can just offer 15 minutes slots and they’re limited.

And we, talk about that. Please don’t hog them we have an understanding that this is for the people who need a hand and. Let everybody have it go. It works really well and it. I even see people talk about, Oh I’ve, canceled my 15 minute spot with Miriam because I’ve worked it out myself.

If anybody wants it, there’s now one available again. It actually helps people look after each other. So there’s a million ways of doing things and we just need to give ourselves permission to be open to it.

Chris Badgett: I love that. What’s working for you from a marketing perspective or attracting clients or, getting clients?

Or, learners or customers, whatever you want to call them, how, what’s working for you as a coach and course creator these days.

Miriam Castilla: Yeah, that, that’s also an, ever changing thing because technology changes the market. Changes the algorithms change. What tends to work really well for me is things, I’m going to give you the energetic answer, is things that feel really easy for me and that I really enjoy doing.

With content, for example I do create content, but I’ve stopped sitting down once a month to create a block of content because I find that when it goes out there, I might be in a different space, so I’ve created something when I wasn’t in the right space. So I’ve given myself permission to do it in a way that feels more in flow for me, which means sometimes I’ll create it on the day and just put it out there, or I will create a whole batch.

I’ve allowed myself to be a little bit more fluid with that. Coming on as a guest on podcasts was like. Because I love talking. I love meeting people and it’s a wonderful way to tap into a broader audience. So I still don’t have my own podcast. So I think again, what works is yes, you’ve got to look at what makes sense strategically, but you also have to look at.

What’s going to work for you? What’s going to feel good? That’s sustainable for you. And having said that, I have started running ads again, because I finally figured out a system that is going to work okay for me. And now we’re up and running with ads again, but I hadn’t run any ads for about two years.

But I think ultimately what works for my audience is and what works for me to bring people into my world is for them to just like even today, we’re talking to have a little experience of what I’m all about. If I just put ads out there with stock images, it, I don’t think it would be the same because that’s not the kind of people that tend to come into my program.

The kind of people that come into my program are people who really want that connection and need that little bit of. I’m going to say mothering and support to go. It’s okay. You’re not the only one. You’re not broken. And we’ve got this because money is a very emotional topic for people, and it comes with a lot of stuff, right?

Yeah, again, it’s tuning into. Yeah. What, what’s going to work for me that’s sustainable, that feels in alignment and also what makes strategic sense and then finding those matches between the two.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I think you would make a great podcast host, by the way.

Miriam Castilla: it’s on the list. It’s on the list, Chris.

Chris Badgett: I didn’t realize the wisdom of it for me at that time, but I’ve been podcasting for nine years and it’s, really easy for me and I enjoy it. I get a lot out of it, I learn. I meet amazing people, I help the community. It’s good marketing. It’s a really cool format. A money question for you.

And maybe you can give us both an energetic and an engineering answer. I see people get hung up a little bit on pricing of an online learning program. And particularly I noticed sometimes some of the best people that are really good are they have the most self doubt or imposter syndrome or whatever.

And their pricing, it’s just hold a finger up in the air and just guess or I don’t know, but since pricing is a money and a value issue, what would you advise people?

Miriam Castilla: Yeah, that’s huge. So I mentioned before that we run some workshops in my community. The most popular one has been the one on magnetic pricing because.

And so one of the big things, it is a huge mindset issue for starters, because what’s the right price for a course? There is no correct answer, right? It’s whatever the purchaser believes is equivalent of its value. And so if you’re the person selling the course, you’ve got to believe that yourself to begin with.

So I think a huge issue with pricing of courses is people come into it with this employee mentality still of thinking about charging by the hour. And then leveraged product where really You’re not working. You are working. You’re working your butt off to market the thing in the background, but you’re not mark.

You’re not working to deliver it., you’re not standing up in front of the class. And so they have this disconnect where they think I’m, not deserving it. I’m not Earning this money. And so the first thing is stop thinking about hourly rate, forget it. And look at the value you’re delivering and the difference that makes in people’s lives.

What’s that worth? If you help people save their marriage with your course. What’s that worth? Just even on a hard practical note, what’s the bloody cost of a divorce? Let alone the emotional aspect and being able to continue in a relationship that’s gotten through a rough patch.

That value is enormous. You can’t, and if you ask people who’ve been through that, and and have maybe come out the other side of it,

We’ve got a strange crackly thing. I don’t know if you can hear that. I can’t hear that. You can’t all

I’m just going to keep talking. I just didn’t want to be talking over the top of, oh, there you go. Sorry. So where was it? if you ask somebody who’d been through that other side and come out the other side of it and said what was that worth to you or somebody who’s going through it and wants to save their marriage they would tell you, I don’t care what it costs.

If you think about it from that point of view, it quickly shifts your perspective on what the value of your course is. And If you also think about if you can help people achieve an outcome in a shortened period of time, what’s the value of that? We’re all used to paying extra for express for an express delivery or yes, I want to get my whatever fixed, but can you please get it done in two days instead of two weeks?

We’re happy to pay extra for that. So sometimes when people Can create an outcome in a short period of time, or in just a few modules, say, they think, Oh, but there’s not a lot of stuff there, but really, that’s more valuable, right? Because you’ve created, say, six modules of learning and you deliver an outcome.

If you made people sit through 20 modules to get the same outcome, you would probably lose. Some of your audience along the way, and so it’s actually more valuable. So it’s about actually shifting your mindset from that employee kind of thinking. We’ve all been conditioned into growing up and really looking at what’s the value of the outcome I’m delivering?

How well and efficiently am I delivering it? And that’s valuable and. Just not making it about ourselves, I think is the bottom line not making it about our self worth and our sense of being deserving. It’s about disconnecting from that, shifting the mindset and going to do the work on why do I feel like I’m not deserving of having an awesome multiple six figure income from a course I created three years ago?

What’s that about? And when you work on that, a lot of the Kind of questioning of the value and the pricing of the course will just drop away and you’ll be able to look at it much more objectively. I’m not sure if I answered your question. Did I answer your question? You

Chris Badgett: did you a hundred percent.

Moving a little further into the journey, let’s say the, course is working, there’s some health and things. What I see happen to a lot of entrepreneurs is they end up on this infinite growth mode, sometimes sacrificing their health, their relationships. Even just the things they used to do for fun or friendships or whatever.

What advice do you have around that for if somebody is like accumulating, but they never, they’re like in this like battle fatigue where they just. Keep charging and they don’t stop and smell the roses or enjoy life a little what’s going on there. And how do we fix it?

Miriam Castilla: Yeah, I think you actually just said it because you said they’re in that accumulative space, right?

That so they’re being an accumulator in terms of it’s still not enough. I haven’t done enough. This can’t be All there is to it. So they keep going, they keep pushing. They keep driving from a mindset point of view and a sort of what’s the story you’re telling yourself point of view. It’s, that it’s not enough.

I’ve not done enough. It’s not good enough. So I have to keep pushing and driving. So it’s actually about feeling deserving of taking the time out. It’s also very much it becomes a. a habit and an addiction, like we talked about being addicted to having to sit at your desk, to having to check, your phone notifications or your emails as soon as you wake up in the morning.

Being able to break all of those patterns and working on actually feeling deserving is, really critical. So I that you can set up structures to help you with that. You can put apps on your phone that don’t let you open things up to begin with until maybe you’ve done your morning meditation or whatever that thing is.

So one of the things I teach people is, and this is. It’s really It’s related to what you’re asking about. But it actually is very helpful in what you’re asking about as well. I teach them a process or I guess an approach that you, I call start high, stay high. Now I’m not asking them to smoke a joint first thing in the morning.

I’m asking them to get on a high vibration first thing in the morning to get in the space of feeling good and just feeling good. Being grounded and centered, so you make that first part of the day about you getting into a good headspace and it means don’t look at your phone don’t Start with maybe a meditation or a walk or some stretching or some exercise, like something that gets you really connected to you and grounded.

And when you can get started like that and get some momentum going. It helps you carry that into your day. And then things like just working maybe to a Pomodoro timer and then forcing yourself to get up and have a break. What works for me because I do have my kind of. recovering perfectionist and inner workaholic that still like to mess with me, is I will just book things out of the office for half the day.

And then I know I’ve only got three hours in the office today. What’s actually important, what does need to get done. So then I focus in and I actually do the important work rather than just the busy work. So setting ourselves up. And self managing goes a really long way. And then at the same time, looking into those deeper belief systems and patterns around, why do I think that I have to work my ass off to deserve this?

Why do I feel like it’s never enough? What’s that all about? And if you need to work with a practitioner, work with a practitioner. But just starting to ask yourself those questions, maybe journaling around them, spending some time pondering them as you go for a walk will go a very long way towards unraveling that stuff.

Chris Badgett: All right. Two more questions for you. One of them is around relationships. What happens when somebody develops a more healthy Relationship with money, let’s say their partner is stuck in the old place where they were. Of course you want to help your partner experience the, things that you’ve figured out or the ways you’ve grown.

But maybe sometimes it’s, not, there’s just like a different money archetype there or whatever. And they’re, not interested. What Cause I know money is the root of issue in a lot of relationships. So talk, to us about relationships and money.

Miriam Castilla: Yeah this, is huge. And so what I found in the past, people would come into my program and two, three weeks into it, they’d say, this is awesome.

I’m really noticing the shifts. I’m feeling so much better already. Now what do I do about that? And I would be like, ignore them, please ignore them, keep doing the work for yourself. It, is a really challenging thing. it’s for that reason that we’ve actually now opened up the space and said. Bring your life partner for free if they’re ready and willing, because they have to be ready and willing.

And even if you don’t have that opportunity of bringing them into a space where they’re learning what you’re learning. It’s really important to stay in your own lane. As you especially do this work around money, feeling deserving, opening to receiving more. And just getting comfortable with the idea that, yeah, I’m.

earning great money, or I’m on my way to earning great money. And I don’t have to work my butt off to, to do it. And you’re getting comfortable in that space. You’re still a little bit fragile, right? You’ve still got these old patterns and these old belief systems that want to pull you back into the cave of safety.

Because we all have that reptilian lizard brain still that just wants to keep going. Keep us safe and keep us small. And so it’s really important to stay in your own lane. Do your own work, ignore them as best as you can. Because as you become stable and this becomes your new normal, and we talked about your own self image. As you solidify that and really get stable and unshakable in that, then you’ll become infectious to them.

But while you’re still wobbly. They will infect you and you’ll end up in. I don’t know, maybe a money argument or they’ll convince you that there is things to really be worried about and what’s going on with you. You’ve suddenly got rose colored glasses on and you’re not being realistic or whatever they may accuse you of, right?

So it’s no, just stick with it. Do your work. And it will automatically become infectious. It just happens. So it’s actually not your job to try and fix them if you do. You’re just opening yourself up to being toppled off the perch that you’ve just managed to put yourself on.

Chris Badgett: I love that. I saw it on your website too, the bring your spouse for free.

And I was like, Oh, that’s such a nice touch. It’s and that comes from a place of abundance. You’ve already paid. You’re not like 50 percent off your spouse. You’re literally like, here’s an olive branch to help if it’s helpful. I love that.

Miriam Castilla: Absolutely. And treating them as a fully fledged member of the community, I think is really important as well.

They’re, I think it really helps the relationship. As well, because now we’re not just asking our members to be the messenger. We’re saying no, bring them in if they’re ready and they want this we’re going to welcome them with open arms. And so it’s actually shifted. My community was women only in the past and now it’s not.

And I think that’s a beautiful evolution of my program as well to say, no, this work is bigger than gender and, any of those kinds of things. It’s, important for everybody.

Chris Badgett: Tell us more detail about Magnetic Money and who the ideal person is for the program.

Miriam Castilla: So the ideal person for Magnetic Money is somebody who’s a small business owner who maybe has been going for at least a year.

Usually they’re they’re usually still in the first five years of their business. Not always. And they find that money is an issue. They don’t really know how to manage their money and manage that irregular income. And it’s a bit of a red hot mess. And also they have these mindset issues around, how much do I charge?

Oh my God, I have to put up my prices. What if all my clients leave me or what if my program doesn’t sell? So it’s somebody who wants to get their money organized because it’s actually a very important part of their life. Resolving a lot of those mindset issues, it actually helps. So it’s definitely somebody who wants to get their money organized, wants to create financial stability and step into a space where they’re not thinking about the money or held back by the fear around money, where they can just move forward and serve their community and know that it’s creating abundance and financial stability for themselves.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Go check out Miriam Castilla. That’s C A S T I L A dot com. Thank you for coming on the show and thank you for doing this work. In some ways, money is a taboo subject. And like you said, it’s a very emotional hot button issue. So it’s great to dive right in and. And help people in that way.

But yeah, thanks. Thanks so much for coming on and I appreciate all the wisdom you’ve shared with us today.

Miriam Castilla: Thanks so much, Chris. I’ve really enjoyed our chat. It’s been awesome.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post How to Make a Bigger Impact and Build Wealth with Miriam Castilla appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Brandon described how you can easily sell your online course and membership to people in China with China payment plugin. He shares the details about the China Payments plugin and its integration with LifterLMS.

Brandon Ernst is the founder of Gaucho Plugins. The China Payment Plugin is also developed by Gaucho. He clarifies that the China plugin makes it easier for non-Chinese companies or organizations that utilize Stripe outside of China to conduct online transactions while selling to Chinese consumers using WeChat Pay and Alipay.

Course developers may easily enter the Chinese market with the plugin, which takes use of Stripe’s connectivity with these widely used payment methods. Brandon also provides insight into Chinese consumer behavior by stressing the prevalence of WeChat Pay and Alipay in both online and offline transactions.

He highlights how Chinese customers are accustomed to and confident in these digital payment systems, which strengthens the credibility of companies that provide these payment choices.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Brandon Ernst. He’s from Gaucho plugins. Today, we’re going to be talking about chain China payments plugin. You can find it at China payments, plugin. com. Gotcha. Plugins also has some other plugins that we’re going to talk about, but first welcome to the show, Brandon.

Brandon Ernst: Thanks for having me, Chris. It’s a pleasure to be on the show with you.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And thank you for integrating the China payments plugin with Lifter LMS checkout. We really appreciate it at a high level. Can you describe what the China payments plugin does and how it could fit into an education entrepreneur stack selling courses or memberships or coaching or whatever with Lifter LMS?

Brandon Ernst: Absolutely. If you’re selling online courses to China, the most commonly accepted payment methods or most widely used payment methods in China are WeChat Pay and Alipay. And so Stripe has created an integration with those payment methods that we’ve taken advantage of in the plugin that allows any non Chinese business or Stripe supported business outside of China to sell to Chinese customers via WeChat Pay and Alipay.

online. It’s a really useful mechanism. If you have any customers who are in China and want to make those payment methods available to them for your online courses.

Chris Badgett: If somebody help us understand kind of the boots on the ground in China as a consumer, if you’re in China and you’re looking to buy a course made by somebody in the United States or Canada or Europe or Africa or wherever, what like what’s their e commerce reality?

Cause my understanding is like they, approach e commerce differently. You have these super. Super apps like WeChat and Alipay. What’s, tell us a little more about that world of the Chinese consumer. Totally.

Brandon Ernst: It’s much more common in China to have a bank account at a traditional bank and a debit card.

And not necessarily having a credit card in addition to that. Whereas in the US or Europe it’s much more common to have a credit card Asia as well. But as a consumer in China outside of that WeChat Pay and Alipay have become the most dominant methods of transacting in China for brick and mortar stores as well as online.

You can’t really go anywhere in China without Meeting WeChat the app in some way. And then also the WeChat pay mechanism allows you to pay for pretty much anything, anywhere whether it’s a hotel, a flight service online or a meal at a restaurant. It’s not so common for a Chinese consumer to go online and punch in their credit card.

and purchase something. It is, it does happen. It’s not uncommon but it’s, definitely not the dominant method that people would use. And from a familiarity perspective, which I think is probably the most important aspect of this if you’re selling to a Chinese customer for them, WeChat pay and Alipay are completely familiar, so it’s going to offer your business a great deal of legitimacy that you’re offering these payment methods on your website.

It’s going to target to them directly, make them feel like they can trust your business because then they’re protected by WeChat and Alipay’s dispute mechanisms, all of that kind of stuff as well, which aren’t really used very widely either. But the point is that they’re familiar with that kind of tool and they’re more comfortable using that than giving their private credit card number to some service on the internet that they may not be completely familiar

How to Sell Your Online Courses and Memberships to People in China: with.

Chris Badgett: I’m just curious or like WeChat and Alipay, more of a mobile first experience or they, are they more likely to engage from a phone than a desktop or laptop computer? Or do you have any thoughts around that?

Brandon Ernst: Yeah. Yeah. So that’s been one of the most interesting aspects of working on this plugin actually, is that WeChat Pay and Alipay are definitely mobile first experiences.

So on your website on the checkout flow for WeChat Pay, a QR code is actually generated. And the Chinese customer must physically scan the QR code with their phone. They can’t like even if they’re on their phone, for instance, trying to make the purchase, they can’t even extract the QR code or read it that way.

It’s actually required that they would have to physically scan the QR code with the WeChat pay app, and then they can complete payment that way on their mobile device. And then the website will update and display that they’ve completed payment. So there are a few limitations and tricks like that, that are important to understand about how these integrations work for the Chinese market.

And so that’s been an interesting journey getting to know the, user experience from our Plugin users, for instance who are selling to Chinese customers and integrating their Stripe accounts and all of that, all the way to the to the end user who’s in China who’s trying to figure out how to actually make the payment with this mechanism, which is becoming more and more widely used.

And so Alipay is also pretty similar. It’s, a little bit better of a flow. It will work on mobile as well where it just redirects to the Alipay website and then they can either scan a QR code if they’re on desktop using their mobile device again. So if they’re visiting the website on desktop, they’ll have to pull their phone out of their pocket and then scan the screen or they’ll get redirected to the Alipay app.

Which is a flow that we chat is having built out with Stripe and next it’s on their, roadmap from what I, understand. Yeah, they’re definitely mobile first experiences and it’ll either be scanning the QR code or redirecting to one of their apps in order to complete the payment.

Chris Badgett: I know you lived in China for a little bit. Is there like how else is it different from, let’s say the United States is it more of a paper cashless world or just when it comes to e commerce or exchange of money for goods or services. Like how is the culture and the way people do things different?

Brandon Ernst: It’s definitely become a mostly cashless society. Cash is used for some things. There’s still definitely many rural areas of China and many people who don’t necessarily have access to technology like we chat as often or frequently as most people in cities would.

So the vast majority though I’d, say would, be using WeChat, Alipay, these kinds of digital methods of transacting rather than physical currency of any kind. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s, interesting. It’s a big world out there and there’s a lot of different ways to do e commerce and The world is a big place.

So when it comes to selling education thinking globally is a really good idea. I want to encourage you out there listening to go to China payments, plug in. com and check that out. We also have it listed on the Lyft or LMS website. You can find it there. Let’s talk a little bit more about Gaucho plugins.

Tell us what you guys have on offer over there in addition to the China payments plugin.

Brandon Ernst: Yeah. So we have a few kind of niche products that I’ve either been inspired to create with my team or adopt actually from the WordPress repository in the last few years. So one of the more popular plug ins is domain mapping system, which is a really interesting tool that allows you to map multiple domains to a single WordPress site.

And that might be a standard WordPress install or a multi site. So if you’re looking to create, for instance, a store under a different domain or brand and you have a different section of your site for that, you can just map a whole other domain to that without having to log in, log out of your site and kind of manage this new micro site within your existing WordPress site.

So it can save you a great deal of time for a wide variety of use cases. That’s been a really fun one to work on in the last few years. There’s also payment page, which is a payment form plugin that makes it extremely easy to start accepting subscriptions and donations through your site.

You can import a template connect Stripe or PayPal, and then start accepting payments. And the templates are the design of the payment form is totally customizable. That was actually my first foray into WordPress, you could say. I started WordPress in 2011 and building websites for clients as a consultant.

And the first thing you need to do is start accepting payment online in a reasonably fancy way without having to deal with invoicing or other, things that are just kind of barriers. Or at least automating those processes. So I struggled in finding a really nice looking payment form plugin out of the gate.

And yeah, that was a while ago, 2011. It was a different time in WordPress as well. But even today I scan the, repository, look at some competitor plugins there are great designs and you can definitely customize them, but I haven’t seen any that really offer like an import.

Tool for templates that just make it like zero to 100 really, quickly. So that’s that’s what is a little bit unique and fun about that one is the playful designs that you can create with the payment form. And I’ve seen all kinds of cool. Designs like retro gaming sites and stuff like that have taken advantage of it.

And it’s been really fun working on that one too. I think

Chris Badgett: just on that one, I think that it’s, that’s a great solution for if you’re just beginning your course journey and you just want to validate the idea or whatever somebody give me money for this training I’m planning on doing, or maybe I’m going to do some private coaching first with three trainings and it’s a hundred dollars a week or a month or whatever to try to flesh out your course curriculum or something like that.

You could literally have a WordPress site and payment set up really quickly. That’s, Yeah, that

Brandon Ernst: was what was if I were able to use this plugin starting out it would have been perfect to have that kind of thing. My main goal was just at the beginning to be able to start accepting one time either hourly or project payments or subscriptions out of the gate.

And so that, that really set the, my Web development business on fire to, to begin with and then moving into the plugin space later on.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about this split pay plugin. And again, these are on gaucho plugins. com G A U C H O plugins. com. What’s the split play or split pay plugin.

Brandon Ernst: I do that all the time too. It’s a bit of a, it’s

Chris Badgett: a tongue twister.

Brandon Ernst: Yeah. But the split pay plugin is very useful for Woo store owners who want to transfer a percentage of sales to any Stripe connected account, which would usually be a vendor for instance, or a partner of some kind to your business.

This, to make it relevant for courses, for instance, let’s say you have a bunch of teachers and you have an agreement with your teachers that you’re giving them a 75 percent cut of the course cost and you’re taking a 25%. What you would do is just install the split pay plugin, go to that product in WooCommerce and set up.

The exact percentage that you wanted to transfer for each sale of that product. And then you would designate a connected account to your Stripe platform, which is a really easy tool in Stripe to set up. You can create a Stripe platform with any Stripe account and then start onboarding accounts to your, it’s called a connect platform.

And so then you designate which account you’d like to transfer that percentage or fixed amount of each transaction to and then it automatically will work after that. So it’s a really useful tool in, those kinds of situations. It’s also great for vendors. For instance if you’re if you have vendors who are doing product fulfillment on your site and you want them to receive let’s say a percentage for the product itself.

And then also for maybe covering shipping fees, you can designate each of those independently as well through the plugin. So that’s, a really useful tool.

Chris Badgett: That’s really cool. About 30 percent of Lifter LMS users use our WooCommerce integration. So that’s literally something you could start doing today by going to Gaucho plugins and get the split pay plugin.

Brandon Ernst: We do have a, update coming up on that plugin in the next few weeks to ensure that it does work with all products in Woo, especially those generated by third party plugins that. Aren’t like the default WooCommerce product structure. That is, it is doable, but maybe not with the current release. So it will be in the next one to two weeks.

I’d say.

Chris Badgett: My guess is it probably works out of the box because Woo, Lifter Woo ties a course or membership enrollment to a WooCommerce product. We don’t modify the product or create it. It’s just perfect. Okay. So I think it would likely work out of the box. I could also see another solution where.

For example, in Lifter, sometimes courses have multiple instructors. So if there were two, you could then split it 50 50 or whatever.

Brandon Ernst: Yeah it’s, I love that, plugin. It’s actually one that we adopted. I’ve adopted domain mapping system and split pay plugin a few years ago and worked on them with a couple of different developers.

And it’s just been so fun because it’s not ideas that I came up with originally, but I’ve been able to add a bunch of my own ideas to this, kind of this niche and actually build out these niches in WordPress that didn’t really exist before. There are plugins that do domain mapping.

There are plugins that do marketplace functionality and everything like that, but not in such a simple and easy way. Intricate way that I’m trying to get these plugins to do. And so it’s been a pleasure to adopt them rather than invent or come up with my own idea or business that I would hope would just succeed.

So it’s, humbling in a way to come up with, take someone else’s idea and just build on it and make it Something that really contributes to the WordPress space. No, it’s

Chris Badgett: like a bottom up as opposed to top down Oh, I’m going to build a marketplace. It’s what’s the first part?

The the payments, like that’s the main goal.

Brandon Ernst: Huh. Huh. Yeah. And, for payment page that was more kind of my idea that came from my own struggle in WordPress. And so it’s it is more of a top down thing. What’s my idea and I’m hoping others will like it and use it.

And I have received good feedback on it, but of course that space is so competitive that it’s it’s, it just takes time to, to grow a plugin in that area and get people to, to know about it, to hear about it and because there’s a hundred other plugins that might be. Used as well.

But, that one’s also been fun and it’s come with its own challenges and everything like that too. And you just meet so many people in these different kind of niche spaces and find out different business models and you come up with different ideas. So it’s the plugins are a different variety, a different, you each have a different flavor, but that’s what makes them so great and fun to work on and also some of them do align together in a pretty interesting way.

Chris Badgett: I love the e commerce focus. That’s one thing I found accidentally, but. The closer you are to the money, it’s like they really want, the market really wants that solution if you’re helping them get paid, basically. And then there’s all those nuances around that. There’s a lot that happens when money changes hands through the internet.

Does the split pay plugin work with WooCommerce subscriptions?

Brandon Ernst: It does. Yeah. The way woos subscriptions works is basically it will just initiate the transaction over again your WordPress site. So it’s a bit of a different approach than creating a subscription in Stripe directly. Woos subscriptions will basically just replicate the Transaction details.

So if there was a transfer involved in that transaction, then it will happen again for each renewal.

Chris Badgett: That’s also good news for people using Lifter LMS with WooCommerce. Cause many do subscriptions. Yeah. And can you tell us about variations as well? You, does it work with variations?

Brandon Ernst: Yeah. So it’s been a complicated journey with this plugin because it was a very simple plugin.

Product to begin with the features we’re really limited. So with all the feedback we’ve received and ideas we’ve gotten from everyone who’s come across the product. And the plugin it’s been really fun to pick and choose what we should build out. So one of the things that we’re finalizing right now, also in this upcoming release is a fallback approach.

So where you have three layers of products in WooCommerce, you have this. Global layer that is unseen. You can set these kind of global transaction details, which is the first layer in our plugin. Then you have the product level where you can edit details on the product level and then the variable product level.

So if you wanted to split payments for five it doesn’t matter how many you can do multiple Stripe accounts. But let’s just say five Stripe accounts for one product for, and that might be because you have Five different teachers. Maybe a different teacher was selected to teach that, that course or something like that.

I’m there’s so many different ways to set it up, but the point is, if you want to split up a transaction between multiple connected accounts, it can be one product. It can be multiple products. You can go into the product level or the variable product level and set each connected account on that.

Specificity. So it’s actually really useful. On that, on those levels, I’m a micro level for managing even a small amount of a transaction let’s say, a few dollars to different vendor that you wanted to give a commission to, for instance or, a teacher that would get a larger percentage or fixed amount.

So the way it works if you have settings configured on a variable product level or global level, is that if there’s any settings configured on one of those lower levels, let’s say the variable or product level, they would override the global settings. So while you might have a 25 percent transfer amount for your store, for every transaction that goes on, you could also set these additional settings that would override that amount for specific courses or specific courses.

Products that you have in woo even at the variable product level. So it’s and that’s one of the, biggest areas of feedback we’ve received that people want to have that control at all of those different levels they want to have a fallback approach as well. So if shipping is needed to be transferred on one for one product, for instance. But not on others, that they can have these rules set up in place quote unquote rules, because they’re really just Values that you set at each level but the way they work sets up a rule based system for your entire store for how transfers work.

Chris Badgett: I love that. We’re really nerding out here on the details as e commerce guys. I think one of the ideas is swimming in my head. As you’re talking is Like in online education. Sometimes there’s like a variable product that has a course like DIY, do it yourself. And then of course, plus coaching, some people call it tutoring. Some people call it like they actually sell in the classrooms. And there’s a specific teacher that’s teaching that course on that variation or whatever.

And I can totally, how you’re just automating a lot of that manual accounting that people do on the back end. If you, that you could just set up with the split pay and very variable products and all that. That’s, really cool what you’re doing there.

Brandon Ernst: Yeah. It’s, definitely an interesting use case to, to come out to come on the podcast.

Now think about all that. I was going to say something about subscriptions because we, Started with China Payments plugin. That’s one of the limits as well with WeChat Pay and Alipay that should be mentioned is that unfortunately they’re not subscription based. They’re all one-time payment methods.

So it would require, if you’re selling a renewing course a subscription based course for each renewal the Chinese customer would have to manually make a payment again. But it’s most useful at this point for kind of lifetime or one time sales. If you’re going to renew I would suggest having a longer time period to make it less of a hassle for the Chinese customer to have to log in and keep access every 24 hours, for instance, or something like that but, yeah those things are.

Also being hopefully built out by Stripe and WeChat Alipay so that there’ll be an easier mechanism for Alipay subscriptions in the future. And then WeChat pay subscriptions mechanism as well. So

Chris Badgett: yeah, that makes sense. So if you’re thinking in subscriptions, most common being monthly subscription, it’s probably for trying to pay payments to think more like an, it’s an annual price and then they have to re up every year if they want to.

Yeah, and that’s another thing

Brandon Ernst: as well touching back on, on kind of China and how e commerce works there is that subscriptions are not really a common thing in China as well. There are, they exist, but it’s not as common here like. It would be in the US or in not any, country outside of China, really for services like Netflix or Spotify. Or other kind of online streaming services.

Platforms, they’re just not as the, I think the businesses don’t succeed as well in China because just subscriptions aren’t received as well by consumers.

Chris Badgett: So how does like a streaming video service as an example, like how do they approach that market? Is it more like a, it’s good for a year or it’s a lifetime access price or what?

Brandon Ernst: I think they’ll, offer a lifetime plan or a limited time offer. They will also offer subscriptions. Alipay itself does offer subscriptions but not through, not easily through the Stripe integration. But domestically they can do it. But for foreign businesses to accept subscriptions from a Chinese customer in particular would be really difficult to, find at this point.

It’s a bit of a barrier in that regard.

Chris Badgett: Tell us where the name Gaucho comes from.

Brandon Ernst: So my mom is from Argentina and the original team was pretty much all based in Argentina as well. And so I had the inspiration, I go, what should I name the plugin business? We’re all working together and I just love the theme and have some fun designing the website.

There’s some kind of cultural. Icons of Argentina on the website, like the, obviously the couch. All logo and icon, and then the horse at the bottom of the site. Then on the about us page, there’s a girl drinking or having having a picnic. And having some empanadas stuff like that. So it’s, been I’ve had some fun with WordPress over the last few years.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And you mentioned something earlier I wanted to double click on, which is the idea of adopting a plugin. Can you tell us more what that means and how you went about that and how those situations emerged?

Brandon Ernst: Yeah. I, also heard about it. In the last few years, and that’s I heard about it and then jumped on a few that were available at the time on the WordPress repository.

There’s a tag that you can have tags on plugins. If you’re, if you have a plugin listed there, and as the, as a WordPress user, you can go and see the tags as well on the. I believe on the Listing the profile listing page for the plugin. One of the tags I believe is adopt Me or, Adopt Hyphen Me, something like that. So those plugin, you can search for that tag and you can find the plugins that are available for adoption on wordpress.org. And these are plugins that are just simply no longer maintained by their original developers or don’t have any updates happening to them. And the developers want to.

Pass them on to you hands that will maintain them or take care of them or add features. And so for many people that can be a business opportunity. I, I wouldn’t adopt a plugin and then take it off the repository. Which could be done I would look at it as an opportunity to adopt the plugin, build out more free features, make sure it’s working really well.

And then and then create a. A paid version of the product. If you wanted to invest in the product in that way, and you were receiving good feedback from the users. And so that’s how a plugin business can get started. If you don’t if you’re not a developer or if, you don’t want to necessarily hire If you don’t have development skills out of the gate and you see a good business idea already out there on WordPress and you want to get into it, you could adopt a plugin, hire a developer to help you maintain it, build it out, and then create a product from it.

And it’s, a totally doable and reasonable process. It’s not rocket science you get much more to the complicated aspects of it. When you’re talking about marketing the business. And growing and everything like that. Which is WordCamps are all about and all of this fun community based stuff that we were talking about before the, call here got started or the podcast got started.

By the way to everyone watching, there’s WordCamp Asia coming up in Taipei. Chris and I will both be there and it’s going to be really fun adventure. And I think this is a very timely update for the plugin for WeChat Pay and Alipay. Although they are targeted to the mainland domestic Chinese market and not necessarily to the.

Taiwan Taiwan consumers, but it’s, just timely for that region as well. So I’m looking forward to, to actually seeing you there face to face for the first time, Chris.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. And I love my team. I don’t know if we’ll find any maté in Taipei, but maybe we could have some maté. They

Brandon Ernst: might have an Argentinian steakhouse somewhere around.

Chris Badgett: That would be great. Awesome, Brandon. Thanks for coming on the show. You out there listening, go check out China payments, plug in. com. Think about selling your training into China. And also check out all the other cool things that Brandon has going on over at gauchoplugins. com. The particularly a payment page for validating your course idea and split pay for getting creative with partnerships. Or kind of teacher or coach vendor splits.

If you’re using Lifter LMS with WooCommerce. Thanks for coming on the show, Brandon. I really appreciate it. And I look forward to seeing you in Taipei.

Brandon Ernst: You too. Thanks for having me and look forward to hopefully connecting with some of the viewers here. Hope you guys enjoy the, new features that we got with China payments plugin. Thanks so much for taking a few moments to listen in.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post How to Sell Your Online Courses and Memberships to People in China appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Sally Crewe shares her journey and the evolution of NurtureDash, an all-in-one business solution based around a WordPress website. She also discussed about Health Practitioner Business.

Sally Crewe a background in graphic and online design and is an accomplished designer and entrepreneur. She is well knowledgeable about WordPress and its features. When Sally saw that practitioners, especially those in the field of nutrition therapy, needed more straightforward answers, she decided to venture into the internet business arena.

Sally set out to establish NurtureDash, an all-in-one business platform centered around a WordPress website, motivated by her love of technology and design. She wants to give practitioners a streamlined and integrated way to handle their online presence, courses, and client interactions using NurtureDash.

Sally takes a customer-centric approach to business, concentrating on comprehending and resolving the particular difficulties encountered by practitioners. In addition to being a computer specialist, she views herself as a helpful mentor who assists practitioners in navigating the intricacies of WordPress and online business tools.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m rejoined by a special guest. Her name is Sally crew. She’s from nurture dash. com. This is going to be a really exciting episode. We’re going to talk about basically taking all the power of WordPress and removing all the hassle and providing a solution for heart centered entrepreneurs and particularly practitioners.

Which is what Sally has been working on and working in that industry for a long time. But first welcome to the show, Sally.

Sally Crewe: Thank you. It’s great to be back. Thanks for having me.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s fun to have you back. And I love seeing like one of our company values is continuous improvement and you embodied that, like you’re just iterating and iterating.

For those of you. Unfamiliar with the term WAAS, that stands for website as a service. So that’s where you basically provide a full website solution. Sally’s even gone further than just the website with marketing and all kinds of stuff. So we’re going to dive into it today at a high level. Can you describe for us what nurtured dash is?

And. You out there listening, go check out nurturedash. com. But Sally, what’s NurtureDash?

Sally Crewe: So NurtureDash is an all in one business in a box with a, based around a WordPress website. So I’m a designer at heart. I started with graphic design that turned into web design that turned into how the heck do I get this thing online, which turned into learning about web hosting, which turned into running a hosting company.

We’re talking like back in the late nineties. So I’ve been at this a while that turned into a I was a, nutrition therapy practitioner for a while, and I saw that a lot of my colleagues We’re interested in doing, creating online courses for their clients. So I helped them. I taught them how to do that.

I had a training course that taught them how to do that. When we got to the module about setting up the tech and the website, which was actually the best part for me, that was the most exciting part for me. A lot of them just like froze. So it, it became apparent to me that was what they needed to help with.

So I, I developed that into a bonus for my course called the practitioner platform, which was an all in one website. And I basically cloned my course website, which was running lifter and gave that to my Colleagues, my students for them to fill in the blanks and put their own nutrition courses, et cetera, into it.

And fast forward to today, like that, that, that platform, which is what we talked about on the previous time I was on a few years ago. What happened there was I found that. Okay. Everybody loved what they had. They had a website, They had the ability to sell courses. They had the ability to book.

Calls. But because it was all built on WordPress and back then things weren’t quite as evolved and cohesive as they are now with the word WordPress ecosystem. I was finding I was potentially, I was basically spending a lot of time playing whack a mole with plugins. And as an earlier entrepreneur, I was still struck with the syndrome of, trying to please everybody.

And when you have WordPress as your main tool you can please everybody. Someone would come and say, Hey can you I have a podcast. Can we make this a podcast streaming site instead of course? And I’d be like, the true answer is yes, we can. We could, we always can if we’re using WordPress.

And I loved that part of it as a pseudo developer at heart. Yeah. So I, got a little bit off tangent with that and we ended up building a bit of a sort of a homer car. I don’t know if you remember that Simpsons episode, but it had a little bit of everybody’s input and, got further and further away from being a platform, which is supposed to be everybody has the same thing.

So we’ve briefly partnered up with go high level to provide so that we could stick with a true WordPress website and then just hook into go high level for the CRM and the email marketing and all the other tools that people were using. They were using different tools for those. So instead of me having to try and learn how to integrate ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, all these other things into WordPress.

I now just had one place to send them and integrated with that. It worked for a little while, but we ended up then with two platforms. We had what we were calling Nurture Dash, which was a white labeled high level. And then we had Nurture Sites, which was the WordPress hosting platform. So I gathered all the kittens together late last year and decided, Having taken another look in the WordPress ecosystem and seeing how far things had come.

I’ve always loved working on WordPress. I’ve never gone away from it myself. But for a while it didn’t seem like the best choice for running like. Email marketing, funnel building, CRM suite, or even booking. But that changed with a lot of the newer plugins. And I tested out a lot of the fluent suite plugins like fluency or influent booking.

And found out, yeah, not only were these. Good enough to where they were actually simpler and doing a better job at what my clients needed than the everything, all singing, all dancing, and often all breaking bigger platform that we were trying to plug into. So yeah, late last year, I rethought it, decided to put both of the parts of the nurture brand, the dash and the sites back together.

And it coincided with. Being reintroduced to the guys at wild cloud who I know you’ve had Roger on here, but they, do a fantastic multi tenancy WordPress platform. So now we are true. We are basically, we’ve basically finally created what I was trying to create seven years ago, which is you go to a website, you click a button, you give them the domain name that you want for your website.

Five minutes later in your email is a link to log straight into your website. And it’s all set up as a CRM, there’s a booking calendar, there’s a bunch of different templates to choose. It’s a really easy page builder. So that’s, yeah, that’s the little winding story of NurtureDash and how it came to be, how it is now.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I love how customer centric you are, cause you have this practitioner that is trying to basically build the online interface for their business and there’s all these different things they need and tell us a little more about what their current reality is like without nurture dash.

And let’s say they’re not working with you. What are they doing to run their business and trying to get clients and nurture clients? Their

Sally Crewe: current reality until they. Cross paths with me is a lot of moving parts. They probably have a WordPress website that is either half built or out of date or is precariously teetering with an unupdated plugins that they’re scared to push the update button on.

They probably don’t know where their domain. Where their website is hosted. They probably don’t know the difference between a domain and a website. And this is also with, a lot of love for these people. It’s just, that’s not there. That’s not their world. And they’ve come into this world as a necessity at various points in the business journey.

And so they’ve got. A domain name over here on this platform, they’ve got a membership site over here on this platform and they’ve tried to hook them up together. They’ve joined a training program by a marketer who’s recommended another platform. A lot of them are paying multiple subscriptions for multiple tools that overlap and do a lot of the same stuff, but are not talking to each other.

So they come to me and I, my, my joke is like, it, a lot of people. When they come to me and we I have what I call tech audits for my discovery calls. And I come in, I’m like, basically just open up your bag, put everything out on the table. Let’s see what we’ve got. And a lot of the time it, looks like a raccoon just got into your fridge.

Like it’s just like all kinds of dead ends and funnels that don’t work and affiliate links. And it’s just, and I totally, I, this is my world. I love this stuff, but it makes me overwhelmed. So I can totally understand how a lot of practitioners and coaches will say, I hate tech. I’m not good with tech.

So my job that I’ve given myself and I’ve, I have a website called the website Sherpa. com, which is where I do my blog and my free training. And that, name came about from somebody calling me that. It’s my, my, I feel like my job here is to guide them through this the, dusty trail of like tech, WordPress, where does WordPress end?

Where does your website end? Where do these other platforms begin? What are you actually paying these subscriptions for? There’s a lot of unraveling. To be done. And, to be fair, we’ve, a lot of us in this world have been have grown up with tech, so we’ve got older versions of, features that were locked into because we’ve got a lot of content on there and then we’ve got newer versions.

And if somebody is coming in today, straight out of the gate and starting an online business, they’re not going to probably have this problem because there’s so many all in one tools now that keep things More organized, but a lot of people have come at this over the years and have gathered a a bit of a mixed bag of tools with various incompatibilities.

So I’m basically in the service. So we, talked about last time we taught you, you’d mentioned the phrase friction removal business. Yeah. That’s still very much true. And I also, I think of myself as a tech therapist as well, because there’s a huge, Mindset component to this, especially with a lot of my clients and customers are, first of all they’re first and foremost, health coaches, practitioners.

They don’t even want to be in an online business, but it’s 2024. They have to be online. Second of all they, have a bit of like tech trauma and WordPress trauma. I’ll see them if I’m on calls with them and they’re sharing the screen and I’m telling them where to click, they will get what I call button blindness, I’d be like, click the button.

And there’ll be like,

Chris Badgett: yeah

Sally Crewe: or they won’t see there’s maybe there’s just one they won’t see. And it’s, that’s I’ve done a little bit of, trauma work and it’s it’s a fight or flight state that people get into an anxiety state and they can’t see, they can’t see where to click because they’re, Their bodies in a sort of panic.

And it it sounds a little funny, but it’s, I bet if you put probes on someone and measured their heart rate and stuff, while they were trying to look around the backend of the WordPress site that hadn’t been updated in two years. It would probably be not a healthy state for them to be in.

So I’ve like I’ve said I’ve, started saying it’s, like tech therapy. I’m trying to be like, first of all, let them know that I’m here to help them that they’re not stupid forgetting themselves in this situation. Much like an accountant for somebody who’s behind on their taxes or bookkeeping.

The first thing you need to do is to say, no shame. You’re here now. Let me help you. And so that’s where I come, at things. I, have a lot of calls with people who will get into that state where you can see their kind of clouding over with the tech talk. And they will say, I want to, I’ve not, I’ve no idea what, you do, but I want to work with you.

I basically, I feel. I feel like you’re going to be the person who’s going to save me from this big tech dragon.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

I love that. It’s, not just providing a solution. It’s being a guide and even a therapist, like you say on there. I love the Sherpa analogy as a guy myself, I’ve actually spent some time in Nepal and hung out with some Sherpas.

And part of that whole thing is a, Connection to the earth and navigating the landscape. And you have a kind of environmental component to your platform. Can you tell us about that?

Sally Crewe: Yeah I’m, from the UK. I’m from Sherwood forest. I do some volunteer work for the pagan Federation. So I identify as, a Druid.

I’m a lover of animals, I’m a lover of nature. I’m an animist, which means I feel like everything has energy. I’ve always felt that way since I was just a small child. That’s just how. Okay. I perceive the world as, someone who feels energy. So I had stuffed that side of me down.

Until I’m in my late forties now, and you start to find yourself again. And that kind of came back around and I realized how important it was to me and with the with the climate crisis and everything. So we partnered with One Tree Planted and there’s another similar.

Company that do this internationally. And basically we just for every, subscription payment that comes in a certain portion of that goes to towards planting trees. So when somebody signs up for if they sign up for a year for, with a platform, we will send them a certificate to say, Hey, congratulations.

You have planted 12 trees.

Chris Badgett: Nice.

Sally Crewe: And people love it. And it’s not I’m not literally out there with a shovel and a bag of acorns we’re just partnering with this company, this initiative that does it, but people really I’ve got a lot of feedback from people being like, Oh, that’s it makes me feel so good.

And it, and because we’re, all internet friends. We don’t often actually meet people in real life. So to know that this business decision that they made, The dollars that they could have spent on Kajabi or Teachable or Thinkific or just another, or just a WordPress site on their own, they choose to use it with us.

It doesn’t cost them any extra. They’re helping offset carbon emissions and everything.

Chris Badgett: That’s great. I love it when values are baked into a brand and backed up with action and that sort of thing.

Sally Crewe: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it and, also through the, sort of the political climate that we’ve just.

Been through and are still in. It, personally to me felt like a, my way of saying, Hey, this is what I stand for. And for some people that they’re like, Oh, I’m you’re not the right platform for me. And that’s fine. But a lot of them have come over to me rather than give their money to like the big tech bros because they want to support a female independently owned business who supports the climate and who, donates to trees.

I think it’s more than ever people can vote with their wallets and with their business tool choices.

Chris Badgett: So a hundred percent and people are hungry to do business with people, like real people behind the screens and all that.

Sally Crewe: Yeah. We, have a blurb on our site. That’s about basically we support LGBTQ plus rights.

We support a woman’s right to choose. We support this, and this. And I know it’s a, it’s for some people, it’s be like, Nope, getting out of here. That’s fine. I wouldn’t want to work with that person anyway. So it’s it’s I’m a musician. So my, former life was, as a musician and I still do that for fun.

And it feels the most punk rock thing I’ve ever done. Put that on my webpage of here’s what we believe if you don’t. Okay, fine. But we’re not the choice for you.

Chris Badgett: That’s there’s that saying in marketing that great marketing should be polarizing and really attract the your, vibe attracts your tribe.

Yeah.

Sally Crewe: And I’m a I’m a peacekeeper. I’ve, always thought of a people pleaser and wanted everybody to get along, but this was something I felt strongly enough. It’s about to actually be like, yeah, this isn’t just a marketing shtick. This isn’t just to try and put my brand somewhere.

This is actually, you get to work with me as a person. Things are going to go a lot smoother if we are aligned on the sort of fundamentals of moral standings on things.

Chris Badgett: You’re, also a tech wizard. So I wanted to dig a little bit on the on the tech stack here. And you’ve mentioned a couple of things, so let me just cue it up.

Use wild cloud, which is like hosting multi tenancy. It handles the payment element of people signing up and getting started with the site WordPress site. It has a front end on it so that people aren’t just dropped into the WordPress admin with a million options. And you’re using certain tools to deliver solutions to different business challenges, like fluency RM for the, email marketing, the broadcast emails, the marketing automation.

You’ve got fluent bookings, which is very important for a service based business to have automated bookings. That’s a, I don’t know how many times I deal with a service industry and. I can’t, I have to end up in this email chain to get something on the calendar. I just want to link to book.

So that’s awesome. And then you’ve got Lifter LMS for if they want to do the education piece. Which I want to dig in on specifically in a little bit of how they use it, but could you tell us any more just nuance or detail of what’s in the tech stack that brings this website kind of online platform as a solution to that?

Sally Crewe: So the big difference with this I’m talking at first more to the other sort of WASP type of providers or other web developers, but we’re using wild cloud, as you said which is a multi tenancy deployment platform, which essentially allows you to have your own like Squarespace or Wix or something.

Chris Badgett: Which is a huge idea. That’s a huge idea right there. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s that’s just the hugest thing.

Sally Crewe: And that’s just like what The first part of the first ingredient in this recipe we’re using a UI press pro, which is an admin theme plugin. And I was lucky enough to have gotten on the lifetime deal for unlimited sites.

So that was, and I did that with a couple of the fluent plugins as well. So I’m cashing in on my. My earlier futurism we doing that. And, that’s really enabled me to, when you log into this. It looks like it doesn’t look like WordPress. We don’t even have a menu bar down the side.

I took the decision after a bunch of research of users that having a menu across the top your, computer’s this shape, I know you can use things on your phone, but for the most part, my practitioner clients are, you are on their laptop. It’s postcard shaped and I took the decision to rather than have a menu down to have it along the top.

So it’s always in view and you’ve got that much more real estate to play with. And one thing I’d noticed from my previous onboarding calls, when we did have the menu down the side, was that a lot of people didn’t understand how to scroll. So I I’m on a, I’m on a huge website person monitor, but if you’re on a smaller laptop and you’ve got 15 things down the side on the menu, and I’m saying, okay, go down to settings.

And they’re not actually understanding that this stuff that’s beyond the page. And this was it’s another thing that sounds a little silly, but for people who aren’t in WordPress or in tech or in websites all day long, like we are, it isn’t something that’s, that goes completely intuitive.

So I wanted to remove as many of those friction points that give every time there’s a bit of friction, it makes people. It makes people stressed, It makes people feel like an idiot. It just makes people like clench up and, not be as comfortable. And we talked last time about me trying to make my website templates, be a spa like experience that when you go to the website, even if you don’t understand the basics of design, you can.

On a subconscious level tell this is a nicer place to be than that place because it’s organized and there’s white space to breathe. I tried to take that to the back end of WordPress as well. So when they log in, it’s a nice place to be. It’s like going to a spa or back to your house when someone has been there and tidied it up and cleaned it all up and put new plants up.

And and there’s a little button there that you can take a break and it takes you to an embedded video of the ocean for five minutes. And just things I’ve learned from my own journey of, working too much. Being a workaholic, working too, late, not taking breaks because I was really enjoying what I was doing.

So I’ve tried to pull all of that experience, not only as a creator of a website or somebody who knows how to help people sell courses and book, discovery calls, but as somebody who’s an online business owner who’s who’s realized the perils of, looking at a screen all day long. And I I, I also build, I use it for my own business.

I think they call it is, I think it’s called dog food. I was like, did I make that up? Yeah, I do it because it’s got all the tools that I need and I don’t see a better way for me as the creator of this thing to be really on top of what’s needed and where the problems are. And, to know how to tell people how to do stuff than to actually be using it for my own business.

Yeah, I couldn’t

Chris Badgett: agree with you more. We’ve learned so much just having our literature on this academy and a quick start course. We use our own tool. No

Sally Crewe: I think really you’re doing a massive disservice to people if you’re not like it’s, and especially if it’s A curated collection of WordPress plugins.

Like I’ve said to my folks yeah, we, this is a curation of the best plugins for the job, as far as I’m aware. And I’ve been at this for 20 plus years. I’m a research hound. If something isn’t right, if something isn’t doing what we want it to do, or if something comes along that does that thing better or adds a new feature that we haven’t even conceived of yet, I will go and find us.

And you plug in a notion, notice the word as not you this is the platform. And so I’ve got this mama bear thing going on. I’m going to look after them. They’re sharing that we’re all using the same tools. I’m keeping ahead of the curve. That’s a whole other bunch of stuff that they don’t have to have in their brain.

What plugin should I use, what platform should I use? What this, do I need to be doing this on social media? Do I need to be doing that? I’m just basically saying,

How to Simplify Your Health Practitioner Business Technology Stack With the Website Sherpa: shush,

Sally Crewe: shush. Don’t worry about that. I will trust me to to be the guide for that part of the business. And, part of that is not just showing them the tools that they should be using.

It’s part, of it is saying, don’t need to worry about that. You don’t need, you don’t need to do that. You don’t need this particular bell or whistle that, some other guru was telling you that you need. And because it’s all on WordPress now they can really sense the the integrity behind that because I am choosing other, I’m sure I’m, piggybacking on your talents and your team’s talents by using Lifter.

And I’m telling them I’m not saying this is Nurture LMS, I’m saying this is Lifter. It’s what is the best, as far as I’m concerned, I’ve tried them all. This is the best one for you guys. And here’s how to use it. And I, will support my clients but they do know what these tools are. I’m not hiding that fact.

I’m not pretending that I developed everything myself. So I would warn anybody doing this, not to do that as well, because the ego gets in the way and the ego wants to take the credit, but the flip side of that is. If something breaks with that plugin, you’re the, you’re now the, yeah.

Chris Badgett: Tell us more about how your users use Lifter LMS, like in their practitioner use case or in whatever they’re doing what, brings them to need an LMS, how do they use it?

Sally Crewe: There’s, that’s a good question. There’s a few different levels of it. So you would typically think of it just as for people who want to. Sell courses as a starting point on memberships. What I actually do is I have recommended to people the idea of, so everyone’s familiar with the idea of you, you have an, a landing page, you have an email, a magnet, a list, building magnet.

Nobody wants a to think that someone will sign up to the list, get sent a PDF and then that thing gets downloaded. Never to be seen again, never to even be looked at or printed or anything. And also trees, we shouldn’t be printing as much as we do. So what I’ve started telling people is a great idea is for everybody.

Even if you don’t have a membership or a course yet, have a members section. When somebody joins their list, your list, it will send you into the membership section and here will be your download. It will also be a very exclusive. Feeling you feel if you give them the keys to somewhere, you feel like you must have either been a really special client or that you’ve paid money for that experience.

And they haven’t, they’ve just joined your list, but it just really elevates and then people can come in and they can also see. Maybe they’ll see some other things that are, Oh, I might go buy that. I might go download this other freebie. Maybe you’ll have a community there. So I’m just trying to, everyone’s trying to get people off Facebook.

I think this is a really good way to do it. And also if you want to. Rather than just emailing your list, another link to another landing page, you can be like, Hey, I’ve just loaded this into your, into the membership portal and have tiered membership. So yeah, people are using it as basically a a content vault for free content.

For, subscribers to feel like they are kind of part of your world, and then they’re using it for traditional courses, memberships. And the other side of things, I’ve got practitioners who have courses and memberships where they’re at the level now that they have other people instructing using their material.

So another thing we’re working on this year is the ability for the, these people to have their own. Platforms. So they will have their they, will have a version of what Notre dash is on wild cloud. They will have a website with the ability for other practitioners, other coaches to say, Hey I want to, teach your material.

I want to, take people through your course. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, I don’t want to rip you off. And I don’t want to some people are really good at creating content and teaching. And they really don’t enjoy. Supporting individual clients through that process. And then you’ve got a bunch of people on the other side who really enjoy the coaching and the one on one handholding, but they’re not necessarily interested or very good at creating a course or.

Material for that. So I’m trying to put these two sides of people together. What they both lack usually is the desire or inclination to, to figure out all the tech. So I’m it’s not exactly a marketplace. It’s more of an individual. One practitioner has something, they have other practitioners who are interested in instructing.

In that particular modality and just putting those guys together with, this fantastic new tech that’s available and basically giving give your instructors a business in the box. Everyone wins. The instructor can hit the ground running with their own. Course platform CRM, everything already to go can be preloaded with email sequences that sell the product.

There’s any number of ways to spin it, but the ingredients are all the same. It’s the same plugins. It’s the same tech idea, It’s just moving it up.

Chris Badgett: It’s like a fractal. It just keeps going. And I totally get it because the there’s like an individual startup practitioner, but then they have team.

Sally Crewe: We’re calling it a digital franchise.

Chris Badgett: There you go.

Sally Crewe: Cause I do have clients that I’m. That I’ve built, or I’m in the process of building custom websites for custom membership sites. And they are at the stage where they’re like, okay, we’ve realized our demographic isn’t actually health conscious parents.

It’s actually other practitioners or other nutritionists. And they want to be able to guide their clients through my material. How do we do it? And here’s how, and we could also give them a CRM and a booking link and.

Chris Badgett: Very cool. Yeah. Very cool. I also love that that idea for a lead magnet to just become a member and now you just have one login.

Yeah. And then if you want other, resources become available and it’s, more like building community. Exactly. Yeah. And you can bring a download.

Sally Crewe: You can build community without even actually having a traditional. Community chat area. You can have communities like here’s everyone gets the email.

They all get in there and see see the new material. And it just really when I’ve mentioned this to, to customers as a way of doing it, they, everyone’s, everyone likes up. Like they love the idea of, cause they can visualize that experience from their side. We’ve all got a hard drive full of things we’ve downloaded that we haven’t seen before.

Looked out, I can’t find. And this way you can keep the material updated. You can give, you can leave little cookies for them. You can be like, okay, rather than just bug somebody who’s on your list to go do something, you can say, Hey, I left you a, I left you a little treat or check out the members area

Chris Badgett: I love that.

And if you’re out there watching and you’re new to LFTR LMS, some people don’t realize it. So I’ll say it real quick here. LMSs are used for courses, but LFTR LMS is also has a membership component. So which can control access to other parts of the website or even pieces of pages and things like that.

So that’s such a cool innovation you’ve done there, Sally. I love that one. Can you tell us a little more about like for if someone’s feeling inspired and they’re watching this, and let’s say they’re in some niche and they’re, they want to really double down and build a platform for that niche.

And I really just let me side note and say, it takes entrepreneurs like you to do that because the software providers, as an example They’re really focused on like their slice of the tech pie. So we need these platform entrepreneurs to assemble the tools. Mama Barrett, as you say, to make sure it’s the right thing and adjust over time and protect your community and really provide the perfect solution for those people with that stack.

But once you, my question is, once you have. You’re kind of niche and the problem you want to solve for them with a platform or collection of problems. How do you get clients? Like, how do you get known in a niche? Like you’ve gotten known in the practitioner niche.

Sally Crewe: In my case, it’s been a very organic word of mouth thing.

I’ve, got like I’ve said I’ve got practitioners who now teach other practitioners. So that’s a ripple effect of other Potential clients. And I get really good recommendations from people because I’ve got the technology, but I’ve got the knowledge of their business model and they just know from their experience that the end of the day, yeah, not everything’s going to work perfectly all the time at the end of the day.

I’m here and I will do them right. So I think that’s it’s, weird at the one, side, my business is scaling and getting more automated, but that’s freeing up time for me to be more boots on the ground available for people. Versus in a few years ago it was less automated, but that meant I was having to do a lot of the manual setup and everything, and this sort of frees Much more available at a higher level for people.

So yeah, what the, but to answer your question as I started this with, education, so I’m bringing that back to the forefront and I have a, course that we call unblock your tech chakras that is and I did it, I did a little bit of as a free training last year as well as a list building exercise.

And we have a quiz and it’s it’s cute and fun, but it’s actually. Brings together. The the, line that I’ve been talking about is like the tech trauma and the mindset and seeing your, business holistically, especially as a solopreneur seeing that, yeah, there’s elements to do with the different energy levels of the body that relates your business and how you show up and what you’ll get out of that part of the business.

So I take them through Unblocking their tech chakras. And those, levels are tied to certain parts of the platform. So it’s a, it’s quite a high level overview of what the tool does. But there’s two ways you can get it. You can either sign up for the platform and you get access to the course, or you can purchase the course and you get access to the platform for a year.

So whichever, feels more value loaded for you. Cause it really depends. Some people. Our tool first and they, feel like spending money on a tool, but not on a course and other people are the other way around. So

Chris Badgett: that’s wonderful. Marketing like getting your target audience, like around the problem before they’re a perfect fit for your, solution or whatever, and educating.

And I love that. That’s cool.

Sally Crewe: And it helps just bring everybody to the same place and everybody realize get rid of that kind of icky. It’s only me like embarrassment, shame element and saying, look, this is difficult. I’ve been at it for 27 years. I still have things that don’t work, I still have things that go wrong.

I have, I still have things that I don’t do perfectly. We’re human. Here’s what we can learn from it. Here’s the best way to look at it. And it’s, yeah, it’s turned like into a much more of a sort of mentorship coaching mindset type thing than I would ever have realized or imagined would be the case.

Chris Badgett: That makes sense. Yeah, there’s tactics and strategies and tools, but there’s the human element has the, mind and the emotional component. One thing I want to highlight, you mentioned, which I think is really cool. I’ve heard of this idea of where you actually have two audiences. There’s, and you mentioned it with your practitioners.

There’s like the clients that come in for help, but then there’s the people who are in their industry. Mostly not as far along and like both groups are watching. So that’s really neat. How for you. You’re getting word of mouth growth through that kind of second, less obvious audience of other practitioners of the practitioner you’re helping.

That’s really, Yeah.

Sally Crewe: And I’ve, grown with them. Like I started, my default was to start with people who were. Didn’t they like the idea of an online course, but they didn’t know what to do next. And this was back in 2015 when online courses were a little bit less known.

And, but those, a lot of those guys have succeeded. Gone on to grow and gone on to become instructor platforms for others. So it, they they’re literally, I know it’s a cliche, but their success has been my success. Cause they’ve brought people back to Hey, this is, she helped me out.

Or they’ve moved off my original platform and gone to one of the big guys and then come back and being like why, did I think that this was like, I think they, because I helped them in the beginning, a lot of them thought that was like, I was the kindergarten teacher and they didn’t realize that I was also teaching college classes.

Excuse me. So they came back. A lot of them did that, came back around and I was like, yeah, I can help you with all that.

Chris Badgett: Very cool. I noticed on your pricing, there’s a couple months free, which there you go. Again, is removing some friction, help people like try it out what’s your advice there on creating something where.

People get, can get into it and develop the trust. And how’d you come up with that strategy? I’m not asking you a clear question, but just tell us. No, I get it. It, I

Sally Crewe: think it comes from, so my original businesses were hosting businesses, so it was very much paying by the month for me was something that was just always, there was never a switch to a subscription model for me.

That’s what it was always there. And it was often if it’s 50 bucks a month. Then 500 a year. It’s just the two months discount for the bulk purchase. And I just think it’s, a nice, easy calculation and it’s something people have come to expect. And I I can, I also now tying in the There’s various offers that run at the moment, it’s the, courses comes if you sign it for the year.

There’s other times when it’ll be we’ll do a one on one setup. We’ll do wire everything up for you versus you just following the instructions. So it depends. And I’ve, road tested a few different ways of doing it and they’re all they all work for different audiences. So I tend to rotate them.

So some people like love the idea of what we have, but they’re terrified of the setup as easy as we make it. There’s still like on the edge of the diving board like this. So once a year we’ll, often do a promotion where it’s okay, sign up for you, we’ll do the setup for you. And that’ll a certain sector of, the audience will, go crazy for that.

But for others, it’s more of waiting for we don’t, we’re not doing any kind of price reduction discounts anymore. It’s usually just value, added. Services or bundles of things. And like I said, it’s the automation side of things. It’s not giving me that much more room to spread my wings as an educator.

And I come back to, Realizing that I’m actually really good at that. And I do really like it.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And last question for you, you mentioned it in passing earlier. So I want to come back to it cause it’s it’s valuable for really any entrepreneur. You mentioned there’s a thing you do on your discovery call.

Some people call it a sales call strategy call. What’s the choreography of that? And what’s, I know you have a ton of wisdom here of like how to sell ethically and gracefully and make it a great experience. So take us to school, Sally.

Sally Crewe: Yeah, we call them tech audits. They, are it’s nothing like it sounds like an IRS thing.

It’s basically people like the person I’ve described that has a lot of, Bits and pieces of their business or various iterations of their business spread out over lots of platforms. And we just say, Hey, come in, no shame, dump it out on the table. And we go through and the, it tends to be a rhythmic cadence to the conversations and it ends up being like this, they say, I’m using this.

Can I cancel that? Yes. Can I, do I still need this? And we go through and it’s not designed as a money, a monetization type of exercise, but it always ends up coming back to, yeah. So all the benefits of working with somebody, you see the stress drain from them when they realize that somebody’s Oh, I’m going to take these.

Issues off their plate. And then they look around and they’ve Oh, and this is either going to cost me the same as I’m paying now, or it’s going to save me 30 bucks a month. And I get all this. So it really takes it into that sort of, it sells itself territory. And the exercise itself gives them a really good experience of what it is to work with, me, who’s someone who’s going to help them.

With the tech and make decisions for them. And I, can’t be anyone else other than I am. I’m just, I am who I am as Popeye said. People a lot of people, the right people do, gravitate towards that, they pick up on my energy and they, know that I love what I do and that I’m really interested in helping them fix these issues and streamlining, you It all for them.

And they usually can’t wait to pass that over to me. Like I said, a lot of them will just write after the call and be like, Oh, you’ve no idea how long I’ve been waiting to find you. Cause they’re just, they didn’t realize how stressed. All of this stuff was making them.

Chris Badgett: I love that.

And that’s really the ultimate goal of sales is collect connecting a problem with a solution and making, and like, why not make that fun and like trauma relieving experience? Oh yeah. It’s like a little

Sally Crewe: bit of a game. And I I love, I’m like a problem solver. So I, But actually genuinely okay, what else do you have?

Any of this? And I do I have had more money to save. Yeah. And the end of the day it’s, guaranteed. It’s either the same or it’s less because they’ve often got multiple tools doing different things or they’re not using with, I’ve got, what is this? What’s this? I don’t like they’ve signed up for something.

They don’t even know they’re not using it. Do I still need this? So it’s great. I can be like whack a mole and just get their bills down by, but also relieve stress and and get them on the platform, which at the end of the day, I’m running a business. So

Chris Badgett: that’s awesome, Sally. Thanks for coming back on the show, go check out nurture dash.

com and see what Sally’s done there and how she’s solving platform level challenges, which is no small feat. Thank you for being a shining example of an education entrepreneur and somebody who continuously improves and iterates and cares about your customer, cares about learning and technology and innovation and the planet at the same time.

Sally Crewe: Takes one to know one. Just like

Chris Badgett: we’ll keep up the great work and thank you so much for coming on the show. I’m really excited to do another one in four years and see where we’re at.

Sally Crewe: Hopefully, Yeah. Hopefully we’ll both still be around and we won’t have been replaced by robots.

Chris Badgett: A hundred percent.

All right. Thank you, Sally.

Sally Crewe: Bye, Chris. Thank you.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post How to Simplify Your Health Practitioner Business Technology Stack With the Website Sherpa appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Barbara Thomason shares insights about social-emotional learning (SEL) within the niche of preteen education and development.

Barbara Thomason is a social-emotional learning (SEL) specialist and the creator of Joy Circles, an initiative that helps preteens build confidence and vital life skills. Barbara also talks on the unique difficulties preteens have in today’s world, emphasizing how incidents like the COVID-19 epidemic affect their mental and social health.

She highlights the need of specific programs and qualified facilitators in this specialty to help preteens navigate these difficulties and acquire critical SEL skills. In talking about the Joy Circles facilitator certification program, Barbara lists the perfect candidates in the niche, which includes school social workers, guidance counselors, and anyone with the empathy and communication skills needed to help preteens in their SEL journey.

In response to the niche’s need for current and easily accessible information, Barbara decided to make the facilitator training program available online. She makes sure that her curriculum reaches a large audience of educators and facilitators committed to promoting the social and emotional development of preteens by utilizing online platforms such as Lifter LMS.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Barbara Thomason. She’s from joy circles. com and she helps facilitators and the people that are helping help preteens with self confidence. Reading all kinds of skills, but first welcome to the show, Barbara.

Barbara Thomason: Thank you, Chris. Thanks for the invitation to come share.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I’m so excited to chat with you today. It’s cool to build an online business, but it’s also, in my opinion, even better to create a positive impact in the world. Tell us, let’s get to the root of it. What is social emotional learning, which is part of the joy circles program?

Barbara Thomason: Sure. Social emotional learning has an acronym like a lot of things do. So I may refer to it as S E L and social emotional learning has been around actually since the sixties, but has had a recent rebirth out of need. Mostly. Some people think of it in terms of character development but I prefer the SEL moniker because it’s more descriptive of what happens.

It is a child learning to understand better their own emotions, understanding themselves and how they interact with others. It helps them as they move into those very special developmental stages and how they interact with the wider world. So it essentially better prepares them for the world of, work.

world of relationships. So it’s very important and important that educators learn to recognize its importance.

Chris Badgett: So what happens? I like to keep it positive. But what happens when there’s stunted development and social emotional learning? Like how? How does it play out or and create challenges in a child’s life?

Barbara Thomason: I think it’s been obvious in recent years because what we’ve noticed has been the result of, COVID isolation when when young ones have not had the social interaction. They struggle a little bit with coming back in to society in learning situations and in working with the team and collaborating.

They tend to become very techno dependent. And I think that it takes time to begin to assimilate back into their, age group. Social and emotional skills are critical for academic learning. A young one who isn’t really comfortable with themselves and each other must be comfortable.

They have to be comfortable with themselves in order to be able to be comfortable with learning. And research bears this out that young ones who score high, I guess you could say on SEL make greater gains in the academic areas, such as math and reading and sciences. So it’s, just very important for all over development.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned like a scoring system or what, types of, what are examples that would cause a higher score in SEL?

Barbara Thomason: I’ll speak to a specific series of studies. There is a, Dr. Gerlach and some of his research has been most cited. And what he found is of course there were certain gains after social emotional learning.

I think he looked at several hundred. SEL programs of different types. And of course, the children that were exposed to SEL learning, as opposed to control groups, certainly saw gains in social emotional learning parameters, but What they didn’t expect, but they did see, was an 11 percent increase in academic gains.

That was rather amazing, and a wonderful finding, because what that communicates to educators is that it is worthwhile to spend instructional time on social emotional learning, because it’s a, Wonderful expenditure of time with a payout at the end for academia.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. I love the name joy circles. Tell us about the name and the circles.

Barbara Thomason: That was both inspiration and I guess you could say a little bit of science too. There are a couple of researchers and of course their names have escaped me, but I have their book on the shelf that produced programming called the circle way.

And they have programs around the world that are a lot of them for adults and they have. Shown how important the circle is, that is putting people in circles. And of course they go back to almost prehistoric times to demonstrate how circles are used in adult gatherings and how, when you put people in a circle, everyone is on equal footing.

Everyone has a say, everyone is heard. And so this concept. It was extremely important to me in that when you enter into the whole process of social emotional learning, it’s important that you establish a circle in order for children to build trust with whoever is working with them and in facilitation you might notice that.

Whether it’s therapists or school counselors, when they’re dealing with a child who may be unregulated or in trauma, they tend to get down on the level of the child. They may kneel down or even sit down eye to eye with the child. It’s the same concept with Circles, everyone is seated on the floor or if, excuse me, if everyone is in a chair, so is the facilitator.

So everyone is equal. Everyone is heard. There are activities within the program that enable the circle to really be born out. There’s movement to music. So we’re doing that in a circle. There are times based on Cliff Derby’s program called Heart Talk, where you have a heart and you pass it around the circle and whoever is holding the heart has the privilege to speak at that moment about their deepest feelings.

So that is a use of the circle as well as there are other things, of course, that we do within the circle, but the use of the word circle is, very critical. Joy, of course, I think is inherent in, the name of the program because that is intended ultimate outcome. It was a perfect marriage of, two concepts really to create this program.

And I have to say it was somewhat divinely inspired.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Yeah. I love that. Love the name and the backstory there. You mentioned therapists and perhaps guidance counselors and educators before who is the best fit for the joy circles facilitator certification program. Cause you’re, going to the educator, not directly to the student.

Who are, who is, who’s the best fit?

Barbara Thomason: That is, that’s a great question because I think there are personal and skill characteristics that make the best facilitator, not necessarily a job title. So there may be someone without all of those credentials that could be a gifted facilitator. Like a camp

Chris Badgett: counselor, perhaps.

Barbara Thomason: Yes it could be someone without an advanced degree. It could be someone with an associate’s degree. It could be someone with no degree. Although that’s, I think, a little tougher to establish, but if I were to go into, a school district, I would most likely start with guidance counselors simply because they are most likely to get it most easily get the concept.

The school social worker is most likely to understand this. For the most part, they’ve had probably. 25 to 35 to 50 percent of the learning that I am offering in the facilitation program. For them, a lot of it is repeat or review for them. So they are wonderful candidates for this program. Teachers, only if maybe they they’re in a special situation where they have instructional time to do it and they have the skill sets and understanding.

But for the most part, they are very focused on the instruction, the area of instruction that they are required to deliver. And they’re usually under a lot of stress to deliver it. And that’s not a good place to be in order to deliver joy circles and social emotional learning.

Chris Badgett: All right. Tell us about the desire to and the story of putting this online and how you made it to the point where you wanted to have a website for this and, create the online certification program for the facilitators.

Barbara Thomason: The, Joy Circles program itself, the, what is delivered to the children, of course, is not online, that is a live program, but it was important to me that the facilitator training be available really around the world certainly across the nation, so that the program could be delivered Widely as quickly as possible.

So that was the way to do it was to, place it online and make it easy, easily accessed and make the interaction between those of us that deliver the program as impactful as possible and make it. Self paced for the learner as well as we could punctuate this, class with periods where we could have live sessions.

So built into it, or a couple of times when we would have what you might call check in sessions and coaching sessions with those that are going through the program. And at the very end, there’s a capstone session where they would do a practice facilitation with a live group but it was important to be able to, deliver this in a widespread way.

It’s also wonderful to be able to edit the program as we go. I attended a all day conference yesterday delivered by the Texas Teacher Counseling Association and went to a number of wonderful workshops and got some great content and thought as I came back yesterday, I need to put that in my, facilitation program so I can go in and edit.

Happily change the program and it’s, done I don’t have to go back to a printer and have a lot of expense, have any expense at all to make those edits.

Chris Badgett: Tell us about the instructional design aspect of it. Like how did you figure out how to structure? The course and the content, and you said that it’s awesome that you can make it better as you go.

But how did you 1st encapsulate the program?

Barbara Thomason: Well, a little spoiler alert. I, have a master’s degree in human resource development. I know a little bit about instructional design and training and development. But I had never created a course and put it online. You guys make it easy.

This drag and drop simplicity the training courses that you all provide it’s hand holding all the way. And I it just made it, it just made it painless. I did it over the Christmas holidays, essentially, and and knew, of course, that as I went along, I could just slide another lesson in or slide another unit in as I went along.

It was. It was so much easier than I thought it would be. So thank you.

Chris Badgett: You’re welcome. I’m, glad that makes me happy. What was your experience with WordPress or getting into the tech of it all? Cause it, it’s not always easy. WordPress is infinitely customizable, but what’s your WordPress journey?

Barbara Thomason: I have a webmaster. And they’re the WordPress experts. In fact, they’re the ones that they gave me a list of 3 LMS companies and you all were 1 of them. And so I reviewed the 3. I ended up with you all. I’m glad I did. I always knew that I had. A fallback. I could go to my web master people and they could save me if I screwed up.

But it was, you just appeared on WordPress it was like, I didn’t know it was going to happen. And there you were. That’s how dumb I was about WordPress. I just found you there and just started clicking around. I could find what I needed just by clicking on courses. And it was easy to find.

And I, found that I didn’t mess up my website or anything. Yeah it was great.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Do you remember, you said you were looking at three different LMSs. What, ultimately led to choosing LifterLMS?

Barbara Thomason: I can’t remember all that went into the decision. I will tell you that I think it was the support that you provide.

Certainly the, instructional support, the fact that we can call on you any, time I think that you were, you had a special going on and it was around Thanksgiving. That certainly helps. Everybody likes a, deal. I think you enabled me to try it, I don’t think I did.

I think I just signed up all the way at the beginning. There were probably other things. I think I liked the look the look and feel of LifterLMS sites. Certainly there were good testimonials there, there really wasn’t any reason not to sign up with you all. And some of the other sites gave me pause.

Chris Badgett: Okay. Here’s a question for you that we get asked a lot for it. It’s one of the reasons we have this podcast. It’s outside the scope of the software, but. How do you get clients or how do you, get facilitators interested in the program and get the message out there?

Barbara Thomason: That’s been tough. This is, I’m a new launch, so my best way is for example, going to a conference, a professional conference yesterday. I reach out to school districts one by one and attempt to make appointments either with. An instructional leader whoever’s heading up the counselors and just have that conversation, see where they are in their SEL programming.

We talk about who would be ideal facilitators just that sort of thing. It’s just the outreach. I also have an e newsletter. And so I have a pretty robust list of schools across the state of Texas right now. So reaching out to them through my e newsletter, which is quarterly. I had an info webinar in January and invited quite a few people to that.

So it’s just a lot of those, ways that, you outreach to your publics.

Chris Badgett: Thank you. I call that the ground game. You have to get out there and yeah. One conversation at a time. You mentioned checking in with districts on where their cell programming is. Is it already kind of part of the flow where, it’s educational institutions have some kind of social, emotional learning mandate or process and flow, or is it sometimes a new thing for a school?

Barbara Thomason: This is tough for me to answer because I don’t want to be negative.

Chris Badgett: a circle on the online right.

Barbara Thomason: Now, having said that I met a wonderful ones.

Program creator, former professor yesterday who has a high school program, which is partially online. And I think that’s perfectly wonderful. As long as they do have the live component, but, I would say that there are many other states that are head and shoulders above my state, the state of Texas, and I’m afraid that we fall far behind.

Many of the administrators, superintendents still view social emotional learning as something that steals away from academic instructional time. They’re not familiar with DURLAC study and, others, and don’t realize the importance, especially in this post COVID time. And I do my best to educate it. I’m just one just one person, but.

I’m hoping that over time they will see the benefit of it. Some of the programs that I saw yesterday especially those that are online just don’t seem to me to be impactful and they’ll, say that they’re evidence based, which is the key word in, social emotional learning, but they can throw that word around without.

Necessarily having to prove it. I think that it just depends on, what school district and what state that you’re walking into as to how far they have come with social emotional learning.

Chris Badgett: For the other folks trying to impact within the educational system, who is, who’s like the decision maker on the program that you mentioned districts, but then there’s individual guidance counselors.

Is it more likely the kind of district lead gets buy in and then encourages their staff to join? Or is it more likely a. Specific guidance counselor, as an example that gets really into it. And I call that land and expand and then others start getting interested, which is a top down or bottom up.

Barbara Thomason: That’s the question. That’s what, how is going to respond? It depends on if it’s top down or bottom up. Sometimes a new superintendent comes into his position and wants to make his mark. And if his mark is one that is pure academics, then social, emotional learning may go by the wayside.

And, that’s what I have seen in the very district I’m sitting in. While another may be one that is very open to listening to his professional staff and we’ll take their recommendations and if they believe strongly in a, sound social emotional learning program, then he or she will say let’s, invest in it.

So it just depends on what kind of leadership is there and how willing they are to listen and take a try on a program.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. You mentioned creating impactful training. What are some examples of how to make the facilitator training more impactful than let’s say other things that are out there and with your background as a facilitator and instructional designer, how does one do that?

Barbara Thomason: I think that in addition to having good content and one of the things that, that I try and do, it’s not always the fun part is, having sound. Resources and insight the sources, but to also have use your tool for what do you call them? It’s like homework and use the tool for creating quizzes.

And so, you’re getting feedback for each unit or lesson if you choose to do it that way so that they’re really assimilating that information and trying themselves out on it. I think too, the more that you can have. more interaction during the learning, the better it can be.

So, an example might be a lesson assignment where they join together with one or two other learners to work on a project, a group project, or they have to go out and do some research on their own and report back on that. Something that’s a little more interactive than just reading and spewing back information I think is, going to be more impactful.

Knowing too that the learning is something that is going to make a difference in how they perform. On the job. And I think just pointing that out throughout the lesson, for example, giving them tools on how to work with the child who may lose control. During a session and why they are that way and tools that they can use to, bring that child back into into self control, those kinds of things.

Chris Badgett: What’s an example of a tool like that? Where the child loses control and how can you

Barbara Thomason: help? There’s a model and I’m not going to go into the model, Chris, because it’s, not an attractive model, but it’s called the polyvagal theory. And it basically shows where we move neurologically in our brain.

where we start out maybe feeling pretty good and we’re in a certain part of our brain and then we go into the flight or fight, fight or flight mode or freeze mode and call that our reptilian brain. And that’s where a child goes if they may be a child who has been subjected to abuse or neglect or any other form of trauma, they go there more readily, and through acts of, ensuring trust and so forth, you can move them from that part of their brain into a more calming place.

There was a strategy I learned yesterday, and just I’m going to build this into my program. A lot of parents learn how to conduct time out, right? A child who has been neglected. or abused, time out would be very problematic for them because what they, don’t need to be felt like they’re, rejected.

They need to be brought in and, feel closer and connected to. A trusting human being so this particular theorist called it time in and I just thought it was a beautiful thing. And she demonstrates how she brings the child who has acted out in to a chair fairly close to her.

She continues to do her thing whether it’s grading papers or, cleaning up at a sink or whatever, and allows the child to maybe do some art or something, but be thinking about how he or she might have performed that behavior differently, not decide what you did wrong, but how might you have done that differently if you had a do over and, then when you have decided that when you figured that out, just say, I’m ready.

And then when the child says, I’m ready, then get down on their level, I level and hear what they have to say. And it’s just great. Let’s try it that way. And I just thought that was a beautiful strategy to bring maybe a child that is high emotionality down to a calm level where they can move from that.

Panic area of their brain to calm thinking logical area of their brain and have learning take place So I just thought that was a beautiful strategy. I’d never heard before yesterday time in I love that.

Chris Badgett:Where does your passion and motivation come for this subject matter and impact you want to make in the world?

Barbara Thomason: It’s funny when this lightning bolt inspiration came to me, I did not want to do this. I’ve had businesses before. I didn’t want to do another one. It was like. No, thank you, God, I don’t want to do this, but it just wouldn’t leave me alone. The day that my daughter was born, and this was pretty long time ago, it was a little over 40 years ago, when I brought my daughter home from the hospital, there was a front page article about a little boy named Tommy Lott, and Tommy Lott had been, had a long, he was probably only 5, 4, 5 years old, but in his short life, he had been really tortured and abused.

And the front page article was that Tommy Lott had been killed by his parents, essentially, by being scalded in hot water. And this horrifying story, the day I brought my sweet baby home from the hospital, Sat in my gut and influenced a lot of what I did. I volunteered for a child child abuse prevention agency for years.

I worked directly with child abuse At risk families I almost became a social worker at one point and decided I didn’t want to have my career fall into that area. It’s too depressing, but anyway, Tommy Lott has been in the back of my mind off and on throughout my career and I.

I have gone on to do other things community development work, economic development work. It’s all been very gratifying, but but, kids are where it’s at and I’ve never wanted to be a teacher. I’ve never wanted to work in a daycare. I’ve never wanted necessarily to have that direct contact.

It was enough to be a mom, but but I have this creative motivation to create and this is the facilitator program guide that they work from create the program and maybe have a little wider impact than I would have just working for the classroom or was always something appealing to me.

And I felt would have would make a difference. It would make a difference in the world. So that’s my motivation. Tommy lot.

Chris Badgett: That’s fantastic. Barbara. For those of you listening, Barbara just held up a workbook. Is that it’s like a binder. Does that come up, does that come with the program, the online program?

Barbara Thomason: Yeah, this would be something I would ship to the facilitator. And as they go through the online program, this is like lesson plans. And maybe someday these would go online as well, but right now because this is something they might take with them into a classroom, I just wanted it to be a little bit more portable and mobile now, we didn’t want them to have to depend on a laptop or a tablet to carry that around.

Yeah, that’s the program facilitator guide.

Chris Badgett: I love that. I actually really like that idea. I call it clicks and bricks. You have some digital stuff and some stuff in the real world and it all just works together For the program. Yeah. What’s your vision for the future with joy circles?

Like where, do you want to go with it?

Barbara Thomason: I want to go across the country. No, I want to continue to offer the, creative leadership of the program. I want to build a program. One thing that I haven’t emphasized really today is the fact that it It, combines reading reading skills development with social emotional learning.

The young ones in the group will read contemporary novels that are age appropriate. For example, one of the novels deals with some kids that are dealing with bullying. And so we read the book together. As we read in the group, the kids build their reading skill, because they’re reading out loud.

But we also stop and we have a series of discussion questions. Have any of you been bullied? What does it feel like to be bullied? What constitutes bullying? Or what is teasing? What’s the difference? So it’s sometimes easier to talk about Somebody else’s bullying experience before you talk about yours.

And because of that. Joy circles has an infinite number of possibilities in that there are an infinite number of contemporary novels for various age groups. So right now we focus on fourth through sixth grade. I’m going to go down to third grade eventually at the recommendation of some school principals, and I may go up a grade or so the other direction as well.

And then, of course, create depth in terms of more and more novels that we might introduce into the program. So, I could stay very busy and just working with developing the program with the addition of literature, KIDLIT as it relates to the different topics of KIDLIT. of bullying and race and socioeconomic differences and developing friendships and dealing with parents and all of those issues that children in this age group are just exploring and dealing with.

So on a micro level, that’s where I want to go with it. On the macro level, I do hope to bring Other professionals in to help me expand this business and to help it grow. I’d like to see it in schools across the country and that’s my vision to make a difference across, across the country.

Chris Badgett: That’s amazing switching back to the instructional design hat. If somebody is. Working on something similar or tangentially related. I’m, just curious, did you create the physical binder of lesson plans first or the online course, and then there’s also this reading list which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

What would you advise somebody?

Barbara Thomason: I, created the program, the lesson plans first, but I. I had in the back of my mind, this outline for the facilitator program. The lesson plans are one thing, but the, facilitator training is why do we use circles? Why do we use models?

That’s another thing that makes us unique in that we, use graphical and word models. No other program does this, that Helps bring concepts to the young ones that will remain in their mind There’s one model for example called Sarge, and it’s this ugly kind of sergeant graphic and it is about the type of communication style that you might hear from a sergeant or another kind of authority and but it’s necessary in an emergency or a certain situation.

So sometimes children have a hard time distinguishing between what’s appropriate and what’s inappropriate communication. So this is a kind of communication model that we teach them. And then we talk about other kinds of communication like eye messages and, how to structure an appropriate.

I statement I feel concerned when you talk to me in that tone of voice. All of this is, and there are more models that are in my head that need to be developed as we move into sixth and seventh grade levels. So program first, then the facilitator training will evolve as well.

Chris Badgett: I wanted to try to extract a, some wisdom from Your experience around a lesson plan for a T for somebody who’s not trained as a teacher, like what is the lesson plan?

Barbara Thomason: It’s a flexible script. And it’d be hard for you to see for me to show you, but it. It provides a theme for this particular day or period of time together.

It provides going, as an example? Like communication or leadership or self management or visioning. And it provides maybe a list of materials and equipment. That you may need to gather together to have for that session so that it helps them get organized and then it has the list of activities you start with movement to music and joy circles has its own.

Recordings of music we’ve, secured the services of a local musician who has provided a soundtrack for us. So it’s very upbeat, positive music that, that he’s created for us. So we have movement to music and of course we’ve taught them in the facilitator training how to do this in a way that’s open and fun.

And then we move right into what we call Soda straw breathing. Where they transition from that movement to music that helps them focus down to a calming state where they they might even have a soda straw and we teach them how to breathe in through their nose and out as if they’re breathing through a soda straw.

And we do that several times, so it’s self calming. And then we go right into reading, where we are in the novels. They take turns. If a child doesn’t want to read, maybe they’re not comfortable with their reading, they can pass or we might say why don’t you read the title of this chapter so that they’re comfortable with just a few words and we reinforce that great.

That was helpful. Thanks, Steven. And then. After we read whatever the chapter is that we’ve decided to do that day, we have our discussions. Why do you think why do you think she ran out of the classroom in that chapter? Have you ever felt like doing that and why? So we take whatever the action was and bring it down to their personal level.

And then we might introduce our models for the day. And a lot of times they’ll track with the action of the book and then we’ll have some kind of a closing circle as well. So it depends on the amount of time that the hosting organization has allowed. If it’s 30 minutes or 60 minutes or 20 minutes how much we can accomplish, but.

That’s, what a lesson looks like and this scripts it for you, but we allow lots of flexibility for a facilitator once they’ve been trained to make adjustments. There may be an activity like creating emoji sticks so that they have a collection of emoji sticks that shows different kinds of emotions that we would use throughout our semester together.

So all kinds of things that, that the lesson plans can provide them with ideas. And then we welcome them to submit their own ideas so that they can be shared among our facilitator community.

Chris Badgett: Wow. I love that. I think the, what I’m hearing, the really big thing there when creating a learning experience is multiple, These in the body, breathing music through the ears, reading arts and crafts.

It’s not like you said earlier, it’s not just receiving content and spitting it back on the test. That’s what makes engaging learning experience. So I say like one of the frameworks or models that I have for for people who create these kinds of online learning platforms. Oh, it can be challenging or difficult is because you got to be five people in once.

You have to be a subject matter expert, you have to be a teacher slash instructional designer. You have to be a community builder, both to get clients. And then also inside your program, you have to be an entrepreneur. You have to start a business and accept money through the internet and marketing, and you have to be a technologist who can work with hardware and software and websites and everything you’ve, put all those pieces together, both yourself.

And you mentioned earlier, you had a webmaster that helps on the tech side. What advice do you have for somebody that’s struggling with having to wear those five hats? That’s what I call my model is the five hats. Cause you were able to get it and get it launched. Like what, advice do you have for wearing all the hats?

Barbara Thomason: I would say get the help you need retain those things that you know, and love. And try as much as your budget allows to delegate the rest. If you don’t like doing your bookkeeping try and find somebody else to do it. If, you don’t like building a website, it’s easy to find people to do that.

I have the most wonderful web people, and they were not terribly expensive, and I have just, I have them on a retainer now to, So rescue me when I need them to do things on a monthly basis.

Chris Badgett: So how do you find that person? I’m just curious because people ask.

Barbara Thomason: What’s that online shopping place? Upwork or freelancer?

It’s Upwork. Yeah. I found them on Upwork. Great, place to go. Yeah, that’s where I found them. And it wasn’t necessarily that they were the the lowest price or anything, it was a gut feeling of a good match and I was right. I would just say, that keep the things that you’re good at and that you love to do and try and, Carve out the other things and see if you can find others to do. I, there are things that I really am ready to delegate but I’m not ready budget wise. I’m, I’ve created a job description and I’m, poised and ready to bring somebody else on as quickly as I can when the time is right.

But, but the time isn’t quite right. I’m just ready.

Chris Badgett: It sounds like also the having your strong vision, mission and purpose helps carry you through all those challenges. And what I’m hearing too, is the team aspect of it. You even mentioned like in your vision to bring in other Subject matter experts to add even more value to the platform, which is awesome.

Barbara Thomason: Yeah, I look forward to that time. It’ll it’s also a challenge too. It gets messier when you bring other people in Yeah.

Chris Badgett: This has been a great conversation Barbara She’s at joy circles. com. What are, what’s the best way for people to connect with you? And particularly if somebody is working in education and social work or guidance, what should they do to connect

Barbara Thomason: with you more?

They can find me through the website. I have an email, Barbara Thomason at joy circles. com. I’m on social media Facebook, LinkedIn, and just reach out.

Chris Badgett: Barbara, thank you for being a shining example of what I call an education entrepreneur, creating a positive impact in the world and, using LifterLMS as part of your tech stack I really appreciate it.

And I wish you all the best on your learning platform journey. And thanks for coming on the show.

Barbara Thomason: Thanks for having me, Chris. Take care. Keep up the good work.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post How to Create a Niche Education Facilitator Program appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Madame Alexa describes how she went from working as a teacher in a program that immerses students in French to launching her own online language learning website. She decided to make her own interactive games and activities to fill the resource vacuum for younger learners in French immersion programs, with the goal of helping them acquire the language more successfully.

Alexa is owner of Madame A’s. She talks about how she creates classes using a combination of interactive features, video tutorials, and other activities to keep kids interested and learning at their own speed. Madame Alexa also discusses the technologies she uses, such as Elementor for WordPress website design, Genially for interactive activities, and recording tools for providing voice instructions.

Madame Alexa also reveals that her husband suggested WordPress to her as a versatile platform that would enable her to personalize her website and incorporate necessary capabilities like translation using the Polylang plugin.

She created a full platform with an LMS for children’s language learning, even though she was new to WordPress. According to Madame Alexa, she did a lot of research before finding LifterLMS, and she thought it was one of the few platforms that let her tailor her services for both individual parents and classroom environments.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Madame Aize. She’s from madameaize. com. She does language learning teaching over the internet. It’s French immersion from home. Welcome to the show, Madame A. Thank

Madame Alexa: you so much. You can just call me Alexa for this interview.

That’s totally fine. The kids called me Madame Alexa. I have a lot of different names.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. I’ll do it. I’ll do Alexa because my French is not that good. No problem. I did spend a, I was in France this past year. I spent some time in the Chamonix Valley area and had a ball there, but I also spent a lot of time in Canada.

Quebec’s an awesome place as well.

Madame Alexa: Perfect. It is lovely. I do really enjoy living here.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Tell us the origin story of how you started teaching French in online or in person. Like where, did the website Madame A’s come to be?

Madame Alexa: Absolutely. I was a teacher for seven years in the French immersion program in Quebec.

So for anybody who’s not really familiar with that, it’s basically a school program in French, where most of the students that will register either don’t speak French at home at all, so they’re from an English household or their parents might speak French at home, but they absolutely want their child to be bilingual.

A little bit of a background on the education system here in Quebec specifically, you when you are in the francophone system, you have about one hour of English a week. You can imagine that a lot of people are not becoming bilingual with that program. And in the English program as well, they have about one hour of French a week.

So again not, great if you want your child to be bilingual. So the immersion program is really everything is completely in French for the most part. And you have one hour of English a day. And when the kids get a little bit older, like in grades five and six, they actually have six hours a week.

So you, you get that additional hour as well in there. I taught on the French side of a French immersion program for seven years. And I got to live the pandemic teaching online with a grade one class, which is very interesting. So most of my colleagues were ripping their hair out trying to figure something out online and I’ve always really enjoyed.

technology and educational technology, and I really saw this as an opportunity to teach differently. I was going online, I was creating these self paced plans for my students, which is not something that’s doable in a classroom, but I’m like, hey, we’re online, we could do this, let’s do it.

And I was finding that there were very few resources made, especially for younger learners. And even more so when we fell into French immersion. So what usually happens with French immersion is that they’re not second language learners, so it’s not as basic, but they’re not necessarily at the level of a mother tongue French speaker either.

So we have this very large middle area. That’s rarely covered. And not a lot of material has been created for that level, so I decided well, this isn’t out there and I need it, so let me create it myself. I think I’ve got the skills to do this. I started creating these little interactive games for my students and they responded extremely well to it.

So well that during my last year of teaching I replaced all of my homework with these interactive games. That was their, lessons, their review. They would be doing it through these activities. So they would learn with me during the week and then they would go home and practice through these games.

And the parents really appreciated it because they used to tell me I always have to fight with my kid to do their homework, to practice this language, but. Every time it’s your games, it’s never an issue. So I saw that there was something to do with this. So I decided to leave teaching entirely at the end of the last school year.

And I’ve been doing this full time since July. So all of the activities are now online and here we are.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That is really cool. Tell us more about the games, like from an instructional design standpoint, like what are

Madame Alexa: they? Yeah. I try to do a mix of a lot of different things. It’s important for me to lay the foundations first.

Usually what I’ll do is I will have an interactive kind of image that the child can click around and can listen to my voice. So they’re like discovering through doing and then once, So instead of having a teacher just talk them through what they need to learn, they get to explore it themselves.

In other instances, I’ll also have video lessons if it’s really a concept that’s important that, that is explained to them. I’ll have it in a video and I, find it nice. especially for the younger ones who don’t necessarily have that attention span to be able to come back to it, hear it as many times as they need to, take a break in between the lesson if they need to.

And then what I do is I’ll have a couple of different activities that can be scrambled letters, it can be a word search, it can be a quiz I really try to vary it so that they never know what to expect and it keeps them on their toes. And then I take what’s been taught and I have them apply it to a bunch of different concepts.

So very pedagogical. Wow. And they really get to use their knowledge in a bunch of different contexts.

Chris Badgett: So cool. I wish I had you as a French teacher when I was younger.

Madame Alexa: Thanks. I would have loved that. It’s never too late to learn. Don’t worry.

Chris Badgett: That’s true. That’s true. Tell us about your technology stack.

What tools do you use to deliver all this?

Madame Alexa: Yeah this is a little bit complicated because I do not have a background in programming or anything like that. And what I was finding with most of these LMS tools is that they were designed for adult learners, right? We know that online teaching is extremely popular for adults in higher education, but it hasn’t been exploited as much, I think, as it could have for children.

So that was something that a big problem that I was running into was that these, LMSs are very busy. They’re very they have a lot of things that children don’t know how to handle or it’s not valuable to their learning. So I needed something that I would be able to really edit a lot.

But at the same time, I it’s got to be if, we’re talking about coding, I’m, it’s very limited what I can do. So I use a bunch of different programs depending on what I’m doing. If I am doing a an activity, then I’ll often go with Genially, which is an amazing tool. So that really lets me add a bunch of interactive elements.

And, put in the designs that I want, which is really nice. And then I will use a bunch of recording tools as well, so that I can add my voice to all of those interactive elements. Because a lot of these students don’t necessarily know how to read, so they need to be able to hear the instructions versus doing them.

And for the design of the website, then that was Elementor that I was using. Which was extremely helpful for somebody like me who has never done a website in her life. So really appreciated that Lifter and Elementric could work together.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. It may surprise you, but I’m not a coder as well.

I I, work with WordPress and tools that you move around. And yes, luckily for me, I have engineering talent on the team and partnership, so I’m able to make it happen. But I’m really impressed with what you’ve been able to do, both from a design standpoint and just making learning fun, I think that’s really the most important thing.

Madame Alexa: Thanks. That’s really the, ultimate goal, right? Is to make sure these kids can have fun and learn at their own pace. I’m so reassured that you say that because I’m like, look at Chris accomplishing everything and he doesn’t have a background in programming either. So it’s all good to go.

Chris Badgett: I don’t need it.

WordPress is for everybody really. It’s, the main goal was to democratize publishing and we just build on top of that with democratizing education is, there can you tell us a little bit about your WordPress journey?

Madame Alexa: Yes, I’m sorry. I seem to be having a bit of a problem with my camera.

Just give me one second. I’m gonna try to fix that.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, no problem. Your audio is still coming through just fine.

Madame Alexa: Okay, that’s good at least. Let me keep talking while I try to fix that. Sorry, what was your question?

Chris Badgett: What was your, like, how long have you been involved with WordPress as a technology?

Madame Alexa: So I, this was my first stint with WordPress actually. So yeah, it’s completely, new here. Oh, there we are. Yeah. What I had done originally with the website is that I had taken a a platform that had the LMS and the website together. But it didn’t work out for me because I needed, like I explained, I needed to modify so many different things and it just was not letting me do that.

And my husband works in, tech, and he’s the one who originally suggested WordPress because he’s you need to be able to adapt a bunch of different things and still have a skeleton. So this seems like the ideal situation, right? This is, the ultimate tool to be able to do that.

That’s how we got involved with WordPress to begin with. The original issue I was coming across was that I couldn’t translate my website with the other platform I was using, which is a huge problem in Quebec. Everybody expects things to be available in French and in English, even if it’s a French learning program.

For kids clearly designed to English marketed towards English speaking parents. You will absolutely get judged if your stuff isn’t also available in French. So that was something that was extremely important that I needed to do quickly. That’s what pushed me towards WordPress.

And then when I saw how much I could adapt to what I wanted to do and find the tools to really fulfill my vision, I was like, all right this is it. This is where we need to go.

Chris Badgett: Do you know offhand, like how that French English button on your menu works?

Madame Alexa: Do I know how it works?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, like what tools you’re using to make that happen or anything?

Madame Alexa: Yes, I do. It’s called, it’s a plugin called Polylang. Okay. Yeah, so it’s, not magical. But it does let me have basically every time that I create a page I can, Tell WordPress like this is the page in English and then duplicate it and explain this is the page in French and then translate the entire thing.

So I still have to do the translations myself but it lets WordPress know okay, when the person clicks this button, we’re going to this, the version of this page that’s in French, basically.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Yeah. Very well done. Thanks. I’m impressed this is your first WordPress site. It’s pretty awesome.

Really? Oh,

Madame Alexa: thank you. It’s so nice to hear because I’m always worried that it’s not it’s not as good as it could be. So it’s, always nice hearing

Chris Badgett: that. It’s it’s, not just like a static website for a business. It’s like the whole thing. And you’re using advanced tools like translation and LMS.

And yeah, it’s there’s a lot going on. So it’s impressive.

Madame Alexa: Yes. In the beginning, it was a little bit overwhelming. I think now finally I’ve got it somewhere that I, like it. So I’ve been able to spend a bit less time on the website and a bit more time on my actual content which has been really nice.

It is definitely a big a big challenge in the beginning because you’re, learning a bunch of different. new tools at once. But yeah, I finally got it to I think where I want it to be. And I think it’s really nice to have all of these. It feels like limitless, right? All of the options that you can have with the plugins.

So I know that when I’m ready to crank it up a notch or add something else there’s, a ton of different tools out there that I could potentially add.

Chris Badgett: Do you remember how you found LFTR LMS or how you got, into that whole world? Research

Madame Alexa: Research Yeah I, at first I was like, there’s gotta be a business up there doing LMSs for children.

And there are. But it’s almost as if, as soon as you’re talking about doing something for kids, they want to really restrain what you’re able to do with it. And none of them I feel like the, concept of my business, obviously it’s not revolutionary. There are online games and online platforms for, children learning languages.

But none of them do exactly what I do, which is really a mix of a bunch of different types of activities. It was really important for me that everything was in one place so that if the child wanted to do it independently, they could. And I think that’s something that really hasn’t been exploited much.

So every single thing. tool LMS that I was finding was too restrictive one way or another. So that’s how I ended up doing a bunch of research for different different LMSs that would really let me customize. And that’s how I came upon LFTR and saw, okay, there’s a bunch of different things that I can do here.

And my service can be bought directly by parents. Who just want their child to have an additional tool at home, but they can also be bought by schools. So classroom access where you’ve got a teacher with a group of 30 students who are all advancing at different paces. And it was difficult to find a tool that would let me have.

Those two worlds working parallel with each other. And LFTR was one of the only ones who were letting me do that the way that I wanted to. That’s awesome. Yeah, but it was months of research comparing and trying things out.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s a little overwhelming with how many, there’s 500 LMS is out

Madame Alexa: there.

There’s a lot. Yeah, there’s a lot. There’s a lot. Yeah. But I think that my vision was so clear and detailed and I knew exactly what I needed. So it was fairly easy for me to go through them and be like, okay, no, this one’s not going to work. It doesn’t have this. This is a non negotiable for me. So I had a couple of points like that, that I knew.

If this is not available, there’s no way I can do this. There’s no way I can put my eggs in this basket and I knew that it was going to be a huge commitment because I’m, trusting this platform to, hold all of my content, to hold my business in their hands and, not let me down.

Let me do what I want to do, because this, is literally my entire product. So yeah you, guys, this is Came in and got me there. I was like, oh, yeah, I feel like I can trust these guys and Will is amazing Every time I was stuck I could go look at a video that he’d done and I was like, alright I feel like somebody’s holding my hand here at all times every time I need him So it’s like a running joke between me and my husband When I don’t know how to do something, he’s have you checked a will?

I’m sure. And then when I get really stuck, if he hasn’t, then he’s joined the lives a couple of times, cause he’s I’m so interested in, the way that they do things you’ve inspired. He’s a I’m going to try to get his title, right? He’s a product manager in a tech company. And he’s enjoyed the way that you’ve done certain things so much that it’s inspired.

His job. And he’s gotten things implemented in his business that because he thought you guys were doing it so well. So like the lives, for example, he’s we should do something like that. This is amazing. So thank you. You’ve helped two different businesses with lifter.

Chris Badgett: That’s amazing.

Thanks a lot for saying that. And I’ll definitely pass that on to will as, well. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. One of our philosophies is. We don’t hide behind the website which, you don’t as a language learner or teacher, you can’t, but like some tech companies, it’s just like this faceless org and we’ve, intentionally went a different path.

So I appreciate you saying that.

Madame Alexa: Yes. And it’s, I think ultimately that’s what convinced me. To go with lifter versus all of the other LMS is, that I, saw that through you. I saw that I can be the teacher that I want to be online and they’re going to let me do that.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Is there anything else on the lifter side that you like about the tool or the features or anything?

Madame Alexa: So many things. The number one thing is really how customizable it is. The, only thing I would say is that I wish I could customize even more. But yeah, to be able to in, the courses page, when you’ve got a student going through the activities it was really important for me that.

It’d be very uncluttered because the more buttons there are for a child, the more chances the kid has of getting lost. I had to remove a bunch of buttons like the mark is complete. I had to figure out a way for the system to recognize that. Yes. Okay. This activity was done. And we can move on to the next one without counting on the child to be like, yeah, okay, I’m done cause that’s, they’re not all able to do that, unfortunately. So I, really love that, that I could take out what I didn’t need. I could embed what I did need. That was really amazing. And it worked seamlessly with the different tools that I was using.

Chris Badgett: We, we get a lot of questions about making interactive content.

So I think you mentioned was it called Gina Lee or something?

Madame Alexa: Genially? Yeah. Yeah. It’s an amazing tool. Explain how you

Chris Badgett: did that inside of a lesson and Lifter LMS.

Madame Alexa: Yeah. Yeah. What I do is through my genially account that’s really where I’m creating the activity. I, have one part that’s the design.

So I do the design of the activity the way that I’ve imagined it in my head. I upload that into Genially, and then from Genially, I can make those different elements interactive. And so I can add a recording to it. I can make it so that when this is clicked, this happens and all of that stuff. Then once my activity is complete, then I generate like a a code to, So that people can, actually use it.

That’s a bit like a private code. Then I go into Lifter and under my lesson what I’ll do is I have to actually go through WordPress to do this. So I’ll go to WordPress. I will add an embed block and within that embed block, that’s where I put my link to the activity and there we go.

Nice. Nice. And then I make sure that it’s only accessible to the ones who are enrolled in the course.

Chris Badgett: Perfect. Yeah. Tell us more about the school or the classroom versus individual learner. How do you do that?

Madame Alexa: Yeah. I use your groups Add on, I guess we can call it that. Yeah. So I had to define the teacher role a little bit because my teachers are a little bit different than most teacher roles within higher education organized.

Because most of those organizations want their teachers to upload content and manage certain things, which is not the case for me. The content is entirely made by me. I don’t want the teachers to be playing around with that or adding their own content. That’s not really the goal, right?

I want to be an additional Like fully formed tool. I don’t want to add any additional work to them. So I really wanted it to be there and they, just have to add their students and then their students can do everything. On their own. So I have this teacher role who’s able to add her students, who’s able to see the progress of her students into the different activities.

And then each student just has their own login and is able to just go in and do the activities either in class or at home. So if the teacher wants to use one of my lessons to present it to the whole group and then have them do the follow up activity on the classroom iPads, then they can just log in and do that there.

Or she runs out of time. She wants them to do it at home. During the week when they have time, they’re able to do that.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s super cool. Super impressive. Inspiring too, to think of lifters up inside of a classrooms and

Madame Alexa: delivering all this on the smart boards directly. Wow.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Tell us, there’s a common question we try to help people with on this podcast, which is how do you get students or clients or classrooms in your case?

Like, how did you get your learning platform to get traction in the

Madame Alexa: market? It’s very difficult. When I originally started, I was marketing it to schools so I was exclusively doing classroom access and the education system in Quebec is extremely complicated. I think in the United States as well, this is something that you’re grappling with.

But especially when you come in as a private institution, as a private business into a public institution, you’re seen with a wary eye, unfortunately. I think because they’re thinking, Oh, this person is trying to just make money and exploit my students for their business when it’s really not the case.

My ultimate goal is to just teach these children and make, French fun. And obviously we all need to make money to make our, businesses. Keep, surviving but I’m never going to be putting a student’s success at risk just so I can make a few more bucks.

That’s, not the point, right? So that was very difficult because I had to cold call the schools, very difficult to get in contact. With administration

in a school and then you have to prove yourself. So bring that message and make them believe in something that’s very new. So yeah, that, that was particularly difficult and considering I’m on my own, that was very rough. Because I, do think sales is a full time job and when you are a business owner, you already wear so many hats, you don’t necessarily have the time to be doing sales full time, especially when, like me, it is not your forte yeah, I found that particularly difficult, so I ended up pivoting a little bit more and gearing the service more towards So lately lots of online marketing campaigns to go and reach those parents and to see what we’re offering and, to see that this is an available option for them.

Because I think on top of getting parents to, to trust this whole the, education of their child to something, an online service. Beyond that, we’re presenting something that hasn’t really been done often. There’s a whole element of trust that I need to to get past as well before these parents.

So that has been particularly difficult. I do find that presenting that, that face and that personal element really helps. So yes videos are, great and informative and educational, but the fact that you’re a real person and they realize that has been extremely helpful. I’m really starting to, I’ve never been good with social media.

I, I, it doesn’t come naturally to me to share my life. I just never thought that I was interesting enough for that, that nobody would care. But it turns out people do care. I’ve been trying really hard to share tidbits of, my life, of learning French, of tricks that parents can use at home, even if they don’t speak French, to support their child.

So that’s been extremely helpful. I think we’re bringing a, personal element, and they see that this isn’t just a face behind a screen. This is a real person with with real things to offer. It’s not just a, voice on the other end.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Is it is it like Instagram and Facebook and Twitter?

Yeah,

Madame Alexa: exactly. Facebook and Instagram, especially. I haven’t tackled Twitter yet. I am tackling Tik

Chris Badgett: TOK. Oh, good for you. For what it’s worth, we have a a Spanish teacher who does really well on Tik

Madame Alexa: TOK, so yeah it’s, Impressive that when you don’t have a very short time limit like people are interested in learning and I feel like this is just a, bite size way to learn now.

And it’s so accessible that I think there’s something to do with that. Yeah, for sure. And the algorithm is. It’s crazy scary good. If, it recognizes, Hey, you’ve got an interest in learning languages here’s a content creator who’s going to help you do that. And then we end up on their for you page and that’s really great.

It’s very impressive.

Chris Badgett: That is good. I agree with you that that whole micro learning thing is. It’s really a trend for one, but number two, tick tock is really good at that.

Madame Alexa: Yes. And, I feel like it’s a whole new era. This isn’t something that we would have been able to do some 25 years ago, right?

When, everything wasn’t so accessible with, the internet and with every, everything out there. So I feel like. It’s okay to adapt to new realities and, to change learning in a way that just suits people better in the lives that they’re living today, right? Of how busy they are.

You have

Chris Badgett: a like a free trial program course on your site? Yes,

Madame Alexa: I do. Yeah. Tell us about the strategy

Chris Badgett: of that and how it works and what it does.

Madame Alexa: Yeah. Originally it came from when I was still approaching schools. I think that Teachers are very concerned that if they jump into a new tool, it’ll be more work for them because they’re going to have to learn how to use it, how to apply it, where can they fit it in their planning.

And I think there was a big block there. They needed to see that what I created was good pedagogically, right? That it was good content, but also that it was easy to use. And I wanted them to see. I think a lot of them couldn’t fathom the types of activities that I was able to create with these programs.

So it was really important for me to showcase just a couple of activities just so they see the potential and that they see oh, wow, this is really easy to use. And my students are really going to enjoy doing this. So that’s where the free trial initially came from. It was just I think five or six different activities just to give the flavor and to show them how easy it was to use, but to also see we’re not just we’re not just teaching vocabulary.

We’re looking at reading, we’re looking at writing, we’re looking at speaking. Like we’re really exploring the language through all of this. It’s facets. So I, wanted them to be able to play around with that and put up an activity on the board and just have their students explore it. So that’s where I came from originally.

And then when I started pivoting towards parents, I figured, Oh, it it might be good for them as well to show this to their child and be like, Hey, is this something that interests you? Is this something that my child would do? And when they see the interest to be like, Oh yeah, this is worth me spending the 29 a month for my kid to have access to a bunch of different activities like this.

So that’s where it came from.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I think that’s the best marketing you can do is a free course or free product. That’s, great. You mentioned a term and just for the non teachers out there, what is pedagogy or pedag? Pedagogical mean?

Madame Alexa: Pedagogical. So it means that there’s, a whole science to learning, right?

This is what we learn for four years in university, right? It’s how the brain works. How, is a completely new concept introduced to a young brain? And then gradually that learning solidifies in their brain to become something that’s fully acquired. So any, you can throw any fun, colorful activity at a child and they might do it and they might understand.

But how does that play into the building blocks of their knowledge and how do you use those blocks to gradually grow towards language learning and becoming fully bilingual. So that’s all of the thought that’s behind every activity. It’s not just fun. There’s, a, yeah, there’s, yeah, it’s not just we’re throwing in this number of activities just, just.

for giggles there, there is a, goal to each and every one of those and they all create building blocks so that the child can take what they learn, reuse it later, use that knowledge to push their learning further and, then build on that. So that’s what it is. It’s, not just willy nilly exercises.

It’s really there is the method to the madness.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And if I’m understanding it does it come with a weekly video

Madame Alexa: call? Yes, it does. Yeah. Part of the package. Yeah. When the when the parent purchases a monthly access, they have access to the activities drip fed weekly because it was very important for me that we don’t overwhelm the child either.

Sometimes there’s just too much going on and that’s a great motivation killer. So I wanted them to. Take it slowly. And every week when they’re on their home screen, they have a big button that says register for this week’s call. And obviously I have limited spots available because it would get very chaotic with 50 kids in there at once.

So if the parent wants too. They just have to press that button and it registers them for the weekly call. And then they get a a Google meet link that they can then join. So at the time of the lesson every week, and then we get to go over what they’ve practiced during the week. So the different types of activities that they’ve done, what they’ve learned, I get to practice it with them, but in an authentic.

context, right? Like, how do you respond with that knowledge when a French speaker is asking you a question, right? And you got to think on your feet. So we keep those very short. They’re only 30 minutes. They’re very young learners, so their attention span is quite short. And again, we’re going with the idea of we want to keep learning.

So we don’t want it to drag on, we don’t want them to get bored with it. So this way we get to do a fun little activity, I can read them books sometimes we can have like fun little discussions and every month I also do a live book reading that’s free that any, parent can join. They don’t have to be registered.

So if they just want their child to be listening to a French story. read by a native French speaker. That’s free. They just have to join the Facebook page and, we do that every third Sunday of the month. So yeah, just a bunch of different fun ways to, make French learning authentic for them.

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s awesome. And the you mentioned, I think current pricing was 29 a month. We get asked a lot about how to figure out what to charge or pricing. Any, advice there in, this education market or how you came up with that?

Madame Alexa: I found that extremely difficult as well. Obviously my pricing for is different from my pricing for parents because we’re talking about an access for 30 children for the entire school year versus a monthly access for one child.

So that was a big moment for me, even for my school pricing was very difficult. I ended up having to drop the price to something. Almost ridiculous and even then it was very difficult to sell to schools because it’s so hard to pass all of those barriers. So I knew that I needed to go with something that was easy to digest.

I think a lot of people when they talk about a monthly membership, they’re very quick to compare it to other monthly subscriptions like Netflix. They come to expect that. As a a monthly subscription price. Obviously we’re talking about education and not just entertainment. So I think that really was an added value to what I was offering.

But you want something that They that’s a no brainer right for them that it’s like this is a very small price to pay for your child to have quality education that’s added to what they learned at school every day. And when I, spoke to many different parents to see the different tools that they had used, what did they, that made sense for them? And that price range came back a lot. The 25 to 35 a month was something that was often mentioned. And I, wasn’t even talking about monthly prices. I was just like what would you be willing to pay? And they’re the ones who kept coming back with the monthly pricing.

And that’s when I started doing the monthly pricing. Cause I was like, okay, this makes sense to people. So let me do that. And and I figured why not just start right in between these two numbers and, go from there. So it is an introductory price right now. I don’t know how long that’s going to last.

I’m thinking that the more, because I’m constantly adding content to these this platform as well. So obviously, eventually, I’m thinking the price will increase. But right now, since it’s all very new I figured this was the ideal place to start. I hope that answers your question. It

Chris Badgett: does.

That was really good. I have found by the way that dollar a day, basically price point is a good price point for certain things. So I’m glad you found that spot. What about expansion or growth plans for the future? I guess you could do more grades or ages and then different countries or like, how do you think about the future?

Where do you want to go? Oh,

Madame Alexa: so many plans. Originally the idea was to create content from kindergarten to grade six. At the moment we only have early learning. So it’s grades one and two. So definitely going to be expanding from. K to at least four and maybe to six. If I see that the interest is there.

It is extremely time consuming to create the activities and to make them as good as I want them to be. So yeah, I have to put a lot of thought into that. It’s a lot of planning. It’s a lot of creation. That’s a lot of testing before it’s put out there. Yeah. So for sure, I want To grow that I’d also like to keep adding on to the current activities that I have so that there’s more I’m going to be visiting Western Canada very shortly so that I can compare the immersion programs over there to the ones.

over here and see what the differences are so that I can better adapt to their needs. So that’s a growth that’s going to be happening very shortly on the school side. Eventually I would like to start marketing this to the US as well, because I think that if this is good enough for English speaking Canadian parents who want their child to speak French, then why wouldn’t it be for, you guys, right?

I think that language learning is so beneficial everywhere, especially today. And especially considering French is such a popular language. I can definitely see some parents wanting to give additional opportunities to their child and, seeing how easy it can be, right? And that they don’t need to.

the language to be able to give their child that opportunity. So that’s something I definitely want to go towards. And you’re the first to hear this. We’re currently developing a, an AI tool, a conversational AI tool specifically for children. So that outside of those. Live 30 minute calls if the child wants to practice their language learning, they’re going to be able to do that with a cartoon version of me, who’s going to ask them questions and respond to what they say.

So we’re working on that right now.

Chris Badgett: Wow. Do you know what that AI tech is called? Oh

Madame Alexa: boy, I do not. Clearly not my area of expertise. That is my husband’s. It’s definitely his passion project right now. So I’m, working on all of the educational side of it and the I guess the knowledge that goes into that.

That data but yeah, I couldn’t even give you a specific name. I have no idea.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. No worries. It’s interesting time for AI and it’s amazing how fast changing and what happens even over a year.

Madame Alexa: Yeah. And the possibilities are just endless. I’m constantly amazed with what he’s showing me that it can accomplish.

I I threw that idea one day because. What I do, right? Every morning I wake up with a new idea and I’m like, we should do this and expected that to be like a unicorn project in 20 years and then he goes no, you don’t understand. This is moving fast. This is possible.

And I was like, really? I feel like it’s way more complicated than you think it is. And he’s no, And within I want to say a week he had the very basic prototype done and the, voice side of it is a little bit complicated given. But it’s, working now. But when he made me try it after a week it was still written.

Which is great for older kids, but younger kids it’s is more complicated. And he had me write to it and talk to it as if I was a kid and it was responding and it was responding well. So I was very impressed with everything that we can accomplish with this. Now it’s, unharnessed, but So many possibilities, especially in learning we, could really take language education to a whole new level before, if you wanted to become a fluent speaker, you needed to put yourself in an environment where people around you spoke that language.

And now potentially we’re talking about. That might not be necessary anymore. Obviously it’s preferred if you’re stuck alone in the middle of a country where French speakers are, scarce that’s not going to stop you anymore, which I think is absolutely amazing.

Chris Badgett: That is really cool.

Yeah. AI as a tutor, particularly trained on your material and style content. There’s just so much there.

Madame Alexa: Yeah, absolutely. I wanted to be able to also analyze the speaker’s level and where they’re at and then recommend specific activities to work on. Their challenges based on that. So that’s the the end goal as well.

Chris Badgett: Adaptive learning. Very cool.

Madame Alexa: Exactly. Good job.

Chris Badgett: A couple more questions before we land the plane here, Alexa. Do you remember the time that went by from, okay, I think I want to try to build this site that does this thing to getting your first paying student or classroom on board?

Madame Alexa: You mean like from, the conception of the idea to actually getting it done?

Chris Badgett: getting it done and having your first customer.

Madame Alexa: So I started getting the idea in 2020 when we were teaching online. I started creating the material I want to say in 2021 or 2022. And I got my first paying customer. I think six months within building like the, bones of the platform. So it was very fast at first and then it came almost to a complete stop.

I think a lot of entrepreneurs definitely live that. Yeah. And, that’s exactly what happened to me. So it was working extremely well. And then It just froze because then it wasn’t just like my, immediate contacts, I had to push this further. And like I said, sales and marketing, I knew absolutely nothing about.

So I think there was a big adaptation period there where I had to be like, okay I’m going to have to put in some real effort for this. So yeah, but yes, initially it happened fairly quickly. I was making more than my costs. So I, was profitable within six months of, creating it. Which I’m, told is something to be proud of.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think the, only reason that I was able to do that was because I have an online service, right? So I, it’s not like I have to pay an office or all of these material production costs to be able to do it. So yeah, it’s it’s a whole new era of business now.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. What advice do you have for somebody else who’s a language learning instructor who has a deep passion like you do and they’re inspired by something like this? What advice would you have for them?

Madame Alexa: I would tell them to have a clear plan in mind and to not expect things to be easy.

I think that teachers already make they, daily they’re doing a job that is extremely demanding. So I know that they’re not afraid of hard work, but this is a different kind of hard work. So I think. Yeah to, be aware that you’re going to need to wear a lot of different hats. And if you’ve got a passion for learning, it’s great because you will be learning a lot.

So for sure to carefully research what you’re going to be, the tools that you’re going to be using. Because they are going to really make a difference in Your, product or your service being successful. But also you want to be able to do your thing. So you need to be using tools that you can trust and so that you’re not constantly handling technical issues versus doing what you’re actually wanting to do.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thanks for that, Alexa. And that’s at madamaise. com. Any other for the people to connect with you on the internet?

Madame Alexa: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So the Facebook page for Madame A’s and the Instagram is at madame. As. ca. And always free for a call if you want more information. So you can just write to me directly.

That’s alexa, a l e x a, at madameas. com. So that’s my personal email. So if anybody wants to know a little bit more, to ask me questions, I am always

Chris Badgett: available. Alexa, thanks for coming on the show and thank you for being an inspiring example of a language learning entrepreneur. I’m really impressed.

I can’t wait to see, we’ll have to do this again a couple of years down the

Madame Alexa: road. Yes, I would love that.

Chris Badgett: Thanks so much for coming. We really appreciate it. Thank

Madame Alexa: you so much for having us. It really makes a difference for small businesses to to be able to be put front and center like that. So I really appreciate it.

Thank you for all the work you do. You bet. Have a great.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post How to Teach French Online with Madame Alexa appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Judy Butler discusses about legacy estate planning and the need of having a thorough plan in place to protect families from hardship when inevitable death occurs.

Judy Butler is an expert in legacy estate planning and is associated with The Guardians Gift. Her area of expertise focuses in offering educational programs and training procedures that enable people and families to proficiently manage estate planning. She highlights the importance of having an honest, humorous conversation while debunking some popular beliefs and superstitions around the subject.

Judy draws attention to the negative effects of not having a plan, including pressure on finances, strife within the family, and rash decisions. When inquired about the more straightforward approach to estate preparation, Judy clarifies that it involves more than just creating a will.

She highlights the intricacy of the procedure by drawing on her own experience, which encompasses legal facets outside of the will, such as healthcare directives and powers of attorney. She explains the comprehensive strategy of the Guardians Gift program, which starts from birth and takes into account finances, healthcare, and ancestry.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Dr. Judy Butler. She’s from the guardiansgift. org. She has a whole learning opportunity and training process around Legacy estate planning, how that works, how that, how to do it well to benefit the family.

We’re going to talk about the subject matter. We’re going to jump in to how she’s leveraging the online world to help with their mission. But first welcome to the show, Judy. Thank you.

Dr Judy Butler: Thank you, Chris, for having me. And I’m excited to be here today.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. It’s great to have you. This is a bit, this is a big topic.

It’s a heavy topic for people. So can you explain at a high level how families and children get into crisis? around inevitable death and, estate planning and the legacy they leave behind. How does that play out when there’s no real planning or it just pops up and there wasn’t really, things are in place.

What kind of crisis happens in the lives of people, when that happens?

Dr Judy Butler: People seem to think they know what’s going to happen, and we do at one level, we’re all going to die, and you’re right, it can be very difficult conversation, it can also be very depressing for some people and people are very superstitious, they think, oh, if I talk about it I’m, going to make it happen, and I’m sorry, but it’s going to happen anyway.

So let’s talk about it. And so I try to make it more light hearted and enjoyable to actually discuss and even funny sometimes what’s going to happen because when we don’t plan and I’ll. 67 percent of Americans do not have a plan. But when we don’t plan, we put our family members into crisis. We actually cause them to have to come up with financial resources physical resources.

We actually have to make decisions that we are not equipped to make because we don’t have the information that we need when a planning. a simple plan can alleviate the heartache, the headache, the family dysfunction, the dynamics. I’ve seen so many families that get into turmoil and they fight over things.

Mom told me this, or dad told me that no, they told me something different. And then it just, it’s a, he said, she said kind of thing. And I just think that there’s a simpler, easier way.

Chris Badgett: So what is that simpler, easier way? And can you talk a little bit about, are we talking about like a will or a lot more than that?

And what,

Dr Judy Butler: is it? It’s a lot more than that. This actually comes out of my own personal experience and life story. And that’s for a different time, but it’s more than just a will. People, a lot of people have a will, a power of attorney, healthcare, power of attorney, and a living, will, and.

Like a lot of adult children, my parents had those things as well, but, and I thought I knew, I thought oh, they got a will, that’s all I need. But when it comes down to what happens from the time a person starts their decline towards death, and this could go for years. And then the actual death, that is a place where caregivers actually spend a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of money, trying to figure things out.

And I was like a lot of adults, I thought I already know what mom, dad want, I just handle it. There’s so many legal parts to it that are not anything to do with the will. And so it’s about knowing how to navigate, how to actually ask the right questions, what resources to look for, and the Guardian’s Gift actually starts people out at birth.

There’s a component of genealogy. There’s a component of health care. There is a financial piece to it where we actually look at what does it cost from the time someone begins the decline to the actual death. Now, death and dying in and of itself is expensive, but it’s really expensive to think about.

In home care, nursing homes, assisted living, and what those things are, how they function, what does that mean, and people really get lost in the weeds when they start navigating that.

Chris Badgett: Couple of clarifying questions. Could you explain the difference between a will, a living will, and a power of attorney?

Dr Judy Butler: Absolutely. A will is a legal document that Talks about your assets and what will happen to your assets. A health care power of attorney is a simple legal document and it actually gives someone else the ability to make health life care decisions for you. If you’re not able to make them. An example would be if you went into surgery and while you’re under anesthesia, the doctor comes out and says, Oh we need to give them some blood.

If that hasn’t been decided beforehand, your healthcare power of attorney could make that decision. And of course it’s bigger and deeper than that. People associate it with pulling the plug, so to speak. If somebody’s on life saving measures. Now, a living will is a legal document that actually says what it is you want to happen or not happen about your life and if you were to need life saving measures.

And it’s different than a do not resuscitate, which is something, another legal document that people have towards their end of life. So a power of attorney is different than a healthcare power of attorney because a power of attorney is a legal document that has to do with your finances and handling of your financial arrangement.

Chris Badgett: That’s great. Thanks for clarifying that. And you said, you mentioned the word we earlier, so I was wondering is, it the parent or the child that leads this process or both? Is it, or is it really, are you really focusing on the person, the parent planning for the future?

Dr Judy Butler: Actually Because I’m also a therapist and I’m very, it’s very important to me that we secure the family dynamics as much as possible.

I really enjoy when we can have the adult children as part of the process. Of planning but sometimes senior adults and not always just seniors, but people in general are very private And they are very hesitant to talk about these things with their family members So sometimes an individual or a couple will come and they’ll want to put their legacy estate plan in place And they don’t want to discuss it with their children and i’m I have that conversation with them that at some point, these people, your adult children, are the people who will have to actually follow through with your legacy estate.

So I think it’s important to have the conversation, at least, at some point during the process. Now, some people don’t have they don’t have family members that way. Sometimes I have adult children that come and say, I want my mom or dad to actually talk to me about this, and I’d like to help them, and I’d like for them to get something in place so I don’t end up having to make these decisions later.

So it can be driven by either of the parties that you’re asking about.

Chris Badgett: Can you speak to the the, memory issues that are common Alzheimer’s or dementia and how that factors in and how that affects this, situation when the parent is starting to deal with that and it’s progressing.

Dr Judy Butler: So in the early stages, and of course, my father had dementia and that’s part of my story is. It’s important early on as possible to be able to get these documents and things in place because particularly with a health care power of attorney when. You take like I had to take my dad to the doctor on occasions and I’d have to go with him Because once he was given medication or some instructions for his health care And of course this goes to financial and all other kinds of areas, too I would have to remember those things for him and help him execute those things And if we had it all written down if We had the guardian’s gift.

Then I would have had all those legal documents in place so that when I went to the doctor’s office, I could say, here’s his healthcare power of attorney. And of course they ask for those things these days more than they did when my dad first was diagnosed. But we I would have those documents and the doctors and offices and all the healthcare providers, it makes it a lot simpler for everybody as well as It would have made it easier on my dad because he didn’t have to worry about it.

He would say talk to my daughter. She’s got it. She handles all that. And a lot of adult children already handle it. They go with their families. But having the legal documents in place is just an added extra protection for everybody. That’s

Chris Badgett: great. Thanks for that. And we’re going to get into the guardian’s gift.

In the time capsule in a second and for you out there listening, that’s at the guardiansgift. org. But a couple more questions before we go there. Tell us a little more, Dr. Judy, about your story and, why you were motivated to pursue this what, happened in your situation?

Dr Judy Butler: As I said, Dan had dementia.

And my parents, I grew up blue collar. My parents were relatively poor. Of course, we didn’t know we were poor. Everybody was poor. And so we I grew up that way. And as the, sometimes caregiving falls a lot to the girls, the family, the females, and I was the oldest and I thought, oh this is my job.

I’m grew up knowing that was my job to look after my mom and dad. But it got to a point where. My mother could not physically care for my father. He had begun to fall and he was having some difficulty getting around, and I was afraid, and my mother has a bad back, and I was afraid she was going to try to pick him up, and they were both going to be injured, and I was going to lose both of them.

So it was decided that dad needed the kind of care that we could not give him at home, and that is a really tough decision to make. And so we sought out a facility where they could look after him, but my parents being poor, they had a will and but they had a home and they had cars and they had furniture and their personal belongings.

They didn’t have stocks or bonds or major assets other than their home. But to go into a nursing home, a skilled nursing facility they could not afford that because it’s so expensive. People don’t realize you can’t just go to a nursing home. Somebody has to pay for it, whether it’s Medicaid Medicare, doesn’t pay for it.

They’ll pay for a few days if you’re sick and you need that kind of care, like for the first hundred days, but for extended care, they won’t pay. So you have to be Medicaid, which is you don’t have any money. And a lot of people don’t realize that, or you have to hire people. My parents couldn’t afford it.

So the only thing that was an option for them was for them to sign their house over. Department of Social Services said you have to sign your house over. So at some point, when he passes and you both pass, they would take the house and sell it to pay off the debt. Somebody has to pay. And my mother was like, no, I’m not selling my house.

I’ve worked my whole life and I’m not going to sell my house. So we had to wait a little bit and get the house put into a trust. And I learned all about trust and how those work but to protect the house so my mother would be okay and then to be able to have social services pay for dad to be in a nursing facility, so it was not the actual death and dying piece.

It was the getting to that part. That was the problem. So I learned all about the legal aspects. I went, I learned all about nursing homes and Medicare and Medicaid and how that works, what they pay for what they don’t and then when dad died. I was exhausted and I was physically worn out from running around, taking care of them.

Mentally, I just didn’t have anything left to try to make those decisions. I was like, we got to plan a funeral. I don’t know. And I’m a pastor. I’m an ordained pastor. So I preached lots of funerals, but this was my dad. And so it was different. And when it’s your own, it’s very, hard to make those decisions when you have no energy left.

So the day that my dad, at his funeral, I stood there. And I thought there has to be a better way to do this. Why doesn’t anybody have all of this stuff together? So I set out, it became my mission, which and I made it my life’s work, my passion, that I would help people. And the way that I figured this out, as a pastor for Senior adults don’t like to talk about death and dying, but they do like to tell their story.

And that’s why we start at the beginning. Where were you born? Where did you go to school? Who was your best friend? Did you have any pets? And I ask all those questions in a very simple format, and we’re going into a different space here but it became my mission to make it simple for people to tell their story, list their genealogy, put all their financial information And their legal information and their health information into a format that somebody like their adult daughter like me or their son has access to be able to make the decisions and help their family.

Chris Badgett: That’s great. Let’s dive into the guardiansgift. org. What was your journey into doing this mission? You have a website now and a process and the time capsule. Yes. Did it start with taking one-off clients and just helping them in consulting or, and how did it evolve into a website?

Dr Judy Butler: yes, it did start off exactly as a one off with a legal pad and a few questions. And and people were like why do you need to know that? But I just sat down with people and consulted with them and helped walk them through it and. Then COVID hit because my father died in 2018 right before the pandemic.

So I was doing it from the time he passed until COVID again with a legal pad and a few questions and then COVID and I was like okay, now what? So I had to transition and put it online so that I could not only make it simpler for people, But I could offer more value to people with more questions, more form uploads and all of that.

I looked at learning systems, which is what lifter is and the 1st system that I used was very basic. And but I learned from that. I learned to put the questions online. I learned to put videos online and to make things explainable and easily accessible to folks so that during COVID, they could just sit at their computer and they could actually create their will.

Get their will, their legal documents, tell their story and create their legacy estate. But I knew as we have progressed and grown, there needed to be a better system, a faster system, more elegance, if you will, for people to be able to do it. And I needed it to be simple and fast and straightforward.

And LFTR.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Tell us more about are you doing the website and everything yourself? Or did you hire somebody to do it? How did you put it all together?

Dr Judy Butler: Yes, to all of it. So again, I started out and I had somebody help me with it. A lot of it I’ve done on my own. And I have again, every time I need some help, I’ll find somebody that can help or I’ll hire somebody.

There’s different agencies that offer. people that you can hire on contract. But when I transitioned and the end of 2023 last year to WordPress, I actually went to WordPress and I thought I need something that I can at least access myself. But it’s time for me now to let it go to somebody who is more proficient and more technical than I am.

So that’s why I went with WordPress, because WordPress is I guess the Rolls Royce, if you will, of hosting and such. But as part of that, I was looking for a learning management system, and there are several on WordPress. But I was impressed with Lifter, because it incorporated It incorporates the commercial piece that I needed to be able to present.

This as a format for purchase that people can buy it, but I also needed the quality That they that you guys offer of how to put the system together How could I put the guardians gift together in such a way? That it flows from one lesson to the next lesson to the next module and that everything is there and simple

Chris Badgett: Awesome.

Tell us more about the student or client experience. Are they working through videos? Are they filling out forms? What’s, in the lesson content?

Dr Judy Butler: So it’s, a mixed bag. When they sign into the guardian’s gift, there is a welcome video. So there’s a little video there. There’s also an instructional video that actually walks them through What they’re going to see, what’s coming up, what they need to do and how it functions.

And then they actually get into what are the forms. They are forms. And I chose formidable forms because Lifter actually said, we work well with these guys. And we looked at some other forms, but they didn’t do again, what I needed them to do as part of this process. They actually, it comes up, a question comes up and they just type in the answer.

Where were you born? And then it also has calendars that you can click on the calendar. This is the date. It has drop downs. It has all sorts of different parts of forms that people don’t normally associate with forms. But they’re very simple to set up and LFTR and Formidable work well together. And so that’s why I chose that.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Can you tell us more about what the Time Capsule is?

Dr Judy Butler: The Time Capsule is a series of questions or question prompts. There’s also a space to answer or tell your stories talk about your first pet. So the Guardian’s Gift, the Time Capsule piece is that we take all of your history That you do want to pass down your legacy.

You want to pass to your family your life stories and we’ve combined it with getting your will and your legal documents and we help you do that. We provide that as part of the process and then also the planning piece towards the end. Where you actually plan your end of life service. We help you write your obituary.

We, set all of these things up. They’re different modules. So there’s a birth through kindergarten module. There’s an elementary school module, there’s a high school, middle and high school. There’s college and career, and then there’s transitions and there’s adulting. We call it adulting because it’s where you would get your first, you get married, or your first love, or your first car, or your first house, all of those firsts.

And you talk about those things, and then we take you from the beginning all the way to the end, And there’s also an executor’s checklist that helps your family members after you’re gone, put everything in order. They’ve got it. They know what to do. Oh, yes. I need to remember to turn off the electricity.

For this outside light that’s running, or I need to remember to stop the newspaper. So those kinds of things, there’s a checklist for that as well.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. So in the end, like for the student, I would say, do they end up with do they print something out? And have a, it’s basically becomes the plan,

Dr Judy Butler: right?

So what we suggest, of course you’re doing this online and when you complete one of the modules, we suggest that you save it to a flash drive, which we give you this handy dandy little neat flash drive. We’ll send it to you. And we want you to save it to the flash drive, but we also want you to print it and put it into a binder because it’s, I hate to kill trees, but at the same time, it needs to be all in one place.

There’s also where you can upload pictures and the documents. So I asked people to get a copy, make a copy of their will, their legal documents, copy of the pictures, a copy of diplomas and certificates. And all of that goes in the binder. So you end up with an autobiography. But we don’t call it that. We call it a time capsule because a time capsule is something that someone else will open at some point in the future, and they will actually see things that you thought were important enough to go in this container, if you will.

But we also suggest. If you have someone that you can email it to, that you can email it, and you can send it, so you have it on a flash drive, you have it printed out in a binder, and you email it to your executor or an adult child or somebody, and they have it as well. So it’s in several different places.

Chris Badgett: Wow. I love this, I call this an instructional design. I call it clicks and bricks. You’re doing like this digital stuff, but then you have these physical things like the binder and the printouts and the thumb drive. That’s really cool. And it’s so focused on this specific moment in time and challenge of life.

I really admire what you’ve built here. Let’s look a little more where we started this interview around. What, happens if this doesn’t exist and someone were to pass away and there’s no will or living will or power of attorney or anything. And yeah, what happens when this, doesn’t exist?

Dr Judy Butler: The first thing that happens is if you don’t have legal documents they, the estate, and some people don’t think they have an estate, but they do it may be small but, we still have assets. It will go to probate when these things go into probate, it can take 18 months to years for this to be settled, depending on what a dispute is, if there is a dispute, but even if there’s not a dispute, the state, whatever state that you’re living in decides who gets to handle the estate.

The state of North Carolina, which is where I am, will select someone and most often they’ll select, if it’s a husband or a wife, they will select that other one. But say one of the parents has passed and now this is the other parent that’s has just passed. It could be some person that you don’t know comes in and says, Oh, there’s a nice estate.

Let me petition the courts. to be the person in charge and they have to provide some, information. It’s called a letter of testamentary and they go before the court to petition to become the person who handles the estate. It can take again a long time. Families get into quarrels about things.

Who’s going to get the clock? Who gets it? Surprisingly, you don’t think people are going to fight about those things, but they do. And if it’s stated in the guardian’s gift, then there’s a picture of it. And you say, this is who I want to get it. But if it’s not there, their family fights, people get into arguments that last for generations.

And sometimes they don’t even remember what the argument was about. 10 years later it becomes very expensive. It becomes you have to hire an attorney necessarily. If there is a dispute some of the major celebrities surprisingly have not had wheels. Let’s see the guy that was, The black panther.

Chris Badgett: I know you’re talking about I don’t know his name.

Dr Judy Butler: Okay, he did not have a will but he had He has a spouse a significant partner and there’s been a lot of legal stuff And so the again that it’s you’re already upset You’re having to deal with these emotions about losing this person that you love dearly and now all of a sudden you have to go into court and Fight about stuff because there’s no will there’ve been a lot of major celebrities that didn’t have wills that they would have their estates would have benefited from had they had those things in place.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned earlier that you came from a blue collar background. And you told your story. How is the experience different on either end of the spectrum? Let’s say somebody dies with very little assets and somebody moves on with leaving behind significant assets. How, do we think about that wherever we are in the spectrum?

Dr Judy Butler: People think they tell me a lot. I don’t have anything to leave anybody, but you do you have your stories You have your life stories if you don’t have any physical assets But even for people who are blue collar like my family as I grew up We had a house even you know, you had a car. There are some things that need to be taken care of a friend of mine few months ago and she did not own a house and she was never married and she had no children.

But what happened was she didn’t have a will. And so her friends were, calling and they said we know that you talked to her about this and you, she expressed some of her wishes. So all of her friends were trying to pull together to Create a ceremony, an end of life ceremony. What’s going to happen to her body, and her ashes, and what and so you have to piece it together at that point.

But there are things, even if you feel like you don’t have anything, you do. What’s going to happen to you, your body, when you die? What’s going to, who’s going to pay for the funeral? How is that going to happen? They can’t just stand you in the corner that the state of the United States doesn’t allow that.

And what’s going to happen, just simple things like that, what’s going to happen to your, clothes? You have things. I don’t care how poor you think you are. Even someone who’s on the street, they have sometimes a grocery cart with stuff in it. And I’m not saying that they necessarily need the guardian’s gift, but they have stuff.

Chris Badgett: Can you speak a little bit to the other end of the spectrum? If there’s a lot of assets stocks, bonds, real estate, People

Dr Judy Butler: who have money and who have a lot of assets tend to think that all they need is a will or they have beneficiaries. Now the thing about insurance, it’s important for people to know, is if you have a beneficiary, that is the person who will get whatever they’re a beneficiary of.

If it’s insurance or whatever. And that’s different than leaving things in a will in your estate. So that’s a different legal fault. But people who have lots of stocks and bonds and things like that, they can actually, a lot of that can be consumed in probate. And a lot of fees and things like that will be charged.

You have to hire somebody. And again, it gets into that. battle in the family. It creates dissension where family members fight over certain things. And so what you intend to leave to someone if you have a lot is sometimes consumed just by the process, which is really pretty awful. Where if you could actually have everything set up ahead of time and how it’s going to be handled.

Or even if you don’t want a family member to handle it, you can hire a bank, can take care of your assets for you and your your will and be the executive of your estate, or you could hire an attorney. So there are different ways to handle it. It just depends on what you have, how it’s tied up. Even a business Chris, like you, a business owner who What happens to your part of the business when you pass and have you made arrangements for that?

So if you own a business what’s going to happen with your business? So there’s a lot more to consider But it’s still the same process on the top end of the economic spectrum as it is on the bottom end.

Chris Badgett: Thanks for that can you speak to the the legal aspect where let’s say somebody creates their time capsule and or I guess one question there is like a will you can just write on a piece of paper, I believe, and it’s still like a will.

It’s their signature. But at what point is where does the legal aspect come in terms of. Having an official will and living will is that something to be done with a lawyer and that kind

Dr Judy Butler: of thing? As part of the guardian’s gift we offer it and when you buy into the guardian’s gift you get a what you get those four legal documents You get a will you get a health care power of attorney a power of attorney and a living will so that’s part of the process You’re right And in saying you’re correct that you can just write out on a piece of paper and sign it.

However, if anybody at all comes along and says. I’ve got a piece of paper, too, and I’ve got it, and then another person comes, so it’s very easily to dispute that’s a legal will. The thing about a will that’s important is not only Filling it out and signing it, but having it notarized that is your signature.

So there is a notary on there and also having it recorded in the local county or state wherever that you live so that it’s recognized. That’s really important. So that if it’s on a piece of paper, yeah, And sometimes that, that works okay, but that’s really sketchy, and I could fill out one and say Chris Badgett left me all of his money and his cars and vehicles and everything.

Yeah, that could be disputed very easily.

Chris Badgett: What’s the the time difference in general? You said something where there’s no No, plan is, goes into probate and that can take up to 18 months or longer. What’s, if you have your time capsule and all your ducks in a row and your plan, how long after the end of life does it take for all that stuff to settle out compared to probate?

Dr Judy Butler: Oh, compared to probate, you can settle that out in just a few months. It depends on the family and it depends on the assets and what has to some things are timed if there’s stocks and bonds and those kinds of things. But let me stop right here for just a second and, just say, let me make a disclaimer.

I am not an attorney. Okay, I have the things that I’ve learned and that I’m passing on today Are things that I’ve learned and I’ve learned from attorneys, but I am not an attorney. So I do want to make that clear however as part of the guardian’s gift We also partner with trust and wills and so we have that is set up where you get a legal bonafide, if you will document and those are actually notarized and they are recorded.

So, yes I did need to make that clear.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Thanks for putting that, the legal disclaimer in there. Side question for those who are inspired by your journey as a subject matter expert who was passionate about a topic. You have a great TED talk on YouTube. I saw it. It’s on your website too at the guardiansgift.

org How does one get a TED talk?

Dr Judy Butler: Oh, a lot of work. It’s just you have to you have to make an application to the TED area that you want to, go to. The best way to do it is you just you make application to a lot of different ones. Because they’re in rotations and you have to.

I had to go through, it took me about a year to get my talk together to figure out how to do the application and to go through the process. And I had a coach that actually coached me through that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And that, video is on the homepage of the guardians gift. org. I recommend you check that out.

Dr Judy Butler: Yeah, I did that at Purdue University. Let me give a shout out to Purdue.

Chris Badgett: All right. Awesome. What how would you describe the impact you’ve been able to make on the, in the world with your work here?

Dr Judy Butler: First of all, for me it, it, actually sits in my heart that. This really matters and people tell me all the time when they understand what the guardian’s gift is because I had somebody tell me recently I didn’t, I thought it was about being the guardian of a person and it is that way.

You are the guardian of your legacy for your family. You’re not a legal quote unquote guardian. But it, makes me so satisfied to know when somebody comes to me after there’s been a death in the family and they say to me I did not know this about my dad and he never talked about these things.

And here are all his stories. Or when somebody comes to me and they say, I wish I knew more about X, Y, Z for my mom or my dad. It’s just gratifying when somebody opens up the guardian’s gift and the pictures are there, the stories are there. They don’t have to find the legal documents. They don’t have to look all over and make decisions about what kind of song or scripture or story is to be told or read at the funeral.

It just people, it allows people to grieve in a healthy way and people come back to me later and they’re just so grateful and it just, it makes me happy. This is a passion for me. It just makes me happy.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. What what’s the best way for somebody to get started with the guardian’s gift?

Dr Judy Butler: The very best way is to actually send me a message. Either I or one of my team members will give you a call to talk about what it is you want to accomplish. Because we’re not here just to sell something. We’re not here just to do that. The whole point is to make sure that nobody else goes through what I went through with my family.

So it’s about that. So we want to map out the strategy. We want to hear your what is it you’re concerned about? Are you concerned about what happens to your body? Are you concerned about the clock? Who’s going to get it? Are you concerned about stocks or bonds or what is your concern?

What is your fear? And let us help you figure out what the best way to go about this is.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Definitely go to the guardiansgift. org. And I wanted to ask you one more tactical question as we land the plane here from your story earlier. You mentioned coming from a blue collar background with your, parents house.

If they move into the state funded Retirement, they, the state would take the house and the cars to pay the bill. But you mentioned a trust as a, as something that could happen with planning. Can you just explain for those unfamiliar with trust how, somebody in that situation could, work?

Dr Judy Butler: You have to decide how you want to handle the trust. The trust is just a container. If you think about it as, a bucket, It’s just a bucket, so to speak, that you put things in. There are limited number or not of people who actually can put their hand in the bucket to take something out.

So you get to decide what the bucket looks like and what goes in the bucket. That’s the trust. So there’s all different kinds of trust. You hear about people very wealthy people who have Trust funds. And one of the best things that I know about trust is that for somebody who has a disabled child. Let’s say, and they are at the point where they’re in their last years of life. They set up a trust fund to take care of this disabled person.

So the monies are there. The money is just in this bucket, if you will, and they have somebody who is the trustee. Designated that’s the person who can reach in the bucket and take out and they can take out. To make sure that the disabled person is taken care of. You know pay their medical bills make sure they have a place to live food clothes all the day daily living necessities. But a trust is just a container and you can put Most anything in a trust. But there’s a lot of legal pieces that go with that.

And again, I’m not an attorney, but you can set up a trust to put the house in. You can put stocks and bonds and things in a trust and you can put jewelry and furniture. You can put all sorts of things in a trust and you can designate then who gets to be the trustee.

Chris Badgett: Thanks for Claire.

Thanks for clarifying that. And there’s so many nuances to this whole thing. I’m so glad that you’ve built the project at the Guardian’s gift. And I love how it’s not just about assets. It’s about stories and, experiences that are part of this whole process and planning ahead for all that. And it’s a big topic in some ways.

It’s a taboo topic that people don’t want to talk about or feel uncomfortable talking about. So I love what you’ve assembled here. Go check out the guardians gift. org. Any other ways to connect with you or any other resources you want to point people towards?

Dr Judy Butler: They can, of course, send me an email.

They can, and the contact is on the guardians gift. org, but it’s Judy. At the guardians gift dot org. Just send me an email. And there’s a ton of resources. The problem is for people when they go as a caregiver, you go on the internet. You Google something or look up something on the internet, it becomes very overwhelming.

So be sure that the first place that you look, is in your local community. People don’t realize what resources are available locally. A local church or synagogue or mosque they typically will have things that are very helpful. There are hospice homes typically have resources available. Look for a therapist in your area that specializes in grief, counseling, or family dynamics.

Those are some areas look locally 1st and and then look in your state and then expand out as you go. Don’t just go on the Internet and look at something that. Could be a scam or not that’s that’s just out there. Caregiving. com is a good one. AARP also has a lot of resources available and points you in the right direction if you’re going to look for those.

Dementia and Alzheimer’s groups. Are very good. Also,

Chris Badgett: Dr. Judy, thanks for coming on the show and thank you for being a shining example of creating a positive impact in the world with your work and leveraging technology and tools like WordPress and lift your LMS to help on your mission. Really appreciate all you’ve shared today and I wish you all the best in the work that you do.

Dr Judy Butler: Thank you, Chris.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post Legacy Estate Planning Through Courses with Dr Judy Butler appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

Discover the simplicity and effectiveness of Maxi Blocks in web design. Maxi Blocks templates help add beautiful design to your website.

The post Increase Your Website Building Speed with Beautiful Templates by Maxi Blocks appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

Learn more about selling WordPress products and the industry with expert Vova Feldman, the founder of Freemius.

The post Selling WordPress Products with Freemius Founder Vova Feldman appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Pua Pakele shares her experience about online coaching and course business in 2023.

Pua Pakele is an expert at course Creators, website designer. She is from RBL Media. Pua creating websites and graphics since 2014 for entrepreneurs who are building, and scaling their small enterprises as well as those who are developing online courses.

She had previously worked as a consultant in the corporate productivity sector due to her engagement with a podcast on health and productivity, but she soon realized that she wanted to help entrepreneurs who were passionate about what they did but feeling overburdened.

After having a poor experience with a web developer and a $8,000 website they couldn’t manage, Pua decided to enter the field of course development and web design.

She made the decision to learn web design on her own, comparing it to online interior design. She developed a fondness for the course developer community while working exclusively with coaches and admired its driven and brilliant people.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of Lifter L m Ss, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of L M S Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Pua Pakele, and she’s from Rebel Media. That’s RBL media.co. She’s an expert at course Creation marketing, helping people build brands. I’m really excited to get into it with you today. Pua, welcome to the show.

Pua Pakele: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Chris,

Chris Badgett: tell us how you got into this whole world. ’cause it’s an interesting world to find yourself in a niche of course creation. And I know you’ve done a lot with Kajabi and marketing and branding, like how did this all happen?

Pua Pakele: Yeah, it, it’s a really interesting niche and I, I, it almost happened by accident and in fact it did happen by accident.

I had a business previously with a business partner, and we started that business as a podcast actually, and it was just a podcast and it was us just talking about nothing and everything, and it was just literally two friends who worked at a gym. And the whole reason we started it in the first place was.

We were doing a lot of research for our clients who were following the prescription that we gave them, right? Come to class five times a week, you know, eat more protein, eat less carbs like it was. It’s, it’s somewhat outdated advice at this point, but back then it, it seemed like it should work, and it didn’t, it didn’t work for everybody.

So people would say I’m really frustrated because I’m, I’m coming to class every day. I feel better, but the results that I’m looking for are not happening. And so we did a lot of just research around like sleep quality and how that affects your health and your stress levels, and. Do you even wanna be your high school weight?

Is that even healthy? Right? All of these things that we didn’t necessarily feel like we had a script for in the gym. And so we were like, let’s do a podcast so we can talk about all the stuff we’re learning. So we got really into the health, wellness, and productivity space. Like how do you create more time to actually do the things that are going to benefit your health, sleep, enjoy time with your family, get to the gym, prepare healthy meals, and we started to get.

Contacted by organizations here saying, you know, could you come in and do like a, a lunch and learn, or a half day workshop or a weekend? And we got into the corporate productivity space and we did consulting in that world for a little while and realized, oh my gosh, I don’t wanna help people who hate their jobs.

To work more and get more done like that just didn’t feel good. So we shifted to supporting entrepreneurs who had the exact opposite problem. They love what they do and they work way too much. And so the productivity space then was helping them to be more efficient so that they could step away. And in that long explanation, the way that I got into the course creation space, in the web design space was when we started our podcast, we hired somebody as a referral to build a website for us.

It cost us $8,000. We had all these things that we wanted, and we got none of them. And we had a site that we were essentially locked out of. We couldn’t make any changes and they disappeared. So we’re out eight K. We’re a brand new startup and we have a website that we hate that we can’t do anything with.

And I was like, screw this. No one deserves this. I had dabbled in web design in previous jobs, and so I was like, you know what? I’m just gonna learn this. And this was, maybe, this was almost 10 years ago at this point, so I’m completely self-taught and I just figured it out and I loved it. Like web design is it’s like interior design online.

And so now I get to build people’s digital storefronts and digital spaces and allow it to feel like a really exciting, aligned experience. And so that’s how I got started and why I provide the service in the way that I do. I always wanna teach people how to make updates if they want to, if they don’t want to.

I’m always here. I never want anyone getting stuck. And the reason why I’m in the course creation space is through that business that I had with a business partner. We worked primarily with coaches, so they were all looking to scale their business without having to do more one-on-one coaching. So they were in doing group programs, they were doing courses, and I just fell in love with the course creator.

Space in general. I think it’s brilliant. I think the people who do courses are really interesting and smart and motivated. And yeah, I just think it’s a fun place to be.

Chris Badgett: I love that story. And I particularly like what you said about kind of the pivot to working to, with people that love their work versus, you know, hate their job.

And I never really thought about it that in that way, but a friend of mine once said, and another podcast name is Dane Maxwell. He said that I. You know, you don’t wanna serve everybody. Like even if you want to help everybody, you really don’t and you can’t. And like the way you told your story there, I was like, yeah, that makes sense.

Like having clients who hate where they’re at isn’t necessarily fun to work with or doesn’t get you super excited.

Pua Pakele: Yeah, that’s, that’s really interesting. And it was hard to leave. I don’t mean to cut you off. No, go ahead. It was like when we made the decision to switch our target audience, we were like, God, but people are still contacting us.

They still want and need help. And it was a very difficult thing to switch because we knew that we could help them and we were like, there’s, we had to realize that there are people out there. Who really want to help those groups of people and to let them do that work that they want versus us doing it because we feel guilty.

’cause we know that we can help them, even though we don’t get super excited about it. I, it’s a shift worth making, but it, it was difficult.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And you mentioned like getting in with the coaches. Are these like health and fitness coaches or business coaches or life life coaches, or how did, how did you find yourself within coaches?

And if there’s somebody else out there who’s trying to, you know, work with clients in the coaching industry, how do they, what advice do you have for them?

Pua Pakele: Yeah, I mean, the answer’s yes. All types of coaches typically, and this was about. I would say six years ago-ish at this point where the online coaching industry, so specifically like business and life coaches, was becoming very, very popular.

And it was like the wild, wild west where people would hear that coaching is kind of an interesting, lucrative industry and everyone was trying to get a little piece of it. And so there, there was also a lot of. Information out there about how to scale coaching businesses. And so that’s, I think, part of where we were able to step in and say okay, if you Google this or go on YouTube and look for how to scale your coaching business, you’re gonna get all of this data.

Here’s what we’ve seen work for, you know, a handful of clients, what we believe could work for you. So it, it was like a good time to get into that space as well. Coaches in general sort of start their business because kind of the same as everybody else. They find themselves in having a specific set of expertise that they can teach, and a lot of traditional coaching was done one-on-one.

They just, you know, jumped on a Zoom call, went to lunch. It was like, you know, essentially. I’m gonna get reamed for saying this, but it was almost like therapy where you have a therapist and you see them individually. Right. And to move from that into group coaching or into courses felt like a reduction in the quality of service.

And which is not true at all. So it was also teaching them the mindset around allowing you to serve more people. Where they’re at, right. Sometimes people can’t afford one-on-one. Sometimes they don’t necessarily get the best experience out of one-on-one, and they prefer having a cohort or a group or an asynchronous learning platform where they can just go through the material at their own time.

If they’re like really busy, maybe they have young kids. So there was a lot of training just around the. Potential and the capacity that online courses and group coaching could offer to people who were just doing only one-on-one coaching, and it could have been anybody, fitness coaches, life coaches, business coaches, and the fitness coaches really, really joined the game in 2020.

When they were used to doing personal training or even group fitness at a location, then they couldn’t be there anymore. So when Covid hit, that’s when a lot of the fitness coaches joined this industry.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s, that’s cool. Now, if you could wave a magic wand, you know, you, you help with websites, online courses, logos, branding, marketing.

You mentioned sometimes people start with a doing one-on-one and then we gotta figure out group coaching and then maybe package it into a course. If you could put all those things in a certain order of there’s some, a fresh fitness expert who wants to do a, you know, a kettlebell thing online, what, what order would you advise them to kinda, if you were to lay out the blueprint of where they might travel over the course of a year, what would that look like?

Pua Pakele: Ooh, I love this question. So I talk a lot about creating an ecosystem because essentially what you wanna do is attract your ideal target audience, the people who you think that you could serve best, and provide each person an entry point to your business. Some people are only gonna consume the free stuff.

So have have some good free stuff. There’s a online programming, like a CrossFit program called Street Parking, and it’s they, if you pay for their membership, they give you like daily daily workouts. They have an online community. They have meetups. It’s really cool. And before you become a member, they have all of these ways for you to try their stuff.

They have Instagram where they post random workouts. They have a podcast, they have, I think it’s a set like a week of workouts. That’s just a sample week that you would get if you paid. So it’s, you know, all of the different modifications, everything that you’d get, it never changes. So that free week is always there.

And then you’re like, okay, I think I like this. I think I wanna give it a try. I’m gonna jump in at the monthly because I’m not sure if I wanna do it long term. Then you can upgrade to annual. You could do, I don’t know if they have one-on-one coaching, but they have an upgrade to like a nutrition program.

So they have all of these stepping stones for you to enter at wherever you think that you need to be. Some people know already, they either were referred or they’ve been following you for a while and they’re like, give me the biggest and best thing that you have, right? And so having an option for people to opt in at the top as well is really important.

But to go back to your question, I would say start with what you have and figure out what the challenges are for you. And that will dictate the next step. So for many coaches, what they already have is a one-to-one setup, and their challenge is they’re, they’re maxed out. They cannot bring on even one more one-on-one person.

So they have a wait list. You could either keep that wait list and nurture that wait list and just wait for a space to open, or the logical next step for that would be to create a group program. The difference between creating a group program and an asynchronous course. Is it’s like this big, it’s just the live component, right?

So the easiest way to go from group program to online course creation is to record the content that you’re teaching to the group and build it into a course that does not have that live component. I would say if you do that, be mindful of the sharing that comes in from the group. So some people, you know, if a group program.

Is a safe space for people to share. You have a, a community that feels comfortable with each other and they’re sharing things that they may not want, you know, Joe Schmo course student to see. Consider editing, consider having people sign some sort of consent form or waiver. But you could essentially create them both almost at the same time.

So I would say for coaches, decide what? Your goal is, and if you think that you are just not even able to do a group thing, you don’t wanna commit to that, that regular engagement, whether it’s weekly calls, monthly calls and you’re like, I just wanna do the course, get it out there, and just have course and one-on-one and I’ll do group later.

Totally fine. The thing about creating course content is it will add more work to your plate before it takes it away. So just be ready for that temporary increase in time and energy that you’re gonna spend creating the course content, knowing that it is temporary if you finish the course, which is like so many people start courses and they don’t finish creating them because of that.

So I would say just plan. Well have a, have a good schedule in place and just commit to finishing it.

Chris Badgett: That’s great. What, with all your experience and time in the coaching industry, what do you see? And we all want our clients to be successful with their courses and their coaching programs. Marketing always comes on the table.

What do you see working for coaches these days in terms of generating leads and you know, a steady flow of leads that doesn’t cause them to burn out so that their business can, you know, survive and thrive.

Pua Pakele: Yeah, great question. And this is something that comes up. I mean, I’m guilty of having something to promote and not, and having like cold audiences that I’m promoting it to, and I’m like, oh, that’s why there’s no action.

You know, it can feel nurturing. Your audience can feel like it’s unimportant. Until you need the audience and they’re not there. So most importantly, it’s create time. Ideally every day, like 30 minutes. Every day, every week at bare minimum, once a month, send an email newsletter like I. That should be the least that you do.

But having an audience that is used to who you are, because as a coach, people aren’t just buying into the information that you’re delivering. You can get that anywhere. They’re buying into your teaching style, your energy, the way that they resonate or don’t resonate with you. And I think that’s equally as important and not talked about enough.

Give people a chance to get to know you and decide whether or not they like you. If they don’t like you, give them the opportunity to get out. Unsubscribe, don’t buy you. Do not wanna sell to everybody. ’cause that’s when you get really, really unhappy Clients, really stressful situations, refund requests.

We want that filter. We do not want everybody to buy our stuff. Unless it’s like everybody can buy a water bottle. If you sell water bottles, go ahead market to every human on the planet. But if you have a coaching program, you want the people who already know that they, they like you and they trust that you can provide whatever solution or transformation it is that you promise.

I love that.

Chris Badgett: There’s a quote, I give him credit, but I don’t know where it comes from. Which is your vibe. Attract your tribe. Yes. And I, I love that one. ’cause it gives you permission to just hey, just, just be you and the people that show up at your door are going to be good people to work with for you.

Pua Pakele: Absolutely. I think I didn’t answer your marketing question ’cause I got. Distracted by that. That’s, that’s

Chris Badgett: part of it is your vi your bu show up, send newsletters like you need to build an audience. So tell us more about how to build an audience, especially if we’re starting at zero.

Pua Pakele: Yeah.

Great question. So again, this sort of comes back down to the ecosystem and the best way to build an audience is to provide something of value. At this point, if you’re listening to this, you probably have heard of offering a freebie on your website. And as a course creator, having your freebie be a mini course is like I.

That, that to me is the pinnacle freebie opt-in because people are gonna see the inside experience of working with you before they actually buy. And it doesn’t take very long to put a mini course together. It’s, and you could even repurpose some of your actual course content. But it allows people to experience you in video form, right?

Do they like the sound of your voice? Because that’s really important. And do they appreciate the user experience that you’re providing? So the other part of this is making sure that that experience in your mini course is also the same or a similar experience that they’re gonna get in your paid.

Programs. So don’t put all of your effort into your mini course. Make it this amazing thing. And then they get into your paid course and it’s, it’s a letdown ’cause then you’re, they’re, yeah.

Chris Badgett: Anyway so that to me is, can you give a can you give a like a mini course? Like just flesh it out a little bit.

What would one look like? How long would it be? Yeah. And that kind of stuff.

Pua Pakele: Great question. So you, the goal is to provide a mini. Result or a mini transformation because if somebody can get a little taste of the solution that you offer, they’re gonna want more. So for the like fitness coach example, you could give a, I’ve seen like a five day sugar detox where you have them take measurements at the beginning of the mini course.

Then maybe it’s a three to five video course, and every video is a. About five minutes and you’re just talking them through, maybe you know what to expect when they’re detoxing from sugar and maybe your weight will go up before it goes back down. So don’t weigh yourself every day. Just you are providing your expertise and your personality in these little clips.

And if you really wanna go above and beyond, you’re also gonna do like a, a worksheet or a download to go with the mini course. And then, you know, it gives them something tangible to say, oh my gosh, this was free. I did it in a week. I lost two pounds. Epic. What else do you got for me? Right? So I’d say focus on the mini transformation and don’t give everything away in your mini course.

I love that.

Chris Badgett: What else? What else? In terms of growing our community and filling our ecosystem with happy folks.

Pua Pakele: Yeah, providing value in something like a download, a worksheet, a checklist, and another strategy that is I would say it’s kind of losing steam at this point. And I don’t know if it’s outdated, microphone is slipping or if it’s.

Changing platforms, but what used to be really popular and actually really effective was like a Facebook group or some sort of online community that was free. Free community. So many coaches. Yeah. Free community. And you talk about it everywhere you, that’s your call to action on your social media, your podcast.

Here’s the link. Join my community. Join a group of like-minded entrepreneurs who are also creating courses. The challenge with that is you gotta show up there going live on Facebook, posting questions, answering questions, being there, allowing them again to get to know who you are. And that can be a little bit of a heavy lift, and I think Facebook groups are somewhat dying out.

And it, it’s a lot to do with the algorithm. Like you can have a thousand people in a group and three people will see your post. So it is it, yeah, I see people doing it in Slack now. I see it in Discord. And you know, you could do workshops, like free monthly workshops to teach a little morsel of whatever it is that you offer.

So there’s a lot of ways to nurture audiences in an organic way. So not paying for advertising, which is another can of worms, totally legitimate. Involves a little bit of a investment and time. ’cause you have to spend time to test the ads and create the ads and adjust the ads and dial ’em in and all the, all those different ways.

So yeah, lots of options.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s, let’s put our instructional design hat on and if we’re gonna actually design a course and you know, figure out what the course outline is. Do you have any tips for that? And I guess the same thing would hold true is what’s your process for a group coaching process?

Like, how do you, how does, how does an expert organize what they’re trying to teach into something coherent that the, their target audience will love?

Pua Pakele: Yeah, great question. I’m gonna do the course design first and then mm-hmm. Tackle the, the group coaching. So I like to look at course design as entertainment, and I don’t mean to diminish the, the actual information that you’re teaching, but the idea behind information delivery is to actually allow it to be consumed and to get people coming back for more.

So I like to teach, like creating your course content in sort of a story arc where you kind of get them hooked. You give them a little, just like your mini course, you’re gonna give them little quick wins along the way so that they wanna come back for more, so that they are almost like healthily addicted to your course.

Is is the goal, like Netflix, right? If you just binge watch a series, it’s because right where that episode ended. You can’t not keep watching. So that’s the idea behind the course and thinking about what your transformation is at the end. And working backwards from that is also a great place to start.

Because you’re going to wanna lay, it’s, it’s very complex. I’m trying to like, figure out how to answer this in a, in a quick and succinct way. But I would say first and foremost, always think about that, that hook and creating a little bit of entertainment value in that story arc as you’re creating your content.

But from an actual information delivery standpoint, you wanna start to train you clients to almost like you. You’re creating almost like this little cool club. So you’re gonna use create language for yourself and teach it in the first few modules. Allow people to understand the bigger concepts by teaching them in bite-sized chunks early on.

For example, if you’re a realtor and you wanna teach people how to buy their first home, You’re gonna wanna define language that all realtors are using in that space, but also creating little like easy to remember maybe acronyms or language that is unique to what you are teaching. Because then it becomes this like space where you know if you know, you know, and people like that.

So there’s, those are just like little tips to get people coming back. Invested in you and setting yourself apart from all of the other people who are trying to teach the exact same thing. Does that help?

Chris Badgett: That does help. That’s awesome. Can you tell us the client’s story about I’m on Rebel media.co, that’s rbl media.co.

And I see all these wonderful faces. Tell us a story about one of your clients. Give it, entertain us with, with a ooh, a story about what they did or, or what working with you and what, what they accomplished with their, their website and their business.

Pua Pakele: Yeah, so I am gonna, I wanna, I’m going around media.co right now too, because I wanna make sure that this person is actually on there so you guys can all check them out.

They’re a newer. Oh, I need to add them. Okay, I’ll tell you about ’em anyway. Okay. ’cause this is a course that is coming soon and the website is go kindling.com and they created an incredible product. It’s a, it’s a course for young adults. To teach them essentially all the things that we didn’t learn in school.

And this program was created with a group of 12 young adults. I think they were aged maybe 18 or 19 to their mid twenties. And all different backgrounds, different fields of study, different aspirations, career goals demographics, and they. They went through all of the course curriculum together, filming in like a warehouse, and it was, it was really, really cool to be a part of the creation of their digital space, their marketing materials, and the course platform itself, because we could take the footage that they captured with all of these young adults and create a story around each one.

So not only are you investing in the. Like the information that’s being delivered, but you’re also investing in the storyline of each of these people that allows, you know, so you can go to the website and then about three quarters of the way down the homepage, there’s squares of each of the young adults and it features a video of each of them.

So you see what their interests are, you see their age, and it allows the young adults that this particular company is targeting. To identify with whoever they feel like they resonate with most. Brilliant. I mean, I, I can’t, I don’t take credit for all of this. Like this was definitely collaborative with myself and the client, but I just think it was so smart to be able to offer such a wide range for people to come in and say, I look like you.

I sound like you, I aspire to be what you aspire to be. I feel the same way that you do about networking or interviews or financial stuff. Right? It gives you so many. Like entry points to be able to say, if you can help this person, I feel confident that you can help me. So yeah, I’m stoked for this one.

Chris Badgett: I love that.

Can you say the website again

Pua Pakele: for that one? Go kindling.com. K I N D L I n G.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. You also do logos and branding and I came from a background of like direct response marketing, copywriting, that kind of thing. But over time I, I fell in love with branding, like brand drives demand and you know, either there’s debate like, oh, you just need this kind of marketing or that kind of market.

You need All of it is my, in my opinion, but Talk to us about creating great logos and exceptional brands that we love, that attract wonderful people to our, our products and programs.

Pua Pakele: Mm, I love this. So I think branding, strong branding can make your business and your ideal client. It, it can close for you like.

It literally is the thing that can make or break your space, your digital space. And I was gonna say, your business, I don’t think I’m gonna give it that much credit because I think people can override bad, br bad branding, but it definitely matters and it hits on that subconscious trust level that people don’t realize that it’s happening.

And I just experienced this. Myself, I, I rebranded about two months ago. It was about a month ago, and not that my old brand was like horrifically misaligned, but it was definitely a little bit chaotic and just having, you know, three brand colors instead of 10 because I had a gradient in my. My logo, like who does that?

And you know, having very specific energy and a specific vibe around the content, the copy, the images, all of that came together and people are like, wow, I love your new brand. Even you said it to me. I was like, I’m pretty much using the same stuff. But the brand itself, the energy is more aligned, the actual logo is more aligned.

And the thing about subconscious. Consumption of like digital content and branding and all of that is people don’t notice when something’s right. And that’s what we want. We want the experience to be something that they experience, like we just want it to be enjoyable. We want them to say okay, I feel like I know you.

I feel like I trust you. I don’t know why, but I do. People will notice when something’s off and they’ll leave, so they’ll say, oh God, that picture’s blurry. Oh, I can, I can barely read their logo, you know? Or who made their logo? Was this made in 1986? You know, it’s just like people will feel the misalignment and they will notice it right away.

We don’t want anyone to notice when the alignment is perfect. We just want them to enjoy. And so having consistent branding is important for that. And if you are ever gonna hire anybody to build or create anything for your business, ever, ever, ever, Giving them a brand guide is gonna save them time and save you money, period.

Tell us about that. You don’t want anybody guessing. Yeah, so anybody that gives me their a brand guide that was created by a professional when they hire us to build their website. They get super aligned colors, they get aligned fonts, they get, you know, logo versions that are created for specific uses menus, dark backgrounds, light backgrounds.

Your brand designer is gonna give you all of this, and it is a roadmap for creating consistency across everything that you have. That consistency is going to be like the biggest trust builder for people who are visiting your site. Cold. If you have a friend and the friend, they know that you do good work and that you deliver on time and blah, blah, blah.

They don’t need to see your branding. It’s the people that don’t know you who need to say, okay, you are consistent. You are predictable. In this case, being predictable is a very, very good thing, right? They wanna be able to say okay. If you can be consistent with all of your stuff across the board, I know that you’ll be consistent with your service, your products.

Again, it’s subconscious. Nobody actually says this stuff, but that’s the game that we’re playing. If you don’t have this, your designers, your service providers, they’re just guessing and they’ll probably guess wrong, and then you’ll say, oh, can you revise this? This doesn’t really feel like me. And they’ll be like, oh, but.

This is what you wanted. And then you’ll say, oh, but the color, I don’t really like that teal. I kind of like a little, like a mint green. If you give them an exact color code, they’ll nail it every time.

Chris Badgett: So is this. Is this something you really recommend people hire to get the the brand guide created?

It’s not something you can create yourself if you very, you’re very unlikely to create it yourself if you’re not a designer.

Pua Pakele: Yeah. It depends. I feel like there’s a lot of resources out there that can guide you, hiring a professional for this can be costly. And I get it. Some people are just starting out.

They don’t, they just don’t have the resources. And I appreciate that, I think that’s, you know, when you’re just starting. You do what you need to do in order to get to where you need to go. And I would say having a brand guide that you’ve created from a template that you found on Google or in Canva that has specific colors and color codes.

A logo of any sort that works on, you know, a dark background, a light background. The colors are aligned. You have a heading font and a body font that you’re going to use for all of your things. Those three things are the minimum that you need to have a brand guide, and having that created by you is better than having nothing.

When you’re ready, upgrade and get it created by a professional because they’ll be able to provide things to you that, you know, vector files that maybe you can’t create on your own without specific software or they can give you like guidelines of how to use the logo, different color options, mockups for apparel or, you know, the list goes on.

And I think. You will know when it’s time to upgrade. You know, you’ll feel like, okay, I really feel like this logo is just not working for me, or I, I feel like my digital space is not quite where I want it. That feeling will start to show up and it won’t go away to the point where you won’t be able to ignore it anymore.

Then, you know, you can, you can reach out to an expert and there are platforms like 99 designs where you have options. I think it’s two or $300 for a logo with, you know, revisions and multiple options. It, you can, there’s, there’s like a bunch of designers that submit their, their logo designs to you and you can ask questions and yeah, so there’s that.

And then you can get a brand guide created for a little bit more money, but it’s not as much as hiring like an, you know, a single designer. So there you have options, but it is so crucial. If you’re gonna have, I would say every business needs one period. I.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s awesome. And we, by the way, at Lifter l m s hired 99 designs to do our logo when we redid it several years ago.

And it’s great. 300 bucks. Yeah. Yeah.

Pua Pakele: They’re great. And they’re so talented.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit more about technology. I see a lot of coaches and course creators get a little. Overwhelmed or, or, or over-focused on technology sometimes. And they, they, they’re not spending as much energy on like actually creating the course or building community or whatever.

If you, if we’re, if you could wave that magic wand and you’re kind of talking to a, a course creator or coach person, what, what are the key technology pieces and what should people be wary of in terms of over-investing or over-indexing in such a good

Pua Pakele: question. This is all you need.

Chris Badgett: For those of you listening, pu just held up her, her iPhone.

I believe so, yeah,

Pua Pakele: that’s it. I mean it’s every, every cell phone at this point can take good enough video to create a course. Yeah. We can dive into the nitty gritty. Like you can get a microphone, you probably actually should get a microphone. And I can talk about what you might wanna use for your phone, but, People spend so much time getting ready to record their course and buying all the stuff that they never

Chris Badgett: actually do it.

The greens green and the Yeah. Right.

Pua Pakele: Yeah. You know, at this point, use everybody’s on Zoom. Use zoom to record it. Blur out your background. If you don’t have a nice background, just get the content out there. My C p A just told me last week, he’s I forget. He was in a program and they said, J L Ss.

The PG version of that is just launch something. Oh, get it out there. Yeah, you can. Yeah. And I, I think it’s so true because we put so much pressure on ourselves to make sure that it’s perfect, that if you buy your $250 Sure. Microphone and your. $300 headphones and you’re make your space all crazy. You get your uplights in the back and your huge lights in the front and whatever, and then your course content sucks and nobody buys it, then what?

Right. It’s so much better to have your content out there helping people. Nobody actually cares, actually. Like if, if I wanna learn how to paint I don’t know, a. I, I don’t know what I shouldn’t have used that. If I wanna paint a tree and I’m buying a, an online course on how to paint a tree, all I want is for somebody to teach me how to paint a tree.

I’m not gonna say, oh man, this person’s audio. You know, we’ll talk about audio in a second, but I’m not focusing so much on the technology that they’re using. I’m focusing on the result that I’ve invested in. With that being said, Audio is kind of important and I would at the very least, recommend like a $20 lavalier mic from Amazon to plug into your phone if that’s what you’re gonna use.

And a tripod phone, lavalier mic tripod.

Chris Badgett: Nice. And just to build on what you were saying, I was in a a five figure a year coaching program for software founders. And I didn’t a lot of the, and there was a ton of content material in there and almost all of that, I listened to, even though there were videos while exercising or doing things around the house or whatever.

So I didn’t even, I couldn’t care less about the quality of the video. It was all about the ideas and learning, getting better, having fun during the process. Yeah, that’s the other thing people, so when I tell people to use their phone, they say, oh, but the video quality’s not good. Most people consume course content on their phone where the video is smaller and that, you know, high definition quality or four K, it doesn’t even matter.

Pua Pakele: And I, to your point, I bought a $15,000 course a few years ago. No, no video at all. It was all audio and they had like subtitles, so for like accessibility, all of the transcripts, all the content was, yeah, transcripted on the screen. But I listened passively. What was way more valuable from that course.

Were the downloads that I used to actually do the work. So I would say put all of your attention into creating good content and good resources like downloads or PDFs or whatever and focus way less on the tech.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Pua tell us about Rebel Media, RBL media.co. What you do and what kind of the ideal person to work with you is yeah, so we just, I say we, it’s me, but I like saying we, ’cause it makes it feel like there’s a whole bunch of us. And there will be. So I recently shifted into what will soon be a digital media agency for course creators. And I did this for all the reasons we talked about today. Before this shift, I was offering web design and online course design for people who I.

Pua Pakele: Basically could come to me with everything put together already, and they just needed it built and beautified. And so I was like, you know, you have to bring your content, you have to bring your copy, you have to bring your branding your course videos, and I will build it all for you. Maybe 50% of the people actually had all of that.

So what I wanted to do is to be able to offer. All of that and more under one roof with people who are aligned with the way that we build, with the sort of concepts that we teach, the mindset. And that includes coaching around creating your content, around creating marketing materials and funnels and even marketing strategy.

And I hope to soon also social offer, social media strategy, although I don’t have that yet. But yeah.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Go check out Rebel media.co. Rbl media.co. Any final words for the people pah? Any words of wisdoms or tips for the course creators out there? To the counterintuitive words for the people insight?

Pua Pakele: Yeah, just, just launch something. Yeah. If you’re like, so many people are like, oh, I wanna do an online course, same thing. Oh, I wanna start a podcast. I wanna write a book. Do it and do it. Do it imperfectly like crawl. Get a podcast recorded and I want you to record and release something that in a year from now you will listen to it and you will absolutely cringe.

That’s where you should be when you’re starting out. Maybe a book you can have like an editor. ’cause you can’t really, yeah, a book. Maybe polish it a little bit more but start writing it, you know? But I think if you look at any creator out there, any YouTube person that you follow, that you think has really, really high quality, great content, spend a little bit of time looking for the first few videos that they released.

And then tell yourself that you can’t also do that too. So just launch something.

Chris Badgett: I love that. And after watching many, many course creators, I’ve noticed that as the, the ones that make it take quick, imperfect action, and they get better over time. It’s a, it’s a long game. Yeah. But perfectionism is the, is the enemy in a, in a lot of ways.

Absolute pua, thank you for coming on the show. I appreciate you sharing all your wisdom with us today. And is there anywhere else people can connect with you besides RBL media.co?

Pua Pakele: Yeah, my social media platform of choice is Instagram, so you can follow me@rb.media and yeah, shoot me a message. I love connecting with people there.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you Pua.

Pua Pakele: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of L M Ss Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at Lifter LMSs. Dot com slash gift. Go to lifter lmss.com/gift.

Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s GuideExclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post How to Start an Online Coaching and Course Business in 2023 with Pua Pakele appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

Learn how this Private Site can help create internal training portals, securely lock down online training content, and protect critical data.

The post How to Make Your Business More Valuable with Internal Training appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

Learn how to efficiently understand privacy rules and create correct policies to confidently secure your online learning organization.

The post How to Protect Your eLearning Business from Fines and Lawsuits appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

Learn how to manage stress patterns, make wise decisions, and promote sustainable growth for long-term success in work and beyond.

The post How to Create Transformation as a Coach appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

Discover the inspiring journey of EZ Smith, a WordPress expert, developer, and entrepreneur, as he shares his path to success on Twitter.

The post The Journey of WordPress Rockstar EZ Smith appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

Discover the valuable techniques and strategies to grow your web design business with expert Shannon Mattern.

The post How to Grow a Web Design Business with Shannon Mattern appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

Unlock the secrets of delivering online learning to over 500,000 students with WordPress and the best LMS LifterLMS plugin.

The post How to Deliver Online Learning to Over 500,000 Students with WordPress appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

Learn the most important tips and tricks to produce professional audio for your courses with expert Ken Theriot.

The post How to Produce Professional Audio For Your Courses appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

Uncover the power of Hostinger and unlock the potential of your WordPress website today. One of the best Hosting for WordPress.

The post Discover the Affordable Full Stack WordPress Web Hosting Company Hostinger appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

Learn how to create impactful and student-centered courses by incorporating emotional intelligence with Iggy Perillo.

The post How to Design Emotionally Intelligent Student Centered Courses with Iggy Perillo appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

Melanie Ramone reveals her transformative journey from wedding planning to empowering service-based entrepreneurs.

The post How to Build the Business and Life You Deserve with Melanie Ramone appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

Discover the power of pre-selling your online courses with course creation expert, Eli Natoli. Gain valuable insights.

The post How to Presell Your Course and Get Paid to Create It with Eli Natoli appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

Learn how to create an engaging and effective online course that students will complete with Dr. Carrie Rose, an expert in education.

The post How to Build a Word-Class Online Course that Students Complete with Dr. Carrie Rose appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Troy discuss the journey as an entrepreneur and how he has remained focused on helping agency owners start, grow, and scale their businesses.

Troy Dean is an entrepreneur and business coach known for his expertise in helping agency owners start, grow, and scale their businesses. He is the owner of Agency Mavericks. Troy gained popularity through his podcast, WP Elevation.

He points out that coaching offers individualized guidance and aids people in adapting the knowledge from online courses to their particular circumstances.

It’s not a one-size-fits-all strategy, Troy argues, adding that his coaching and training are tailored to the needs of agency owners. He stresses how crucial it is to comprehend the client’s conversion event and build a plan from there. He also says that while he has standardised several elements of his coaching, such lead generation, the precise focus may change based on the demands and stage of the client’s business.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of Lifter l m s, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Troy Dean. He’s from agency mavericks.com. I’ve been following Troy since, I think it was 2012. I got a funny, funny story for you, Troy. I was, uh, Listening to one of your older podcast, WP Elevation. As I moved my family across the country, I, I had recently left Alaska where I used to run sled dogs and do a bunch of stuff up there, and I was wanting to start an online business and, uh, work remotely, and I kind of fell into the agency thing and building sites for clients.

And you had this series, it was like 62 tips or 87 tips or something. What, what was it called?

Troy Dean: 101. Ways to Elevate Yourself and Demand Higher Fees.

Chris Badgett: Okay, so, so go back in time to that moment and picture me with a U-Haul truck driving across the United States, early days of podcasting, and I’m taking the download and I was just, I mean, you helped me in so many ways.

A lot of my, my journey into products started as at agency and, uh, just, just the clarity of thought, the tactics, the tips, your excitement, the strategies. Um, you just had a big impact on me, and, and I know you’ve impacted so many people. And over the years I’ve just watched you stay focused on helping agencies start, grow, and scale.

How have you remained focused? A lot of entrepreneurs get the a, d, d thing going or jump to the next opportunity? And I know your business has evolved, but how have you stayed true to the agency owner as an avatar?

Troy Dean: Oh, you make all sorts of assumptions there, Chris. Okay. Um, I get distracted every day, man.

Um, I think it was. I think it was just out of, you know, when you, you know, when you try something enough times, you know, like the saying, you try something and expect the different results. The definition of madness according to Albert Einstein, well, you have to learn that, right? You can’t just, otherwise it’s just a cerebral exercise.

You, you understand it theoretically, but you have to learn it. And so I, I learn, I’ve been distracted a lot. I’ve tried many different things and I. What I’ve noticed is that every time I double down and, and just focus on the core business, we grow and every time we go through a, you know, every time we hit a speed hump, it’s usually because I’m distracted and I’m off doing something else.

So I. Um, I think, and I think in the early days what happened is I came from agency land doing client services, which is really hard business model by the way, and I’m sure we’re gonna talk about that. But, uh, I, I started coaching accidentally and I started getting a lot of gratitude emails and messages from people, like similar to what, how you just opened the, the show.

Like, you know, you’ve really impacted me. And, and I just was getting that from a lot more. People than I was in the agency. Just because the business model, right? Coaching or online course business model, you can just reach a lot more people. So I was just getting a lot more positive feedback. And I don’t know if you know the five love languages, but um, back then it wasn’t a thing.

But I’ve since learned that my love language is words of affirmation, right? So someone tells, someone says something nice about me with words from their mouth that I can understand and I’m in, I’m hooked. Like they’re gonna be my best friend. Send me gifts, massage my feet, all that kind of stuff. Not interested, just doesn’t resonate with me.

So I was getting this feedback from people and it was, it just became a drug and I just became really hooked on it. And then, yeah, over the years I’ve become really distracted, but now fortunately, I have a team. And a CEO in place, which means it doesn’t matter if I get distracted anymore because you know, the, the bus is being driven by other people who, who are very, who are much better at and much more disciplined than me because I think I do have the a, d d thing.

I do wanna go off on tangents and explore other things, but you eventually, you learn. If I like, consistency is the secret. It’s really boring. But that is the secret. Like if you remember that guy that started that podcast and quit after a few episodes, no, exactly. No one does. Right? So you remember the guy that, you remember John Lee Douma, cuz he did like, you know, eight podcasts a week for a hundred years.

Everyone remembers him because he just did it consistently. Right? Love him or hate him. You just, you have to take your hat off for the consistency so that it’s super boring. Consistency, but that’s, that’s the secret.

Chris Badgett: I know you’re mostly focused on coaching these days, but like the trifecta of courses, coaching and community, how did tell, tell us a little more about the, you know, the, the focus on coaching and how you’ve kind of experimented and, and are active in those different, uh, methodologies.

Troy Dean: It is, it is the. Trifecta, really. Um, and we still, I mean, our website, we still talk a lot about coaching community and courses. The thing, I think what happened is we grew a pretty good online course. Pieces, were multiple seven figures just doing online courses with no coaching. And I got bored because I, I ne again, I needed like the feedback.

Yeah, I needed the feedback. And so I wasn’t talking to any of our customers except like in a Facebook group. I wanted to interact with customers more on a more one-on-one. And really dig in and help them. And I could also see that there were people who were coming in and consuming our courses and then leaving the ecosystem.

We started doing exit interviews back in 2017. We’re like, oh, what? What’s going on? Why are you leaving? Like, how, you know? And they’re like, well, we just need more help. And your business model’s not set up to help us. It’s like a do-it-yourself model. And we need more help. And they had, they all had the same questions they needed because the thing about online courses is online courses are essentially information.

The good online courses are information with insight Coaching is information with personalized insight to help you apply the information in the course to your specific situation. And that was what? Um, really got me jazzed in, in towards the end of 2017. And so we launched coaching programs in 2018 and now, you know, 95% of our revenue is coaching and our courses really are just there.

Um, we, we kind of consider ourselves as librarians. Now our job is to kind of connect our clients with the right resources. And so we put together trainings. We package ’em up, we put ’em out as courses, but really they’re just there for our coaching clients to, to reference when they need it.

Chris Badgett: So how, you know, like not all agency owners the same, like what are some common ways that, like, it’s not one size fits all where, you know, you start the coaching maybe in a different way or with a different focus?

Troy Dean: Yeah, it’s a good question. And it’s f it’s, you know, it’s interesting because we’ve actually streamlined, um, what we do and who we talk to and our avatar a bit over the last couple of years. So I think of, I think of. And this is something I talk to our agency owners a lot about. I think of what we do or what agencies do, if you can really chunk everything down into like Lego blocks, right?

So let me give you an example. I’ve still got a handful of private clients outside the agency space that I coach just for fun and it kind of keeps my hands dirty. And one of the things I don’t do, like, there’s a lot that I don’t do. I don’t do seo, I don’t do, I don’t run ads, you know, I don’t actually do anything.

I just coach. But in terms of like. You know, if they need a lot of help with ads or seo, I’ll connect them with a, with a partner. But what I do is I help them with the strategy and typically speaking, one of the first things I’ll look at is what is, what is their conversion event like, what are they aiming for, right?

If it’s a per an online purchase, or it might be a sign up, or it might be, you know, working with a client. Who wanted applications from speakers for one of their conferences. So their conversion event was like submissions. So I, I look at like, how do they measure success and then I work backwards. And so one of the things that I think I’m particularly good at is lead capture, whether it’s for sales, recruits, applications, whatever, it’s, and so lead capture is fairly well standardized in my world.

Like I could do it fairly easily. I’ve got my preferred set of tools. We use Convert Box for the actual popups and stuff. We can integrate into whatever CRM we use. I’ve got a framework for like the offer in a, in a pop-up. I’ve got a framework for like the thing that you deliver. So I’ve got all that stuff standardized, and a client might need that in the first couple of months of working with me.

They might not need it until, you know, 12 months. So it’s, but it’s a, it’s a product that I’ve got on the shelf. It’s a Lego block that I can pull in whenever I need to. Same with coaching. Like we have things that we help agency owners with, but someone might not need it now, right? They might need, so we had a client join one of our masterminds who was already multiple seven figures and he’s like, do not teach me how to get clients or generate leads.

I need to grow my team and fix my processes so I’ve got extra capacity before we take on any more clients. So with that particular agency owner, it was a very different journey, right? But. So we, we say that it’s customized, but it’s templated because if that client comes in and needs to hire staff, we have, we have a, we have like dozens of templates from job scorecards, job ads, rec, whole recruitment pipeline built out and click up.

We have, you know, meeting agendas. We have, uh, interview questions. All that’s built out. We might not give that to a client until they’re in their third year with us, because what they need right now is to grow their recurring revenue and fix their processes. So it just depends on where the client is. Now, having said that, over the last sort of 18 months to two years, we’ve really kind of honed in on.

What we want to do is everyone who comes into our world, we put them through our sales training first to help them grow their recurring revenue, and 95% of our agency owners go through that first, grow their recurring revenue. Then we can talk about team and processes. Very rarely we have someone now turn up that’s like, I don’t need the sales training, just get me into the team building stuff.

But. You know, that that’s the, that’s the exception, not the rule. So I think the answer to the question is, if you standardize the way that you deliver value, and then think of everything you do instead of like, Hey, we build websites which is really ambiguous and really vague and really hard to understand and it’s, there’s nothing concrete in that.

Um, if you say, you know, what we do is these, you know, eight things. That might mean that we end up doing a lot of work on your website, but we don’t just build websites. What we do is these eight things that actually move individual needles within the business and solve specific problems. Standardize the way you deliver it, and then find clients who, and, and, and get them a quick win.

Like if you get a client a quick win, they think you’re a magician and they’ll basically do whatever you tell them to. Right. And so just one other example, if you’re doing, if you’re in the branding game and you’re building brands for clients, doing, you know, logos, interfaces, whatever, standardize the way you deliver a brand book or a brand guide, like have your Canva templates built out or whoever, whatever you do.

And so, well, the first thing we’re gonna do is fix your brand and get consistency across all the channels before we worry about SEO or doing that kind of stuff, and have that standardized, and then just pull that off the shelf when the client needs it.

Chris Badgett: That’s super cool. We, we kind of have two audiences here.

We have like the course creator coach, and we have the agency who supports that industry. Mm-hmm. So we’re, we’re kind of in the course creator coach mode right now, and we’re gonna, uh, flip entirely to the agency in a second. But a couple more questions. Um, do I understand it right? You have other coaches that work inside your organization as well?

So like, how do you get to a point where, mm-hmm. It’s not dependent on the founder for delivering coaching and your, your, your, your system here. And I, I’ve also experienced, you, you do a great job with, um, uh, assistants and other people in your organizations. I think you said you had a CEO as well. Yeah. So like, yeah.

So how do you do that?

Troy Dean: Uh, well, you know, the first thing is you gotta, like the first Simon’s an X, right? You have to start with y like Y. I’m no good to my clients if I keep coaching for, you know, another 10 years I’ve been doing it for, you know, over 10 years now. I’m no good if I keep doing it for another 10 years cuz I’m just gonna get cranky.

Right. Yeah. That’s just, that’s just the nature of if you do something long enough, it’s just gonna wear you down. And so I needed my, my big why is I wanted, I want the company to be the most valuable it can be to its customers. And so I also, I’m, I’m in Australia, most of our clients, probably 60% our clients in North America.

So how do we serve those guys in time zones, right? I’m not like, I used to get up at five o’clock in the morning around coaching calls. I’m too old to do that now. I have two kids, like I wanna get up and have breakfast with ’em in the morning, get ’em off to school, all that kind of stuff. So we needed coaches in different time zones.

And so, and also eventually I got to a point where I realized I wasn’t the best person to run the company. Uh, I’m really good at creating content and that’s about it, you know, and I’m good at coaching. Um, but Emily, who was our operations manager, eventually, I said to her, you are better at running this company than I am.

You’re basically doing it anyways, so we should just pay you for it and incentivize you around net profit. And you can become the c e o and you can drive the company. And I’m the shareholder. I mentor her, I also play an active role in the business. I kind of, you know, create content, do a bit of coaching, contribute to marketing.

Um, but eventually the plan is for me just to create content and be the shareholder I. And, uh, Emily and the coaches, you know, and the, and the team do everything. And so the way that we do it is I spend a lot of time documenting how I think. How do you do that? Well, yeah, it’s a good question. I mean, you, I spend a lot of time creating Loom videos and voice messages to the other coaches.

They asked me questions. This particular client stuck with this, and really, like in a, in, in, in, if you’re an agency, Everything kind of comes down to two categories, right? There are two categories of problems that your clients have. They either have a traffic problem or a conversion problem. And I if then, now that’s, if you are building front facing marketing websites, if you’re building like, you know, internal LMSs for large corporate corporations to like implement change management or something in their org in their organization, then you know, you’ve probably got like an attention problem and an engagement problem.

You could probably break it down to those two buckets, right? So how do we get attention or how do we drive traffic? How do we convert or how do we get engagement? Every problem can basically come down to one of those two categories, and then it’s just a matter of. Again, having those assets on the, on the, on the shelf.

So when someone comes into our world and they’re, and they’re like, well, the problem is, let me give you an example. The problem is, you know, we just get referrals and the referrals are starting to dry up. It’s like, cool. So have you ever done any proactive lead gen? We have a series of questions we ask ’em.

You ever done any proactive lead gen? No. Okay. Why not? Well, because, you know, I dunno how. Okay, cool. So before you do lead gen, we need to make sure you’ve got a good offer to go out to the market. Then we’re gonna do some lead gen. We’re gonna practice doing lead gen, and then we generate leads. We’re gonna get ’em on a call and we’re gonna convert ’em into some kind of paid discovery or, you know, get ’em in as a, as a client.

So there’s probably only about. Half a dozen things that we can help a client with in that process. And then the rest of it is just like digging into why they’re stuck. Now the training, by the way, we’ve done, like we’ve doc that’s done, that’s in the library. So the coach just says, you just gotta go and do this training here.

It’s gonna teach you how to, you know, run ads and get leads, or you can do this training here, it’s gonna teach you how to write your offer. Or we do this training here, it’s gonna teach you how to recruit a project manager, right. And then they come back with questions. The coaches dig in and figure out where they’re stuck, offer insights from their own experience, and then occasionally come back to me and say, Hey, I’m stuck here.

This client needs this. And then say, I basically coach the coaches how to coach the clients. Does that make sense?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it does. Yeah. That’s that’s

Troy Dean: awesome. And, and eventually you get to a point where it’s like the coaches end up coaching me. Like I learned from the coaches and I’m like, oh, that’s good.

You know? And we also surround ourselves with training. Like we’ve got the training from Mind Valley, we’ve got training from UP coach. We like, we constantly are learning how to be better coaches. Um, and you know Simon Bowen? Yeah, I, Simon Bowen very well. I.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I’m in, uh, I’ve met him through a program called SAS Academy with Dan Martel and his, uh, his training really resonated with me.

Got me really systems thinking and the visual models and everything, but yeah. Yeah, yeah. There’s always so much room to to level up. It’s never done.

Troy Dean: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Never done. That’s right. And. Um, and, and I think one of the challenges is that as business owners and entrepreneurs, is that we believe we are the best people for the job.

We believe that no one can do it as good as us. Right? And entrepreneurs are really good generalists. Mm-hmm. Right? Entrepreneurs. You can’t stay a specialist as an entrepreneur. It’s actually counterintuitive, right? It won’t, it won’t work. You have to become a really great generalist as an entrepreneur, cuz you have to understand every part of the business and how it all works together.

And so at some point you have to realize, Generalists are, are really bad at doing the job. So you need to hire specialists. Yeah. Um, that’s it. And, and, and specialists, CFOs, specialists, operations specialists, CEOs, specialists, whatever, designers, developers, marketers. Copywriters, you know, chat, g p t, um, chat, g p t’s a way better copywriter than I’ll ever be.

Right? So you need to, you need a hire specialist and, and become the, the best generalist you can be as an entrepreneur and a business owner. Because the other thing is, is that as a coach, my job is to pr. My job is to maximize the value of my client’s company, and sometimes that means protecting my client’s company.

From my client’s, poor management of that company. Right. That’s wise. Yeah. So I’d be like, well Chris, my job is to maximize the value of Lifter l m s. And I gotta tell you, you are doing a really bad job at running Lifter LMS right now. Even though you are the shareholder and you are the ceo, I kind of have to protect you, the shareholder from yourself as the manager.

Right, right. You know what I mean? Yeah. That’s why we also have coaches that coach the coach, my c e o, and myself through the same kind of thing, like protect us from ruining the company because we dunno what we’re doing and we’re trying to figure it out and we need some help.

Chris Badgett: One more coaching question for you.

How do you build trust? Because if you’re gonna develop that kind of relationship with a, uh, an owner, they gotta trust you, especially if you’re gonna give ’em some, um, constructive criticism and whatnot. So how do you kind of get that rapport and that trust going?

Troy Dean: It’s a really good question. Um, I do it, we do it.

I largely do it through content. So the, like I, we have people that have joined the. You know, pro one of our programs and then get on a call. And you know, I say this humbly, but they’re kind of like, oh my God, I can’t believe I’m hanging out with you. I listen to your podcast all the time and watch your videos all the time.

And so content is a great, like if you publish videos instantly, you’re on authority, right? Like it’s just because, not because most people won’t do it, most people won’t publish videos because of some kind of fear of whatever, right? In fact, most people won’t do anything because of some kind of fear.

Because they’re stuck in their own shit in their head, right? So if you just publish videos, you just publish your thoughts and I think video is the most powerful format you, you’re an instant authority. Like it’s really easy to become an authority, just publish a bunch of videos and retarget them, and repost them and share them.

And people are like, oh, well you are clearly the expert because otherwise, Why else would you be publishing yourself on the internet talking about learning management systems if you weren’t an expert at it? Like, no one’s deliberately gonna throw themselves under a bus. Right? You know what I mean? So now, so the, the fastest way to grow authority is to just, doesn’t matter how much, you know, just start publishing videos about what you know, because even if you know a tiny bit, you know more than 99.99% of the people on the planet about that thing.

So just start publishing your thoughts on the internet and you become an authority very quickly. That’s how we build trust and, and then through case studies and testimonials and social proof

Chris Badgett: transitioning to the agency owner. You out there listening that has an agency I noticed on agency mavericks.com, you mentioned imposter syndrome, which is kind of what you’re talking about there.

Mm-hmm. How, how do you. Help agency owners overcome imposter syndrome, or where does it show up for them?

Troy Dean: Everyone, the minute their eyes open in the morning. By the way, everyone experiences imposter syndrome, right? It’s a part of being a human being. In fact, we ran an event in Melbourne in 2019 and I had a friend of mine who was a psychologist, come up on stage and talk to a room full of people, and I asked her that question.

I said, Talk to, you know, like explain imposter syndrome. And she said, well, the first thing you gotta understand is that the only people that don’t experience imposter syndrome are psychopaths and liars, right? So if someone says they’ve never experienced imposter syndrome, run fast and don’t do business with them, uh, imposter syndrome comes up in, you know, I’ve seen people completely sabotage their own sales process because they don’t feel like they can deliver the work.

Even though they’ve got, even though the evidence would prove otherwise, they’ve got like, you know, years of history of delivering great work for great clients, but they won’t take a sales call because they’re nervous then because they think the client’s too big or has a profile or has a podcast or, um, and they don’t think they can deliver the work.

So imposter syndrome manifests in a whole bunch of different ways. And this is true for coaching as well. Cause I think there’s a lot of overlap between agency and coaching. I think the smart agencies are essentially coaches. They probably just don’t know it. You know what I mean? Business coaches. Yeah.

Um, and, and the way that I, the way that we help them overcome imposter syndrome is a couple of things. First of all, just acknowledge that it’s a thing. Right. It, it’s okay. It’s, we just normalize it. It’s perfectly fine. I share a lot of my, I, you know, have had a, a, a bit of a journey with my own mental health issues and I share that with publicly and I talk about that all the time.

Just as a way of normalizing. It’s totally fine. There’s nothing wrong with it, you know? Um, and then we get them to take small actions. We get them to take bite size chunks and get small actions because, The more competent they become at something, the more confident they become and the more likely they are to try something a bit more daring next time.

And so there’s this great analogy as that. You know, in your personal growth or your professional development, there are two ladders that you’re climbing at the same time. One is the confidence ladder and one is the confidence ladder. And you’ve got a foot on each ladder. So imagine that, right? Visualize that.

It’s really hard to climb one ladder without the other, cuz eventually a legs are gonna get too far apart. So our job as coaches and mentors is to help them grow the confidence ladder so that they, their competence ladder can keep up. So they’re more likely to try something. They try it, they achieve something, they get competent.

Then their confidence grows. They have to grow the confidence ladder themselves because they’re the ones that have to take action. But we help them grow the confidence ladder by let, by supporting them and letting them know that there are other people that have done this. There are frameworks and what we call scaffolding that we can put in place around them to make sure if they do slip, it’s not gonna be too far and it’s not gonna hurt.

Then there’s a great commute. So that’s, you know, templates, tools, frameworks, whatever. Then there’s a whole bunch of, uh, agency owners and coaches in the community around them that help them when they fall over because they will fall over and we are there to catch them and put them back up. And I think agency owners have a similar responsibility to their client, is to let the client know.

You know, if you think about the word consulting, consulting literally means to protect the client. And so our job is to protect the client from getting into too much danger or to let them know that it’s okay, that it’s just their brain trying to protect them. They’re not in any real danger, and we’ve got these frameworks here and this social proof and this track record and this history that will support them on their journey so that they’re not.

Out there on their own that they feel well supported. So if we can help them grow their confidence, they’re more likely to try more things and therefore they’ll grow their competence and then it becomes a really nice kind of virtuous loop.

Chris Badgett: I love that. What do you think makes like a great agency entrepreneur?

Like, I mean, some people are just chasing the money, but then there’s those like really special agency owners and there’s nothing wrong with making a lot of money, but like what do you, what patterns have you seen in the really talented agency owners that have really spread their wings and gone far?

Troy Dean: So our most successful clients are really good at.

Uh, at sticking to their knitting, right, or staying in their wheelhouse. So the agency, the agencies, I think that struggle or the agencies are trying to do everything for everyone all the time, and that’s a recipe for disaster. Um, if you try and please everyone all the time, you end up pleasing no one because you end up just, you know, you don’t do anything very well.

You just do every, you are a bit of a hack at everything. And so the agency, um, and so when I talk about, you know, the riches are in the niches, I think the big misunderstanding with the word niche or niche is that it, it’s not your target audience, right? Your, your, your niche is, Is the way you do something or how you do something your, so like your niche is learning management systems, right?

You, you’ve figured out a way that, that you help people deliver value by posting their information up and putting learning management system and impacting their clients and their students that way. But your target audience is quite varied. Your target audience is agencies, but also course creators. And that could be like, Parenting, mental health, weight loss, business coaching, crypto, you name it, it could be any, it’s all that.

Yeah. Right? So, so your, your niche is not your target audience. Your target audience is who you are best at serving. Your niche is, is how you do it and the way that you do it. Um, so, uh, I’ve, I’ve carved out, uh, I’ve carved out a, a niche of, and a lot of people just think that your niche is a vertical. Right.

I’ll come back to target audience in a sec. Your niche is, Is, is the way that you deliver value to your clients. And every business is slightly different, right? Your target audience is who you serve, and that can be either a vertical, accountants, dentists, pregnant women, whatever it can be. Uh, Demographic.

So it could be, you know, 38 year old males who are, you know, scared of email and scared of getting fat when they hit 40. That’s a, that’s a real demographic, by the way. Mm-hmm. Or it can be psychographic and psychographic could also, a demographic could be return to work moms, that’s a great demo. Example of a demographic niche, right?

Cuz they’re roughly the same age, same, uh, stage of life. And have similar motivations. Psychographic niche is similar desires, similar fears, but demographically could look very different. They could be different age, different gender geographically could be very different in the world, but they have the same desires and fears.

Now, there’s a bit of overlap with demographic and psychographic, but the point is your target audience doesn’t have to be accountants. It could be business owners, but it could be growth-minded, abundant thinking type. A high energy business owners, right? Well, that’s kind of a very, yeah, that’s a psychographic niche.

They could be, they could be 22 year old females, they could be 50 year old males. Right. Um, it, like demographically, they’re very different, but psychographically, they are very similar. And so what you’re looking for is commonalities across your target audience to bring together an avatar, which is either a vertical demographically or psychographically similar.

And then you put together a standardized. Uh, way of delivering their value and like a productized offer that they understand, which is your, which is your niche. That’s kind of how you deliver value to them and how you help them.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned that one of the main things that almost everybody needs help with in the beginning is getting the recurring revenue engine spinning.

Mm-hmm. First to start, like I know some agencies are really focused on the project and like project pricing. What kind of things do you do to help people transition to more of a recurring revenue mindset or just embrace that? Way of thinking. So

Troy Dean: the project model is so broken. Right. And I’ll explain like as a consumer, as someone who sold projects for years and as a consumer of projects, cuz we’ve hired a lot of agencies in this business over the years.

Mm-hmm. It’s typically what happens is. You go through some kind of nurture process with someone. First of all, you’ve, you have to identify that you’ve got a problem that needs solving or you’ve, there’s an opportunity worth exploring. You reach out, you connect with someone, you get a referral, you respond to someone’s ad, whatever it is, you go through a nurture process.

You get on a call with them. Eventually you decide to hire them, you pay them whatever it is, 20 grand and do a project. And then what happens is everyone bites off more than they can chew. And everyone runs around like a headless took for three months trying to meet a deadline, right? It’s a recipe for disaster.

It very rarely works out. And I think the reason, uh, is that the time pressure is, you know, crazy and, and it w like it does work. I know a lot of people make it work. I, for me, the way I, uh, pivoted was I said, you know what? Let’s just, instead of getting, instead of you paying me 20 grand, now let’s just work together for the next 90 days and we’re gonna work on a very specific thing and I’m gonna solve a very specific problem.

So that we can dance before we get married, so to speak, and let’s get you moving in the right direction. Let’s get you some wins. Uh, I broke it down to like a two and a half to 5K a month engagement, depending on, you know, what was involved and a, at the end of that 90 days. Usually what happens is we’ve had such, we’ve got, we’ve gained such momentum and we’ve got so many wins on the board that they’re like, You’re a magician.

What should we do next? Right now, over the period of 18 months, we might completely redo their website, but we’re not gonna try and bite it off and, and then get indigestion for three months. You know, chewing more than, you know, trying to chew more than we’ve bitten off, if you know what I mean. Um, So, and also the math for me was like, I used to, you know, I was charging between 15 and 25 a website, a, a, a project, by the way, a project’s never just a website.

It’s always like, well, there’s SEO marketing, there’s seo, there’s care plan, whatever. And I pivoted to a two and a half. Originally it was a two and a half to three k a month model. And by the way, two and a half a month is 30 grand for the year. And it’s recurring. It’s not a payment plan, it’s recurring because at any point they could decide, well, you know, after 12 months this isn’t working anymore, are we gonna end the engagement?

I like to think that when I start working with a client, it’s a probably a two to three year, you know, process because there’s never. It’s always never gonna be finished, right? There’s always work to be done, but I don’t try and bite off more than I can chew. I’m really good these days at managing everyone’s expectations and reducing the overwhelm, and just identifying the big domino that’s gonna knock over the little ones for the next 30, 60, 90 days.

Let’s just get that done. Get some runs on the board and the big projects, I just don’t do them anymore. As I said, they, they, some people make that work, but it’s just a business model. I think that’s just fraught with danger. There’s no recurring revenue in it. You’re constantly managing your PE people’s expectations.

Your team, you’re constantly burning your team to get everything done on time. It’s just a, I just don’t like that model at all.

Chris Badgett: Do you have a, like, kind of a updated take on the discovery process? So like going from like a sale to uh, oh, we’re gonna do this paid gig to figure out what we’re gonna do and then we’re gonna do the ongoing thing.

Like what does that look like in in, what’s the best advice

Troy Dean: there? Yeah, so we have a whole training that we put out, I don’t know when it was called the paid discovery method, which is. The fastest way to get new clients as an agency. In fact, we, what we teach now is how to get paid to close, right? So the traditional model we’ve, we have clients turn up on our doorstep and they’re like, I’m doing, this is a true story.

I’m doing five free strategy sessions for a client cuz some coach told me that’s what I should do. And then writing proposals and I’m converting it maybe 20%. Oh wow, that’s horrible. And I’m working till 11 o’clock at night. And by the way, my wife’s gonna have a baby in a couple of months and I can’t see a light at the end of the tunnel.

So our model is, uh, of uh, you know, put out great content, generate leads either through referrals or some kind of proactive lead gen process. Get people on a quick call, 10, 15 minutes, qualify them. They’re either in or out. We’re either gonna play ball or we’re not. If we are, we’re gonna do paid discovery.

We just don’t call it paid discovery cuz nobody wants to pay for discovery. So we call it a digital roadmap workshop. It’s usually a two to four hour workshop. Our clients charge anywhere from, you know, 1500 to six grand depending on the client. At the end of that paid discovery workshop, there’s a whole series of questions that you can go through to ask the client again, based on the services that you’re gonna be delivering.

But at the end of that paid discovery workshop, you’ve got a master workbook with all of the documentation and all of the answers to the questions that we’ve worked through. We then go back to the client with a recommendation session, uh, you know, about a week after paid discovery. And we basically lay out the 12 month roadmap.

This is what it’s gonna look like working with us over the next 12 months. If we were to work together, we would do this, this, this, this, and this. We give them that plan so that, and we, we basically say, you can go do this yourself. You can take it to another agency, or you can hire us to help you. And at that point, we know more about their business than anyone.

They’re so invested in the relationship that the typical conversion rate’s about 75% from paid discovery into ongoing engagement. Right. So it’s a way, and that’s, that’s why we say you can get paid to close these clients because you’re getting paid to scope it out and present your proposal, which we don’t do anymore.

We present the recommendations and then a statement of work. You get paid to do all that and then close them into an ongoing recurring revenue client.

Chris Badgett: What are the primary things that have agency owners stuck? Like either barely it’s barely working out, or we’re just, we’re just kind of diminishing returns and kind of overwhelmed, like what?

What’s usually at the root of that?

Troy Dean: So I’m gonna reference a book I’m reading at the moment called The Almanac of Naval Rav, which is. Unbelievable. It’s so good, It’s good, right? It’s a basically collection of his tweets and blog posts put together by another guy. Um, he talks about the concept of radical.

He talks about the concept of accountability and, um, and that the more at risk, right, the more, the more you are willing to take risk and accept. Personal accountability, public accountability in your own personal name. The more upside there is, typically speaking, an agency, agency owner or a small business owner gets to a point where they’re making money, they’re making profit, they’re burning out, they are the bottleneck in the business.

Um, I have clients, I’ve spoken to agency owners who have been earning the same revenue for 15 years, and to me it is so obvious that they just need to hire an account director or an account strategist to take all of the phone calls and the emails from the clients so that they can free up and figure out what they actually wanna do with the business.

But they’re, they just can’t do it. They can’t, they don’t trust that anyone else is gonna do it as good as them. So they have a fear that holds them back. And they end up resenting their business. They end up burning out, then they’re no good to anyone. And so I think it’s that, you know, you need to become a new version of yourself.

If you want to go from technician manager to actual business owner, first of all, you need to stop thinking of your business as your baby, right? You need to think of it as an asset that can generate a profit for you while you sleep. Because if it’s not generating a profit for you while you sleep, then it’s not an asset.

It’s a job, and you are the boss and you are a horrible boss because you work yourself more hours than anyone else would, and you don’t pay yourself enough. And so if you think of your business as an asset that needs to generate a profit, you start thinking, who can I get to help me nurture this asset and grow this asset cuz I can’t do it on my own?

And the moment you have that realization, everything changes because that’s when you start asking who, not how? I don’t need to fix this problem. The only problem you need to fix is growing your recurring revenue, right? So that you’ve got enough profit and predictable cash flow in the business to hire the next person.

And you don’t need to, hi, you don’t need to grow a team of, you know, 20 or 30 or 40. You can get, you can grow a great lifestyle agency to seven figures with a team of, you know, 10 or less be super profitable and eventually like work a couple of days a week in it, maybe doing some sales calls or some strategy calls and have everyone else do everything else.

Chris Badgett: Do you have any, just kind of final tips on working with A C E O? Like what makes that chemistry work that you were able with your business to have somebody come in at such a high level, have it work for them and you. And over a long time horizon.

Troy Dean: So, yeah, it’s a good question. Um, I didn’t think it would ever happen.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it seems impossible.

Troy Dean: A lot of people would say it’s just not possible. Yeah. Yeah. I’d said for years, I, you know, I can’t have anyone run this business, and so there was a, Convergence of of events. One, we had a customer who came through our programs and implemented, took massive action, was asking lots of questions, and was getting just our courses, not our coaching programs.

And then I had a sales call with her and she was just about to join our mastermind, but she was also about to have a baby. I said, look, go and have the baby first and maybe we should talk. Yeah. After the baby. She came back after she had the baby and she said, I’m gonna sell my agency. I wanna come and work with you.

And I said, okay. And so she came in and just started working with us as a contractor, managing our Facebook group, doing some content. Then she kind of moved into a marketing role, then we lost our op. So worked way up. Worked the way up. Yeah. Then we lost, lost our ops manager and so we moved Emily over to operations and she was ops manager for, I don’t know how long, like six, uh, pr, no, probably nine months.

And then what happened? I think at the end of 2021, you know, it’d been a weird couple of years. Um, I came back from holidays at the start of 2022 and I was supposed to come back to work on the 10th of January, and I remember. I was in the park with the family on the Sunday and I said to my wife, I’m gonna come back to work tomorrow.

I’m not ready. Like I just need some more time off. And I rang Emily and I said, I’m gonna come back tomorrow. I’m gonna take another couple of weeks off. So just, you know, reschedule everything in my calendar and you, you know what you’re doing. Just like do what you need to. And then when I did come back at the end of January that year was, I was like very light duties.

I just said to her, I don’t want to come back in the capacity that I was last year. I want to, you know, uh, and so she was happy just to kind of keep running it. And I think we had such, we had such an, an alignment with our vision of what, what do we want, what we wanted to do with the company, which was like, that was the number one thing.

Like I would not, I wouldn’t have, I. I wouldn’t have felt comfortable letting go of the reins and giving her more and more autonomy unless I knew that we had basically exactly the same vision. We don’t agree on everything, which is a good thing, but we have the same vision. We’re we are going to the same destination, we’re on the same train.

There’s enormous trust there. Um, and then at some point in, I think March, 2021, I rang her and I said, I don’t wanna run the company anymore. Uh, you’re much better at this than I am. Like if I never have to look at another spreadsheet again, it’ll be too soon. Like, you just, I think you should do it and I think we should make it official and make you general manager or ceo, whatever you want to be.

And she said, I wanna be CEO e o. And I said, okay, you can be c e o. Um, and so my role now is like, so I talk to Emily most days, probably two, probably three days a week. I talk to Emily, she’s in New Zealand, and. Uh, you know, she doesn’t make any massive financial decisions without me cuz I’m the shareholder and, and a board member.

But she’s got full autonomy to make, she can, you know, it’s her call. Um, she does, she knows what she needs to do and she’s got her metrics. She’s incentivized as well. So it’s in her best interest to, uh, to do a good job. And I think ultimately though, Chris, what happened is I got to a point where I re, I said to one of our coaches, Pete Perry, I said, You do not want me coming back into team meetings, making decisions because they’re gonna be the wrong decisions because I’m cooked.

I just need some time off. I’ve been doing this a long time. I need a fresh brain to come in and look at this company with fresh eyes because I’m not making good decisions anymore. And they’re, they’re, they’re just gonna, because I’m making fast decisions because I just want the problem to go away. Mm.

And so I need someone to come in who can, who, who’s actually got a bit more patience and a bit more energy to look at this, just because I’ve been doing it for a long time. So that was really the decision was the best thing for the company is for me not to run it anymore. And I was the one that identified that.

And. Pulled myself out of it.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Uh, just to kind of land the plane, looking back in the past, say 10 years to present, how is agency life different or, you know, if somebody wants to quote, build sites for clients or do a marketing agency, what’s different now from 10 years ago?

Troy Dean: The technology now is so easy, right?

Yeah. It’s. Nuts and chat. G p t has is, is, has and is going to change the game the same way that page builders change the game for web developers who are using WordPress, right? The same way that custom post types change the game. Right? That was like, Holy shit. Now we can do what? I mean, your business basically grew up because custom postops were, were were possible.

Right? Um, Elementor Comple Beaver Builder completely changed the game for WordPress. Elementor completely changed the game for WordPress. Everyone was panicking. Oh, it’s gonna put us out of a job. Everyone’s doing the same thing with Chachi Peter. It’s not gonna put you out of a job. It’s gonna make your job easier and faster.

The technology now, It’s so easy and so fast that y if I’ve said this at one of our events recently, everything you need to grow to seven figures or another, seven figures in your agency is right at your fingertips. It’s right there. The challenge that we have now is that agency owners, I think, are in this.

I think the, the world has kind of got to a point now where agency owners should be doing what they have, what they always should have been doing. Which is getting paid to think through the strategy for their client. That’s the most valuable thing you can do for a client is help them think, in fact, that’s why they’re paying you.

Clients are not paying you to install plugins. They don’t care about that they’re paying you because they don’t want to think about the thing because they can’t, they don’t have the knowledge. And by the way, thinking. Consumes way more energy than any other physical activity, right? The brain can uses more calories than any other part of the the body.

So thinking hurts. It’s painful, it’s exhausting. Clients pay us to think for them and to give them advice based on best practices. And so now I think more than ever, Agents, owners should be leaning into their clients and conducting regular, you know, every two weeks, conducting strategy calls and accountability calls with clients to make sure they’re on track and know that the technology and the deliverables is just easier than ever.

So understand that your real value is actually helping. Your client sink through problems and come up with solutions, and you should be getting paid for that work, not giving it away for free, and then negotiating on price for the deliverables, which is what most agencies do, um, because that’s a race to the bottom and you’re never gonna win that.

You’re never gonna win that race.

Chris Badgett: What’s in your crystal ball for the future? Uh, like kind of if you were to project way out, I we’re kind of in this chat G P T AI moment and, you know, the tools are getting cheaper, easier, whatever, but like, what’s, what’s a little further out on the horizon for the agency owner?

Troy Dean: Well, it’s interesting. I was talking to a friend of mine recently who was saying, you know, uh, AI. There are already, there are already some companies working on AI to completely replace the traditional sales development role, right? So sales development role is, is you know, the role that does outreach and qualifies people and then puts ’em on a calendar to speak with a salesperson.

Well, that can, you know, is not far away from being completely automated. Right. Um, I think the other thing that’s gonna happen is that we’re gonna end up with, unfortunately we’re gonna end up with more. Crap on the internet because everyone’s gonna be thinking they can use chat g p t to just do it themselves.

Right. So, you know, and it’s super funny at the moment to watch all these dudes selling courses on how use chat G P T, right. I’m gonna like, I reckon I could use chat g p T to write the curriculum for a course on how to use chat G P t. Sure. And write the sale. I’m gonna do it as an experiment. Just go the whole thing’s done by chat G P T.

Right. It’s just nuts. But I think we’re gonna end up with more vanilla ice cream on the internet. You know, it’s gonna be, um, and I think the opportunity is, And Seth Gordon’s been talking about this for a long time, is the opportunity then is really for us to become craftspeople, is to really spend time honing our craft and understanding what it is we do, which is not about pushing pixels around or, you know, writing code, that what we do again is, is bring some unique value to our clients and help our clients tell their story, help our clients understand what their unique value is.

And that’s the work that I think is the most valuable, the most exciting, um, and the most rewarding. And, and will also get you paid. Because if you, and I think you, I think embracing AI and chat e p t is, is, you know, you need to because it’s not gonna replace you. So I heard this great quote the other day.

Automation didn’t put accountants out of a job. Accountants who used automation put accountants out of a job, right? So if you’re an agency owner and you’re not using chat, G P T. Then you’re probably gonna be out of a job by the agencies who are using chat g P t, because they’re just gonna work. They’re just gonna be able to move faster than you.

Right? Like way faster. And so I think it’s an opportunity, I think it needs to be embraced. Um, I dunno where it’s gonna end. It’s probably just a cycle, you know, we’ve seen it happen all before. And, um, I think once the dust is settled, we’ll come back to basics, which is, you know, the one thing it can’t replace is human beings listening to each other, connecting and, and collaborating on solutions.

I think we’ve lost Chris, which is unfortunate because he’s the host

and he’s frozen. And here I am now hosting LMSCast for Chris. Lucky. I’m a podcaster. Uh, so if you’re watching this and you are live, we are live. I don’t, I’m not exactly sure where we’re live, but if you’re watching this, uh, Chris is obviously. Had a problem with the internet. He did say that, um, he was in the middle of a snowstorm, and so maybe that’s impacted his internet connection.

I don’t know. But hopefully he’ll be back soon. Um, if he’s not then, you know, uh, this has been fun. And I’ve had a, a great time chatting with Chris here on Lifter, on, on LMSCast. I dunno what his call to action is, but probably subscribe to the podcast, tell your friends about it. Go and check out Lifter LMS if you’re in the, in the business of, uh, looking for an LMS solution.

Uh, I know Chris, we hung out at Word Camp, um, in, uh, San Diego, uh, last year and uh, it’s been fun being on the show again. Sorry that he’s, uh, he’s bounced out here. I think the snowstorm may have got the better of him. But anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed this. I’ve had a, a fun time hanging out and I look forward to, uh, doing it again sometime.

Alright, gang, I’m gonna scoot outta here. Hopefully, uh, Chris comes back soon. Um, but, uh, yeah. I’m Troy Dean from agency mavericks.com. Thanks for having me. Bye for now.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode.

And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post Grow Your Agency Business with Troy Dean appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Stephanie Hudson shares her experiences and benefits of Artificial Intelligence in the context of course creation and website development.

Stephanie Hudson is a business coach, entrepreneur and author of Bertha AI. She is author of The Sizzle. According to Stephanie, generative AI can assist course designers in overcoming the difficulty of putting their knowledge and experience into a systematic and orderly framework for their courses.

She discuss that Bertha.ai offers a variety of features for creating content, such as course summaries, course descriptions, titles, and even website components like call-to-action buttons, special value propositions, product descriptions, about pages, and FAQs.

Stephanie underlines that while AI can help with material development and organizing, it doesn’t take the place of the course creator’s knowledge. Use Bertha.ai to start a discussion, come up with better course topics, and get suggestions based on the course creator’s areas of expertise. The program enables course designers to decide how authoritative, humorous, or professional the produced content should be.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of Lifter l m s, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of L m S Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Stephanie Hudson. She’s from bertha.ai, which is well, we’ll get into that in just a second. But she’s also the creator of a newsletter called sizzle.ai. AI for course creators. Steph, what is it? And take us, take us in at a high level.

Stephanie Hudson: Well, I don’t know if, if you guys listening out there have heard about this little thing called AI that’s been happening in the tech world lately, but it is the generative AI is where it’s at, so it’s generating Content, images, text, all kind of things. And for course creation, this is awesome because what is a course, but tons of content, right?

You’ve gotta get that the, the biggest hurdle. A lot of times we see people who are creating a course, right? They’ve got something in here and they know they could, that it’ll be beneficial to other people. But how do you get it from in here to out there in the world where people can. Benefit from it and you can make some money off of it, right?

So you got lift your L m s, that’s great, but you’ve gotta still get all that this out of here into that vehicle to transports them. And AI is a great tool for doing that. It doesn’t replace your knowledge, your expertise, it just helps you to get it out of your head. Oh, sorry, I caught you taking a sip.

Chris Badgett: It’s okay. It’s okay. And, and I mean, I like to think of myself as an early adopter of technology and when I first You sure are. Yeah. When I first saw Bertha ai, I was, I was impressed, but I’m like, I’m not sure how I can use this. And then you actually jumped on a call with me and you started demoing. We actually did a like I was like, well, how can I use this as a course creator?

And you, you showed me like, we’ll pick a topic and, and we can come up with like a course outline and you know, kind of use that as a starting point. And I think we did some kind of like how to do this niche type of investing and then it like, spit out this outline, which is a course creator. Is essential.

And a lot of what we have is the experts curse. We don’t really know how to like chunk things into steps. Mm-hmm. Unless we’re trained as a teacher or whatever. And I just found that idea generation and that organization ability and just the speed of it all is just kind of mind blowing. So it’s so fun.

And like you said, like it’s not, the human isn’t like, no longer has a job. Like you need to work with it. Just like any tool. How, yeah. How can we use something like bertha.ai, like we can do outlines? You, you kind of mentioned images and, and texts, but there is a lot of different types of texts, like in the course content and the marketing.

Like give us some, give us a laundry list of ideas how we can apply ai.

Stephanie Hudson: Do a course or, I mean, you can use it actually on the entire website that you’re putting out there for your course as well. Yeah. So within Bertha, just well at the time of this recording, it, it just went out last week that we’ve got chat with Bertha.

So it’s very similar to chat G P T. It’s based on the same engine and everything, so you can get in there and ask birth the questions. And so if you’re feeling stuck, you could even say something like, how do I start to create a course? You know, you could even ask those kind of questions, like the questions that y you’re thinking about.

Now, Chris, I know you have tons of training and other materials online to help people get started as well. But when it comes to actually formulating, like what you’re gonna say to people, you, if you have a topic idea, You can put that into Bertha and ask her to generate all of the surrounding bits. Could you help me generate a title for this that would be engaging?

You can control the, the tone that she uses as well, so if you wanna be very authoritative and expert level on things, you can use that. If you wanna be a little bit irreverent, witty, silly, you can, you can do something like that. She’s not hilarious. Like none of the ais are hilarious. But they can go lighter and they can definitely go serious and professional and things like that.

So, so that’s kind of fun. And and then you can, and let me take it a step before that, even if you don’t know what to teach, but you want to create a course, because courses are cool and course creators are the coolest, right? So if you just know that you wanna get on the bandwagon and create a course for yourself, your business.

You could get out, you could get into Bertha and start a conversation with her and ask for suggestions. You could say like, these are my areas of expertise. What could I teach? You know, you could say like, I’m a pet owner and I know how to train dogs and I have a bird that sings and I, whatever it is. You can list things that you have and say like, could I create, like, what kind of course could I create about these with this skillset?

And she’ll tell you. So you can do it like that, even like before you’ve even started to build the thing. That’s, I mean, then you get into it and it can like within each step, and with ber that is actually, we’ve got a module specifically to help course creators. So you can go into the Bertha Chat where you can just talk freeform and have a back and forth conversation with an AI, basically.

Or you can use the specific prompts that we’ve created and refined a bit. To actually specifically, so you put in, you enter in a certain couple fields like the topic, the the certification, you know, what’s the end result? Do they get a certificate, they get a gold star, whatever it is, you put in those things and then it will generate your course outline.

The, the big long, like the description basically that you would see. Like when we did it, when we did our example, we went to Udemy, I think. Is it you to me, that we went to the, the website and the, the, the big course description, not the little snippet, not the whole course, but that’s the thing that we really are helping generate.

Once you get that, then you’ve got building blocks, and you can take that and go with it. From there, you can use Bertha to still help you generate the content right within each field, inside Lifter. So it’s pretty awesome.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And let’s, let’s talk about the WordPress connection the chat G B T thing with you know, like this chat interface.

And I know that’s available with Bertha now too, which is awesome. But Bertha started from within the WordPress community. And this is kind of a visual thing, so let’s, let’s see if we can talk about it like through the audio format. But if I’m in my WordPress dashboard or on a, on a, on a piece of content, like a page or a post or a lesson, What do, what are these like different building blocks that we can use within Bertha to create different types of content?

You mentioned the course description, but how else can we, like what are the little pieces can we ask Bertha to do of, of a website for sure.

Stephanie Hudson: So when you install the Bertha AI plugin, for starters, let’s just explain that, that it is it is a plugin in the WordPress repository, right? And so let me, let me open up my Bertha right here, and I’m gonna just read out to you some of the different prompts that are inside Bertha.

So there’s when you’re in your WordPress dashboard, there’s a menu on the side that says to launch Bertha. But pretty much any field that you go into when you’re building a site, it has the little purple icon, the little robot face of Bertha. You can open it up and then there are templates that are within there.

So here are some of them. If you’re writing a website, you could generate a call to action for your, your button, like the different, instead of just saying click here mm-hmm. You could create a unique value proposition for your company. You could generate. A product or a service description. So if you’re using, doing an e-commerce site, this one can also be used on things like courses.

It can write a full about page in one prompt. You can do FAQs are a really great one. Those are useful on course websites and other sites too. But you can generate not only the list of FAQs, but it’ll then break down each one and you can have it right answers. To them as well.

Chris Badgett: I think you’re muted. Steph, I think you did the reverse mute. You. You, sorry?

Stephanie Hudson: Did you hear me cough?

Chris Badgett: We did, and then I did, and then I muted myself. Yeah, it’s okay.

Stephanie Hudson: Great job, Steph. That’s, I tried so hard to be slick. I to be slick about it. Oh, so there’s also some. Higher level frameworks that you can take advantage of if anybody is interested in copywriting and how it works and some of the methodology and tactics that are used there, there are different frameworks like the, the p a s framework problem.

What is that Agitate solution? Okay, cool. Problem, agitate solution. I feel like you’d be all about these frameworks.

Chris Badgett: You like copy? I do love copywriting. I do love copywriting. Yeah.

Stephanie Hudson: So the A I D A, do you know that one?

Chris Badgett: Attention, interest decision. Action.

Stephanie Hudson: Yeah. Basically we, we say awareness, interest, desire, action.

But yeah, you had, they’re all the same. Yeah. So you can also do an outline for a, a blog post and then go back in and put the outline items into Bertha and generate paragraphs. So really you can do,

Chris Badgett: I just wanna say, I wanna park there cuz when you fir when you first shared it to me, I didn’t quite get the power of that.

And this outline concept is the similar to making a course syllabus. Yeah. So instead of thinking about it as a one and done, like you can, you can interact with AI at different layers. Like, okay, first I need like a strategy like, Hey, I had these interests. What should I make a course about? Or whatever, like super high level.

But then once you make a decision, you can be like, all right, well let’s come up with an outline and then Okay, that’s cool. Let’s, let’s check chunk that outline into like some steps. You know, like a sub out, you know, indent sub mm-hmm. Components. And then let’s pull out this sub-component and ask the AI to create content for that component or, or whatever.

Like you can, it’s not like a one and done, like, hey, create an about page, or Hey, create a course. It’s, there’s all these like layers and you just keep working it. And then the magic happens when the human and the machine just work together to create the best possible, right?

Stephanie Hudson: Right. So you’re not gonna put in one sentence, And it’s gonna generate an entire course for you, right?

Like I wanna a passive

Chris Badgett: income as saying I want a passive income producing course, you know, on my website. Go, yeah, you gotta take

Stephanie Hudson: it in phases. But, but it, the cool thing is, is that that makes it you, even though it’s generated by an AI, because you are giving it the building blocks that it’s creating content with.

Yeah, and then you go back. The other key is, you know, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of concern or backlash or whatever you wanna call it about how Google views AI content or how. Humans read it and stuff, and if you just only let the ais generate content and you never touch it after that, yeah. That’s not ideal.

Like it, it needs edited and that’s, that’s okay. I don’t think that that’s a flaw of the ai, I don’t think it’s like, oh, it’s not making it perfect. I think that’s what’s allowing, like you said. The combination of the humans and the robots. Is the best because then that’s where you make it truly unique.

You make it you and and then it, it elevates it beyond what you could do by yourself or what the robot could do by itself. So it’s the what’s that expression? The. It’s greater than the sum of its parts or something is that, you know, that expression where you can Yeah. And

Chris Badgett: I, I just wanna build on that idea too, is one of my frustrations with writing, especially with outsourcing writing, is that there’s actually three phases.

There’s research, then there’s writing, and then there’s editing. So what I’ve found is that when I’ve ever, I’ve tried to outsource writing I may get somebody who. Who writes something, but they didn’t do the research. Or somebody who’s good at research but doesn’t know how to write or who doesn’t edit.

So like when you think about working with ai, Or with a person. I’m just saying like, when it comes to creating a great piece of content, you gotta go through the three phases and you can use AI to do all of that.

Stephanie Hudson: Like, well, when it does the first two in like seconds, which is amazing.

Chris Badgett: Like I had to, I asked for a statistic the other day, like, Hey, I need a stat about the e-learning industry.

And like, it was like boom, boom, boom. And it was like, holy cow. Like I, that would’ve taken me forever to find.

Stephanie Hudson: And the, so I don’t know if your audience is up to speed on how this kind of works, but I’ll just give a quick little primer that basically birth is based on an engine created by Open ai, which is this company that’s been very much in the news and things like that.

And so there are other engines out there. They’re called large language models. And what that. Basically means is that it is, it has been fed. The internet. Yeah. Like it’s been fed tons of content, not the entire internet. It only goes up to like, I think September of 2021 or something like that. But it, it’s been fed literally billions of lines of text and so it has been able to absorb and basically sort of learn.

I mean, it’s not sentient, it’s not really learning, but basically it’s got all this information and then the way it works is, It has it, it then generates Content based on what it has learned in a similar way that humans do. So I’m talking to you right now and I’m gonna answer, you ask me a question. I don’t know all of the things I’m gonna say.

I’m gonna come up with one word after another, like I might have an idea and then the way I say it, if you ask me the same question tomorrow. I might give you the same answer, but the words would be slightly different. And it’s similar with ai. It’s not gonna spit out pre-programmed answers to a certain question.

It’s literally putting one word after another based on, instead of, instead of actually learning like humans do, it’s more like probability, like what words should come next. And so it builds its sentences. In that way, like one word after another, which is just mind blowing how anybody figured out how to create these things.

It’s so, it’s so wild, isn’t it?

Chris Badgett: It is really wild. And another thing I, I’ve learned, just going deeper on it is, and you guys have figured this out at Bertha, is the prompt matters. The question matters. And I heard this concept on a, on a po, another podcast called Prompt Engineering. Like what? The question or the idea was, okay, if AI is also gonna write code and write software, what do, what does a developer do?

Or how do we futureproof our career? And the, the concept I heard was, we’ll get really good at prompt engineering, which is asking, knowing what to ask or tell the AI to do. Like that’s where the creative director human comes in. So you can actually do more with. Faster, but you still need like a director, if you will.

So how do we write Great, for sure. Prompts. Like how do we prompt, I, I know the software has it built in, but how do we, how do we become better question askers, right?

Stephanie Hudson: So that’s If you go to chat, g p t or even Bertha chat there’s, there’s so many or that there’s an ask me anything module in Bertha too, that’s just a freeform sort of thing where you can just put in whatever prompt.

The prompt in the lingo of, of the AI generators is the. The thing you ask or the instructions you give, it’s what you put in. You’re prompting the ai. So just to clarify that. And then so what, what happens is you. You can do it in a free form way, but what ber the AI has done, and many of the other tools that are out there, there’s a, there’s 10 new ones every single day at this point, but they create these little fields and things like that.

So it’s more of a structured prompt. So for example, the on the. Course description, it’s already built in there. How, like what it should do with what you give it. So we have little fields like what’s the title, what’s the subject, what’s the certification? All these different things that you fill in.

And then we’ve already trained Bertha to spit it, spit out her answer in a certain format, listed in an outline, put this headline at the bottom that chose the certificate. You know, like all of those things, if you don’t use one of those pre-formulated ones, Then you just have to say those things in your freeform prompt that you’re putting in, which you’re totally able to do.

Those pre-made prompts are just shortcuts, basically, just to make it even easier on you. So the best way I think, to learn how to do prompts is. To play around with it. It’s it’s a real easy way to start to learn and you can, you can start, you put something in and you see what you get, and then you tweak it and you see what you get and you, you know, you sort of have this back and forth and that really is the best way.

The other way is to watch other people doing it. So Andrew Palmer and I have done a couple ask me anythings in the group where we go and just say like, Hey, let’s write a blog post together, or Let’s write it out. You know, like, whatever it is we decide to do. And people are always like, oh, that’s how it is.

You know, kind of like when I showed you some of this stuff, right? Yeah. Like, you can have a concept of it, but until you really see it, you’re like, oh, wait, so I could do X, Y, and Z with this? You know? Then your brain starts to kinda get carried away with it.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Tell us more about tone. Like I heard I heard somebody, like you said, it’s all about modeling somebody or hearing a cool example.

I heard on a podcast somebody was like, okay, have it, write something and then have it. Restate it using the rhetorical devices of Barack Obama and it, and I was, and then, so I did that with something. I was like, holy cow. Now I sound like this inspirational speaker guy, but yeah. Yeah. What are the tone options?

And I’m not going away. I’m just putting a log on the fire, so keep talking.

Stephanie Hudson: Okay. Chris is the only guy I know who would have a fire burning in his office with his outer space backdrop and his Britney Spears concert microphone. Anyway, so the, now I forgot the fire thing. I forgot what is even, what was your question, Chris?

Come back from the fire we were talking about tone. That’s right. Yeah. Tone. I remember now Tone. So It can, it, it learns. The AI has learned from so many different sources that it can identify, so it understands who has written different things. So you can, it’s like there’s no list. It’s unlimited. You can say like Right.

Using like in the tone of Barack Obama combined with. Kevin Hart or something like that, you know what I mean? Like you can even combine things. You can say anything, and if you are stuck for some inspiration on that. The coolest thing is you can just ask Bertha. We did that once on a, on a, on a live in the Facebook group, the Bertha Facebook group.

So the video’s still up there, but somebody asked a similar question, like, what tones could we use? And so we just opened up the asked me anything on Bertha and said, gimme a list of 50 tones, and it just rattled ’em off. Those weren’t celebrity W ones or anything. They were just like witty, irreverent, professional, you know.

Light sassy, you, whatever, you know, just listed a million of those and you can combine ’em, you can do anything. So it’s really fun.

Chris Badgett: Tell us about your newsletter, the Sizzle ai. What, what’s, what’s that about?

Stephanie Hudson: This is new. This is new and it is BER is a sponsor of it, but it’s not it’s not about Bertha specifically.

I’m just geeking out over all of this AI stuff. Chris, I love it. You and I got into an awesome conversation when we talked, and there is so much happening so fast. There’s, we really, you guys, not to be overly dramatic, but like we’re on, we’re on the cusp of a new revolution. Like we’ve had, like the industrial revolution, we’ve had, you know, like all these different points in history.

I. Where innovation has made a massive change. And you know, we’ve seen certain things like this in our lifetime, of course with computers, I mean the internet, all of this stuff, and this is the next major thing because this is gonna change everything. It really is. I know that sounds very dramatic, but the way we all work and it’s, it’s much like.

We already can’t imagine going about our day without our smartphone navigating us from one place to the other. Auto, you know, like voice texting people while we drive, doing everything, you know, like communicating with our friends and family. Everything we do is on our phones and we can’t imagine that we didn’t have that.

And yet, What, 10, 12 years ago it was nothing like this. So this is what’s happening now in the next decade, we’re not gonna remember, or like imagine how we went about our days without ai. I really believe that like this is, that’s how revolutionary all of this stuff is, and the speed with which it is accelerating is phenomenal.

The stuff that has changed already just in the past few months is. Almost mind blowing. So it’s gonna keep going. And I’m just, I’m already like, I’m into it and I like reading about it and learning about it. And so I’ve seen other people do it too and I thought, well, why not? Why not take some other people along for the ride?

Since I’m already out there reading it, I’m just gonna start a newsletter. I may do a little podcast about it too. But anyway, it’s the sizzle ai. It’s called the sizzle, because, you know, why do you smell that? That’s the future cooking. That’s the, that’s my dorky

Chris Badgett: Well, on, on the, on the effective dorky, techy stuff.

One of the, one of the things I’d love thinking about is like second, third order effects, fourth order effects. Like, so the first thing that ha the first order effect of AI is like, oh my gosh, students are gonna use this to write their essays. What do we do? But there’s like, There’s like second order effects that come after that.

Like, okay, well what’s, how does this change education? How does this change the role of teachers? And then, and then what does it, what does that change then Cause to die, accelerate, change, whatever. Like what are some. Like more further out there, less obvious, you know, second, third order effects you might see happening because of AI that people aren’t even realizing yet who haven’t spent as much time as you like thinking about this and geeking out about this and observing society and everything I.

Stephanie Hudson: That’s a tough question, but I think the education area is really an important one right now because what it makes me think about, like I sort of go backwards into history to compare it to different things, and one that is not so far back is when you would be in math class and you weren’t allowed to use your calculator.

Mm. You had to do the math and, and why? Because you’re not, it’s not like you’re gonna be having a calculator in your pocket everywhere you go. Guess what we do? Right? So what, what does that mean? And the, the fact of it is, Like, yeah, we don’t have to do tons of long division or algebra in our brains, and we do have these tools in our, literally, in our pockets, but it’s important to understand the underlying mechanics of those things.

Like if you can understand sort of how it works, that’s still valuable. Right? So but it’s also good to know how to use the tools. I mean, all AI is, is a tool. And so when you think about it in that way, if you. If you go forward trying to deny it or subdue it as a, as a educator or an employer or whoever, you’re gonna fail cuz it’s here and it’s happening.

You’re better off learning how to utilize this tool properly. Another example I like is maybe even a more powerful one, is do you ever see that movie hidden Figures? It’s a. Based on a true story of the women that helped launch the space shuttle. Mm-hmm. They were in a, a job pool. Like there was a big group of women black women as a matter of fact, who were called computers, and they all had pencils and they would compute the, they would do the math long hand with pencils.

And within the course of this, the time period represented in this movie, the company there, NASA got. The first big giant i b m computer that filled a room. Now what do we say about that? Well, that’s gonna take all their jobs. That’s terrible. It’s gonna take all their jobs. Yes, it is. Is it terrible? Well look at how much more can be done.

So right now we’re, we’re seeing like, Oh, AI’s gonna take jobs and people are up in arms about it. But there was one character in the movie I can’t remember the charac, the, it’s a real woman. Instead of being scared or complaining she was gonna lose her job, she went to the library and bought books on programming and she learned how to code that big giant b m computer.

A black woman in the sixties did this and she became like the first computer pro, like one of the first computer programmers. And she got, went on to have like, A management position at NASA instead of just being this lowly computer with a pencil. Right? So there are, there are people who are going to be left behind in this revolution, and there are people who are going to realize that this is an opportunity and they’re going to take advantage of it.

So what that looks like in the future, I mean, it’s super easy to see now. We already hear a lot of people talking about prompt engineers as a job. I think that’s shortsighted. That’s a thing right now that is a. I mean, that’s, that’s just gonna be like a, a low level thing. That’s not gonna be like a major career.

But but there’s, there’s really no telling how many areas of life that this is, is going to affect, you know it’s do you have ideas? Do you have things that you’ve already got in your mind about like second, third, forest level repercussions?

Chris Badgett: Well, I like what you’re saying about going back in history.

So another example like the, the calculator is the internet versus the library versus the encyclopedia, botanical botanica versus oral traditions and books. Right. You know, like we go back and back into how we, we pass information and access information and it’s like literally exploding exponentially. So you know, right now we already have too much information, like, there, there’s just so much information coming at us, so, so it’s no long, it’s no longer about the volume, it’s about the quality and the, you know, kind of minimizing it.

I, I haven’t spent too much time thinking about it. I, I need to, cuz I, you know, I w I would start to see some things, but. You know, I think we’re gonna see people who fight back against it. Like, kind of like the Luddite thing where people used to throw shoes and the gears of the machine that was taking the factory jobs.

You know, we people, there’s like a kind of a, a. A revolution against the internet, which I’m a believer in of, in terms of like, Hey, your brain needs a break. Don’t be online all the time. Don’t have the phone in front of your face all day long. You know, don’t talk to AI all day long either. Like we’re gonna have that same thing again.

With ai, there is such thing as too much ai.

Stephanie Hudson: So yeah, like don’t let your brain turn to mush. Like you gotta still think, you’ll just let machines do it for you.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, true. Yeah. And this happens every time when we get new technology. Like when the automobile was first introduced, there was lots of car accidents and figuring out how do we share the streets with horses.

And then eventually the horses weren’t on the streets anymore. And, and, but over time, like humanity has always adapted in terms of jobs and stuff like that. I mean, there could be big changes in terms of. It is possible that there, it’s kind of like a game of musical chairs where there, there literally won’t be enough jobs like that could happen, but I’m confident in the human ability to figure out how to deal with that.

Like in terms of like that being a benefit that hey, we, we figured out how do the machines, both the hardware and the software can support us. Let’s figure out a way to still take care of society and make sure everybody’s covered and like kind of figure that out. Like, I’m confident we can do that, but I think we’re gonna see some of those issues arising in the next 10 years for sure.

Of like, yeah.

Stephanie Hudson: I mean, when, when tractors were invented, farmers were thought they were gonna be outta jobs. Right? Right. When Yeah. The camera was invented, painters thought they were gonna, it was gonna end painting. You know, like there’s, there’s so many different points in history where new technology, Technically reduced or eliminated jobs, but it creates so many new ones.

And, you know, it opens up the world to so much, so many more amazing things. Now that is not to say that this isn’t without cause for concern. There are tons of ethical issues with all of this. Mm-hmm. The art world right now is really up in arms about. The ethics of AI art generation because it has scanned the internet.

You know, these AI machines have scanned the images that are on the internet, and they’re able to recreate art in the style of different artists and things. You know, we haven’t really talked about the art side of it, but. Have you played, have you played around with Dolly or Mid Journey or,

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I’ve played around with all of them or many of them.

Stephanie Hudson: Oh yeah, you’ve had all, like, you have all those profile pictures of it. The the, which one was that from? Was that, imagine that you used for those?

Chris Badgett: That was, imagine I literally have like 700 and I just, I, I didn’t wanna like spam the internet with everything, but I also have given that as a gift to people that, like at Christmas I like, you know, did the whole thing.

For some people that are, well, it’s a great idea. Her not as techy as me. And they’re like, whoa, Mia is like a queen. Mia as a superhero. Mia is this and that. It’s, yeah, it’s kind of fun.

Stephanie Hudson: So, oh, that’s awesome. Yeah, so the art stuff is super cool. But then you think like, okay, so it’s, it’s pretty cheap, right?

Like, what is it, 30 bucks or something, and you can go and generate. Whole bunch of images of yourself. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Like 300 or something.

Stephanie Hudson: Yeah. Yeah. And so why, why is it so cheap? Why are they doing that? Well, guess what? You’re giving them your face. So what happens there? Right? There’s nothing really locked down.

I’m not a particularly like I. Panicky conspiracy theorist person on that. Like, we’re not off grid. You guys, like if we, you wanna be off grid, like you gotta like throw away your phone, you gotta get off this podcast for sure. Like this is on, you know, like there’s no, like the grid is everywhere. It’s you, you really have to be determined to be off of it.

But, but there are certainly, like, that’s a small example, but there are tons of privacy concerns when we’re doing this. So chat, G P t, if anybody. Played around with that or used that for anything. You think you’re using it, guess what? It’s using you. It was getting information. It was learning how people used it.

They were losing, they losing, or spending is a better word. Like I think it was like 3 million a day or something. Like the numbers were all different, but like millions and millions of dollars were spent allow, allowing that to be free because it co it takes computing power, tons of computing power to generate this content and stuff.

So, Even though it’s fairly inexpensive to generate content as a user, you know, on a mass scale like they did, where they opened it up for free, it was very costly, but they were learning from us while we were learning from it. So they, you know, so there’s all of that. And the, the art one is really one of the more controversial ones because, you know, you can, you can generate.

Text and you can run it through a plagiarism checker very easily, but there is no tool like that for art. And what constitutes somebody’s personal art.

Chris Badgett: One pixel difference. One pixel different, right?

Stephanie Hudson: What makes it makes it unique And you know, on, on one side of the argument, you can say like, well, okay, Mr.

Or Miss Artist, how did you learn to be an artist? You learned from looking at examples of other people’s art, right? Like you. You know, some people learned from copying the greats, right? Like you hear, you hear that a lot. Like go look at the Renaissance artists and copy them, try and duplicate their works, and you generate your own style eventually and you learn what you’re good at and things like that, so, so that’s one side of it that like, okay, well it learned from all those, just like you did on imagery that was publicly available.

So is it theft or is it not? But then you start looking closer and you see some of these images that get generated. They actually sometimes have little snippets of like signatures, which is not taking inspiration from something that is actually hopping. So, so then it’s a, so, you know, there’s, there’s a whole big gray area of the ethics around this.

That you can sort of very easily argue both sides of, and it’s gonna be really, really interesting to see where things fall. And the other thing is who gets to be in charge of that, you know? Mm-hmm. Who gets to determine what’s okay and what’s not okay. This isn’t a, you know, this isn’t, A national thing.

This is a global tool that’s been created. So how do you determine like who gets to say what’s okay and what’s not okay. Right.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and I think I heard this debate too with the way search engines work, where there’s a file on websites called Robots dot txt, I think, which allow, gives the creator the ability to.

Block search engines if they want to. So perhaps in the future of the internet and or at least our internet-based content, maybe there will be a new like robots.ai file where creators can choose to they want to get the, the, the content out, or they want to protect it from. Fair use or AI or whatever.

So it’s it is complicated, but at the end of the day, I like to think of the analogy of 3D printing. So if you look at building a house, you know what I’m really excited for within 10 years is the ability to be able to 3D print a house. Cuz if you’ve ever built a house or done an addition or construction project, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re assembling all these different tools.

There’s a lot of manual processes, there’s a lot of delays and inefficiencies and this and that. But what if. A truck can roll up. It has all these inputs of like different materials and then like a bunch of, you know, like scaffolding of structure is erected and it literally like prints a house in a day or two.

How cool is that? That’s where we’re going. It’s coming.

Stephanie Hudson: It’s coming. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I don’t know if it’ll even take 10 years. I mean, yeah, with the speed, the speed with which this stuff is happening is pretty. Pretty nuts. So here’s another scenario that’s a little bit tricky to think about. You gotta readjust cause lights are coming in from outside.

But so theis only have access to to up to a certain point, right? So they’re not actively searching the internet at this point.

Chris Badgett: I notice that when I, I. I’ve gotten some error messages that say things like, oh, this U R URL was created after 2021. Like you said, like there’s a, there’s a model that’s trained on and then it stops.

And in my mind I was like, why don’t we just release it on the internet? Like so they Right. But I think there’s probably some ethics issues and some fact checking issues or something. There are ethics.

Stephanie Hudson: There are, and also, so the difference between, this is something I wanna talk about a little bit.

The difference between, so there a lot of people were saying like, chat, G P T, oh, it’s gonna be a Google killer. Right? But what’s the difference between doing a search of the internet and asking an AI a question when it’s been trained on the internet? To me it’s, it’s not remotely the same thing. You’re asking the AI to make a judgment on what content is true, what content is the best.

When we do a Google search, yes, we trust Google to serve up things that it’s using, trust factors and things like that to say like what’s the most relevant? But we have pages and pages of Google results that are generated by human beings that we get to evaluate. What answers we believe and trust, or you get to say like, oh, multiple people have said this, but a few people have said that.

Whereas AI’s giving you like its interpretation, full stop. And so when you’re doing a search of other generated content, you know, which at this point is pretty much all generated by humans, it’s. It’s up to you still. And so that’s a big difference. Now there is going to be sort of a combo effect happening, which this is gonna be the craziest prediction that is out there right now, but it’s gonna be true.

It’s it’s, it’s almost fact. Bing is gonna surpass Google. Like, if you’d have told me six months ago, I would say that I would’ve said I would’ve laughed. Why? Why? Because by a show of hands, who has ever even used Bing? Exactly. Nobody like you. It’s hard to, even, like, you forget Bing even exists, but Microsoft.

Chris Badgett: Cause Microsoft’s investment in open ai.

Stephanie Hudson: Microsoft is going all in on ai, and they’re going to incorporate these AI large learning models and the other processing tools into their search. So it’s gonna be a combo, which is going to be super powerful. But think about this scenario for a second. We’ve got.

It only goes up to 2021. Right? So now we’re in 2022 is when this whole thing starts busting wide open. Thousands of the people start generating AI content, right? They’re, they’re creating AI generated content. So the internet then becomes flooded with AI content. Then we open up AI to search the internet, and it’s.

Searching yourself. It’s finding content that it generated that may or may not be true. Yeah. Some of the things it comes back with are like, it’s fabrication, it’s, it’s not accurate and it’s not true.

Chris Badgett: But if you like, you can go into also creating content that’s not necessarily true on the internet, like people are Sure.

Stephanie Hudson: Yeah. But it’s, to me, it’s like that, then it becomes like the AI feeding itself. Okay. Which seems to be such a different thing. Right. And so, you know, like you can go on, like in Bertha, there’s A bio, you can write a bio you can say like, write a bio for Chris Badgett. You can just say that and it will generate all this stuff about like where you went to school and what you did and blah, blah, blah.

It’s not true. It’s gonna have the format of it, and then you could just go in and swap out like, this is the degree I got, or this is the school, you know, like you swap out the schools and stuff. But it, it. It does a format, but it doesn’t have all the factual details. But if you start generating tons of that stuff and then it’s just feeding this machine, it’s like, I don’t know, it just becomes like, are we gonna end up with this like weird closed loop of information that like, we’re just generating content based on the content that was already, you know, like, I don’t know.

It just seems that’s a, that’s an interesting problem that’s gonna need to be overcome, I think.

Chris Badgett: Well, maybe we can learn from Wikipedia or something there where like there’s a, this constant like human editing happening or something. Yeah. I mean the humans and the machines have to work together. Like it’s not like Yeah.

For the quality. Yeah. There’s, there’s gotta be a way for, for the people to work together. Last question, Steph, you mentioned like generative content, I think what, what else, what else other uses are there besides generative content?

Stephanie Hudson: Oh, you mean in ai? Yeah. So generative means to To generate. To create, yeah.

So you can generate text, you can generate code, you can generate art, you can generate all these things. But AI has already existed in, in many ways as far as you know, analytics. In things like self-driving cars, that’s AI for sure. You know, and that’s gonna take off even more. Like we’re gonna really start to see that techno.

That’s one that I’m excited for. Cause I don’t like to drive, I like to be chauffeur if possible. So yeah, I mean in healthcare, that’s gonna be another, like that to me is gonna be a really, really beneficial one where diagnosis and stuff more, more analytical. Yeah. Elements of ai. So rather than having, you know, you go to this doctor and that specialist and this thing and that thing, and then you go to somebo, your j your general doctor when you’re sick and they don’t have the whole picture.

For starters, they have an imperfect human limited mind for second, you know, so they don’t have like the history of medical documents to, to base things on. You know, so if you can go in and give it variables like. Of your history and all that, that is continually being fed in throughout your life. You know, I mean, kids that are born now, pretty much, they’re gonna have AI diagnoses when they’re older, you know, which is in some ways, you know, you still like, at this point anyway, it still needs human oversight for sure.

But you can see how something like that could end up being more accurate than.

Chris Badgett: Like interpreting an X-ray or a CAT scan or whatever, like mm-hmm. Yeah. Like what if it was using the data set of all x-rays and CAT scans of Yep. Ever. And what actually happened, like following the patient and all that. Like it’s just insane.

Stephanie Hudson: Yeah. Or what happens when you know you’ve got, I. A person’s entire, like every single test result, every single thing that has happened to them. You know, I have a, I have a close friend who is like in her late forties, randomly got like a growth in her brain and had to have brain surgery like it happened in a week and.

They don’t know what caused it, but she had a crazy bad infection like three months before that. And no, it didn’t, it wasn’t on anybody’s radar and nobody knew that that was, you know, so then she’s got these symptoms and it takes how long to identify that there’s an actual problem there? Well, if you’ve got these in incredibly like it’s not intelligence, but it’s informed.

They have all of the data that they can crunch, like a human mind, just, we can’t hold all that data. Even if we could, we couldn’t hold the, you know, a doctor can’t hold all that data for every single one of their patients, right? So they can take that kind of stuff and process it and come up with different solutions, warnings, all kind of things, and treatment options and stuff.

I mean, I think the potential in the medical field is gonna be phenomenal. There’s a rabbit hole.

Chris Badgett: Go check out it is the sizzle ai cuz there’s, yeah, because I would encourage you to get in front of this issue and and just kind of fall in love with it. And what I mean by that is there’s a lot of challenges but there’s also a lot of opportunities here.

So better to like, learn from people like Steph, who were, have really been in this space for, you know, multiple years. A ahead of the majority as a early adopter. And also check out bertha.ai to use AI on your website to not replace you, but accelerate what you can do. Any final words for your people,

Stephanie Hudson: Steph? Oh, sure. Yeah. I mean, I think we are at a huge advantage if you are. If you’re a follower of Chris Badgett, if you’re, listen, if you’ve made it 53 minutes into this podcast, listening to us talk about it, then you have an advantage, and that is that you’re probably a geek and you’re probably interested in technology.

You’re probably, I don’t know, maybe you’re an entrepreneur, maybe you’re a free thinker. Maybe you’re, you’d like to learn new things, right? You’re a lifelong learner as Chris is, and I am. You have a huge advantage because, This is available to us now. It’s available to other people too, but it’s technically out of their reach because it seems too scary and too complicated and things like that.

Right. The Luddites or the, you know, the moms of the world might not be, you know, like my mom could not care less about this kind of thing. It’s gonna affect her life, but she’s not, you know, like we are on the cutting edge of a huge. Technological revolution, which is an awesome, we’re we’re the ones that are gonna start defining what those new roles are and how we can use this in our lives.

So, by the way I think that we should give your audience a hookup. I think we’re gonna give everybody some extra words if they sign up. For, let’s do it. Bertha ai. We’ll give you some extra words and some extra images. So let’s do I’ll have to go set up the code after, as soon as I get off of this live.

But if you’re listening on the podcast, go use Code Lifter 2023 and we’ll put, let me write that down so I do the right one. Christopher that down. And remind me what code I just lifter 2023. And go sign up for Bertha AI and, and get some extra words cuz that’s how you, that’s how you learned by playing around with it.

That’s awesome.

Chris Badgett: So Lifter 2023 is the coupon code Bertha ai check out Steph’s AI newsletter at the Sizzle ai. Thanks for coming on the show, Steph. We really appreciate it.

Stephanie Hudson: This was super fun. Thanks for having me. I mean, I always love hanging out with you, Chris, but I, I geek out over this topic as you can probably see.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post Artificial Intelligence for Course Creators with Stephanie Hudson from Bertha and The Sizzle appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett shares his thoughts on the block editor for WordPress. Also he discuss about the new theme of LifterLMS called “Sky Pilot“.

Chris Badgett is the CEO of LifterLMS, a learning management system, and has over 15 years of experience with WordPress. He believes that the block editor has come a long way since its inception and is excited about it. Chris explains that he loves the block editor and that Lifter LMS has built a theme for e-learning sites called Sky Pilot. Which uses all the modern technology for building sites.

Sky Pilot is a fully responsive WordPress theme designed specifically for e-learning websites. It uses the power of the WordPress block editor, allowing users to easily customize and design their website without needing any coding skills.

He explains that Sky Pilot is unique because it has an exclusive focus on online learning websites, unlike themes that try to do everything. He emphasizes that by participating and contributing to the cutting edge of where WordPress is going, Sky Pilot can leverage the benefits that come with it.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of Lifter l m s, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Will Middleton: Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the L M S Cast. I’m joined today by a special guest host of the show, Chris Badgett from Lifter L M s. Chris is usually in my seat interviewing people on the LMS cast, but today Chris is being interviewed. My name is Will Middleton. And we’re gonna be diving into Sky Pilot, an all new e-learning theme for WordPress.

Chris, welcome to the show.

Chris Badgett: Thanks for having me on Will. It’s fun to be in the in the guest seat. Thank you.

Will Middleton: That’s awesome. So my first question is, you’ve been in WordPress for 15 years? Since 2008. And Lifter LMS as a company is investing big into the block editor and full site. The full site editor in general.

With the release of the new Sky Pilot theme, does the block editor live up to the hype? And what are your thoughts on the new editor for WordPress?

Chris Badgett: I personally really like the block editor, and when I think back to 2008. When I started building WordPress websites and I remember what the interface was like and how to try to figure out menus and pages and post content, we’ve come a long way and.

WordPress itself, I’ve been in it for 15 years. It started five years before that, and I had no idea when I was getting started building a personal hobby site. A blog about leadership was what I was writing about, that I would become so entrenched and ingrained, obsessed, and build a business around WordPress.

But. What I realized the longer I was in WordPress is for people like me. There’s different types of users. I’m not a developer. I’m more of like a power user of technology. Like a, I’m a power implementer, but I don’t write code. I’m not a great designer. But I do like to solve, to express myself as a creator and then also solve business problems with WordPress.

Whether that’s creating a course or creating a website for a business, an agency, all that stuff for clients who have a lot of business problems. I’ve done a lot of that. But the one thing I’ve learned, especially as the timeline stretches on with WordPress, is that in some ways you have to just trust the process.

Like we’re all in it together. We’re all trying to figure it out. There’s conflicting opinions about what we should do. WordPress is a open open community. There’s lots of different angles and perspectives that people have and reasons they’re using the tool and there are different types of users. But at the end of the day, As time stretches on as we celebrate the 20th anniversary of wor WordPress, I’ve just learned to trust it and do things the WordPress way and to contribute to that.

Not just sit on the sidelines and have opinions, but to, contribute software to the community. Contribute sponsorship to events, helping organize events contributing to some of the team, the volunteer teams, and really just investing in the people of WordPress. I’ve done a lot of that.

It’s like a it’s like a family. You get, you don’t choose the family you have or whatever, and there’s always like lots of different characters in the family. But I’ve learned to trust it and. So when WordPress, four years ago announced the Gutenberg block editor thing and the direction we’re heading in there, I knew just from then, I’m like, all right I guess we’re gonna go this way and see what happens.

And myself, I really love Page builders. Me personally I’ve have a long history with Beaver Builder, used it on a ton of projects, but as I learned how to use Gutenberg I found myself being able to lay out. With just native WordPress in a way that I couldn’t do at the beginning of my career in WordPress when it was, you couldn’t even get columns on a page.

It was that hard. There was like a columns plugin. It was just even columns. You had to be a developer and but now, page builders really unlock the, for power user types like myself the ability to express visual layouts without code and now native WordPress is really catching up.

So I don’t know if you want to dig in anywhere there, but that’s why I like the block editor. That’s why. At Lifter we’ve built a theme for e-learning sites worldwide called Sky Pilot. Just launched it’s forward facing with the block editor and uses all the modern. Technology there for building sites.

So I’m excited about it and the more I use it, I love it and I find that you have to get in the sandbox and play with it. Just like the beginning of when you learn a tool, you may get used to doing things one way, but then you learn how to do ’em another way. I remember it took me a while to learn how to use Beaver Builder, and I still wasn’t like the greatest with it, but every tool.

Especially if it’s changing, which most tools are, you have to keep reinvesting in your learning and your education.

Will Middleton: Yeah, that, that’s absolutely awesome. And we talk about page builders versus the block editor, and I was curious. With, what would you say to people who tried the block editor and didn’t really like it?

People who are on Elementor Divi, beaver Builder, they got used to a certain page builder and now the block editor’s coming more strongly into WordPress. Like I was in that phase where I was using Elementor and the block editor comes along. It sounds like you were deep into Beaver Builder and then the block editor came along and there’s that complicated transition period where we try the block editor.

And we really just try to figure out how to turn it off and keep using the page builder. But now the block editor is coming into play in a major way. And like you said, there’ve been a lot of improvements. So what would you say to people who are skeptical about the block editor or aren’t really big fans about why they might want to try it alongside a new theme like Sky Pilot?

For billing a site?

Chris Badgett: I was skeptical the first time I tried sushi, but now I love it. Yeah, first of all, it’s changed a lot. It continues to evolve and it’s also not like this major event where all of a sudden everything breaks and now you gotta rebuild everything. And the block editor for me personally, in my journey, I started following in love with the block editor, just with blog posts.

So just everything else was in a page builder. And I started using the block editor to lay out a blog article, a single article. Not all my articles, just the one I was working on, playing around with it. And that’s where I started to really get it. And then another area where I really started to get it.

When it first came out. First thing, I’m a marketer, sales guy, so like the first thing I think about is, okay, the hero area of the homepage. Very important piece of real estate above the fold. Beautiful background, image, color or video. A hook, a promise, a call to action button a video, an image, something like that.

Let me see if I can build that in a block editor. I think that kind of hero area. Whether it’s a homepage or a landing page of any kind that’s where I recommend starting trying to figure it out. And then, as a marketer person, stuff like that, then you need to start working with forms. And then you realize like your form plugins have these form blocks so you can drop them in, which then makes you realize that short codes and blocks are really the same thing.

So if you’re used to short codes, And block you and the tools you’re using have block everything. They’re actually easier to use the block version, the settings panel. Once you figure it out, it’s not like a short code with all these attributes and quotation marks and everything, you’re You’re just putting it in and choosing a bunch of settings and options, so as you get better with it, it just starts clicking and making sense.

And we haven’t even talked about templates yet. We’re just talking about editing a single page content.

Will Middleton: Yeah and speaking on the idea of templates, sky Pilot is built on the new full site editor for WordPress that’s come out, I think, in LifterLMS or an WordPress version. 6.0 and is getting a lot of updates and evolutions currently, and so it’s really cutting edge the full site editor leveraging templates and that kind of thing.

So for someone who’s on a page builder, considering transitioning, To a Sky Pilot theme and working with the block editor is what you mentioned possible with Sky Pilot, where they could have their page builder on some pages and the block editor on some posts and courses and things like that possibly, but then also include the page builder alongside the Sky Pilot theme.

Chris Badgett: Is that a possibility? A hundred percent. One of my favorite phrases with as things change in whatever context is to transcend and include, we recently at Lifter l m s went through a major web design WebDev Studios and a gentleman named Matthew Bumby helped with the design. Great work.

And then we we’ve just recently launched that design on our site. And there’s still pages on lifter lms.com that are Beaver Builder, but then there’s a lot of pages that are just native WordPress by itself. So in the Sky Pilot theme, basically the way it works is there’s a 10, a blank template that you can use if you wanna load up Beaver Builder Elementary or Sky Pilot.

Or divi builder any of the builders, you can just continue to use on a, on top of a blank template. So you can’t have the best of both worlds and there’s literally no emergency. You just have to, yeah. You can start by just doing one blog post with the block editor. Keep everything else in elementary or in or whatever you’re using, and then transition or keep them both alive together forever and just figure out how to keep your designs consistent so the end user just, it looks the same.

It doesn’t really matter if it’s a page builder or the native WordPress block editor but Sky Pilot makes it easy. To to do that and native WordPress does with the new templating engine. Like you can build all these custom templates to just make your job easier and make things look a certain way on certain types of pages or even components of pages like the header and footer.

Totally. Totally.

Will Middleton: And the idea of templates seems to be something introduced by page builders and like you were talking about earlier, We work with the WordPress ecosystem and where it’s going, but we also contribute to it. WordPress took inspiration from page builders and integrated a page builder into WordPress directly.

And so it’s like the innovation cycle goes both ways. Where we’re as companies building plugins, we’re contributing to WordPress, and then WordPress contributes to our vision serving customers, building websites and all that kind of stuff. And the concept of templates, even for people using page builders can be a little bit complicated.

Do you think you could give us a high level overview of what is a template? Like I, when I come into WordPress, I’m used to just editing an individual page, editing my header footer maybe. But what is a template and how does that work inside of WordPress?

Chris Badgett: Yeah in, in native WordPress, there’s templates and there’s template parts.

A page we all know, like a webpage is a, that’s actually a type of template. It’s a page like the about page on our website is using the page template. Probably just like a normal page, a regular blog post is using the blog post template. Some blog posts, single templates. Have additional information in the template level, like the author bio block thing that shows up at the bottom or at the top.

That’s an example of, okay, it’s not just the content of the post. It’s also this data related to the author with their image and their name and their bio that shows up there. So that’s like the single blog post template, and as things get more advanced with your website, If you’re using WooCommerce and creating products, like a product has a certain template and you may want to adjust the pieces that, and how it looks visually of what’s included in the product template.

And then there’s template parts like the header of the website that has the logo, the title, the menu or the footer, which you know, often has some more links and widgets and sometimes. Or most of the time, like a copyright footer below that with a link to privacy policy and terms and conditions and things.

So those are like template parts. Okay. And then, it starts getting more advanced with what’s known as custom post types. So like for lifter, l m LMS as an example, there’s If there’s a course template, a membership template, a student dashboard template course archives and all these things.

It’s basically thing what it is like working on the ways, certain types of the same things look at a global level versus on the individual post level.

Will Middleton: That makes sense. And that is really interesting functionality. So you’re saying that all blog posts follow a certain layout, all pages follow a certain layout and we could edit.

What all the pages look like. They have a header. And then the template parts, as you mentioned, would be parts that are included in other templates. Like the header is a part of the post template. It’s also a part of the header template. But now with Sky Pilot and the full site editor and WordPress 6.0, you have the power to change those templates.

Usually you choose your theme sets it, and that’s it. But now you have the power even with Sky Pilot to modify what all these templates look like. That Zach kinda sum it up pretty well.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Without being a developer, having to write code or understand any of that, it’s just a visual interplay phase to edit the template instead of the individual post.

It feels very similar. You knows a lot of the concepts are the same but you’re just doing it at a global level without code, which is really cool. For example, and you can create new templates. So I was building something today and. One of the first places you run into it, I know it’s because a lot of themes do this, is they have an option to remove the page title from a page.

Yeah. And the reason they do that is what, when you start to heavily want to customize a page and put like a fancy hero area up there, you don’t want like home or welcome to show up like above all that. So you wanna get rid of it, the page title. So if you just have a template that’s like page without title.

And everything else is the same, then you can just switch it to that template. So I did that. That’s like a really common easy, just like removing one element that, if I’m making like a regular page, let’s say the privacy policy or terms and conditions, I don’t care. I’ll just use the regular default template page, title content, we’re done.

But when you want to get fancy, one of the first things people want to do is they wanna remove the. The page title and start with a blank canvas. Or if, as you get into marketing and sales, you want to create these landing pages that have certain jobs to do and you wanna remove the header and the footer and just have a really focused, funnel landing page.

That’s an example of a certain type of landing page template. And there’s different types of landing pages, so you may wanna have multiple Landing page templates. So not only can you customize what’s there, you can create new ones too, which is really cool.

Will Middleton: Yeah, that’s awesome. So you’re giving yourself, you have the page template and you can edit that, but you’re giving yourself a second option that also could apply to pages that you create yourself called the marketing page template.

And so when you create a page and WordPress, you can select, do I want my default page template or do I want to use the marketing page template I created? Exactly. And you could create infinite templates and really get. Customized on your website. And that doesn’t just apply to pages, it applies to blog, post courses, lessons, and all kinds of post types and WordPress.

And I want. I wanna switch gears a little bit towards the forward thinking aspect of the block editor and LifterLms. And so not a lot of people know from the ages of 19 to 28 years old, you spend a lot of time climbing as a mountaineer and a climber. You learn a lot of course about how to do more with less and be resourceful.

And so my question here is how does your experience with being resourceful and doing more with less translate into the block editor and the future developments, WordPress? Do these things relate at all with enhancing the tools, investing the tools? Like you said, we’re now democratizing the ability to edit these templates.

Does doing more with less your experience there reflect and WordPress.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, the classic example if you’ve done any kind of climbing or backpacking when you’re new to those sports or activities you tend to like, get a lot of equipment. And I remember like one of my early backpacking trips as a kid just doing, going out with friends, like my pack was like super heavy, way too heavy than it should have been.

And. As you graduate into climbing, rock climbing and mountaineering, it becomes more of a problem. You can’t just schlep, like if you’re going up something like super steep or sketchy or whatever, like the last thing you want is an extra 20 pounds on your back. But it’s known like in the, in climbing, there’s something called a gearhead, which is somebody that has like a lot of gear and there’s nothing wrong with that.

But as you get better, you become more of a minimalist. When I first started climbing technical mountains, with rock and ice and ropes and all that kind of stuff I had a lot of stuff, but then later I got into the fast and light camp, which, so my climb partner at the time, we’d roll up at 3:00 PM.

Somewhere, hike in, get up on the glacier. I wouldn’t even have a sleeping bag. I would sleep in my backpack, like my legs in my backpack. And then I think I had a short pad and I just had my, a big down jacket and a bivy sack, not even a sleeping bag. And then when the sun would rise, we’d.

Before the ice of the face. There’s a, this north face of this mountain that we were climbing called I think this one was Mount Baker. We had to get through it before it warmed up. So all the stuff we were hitting with our icees and crampons and everything else doesn’t start like deteriorating in the sun.

Yeah. Because it freezes during the night. And that particular climb, we did successfully make it to the top, but it was totally like de deter starting to deteriorate right as we got through the really hard parts of it. So if we’d been a few seconds, or not seconds, but minutes or hours later, it would not have been possible and we would’ve either had to turn around or faced some challenges.

Yeah. But that’s fast and light, so sometimes less is more. And I’ve also been caught out before, like when I thought I was gonna be doing a day trip and I ended up like having to sleep out without a tent or anything. It just teaches you those lessons as like, how can I be self-sufficient with very little?

And we’ve seen like the whatever the mu the movie is about Alex Honnold climbing without ropes free soloing and stuff. That’s like an extreme example of that. But for, in most cases, tying it all into WordPress. Guilty is charged. My first site’s probably had 80 plug-ins on ’em right now.

Right now I just, it’s not so much about the number, it’s just more about, let me just use as few tools made by as few different companies as possible to get the job done. And particularly in the context of online learning. Flashy like website is not what it’s all about. It’s all about the content and the instructional design and stuff like that.

That’s what really matters. So fast and light, that’s what I like about just using native WordPress and a few tools to create some kind of business outcome or learning opportunity or whatever kind of site we’re trying to build.

Will Middleton: That makes sense. And I really like that analogy or like metaphor where.

It’s almost like climbing. So with the free solo where you have no equipment, you’re just climbing no ropes, that’s like custom coating website from scratch. Just did it all on your own, wrote the php, put it on a web server. Yeah. And it’s launched. And then maybe WordPress is like having a backpack that you can include tools in like these plugins and themes to extend the functionality and make it a little more accessible to climb.

It would be like the equivalent of a backpack. And then the themes and plugins that we add to the site are things we’re putting in the backpack. And so we find ourselves putting a ton of stuff in the backpack, our first few hikes, and then we get more minimalistic with it. Does that analogy kind of track for you where now the page biller functionality is coming into the core WordPress?

So it’s like a part of your backpack. You don’t even need that as an item within your backpack anymore because it’s included.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s two things, like the tools evolve over time. Like when I first started at Rock Climb as an example, the ropes were like 12 millimeters thick. But then as I got, as the technology evolved, the ropes got stronger and thinner.

So they got lighter, more water resistant, like waterproof, better and stronger with like less. So like the tools change as you go. And then at the same time, And climbing as an example you get physically stronger and more skilled at moving through the landscape, whatever kind of terrain you’re on.

Which is like building a website. Like the tools are getting better. You’re getting better and your ability to use the tools is getting better. Your ability to understand where you are and what you need to do is getting better. Your ability to anticipate what’s coming next is getting better.

So all of that is coming together to make you a better climber or website builder. And it’s just part of the process. It’s just like learning to walk. It’s not unique to climbing or anything like that. You just get better. And when it comes to learning to walk, from a baby crawling and all that.

It’s really a choice of like, how far do you want to go? Do you want to become an ultramarathon runner or are you good with just walking? Which is fine. There’s no it’s fine, whatever anybody wants to do. But when you approach website building like a like a crafts person’s approach, You know that you want to continually get better and better.

You’re gonna start as the tools and the environment and your skills get better, you’re gonna become like a finely tuned athlete of website building.

Will Middleton: Yeah. And so I’m curious with With all that about what sort of makes Sky Pilot a unique part of this tool set. And like you mentioned earlier in the interview, investing in WordPress is really what we’re doing by creating a theme that works with the new full site editor.

Instead of we, when creating a WordPress theme, we could just make our own theme panel and set all the settings there and completely ignore that the full site editor exists. Cuz the theme really does control a lot of the website. But like you mentioned earlier, we’re leaning in. To the WordPress 6.0 that released just earlier this year and creating that product.

So that makes sense. Like investing in the technology, in, in the analogy like investing in the ropes to get thinner and stronger. My question is, what makes Sky Pilot unique and what makes it something that people will want to include? In their tool set in their backpack for their climbs of building websites.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s a great question. Bring me in if I get off track, but climbing a mountain. Sometimes it’s important to reduce things down to first principles. So why do I want to climb a mountain? Why am I here? This is like the first question, which is like what are we trying to achieve or what are we.

What are we trying to do here? So if a little bit more about mountain climbing and then I’ll bring, I’ll tie it all together. There’s, in, in rock climbing, there’s something called trad or traditional climbing, which means. You’re climbing and you’re putting in gear as you go, like in cracks and carabiners and to pass the rope through.

So if you fall, it like reduces your fall to 20 feet instead of 200 feet or something like that. So that’s traditional climbing. And if you do that without gear, you’re free sailing, but that’s traditional climbing. But then what happens is. Then P Rock climbers started putting bolts into rocks. So that they could get through areas that were either too hard or there was nowhere to place natural protection.

And people wanted to climb it, but they didn’t necessarily wanna free solo it. And then what happened is we created gems, indoor plastic wood gyms for climbing. All that is fine. But why are you climbing if you’re, if your goal is to. Go back to the beginning. And it’s a you’re trying to become the best version of yourself.

You’re trying to connect with nature. You’re trying to figure out your place in the universe. You are trying to make yourself feel small, like basically standing in like this creation of like natural wonder. Start from there, right? There’s nothing I’ve been, I’ve gym climbed too. I’ve bolded in gyms and does stuff.

There’s nothing wrong with that. But building websites is like that too. If you’re if you’re just looking at native WordPress, like to democratize publishing, to give people a voice, to give to democratize e-commerce. Make it so anybody can create a store anywhere on the internet and sell all over the world or whatever.

We do it at Lifter LMS to democratize publishing or education and. That’s why we contribute the free core Lifter LMS plug into the world for complete free. But in terms of just starting at the very beginning, like for an education site, I have something I want to teach. Who am I helping? Why do I want to teach this person?

Do I have the skills to deliver that? Can I figure out the instructional design? LifterLMS, as an example, comes in and helps provide a framework course structure for you to build in a learning experience. Student dashboard, all that stuff for you to build in. But WordPress is doing the same thing right beside LifterLms. Which is while it’s lifter is democratizing the pu, the course creation, the digital classroom.

WordPress is just right there, natively giving you the tools to publish. And if you go back to first principles. The first time I built a website and I got the webpage up without writing a single line of code. And this idea that this webpage is viewable from anywhere in the world on any device with an internet connection is mind blowing.

Like the power of that is insane. And then you go to stuff like Kevin Kelly’s thousand True fans. A thousand people paying you a hundred dollars a year, that’s a full-time salary. Even if you you’re in some micro niche, you only need a thousand people paying you a hundred dollars a year to have like a.

A full-time income or whatever. That’s like the dream anyways. But so like the way WordPress works in terms of blocks and componentized building it’s one piece, one piece at a time. What do you want? Like when you see it in your mind, okay, I want three columns. This one video here, this here, contact form here, whatever.

You just press the button and then you can group things together. And WordPress, just like lifter is structured data. So like lifter structures, learning content in certain ways, and you can modify that. WordPress has its native structure and templates, and you can modify that. So really it’s a tool for people with a vision of something that they want to do. And create and some kind of value they want to create to be. I think that the number one trick to being good with the block editor or any tool is to actually have strong vision of what are we trying to do here?

Myself included. I get distracted by tools. I’m like, oh wow, this plugin has all these different things or these blocks do all this kind of cool stuff, and all of a sudden I’m building a table with all this stuff and I’m like, cool. That’s how we learn. Just like climbing and messing around trying to get up something.

But yeah. What makes, what makes Sky Pilot. Unique in the context of modern WordPress is it’s built with exclusive focus on online learning websites. And this goes, again, goes back to first principles. If the first principle is I wanna make as much money as possible, I create a theme that’s a Swiss Army knife for everything, right?

And the first principal approached the sky Pilot. The goal is not to create as much money as possible, is to create the ultimate theme for online learning and membership sites only. That’s it. So extreme focus, that’s number one. Number two is by a rising tide raises all boats. By stepping in and doing things the WordPress way and participating and contributing with the cutting edge of where it’s going and leveraging the benefits that come from that, like speed.

All the community contributions of different blocks and things that are now available from the block editor that any website anywhere in the world can use is huge. So those. Basically just being ultra-modern. And then the third thing is really just the there’s there’s SEO benefits in the way Sky Pilot is laid out with correct, correctly.

Doing the H one s and for the site titles and all that stuff. So there’s the SEO thing is there the speed is there. The, everything we’ve learned from working with tens or even hundreds of thousands of course creators over more than a decade is baked into like the decisions of what should we do here?

What should we do here? What people like in, in the dashboard, a student dashboard. It’s all just baked in sometimes after lifter LMS is getting close to nine years old, I believe. And so when you take a decade, almost a decade’s worth of experience, and if you count our agency work before that, So over a decade in the e-learning space.

And before that, I have my own time in the course creator space and. The online marketing, sales, the, being a leader, manager, teacher person. Myself all that is just like super focused on the product of Lifter L and Medicine. How do we give people a platform to make that site beautiful, functional, customizable through Sky Pilot?

That’s what it’s all about.

Will Middleton: That’s awesome. I really love the metaphor, and we do. We dove into a lot of epic abstract ideas around why WordPress, the block editor and Sky Pilot are. Options that, that we’re really excited about and are excited to get the community involved with as well.

And so we spoke a lot to the abstract benefits. But for those, there are a lot of concrete benefits like you’re talking about too, like with SEO optimization of headings. And readability for accessibility tools and all kinds of other concrete sort of features that are amazing in Sky Pilot. And so coming to the end of the show here. I wanted to thank you for joining me today and sharing your experience around everything, e-learning, WordPress and Sky Pilot.

But do you have any final words for the audience. And where people would want to go next in order to check out some more of the concrete examples of what makes Sky Pilot.

Chris Badgett: great. Yeah. Head on over to the LifterLMS blog where there’ll be an article about Sky Pilot. We also use our own products at LifterLms.

If you go to the Lifter LMS Academy, That’s powered by Sky Pilot. It’s a nice, simple implementation of it. You can check it out. We’ve also got demo sites our $1 30 day demo. Where you can, if you prefer to just play around with it yourself, you get a sandbox environment to play around with it.

And of course, you can buy the product. I’d recommend if you’re watching this live, get it while it’s on sale and lock in the cheaper. Price. It’s also included in what we call the Universe Bundle and the Infinity Bundle. And yeah, check it out. And, this is just version 1.0 of Sky Pilot and I’m so excited with all the plans and stuff.

I can’t get too much into the details of what’s coming next. But yeah go get Sky Pilot, try it out and give yourself. The time and the space to play around with the WordPress Block editor. And a new modern full site editing theme like Sky Pilot, there is a learning curve. But once you get into it. It’s all this like templating and template parts and all the design controls and options. It’s gonna start making sense and you’ll start evolving with the product.

So I just, I recommend you get in the sandbox and start playing.

Will Middleton: Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me and to everyone watching, we’ll see you in the next episode.

Chris Badgett: Thanks, Will.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post Sky Pilot Is The New Way to Build Online Learning Platforms with WordPress appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Jake Davey shared his experience and expertise in using Instagram for marketing and lead generation.

Jake Davey is a social media expert who specializes in Instagram. He is the owner of a website called Jakeadamdavey. He helps businesses, entrepreneurs, and experts grow their audience and run successful businesses on Instagram.

Jake explains that Instagram is different from other social media platforms because it focuses on mobile use and has a range of built-in tools that allow business owners, entrepreneurs, and experts to connect with a global audience, grow their audience, and run a full business.

He also notes that Instagram users can use clickable links in their bio, stories, and direct messages. In terms of the different Instagram features, the feed is the main way users grow their audience by sharing posts, pictures, and reels. Instagram stories are a screen experience that allows users to share short-form videos, while direct messages are a more powerful way to move people towards a sales conversation.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of Lifter l m s, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hey, hello and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast. I’m joined by a special guest from across the pond. His name is Jake Davy. You can find him@jakeadamdavy.com slash brand. We’re gonna be getting into Instagram, how to leverage it. If you’re a course creator or a coach, or if you have an agency, before we go into the details, welcome to the show, Jake.

Jake Davey: It’s great to have you on. Thanks, Chris. It’s nice to be here. I’ve been looking forward to this yeah. I appreciate the opportunity to come and speak with your audience. I’m with you, of course.

Chris Badgett: Awesome, man. Just at a high level, before we get into it, How does Instagram differ from other platforms like Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter?

What is the Instagram kind of segment of different differentiation in the space?

Jake Davey: Yeah. The, so the first thing I’d say is that h it’s changed over the years and, there’s been a clear. Shift in the platform, what it looks like, how it works, how people can benefit from it over the past few years.

And for some people that’s caused a little bit of frustration for some people. That’s been very exciting. But where we are now, and again, very kind of high level is. The majority of functionality for Instagram happens on the phone. And so it means that as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, as an expert, somebody who wants to get their message out there, it means you can connect with a global audience and they’re literally carrying you around in their pocket.

The other thing that, that I like about Instagram, which doesn’t always feature on other spaces is that you it really does have everything built in the sense of you’ve got the opportunity to grow an audience and reach an audience. Through things like reels, but then you’ve also got the kind of the, I don’t say sniper tools, but something that’s a little bit more powerful in terms of lead gen and actually moving people towards a sales conversation, which is Instagram stories and then direct messages.

So it really, it can be a platform where somebody can run a full business through that one platform alone. And you’re

Chris Badgett: And you’re already getting into it, but one of the things that I’ve always found quote challenging, and I put that in quotes, is cuz it maybe it’s actually an opportunity, is that i’ll, I’ve always thought that kind of links were the currency of the internet and Sure.

In Instagram we can get one link in our bio, but what would you say to somebody who’s concerned that you can’t really drop links in Instagram the way you can in other social media posts?

Jake Davey: Yeah it’s a great question. And it’s something I’ve been focused with the business on Instagram since 2016, so it’s been something that we’ve realized right from the start.

With this platform. The, I guess the thing I would. Say is that there are it’s, there are all options to use links and it comes down to how do you use them most effectively. And the link in the bio is the main one that I think most people know about. The second one, which I generally suggest people use or second and third, are those where you can have a link in your story.

And then those where you can have a link a clickable link in the direct message and so generally those tend to be the ones that I personally would recommend and that comes back to how are we using the platform in the first place. Our kind of message, our overarching theme with our clients is that we market publicly.

And we sell privately. That’s why people, people don’t go social media to be sold to. And so long as we get that balance right at the start in terms of what we’re showing public facing, then we can move people through the process, warm them up in that no and trust relationship and bring them into a, an opportunity where you can actually embed links.

And generally it’s for a warmer audience, people that are more likely to take action and first, the

Chris Badgett: uninitiated, could you just briefly touch on the difference between the feed, a story and a direct message?

Jake Davey: Sure. Yeah. So the Instagram feed is if somebody opens up their phone, maybe having never used the platform before or used it quite infrequently the Instagram feed, like Facebook Twitter, I guess TikTok is where you open at your phone and you can scroll through and you generally see other people’s content, other people’s pictures, other people’s post, other people’s videos.

And you can contribute to that by sharing your own post, your own pictures, your own reels reels being short video and tho that content can be seen by a, an audience across Instagram. And it can also is the kind of the main way that you would grow your audience. The Instagram stories, which is the second part you mentioned stories are.

It’s like a whole screen experience similar to what you would expect on most of the platforms. Now, whole screen experience stays on the platform for 24 hours. A lot more immersive can be a lot more personal, a bit more off the cuff. You wouldn’t necessarily use stories to grow your audience, but you would use stories to engage your existing followers.

And direct message is again, Very simple terms is like email, text message, WhatsApp inside of the Instagram platform that allows you to speak to one or a group of people in a, ultimately in a private format.

Chris Badgett: And what are reels? Or is that’s an Instagram thing, right? Reels and stories.

I’m personally confused on the difference. Okay. Yeah,

Jake Davey: no problem. So reels the simplest way. I’m really glad you asked that because the people, one, one of that, but they don’t ask. So the simple explanation is that reels equals short video. It was predicted in 2017 that by this year I think 85% of the internet would be video, something crazy like that.

And that was before they knew about Covid, right? So we are definitely in a world today where 85% plus of the internet is video. And that includes things like this and, Netflix and all that other good stuff. Reels are short video, which is generally anything up to say 30 seconds or so, people can go longer.

But that would be short video, a bit like a TikTok. And they can be used on the main feed. So you can share a short video, you can share a reel, and it can go to a potentially global audience. Stories can be video, they can also be pictures but that is something that you would share just to your audience and it shows up in a slightly different part on Instagram.

Chris Badgett: Does one of those besides direct message have more reach at least today?

Jake Davey: Rios. So Rios are the thing that, that will give you the greatest amount of reach right now. We’re seeing clients as an example. We had a message from a client last week literally last week. It was incredible. She had used one of the strategies that we teach, one of the specific things we share about Rios.

She’d be doing it for a year. She had about 300 followers. To that point, she’d used some of the things that we’d shared. One of her reels went viral, it had over 10 million views, and she’s now on 18, 19,000 followers. Wow. That, of course, we share the best version. Of course, we share the best stories.

Of course we do. But it just shows that the potential there, so the reach can be absolutely enormous and Instagram reels are definitely the way to do it. Awesome.

Chris Badgett: And now let’s handle some objections for me. One thing I hear from the expert industry and myself.

An example as like a, as a software guy, like I have an online course software at Lifter l m s. If our content is not necessarily super visual, like for example, Fitness instructor or yoga instructor to me seems like classic Instagram use case. But what if our expertise is less visual and cinematic or whatever.

How can we still leverage Instagram if we’re not if our modality isn’t like super flashy visual aesthetic, if you will.

Jake Davey: Yeah. So this, I guess two. Two ways I would answer that. The first is let’s assume that it wasn’t the flashiest industry, but you were still, say, in a position where you could put your face out there.

So let’s say, for example, a solicitor right, or a lawyer they might not have the type of content that you think this could be really flashy and exciting. But what they can do is it still makes sense for them to speak to their audience and put their face out there. So in that instance, we would generally recommend, still going down the Instagram reel’s route, short video.

Even though it brings people outta their comfort zone just to, people do business with people. And so the opportunity to connect with your audience and talk about topics that are relevant for their audience will be a natural first step for, say, software companies and those where they generally are a lot more behind the scenes.

First thing I’d say is or we wouldn’t associate with kind of pretty pictures and search. I would then go down the route of some of the lifestyle brands would generally be my advice. And I’ll explain what I mean by that in a minute, but just to reframe that. I’m a huge believer that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

Like the last thing I want our clients to do is to have to come or feel, not, they don’t have to do anything, but feel that they have to come up with something which is brand new, totally revolutionary, is just absolutely in, incredible to get the thing that they want, the outcome that they want.

And the reality is that they’re already people on Instagram doing very similar, if not the same to what they’re doing already. So it’s about identifying those people and then how do they model that? And so in that instance, the first thing I would say is, How do we identify some of the market leaders and experts in what they’re doing?

And take a look at what’s already working, would be my natural first step. So it might require a little bit of digging. The second angle would be around the lifestyle signs. And even though, you could say these companies are still pretty visual, but I’d be looking at companies like, GoPro, obviously they they have a lot of user generated content.

Patagonia target, for example do excellent marketing. Again, they’re not software, they’re obviously a store,

Chris Badgett: but they’re a boring business, if you will.

Jake Davey: Yeah. Exactly. People wouldn’t necessarily get excited about that, but I would say Target is one of the best certainly in, in recent years, one of the best accounts that I’ve looked at in terms of their marketing thinks excellent.

The, yeah it comes down to we just gotta think a little bit outside the box, and it’s very much about getting people to buy into you and what you’re about and the lifestyle side.

Chris Badgett: All right. How do we do DM without becoming a spammer? And I ask that in the context of myself as a guy who’s been online for a while, I get a lot of direct message spam, not just Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, everywhere else.

Like how do we DM. With care.

Jake Davey: Yeah. So it used to be a few years ago that you could literally access anybody, you could DM anybody on the pla you still can

Chris Badgett: like, Hey Gary Vaynerchuk, how you doing?

Jake Davey: Yeah, exactly right. Yeah. So Gary v would, Gary, we, I think you know, Gary v’s.

Got the videos where he is, he sat in his barbers and he is DMing people in the local area and stuff. I remember that video fondly, excuse me. And So that of, that’s one thing that doesn’t quite work as, as well anymore. One of the ways that generally I, I would encourage our clients to do it is by going through stories.

So generally, if people have an active story, by engaging with that story, replying to that story, and actually starting a, an authentic conversation, it just gives more of an in as opposed to a cold dm. There of course will be accounts where they don’t have active stories. And so in that instance, I would actually start on the content first.

I would start by engaging with their content first, and then you would hope to move that into a direct message conversation.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And what, one more objection for you is what about a mark content marketer or social media marketer that’s concerned with. A lack of evergreen content. If I get it, if I really focus on Instagram, am I gonna get myself on a content treadmill that’s gonna be hard to maintain?

Or is there some evergreen benefits to Instagram content?

Jake Davey: Yeah, it’s a, yeah, again, excuse me. It’s a great question and it’s something that. We’ve even reviewed ourselves recently. And we’re constantly looking at the type of, if I personally am a big fan of Evergreen, I like to think that if I’m gonna take the time to do something, we don’t use it once, and then that’s it.

So I totally get that. The, there’s a couple of things that I would say to that. The first is, the number one type of content I’m encouraging our clients to create is reels. And that’s ver ultimately vertical video. And so vertical video now works on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube.

So it, it immediately allows you, with the click of a few buttons, that you can multiply that content and that reach and that engagement and put it across multiple platforms.

Chris Badgett: Quick side note there, is it okay to repurpose that, that vertical video across multiple platforms, is there any harm in doing that?

I wouldn’t have thought.

Jake Davey: So what the only suggestion I would have is I probably wouldn’t put exactly the same post out on exactly the same day. Let’s say you’ve got a week’s worth of content, whatever you put out on Monday, on TikTok, you would put out maybe on Friday, on Instagram, for example.

But I wouldn’t see anything like that. There was a few issues when people used to use their TikTok videos and put ’em on Instagram and it had the TikTok logo. Instagram would reduce the reach for those posts. But in terms of if it’s a, if it’s the pure video, like in its purest form and putting it out there, then I wouldn’t see an issue with that at all.

So that’s the first thing. The second thing in terms of getting on the content treadmill, again I don’t wanna do that. So I’m looking at well solutions for that for myself, but then also for our clients, and this is where we have something which is called six second reels. So we have a specific formula which which we follow and we encourage our clients to follow, which is called six second reels, which is ultimately we focus more on the process and the outcome.

And by that I ideally, I’m encouraging our clients to create short video, which is up to six seconds, obviously a bit longer, sometimes shorter, sometimes. So it doesn’t take ages and ages to create. They can do a whole month of con worth of content in less than 90 days a month, sorry, in less than 90 minutes a month.

So less than 90 minutes a month, a full month of content that can be across four platforms. I think that’s pretty good right now. I.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And what what’s a posting frequency you recommend? Is this like daily, hourly, weekly? Yeah. Yeah

Jake Davey: Like my heart skipped a beat then. No I personally am, I encourage daily, I think.

I think that’s, That will be the right frequency for me. You will still see people that, that hits it really hard. I know there’s, TikTok, of course, is a newer platform and one of the strategies there seems to be, 5, 6, 7, 8 posts a day. Which again, I think for many people is nauseating.

So I’m a big, I’m a big one on consistency. There’s two key stakeholders here. That we’ve gotta be consistent for. One of those is the audience. It’s one of the fastest way people can build trust. Consistency equals reliability, equals trust. And I think if as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, or as a company, brand, if you can be shown to do the basics consistently and do them right, then you can be trusted in other areas.

But then of course for Instagram, Instagram’s looking for consistency as well. And I think if we give, if we feed Instagram, feed the beast, so to speak then again we give ourselves the best opportunity to get the return that we want as well. Let’s get into

Chris Badgett: systems. What do you recommend for a beginner who’s excited about leveraging Instagram for themselves or for their client to get more leads in sales?

Jake Davey: So, the the fir the first step is to ultimately ensure that they have set up their profile the right way. Let’s take a beginner. So the first thing is it’s a six step process that we share. Number one is to get absolutely clear on what they do, who they do it for, and who their market leaders are.

So those are the first step that I would recommend. From there, I would encourage them to, Optimize their profile. Put all their highlights on their profile, position themselves as an author, as an expert. Quick tip for people that are watching would be put your best, like your absolute standout headline as your, the first line of your bio.

And the reason is firstly, People generally will read the first line more than the rest of it. But also on older devices, like smaller mobile phones and such, I’m holding a phone up at the moment. But on older devices, generally it will only show the first line or so, and then it has a See more link. So I would recommend people put their best features in there and of course, very high level, but, Getting that profile in order is first.

Then I’ll be looking at content strategy again based on maybe market leaders. If they’re coming at this completely green and completely new, then I’ll be looking at what are other people in the space doing? Let’s get some reels out there, let’s do this consistently. Let’s make sure we’re speaking directly to the audience and solving a problem.

From there, I would be looking at growth strategies. We teach three in particular the most powerful. Those is something called growth loops, which would allow people to grow, a few thousand followers in 24, 48 hours. And as you then grow your audience, then the key thing is to capture people with your Instagram stories.

Instagram does a lot of the heavy lifting, and it will generally show the top 10 to 15% of your audience, as in the most engaged followers that you have. It will show them your stories as a priority at the top of their screen. And so as you grow on your audience, if you can get those stories going consistently and moving people off the platform into a landing page. A lead magnet register for a training, booking a call, whatever that might be, that’s your first step.

And if that, If they’re not taking action on the links, there is a way you can see who has viewed your stories and that’s where I would then be going. And we use this to great effect certainly in the last couple of years where you look at people that viewed your stories and then you follow up with those people that have viewed the stories and engage with them that way.

So that is a high level ultimately of exactly what we teach.

Chris Badgett: And all this is without paid ads.

Jake Davey: Yeah. Now we, we use paid ads in our business and we have clients who do go to paid ads depending on, where they are in their business. But generally, the first steps I’m a big fan of encouraging people to at least generate a handful of sales in what they’re doing before they even consider payouts.

I’d like them to build up a bit of a budget before they even look at paid traffic. And what,

Chris Badgett: What do you have, what advice do you have for a pro user who may not know your exact systems and methods, but, they’ve got tractions, they’ve got several thousand followers, and they’re regularly producing content for their audience.

What can they do to grow,

Jake Davey: what to grow at that stage? I would be looking at two things. I’ll be looking at something called growth loops which is where ultimately you tap into a Larger influencers who will promote you from their accounts and you can you can benefit from their followers.

So that will, that’s the, again, very simplified version of that. So you ultimately buy into a promotion from a, an influencer, they will promote you and they’ll, they will ultimately drive a handful more than a handful you would hope of their followers to your Instagram account. The second is I would also then be looking at strategic partnerships.

So I’ll be looking at who are the people who serve the same audience as me, but are non-compete? And again, for a simple version, you might have a yoga instructor and a I dunno, a vegetarian chef. Of course. I realize that’s, huge generalization, A bit of stereotyping, but let’s just keep it simple.

We would generally assume that people that are into vegetarian cooking and vegan cooking such may also. Be making mindful choices about their, their exercise and such. So I would then also be looking at strategic partners to, to benefit with that growth. And the only other thing I would add is I’d really be looking at, am I converting my audience?

We’ve had people that have come to us with thou, tens of thousands of followers, and they haven’t been generating any sales. And so if they’re not converting their audience, then something in that process is missing. They’re ultimately not making the move from growth and followers into private conversations, and maybe they don’t have a system in place to be able to do that.

Is there a price

Chris Badgett: point? Where it makes sense. And what I mean is if we’re getting into DMing people and we’re sending people to a sales conversation or a webinar, is there a price point at which it just doesn’t make sense? I guess what I’m saying is does this only work for a high ticket businesses or can it work for really any price point?

Jake Davey: I think it can. I think it can work for any price point. It’s. It, it purely depends on the model ultimately. We, I’m a big believer that if people follow the steps and follow the system, that they will be able to drive, traffic into their business. Now if they have a super low ticket mo again, think of people like, the Morrison brothers, for example, that have, I think it’s seven or $10 low ticket entry or something like that.

Chris Badgett: And who are the Morrison brothers? I actually don’t know. Who is

Jake Davey: that? Oh an Anthony and Adrian Morrison. I think they, they did a lot through possibly Shopify maybe. I, again it’s, but they the only reason they come to mind is cuz they’ve used Instagram a lot.

They’ve promoted and talked about the benefits of Instagram a lot. And they have a low ticket offer. But of course, part of that process, anyway part of the process generally that we recommend with our clients is building a database. And so does it only work for low ticket? I’m sorry?

Does it only work for high ticket? No, I don’t think so. I think it works for low ticket as well. It ultimately is about putting the right offers in front of the right audience, but it doesn’t I guess the thing I would emphasize is that obviously you will know this, but again, just clarify for the audience is that the, the bigger the investment, the bigger the ask.

And therefore if it’s a low price point or a low ticket, if it’s a $7, you could be selling that or $47. You could be selling that directly from your stories and you never need to DM anybody. If it’s getting people onto a phone call or investing, a few hundred dollars perhaps, or a few thousand dollars, then you probably do need to go through that process of dms.

So I think there is that balance between the two. And if it’s low ticket, then it probably requires fewer things on the front end in terms of the dms, but you would want those things in your stories. You’d want those links in the right places on your profile as well to still drive your traffic into the right part of the business.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Can you tell us a little more about buying into a promotion of an influencer? What does that mean and how do we do it? Yeah.

Jake Davey: So the let let take a, so if we, let’s take an example. Let’s say you are a let’s say you’re in the fitness industry and you’ve got 50,000 followers.

And that the first thing is that you are looking out for people in that space who offer. Promotions. And so there are specific companies that you might find and specific influences that will do this, but there may be influencers who have, let’s say a million or 2 million or 5 million followers and they will run a promotion where they will speak to their audience and they will basically say I’m running a competition.

This is the giveaway. It’s some crazy giveaway. Either cash or devices or whatever it might be that’s appealing and relevant for that audience. All you need to do to enter is do A, B, C, D, E, and one of those things is go and follow all the people that I’m following. And so this influencer will reduce the number of people that they’re following down to anybody who is involved in that route.

So what that means is that if you are one of the people that buys into that promotion, you are one of the people that influencer with 2 million, 5 million followers is following. And therefore you would benefit from all of their act. Realistically it’s their most active, most engaged audience who are most hungry for that particular offer that are then gonna come and follow you as part of that.

And It can be it’s ultimately, it’s just another way, it’s another way of marketing. And people will invest anywhere from, $10, $50 up to 5,000, 10,000, $50,000 into these engagement groups, depending on who’s in the promotion, what the offers are, what the benefits are, what the outcomes could be as well.

So one of the things again, that we teach is how to find those groups. And then how to set up and position your account and your content the right way and your follow up so that if, let’s say somebody promotes you, you’ve got an influx of, I don’t know, let’s say conservative, 5,000 followers, then what journey do those 5,000 followers go on where you could potentially convert them into leads, clients, and customers?

That is

Chris Badgett: awesome. I didn’t even know that existed. And you said there’s There’s you can work with influencers directly, but there’s also like agencies or organizations that help set up those collaborations. Is that right? Yeah,

Jake Davey: So that the influencer, let’s say, who’s got the 2 million followers, they probably.

They wouldn’t have had much idea about that originally. They will have been approached by somebody who said, I’ve got a really good idea where I can help you make some money here. And here’s how it works. So yeah, generally there will be a, middle person that gets involved. It offers those promotions.

So there’s, yeah, there’s multiple out there where you can, yeah, you can ultimately leverage those types of group those types of promotions and therefore that type of growth.

Chris Badgett: Tell us about your webinar@jakeadamdavy.com slash brand. What can people find when they go to jake adam davy.com/brand?

Jake Davey: So there, there is a, there’s a training where we We ultimately walk through the steps similar to what we’ve talked about today, but obviously with visuals and kind of graphics and screenshots and examples about exactly that. How the best way for people to firstly grow their audience. Sec firstly, who it’s for and who are the types of businesses that would benefit from this.

From there, it goes into how you grow your audience. Then we look at how you convert your audience, and then finally different ways that you can monetize. Again, pretty high level, but that’s the it’s more or less what we’ve covered today, but with visuals.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Let’s let’s land the plane on, let’s say somebody’s creating an online course or a membership site with Lifter, LMS or any other tool and.

What are like three classic mistakes to avoid when approaching Instagram? If we’re like, okay, I’m gonna commit to Instagram and see if I can grow this marketing channel. What are some three mistakes to avoid?

Jake Davey: So the first mistake is selling publicly. It, it’s landing on Instagram and assuming I’ve got a product, therefore people want to buy it.

And as we know we need to do a little bit more than that. So the first thing I’d say is just being aware of why people are on Instagram in the first place, why people are on social media in the first place and going on there to market publicly and ultimately sell privately, which we’d said before.

The second thing I would suggest is really fo focusing on looking at processes and systems. In Instagram on one hand is beautiful pictures and the. Photo influencers and the celebrities and all this kind of thing. But I processes and so for me, it needs to have a system and a process, and I want to be able to approach it methodically.

So I, I guess the recommendation. Second thing I would have is make sure that it’s a tool that you are using a. Rather than it using you. You don’t wanna be sat there scrolling, watching other people’s content cuz you are being influenced by others. Use it as a tool where you are almost removed from it.

Set up systems, processes so that you can do the influencing of over others. And then the third element is, I guess it might be a little bit cliche. But I would generally say just use it as a tool to actually have fun and build relationships with people. Because, It’s exactly the same as if you were talking to somebody you know what?

Like we’re speaking right now. Or if you’re talking to somebody face to face. I think a big thing in this, in 2023. And moving forward is certainly in the uk finances for many people have been quite tight recently. It may be impacting globally. And so if people want to firstly acquire customers. Then keep their customers, then there needs to be some degree of relationship built up.

And I think people want that. I think we’re crying out for connection. With other people. And it doesn’t have to take long, I think that’s a misconception. The actual relationship side I think can be very enjoyable and very gratifying. And it means that you’ve got, you’ve got satisfied customers as well.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s. Jake Davy, he’s at jake. Adam davy.com/brand. Jake, thanks so much for coming on the show and sharing your Instagram with wisdom with us today. Is there anywhere else people can connect with you besides jake adam davy.com/brand, perhaps on Instagram.

Jake Davey: Yeah, Instagram’s a good one.

Yeah. Yeah, Instagram. So again, it’s just my full name. It’s Jake, Adam Davy. People are welcome to connect with there. Send me a hello. And yeah just keen to me people see what they’re doing, see if it’s something that we might be able to support them with if they want to grow their drive more traffic into their business.

Yeah, more than happy to, to connect with people on Instagram as well.

Chris Badgett: Thanks, Jake. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post How to Get Clients from Instagram with Jake Davey appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Eric shares his experience with using LifterLMS for creating online courses. He also talks about the hosting issues he faced with major hosting providers and the high costs involved in upgrading plans during traffic spikes.

Eric Gracieta is owner of WP Unchained, a managed WordPress hosting service. Eric created WP Unchained to solve the hosting problems of clients. Eric’s agency is called Brockway Production.

He talks about his solution to this problem, WP Unchained, which is a “done-for-you” hosting service that looks at the site’s pain points and tries to solve them. He explains that hosting LMS and CRM websites can be more challenging as they may need more powerful servers to handle spikes in traffic and CPU utilization.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of lifter l m s, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Eric Gracieta. He’s from France, he is been in WordPress for a very long time. He’s a power user of Lifterlms. His agency is called Brockway Production, and he’s built a really cool project called WP unchained.io, which we’ll get into in the show. But first, welcome to the call. Eric,

Eric Gracieta: Thank you for Amy.

Chris Badgett: I love getting a chance to talk to people in the WordPress community, people who build cool things with lifter l m s. Where did your lifter l m s story begin? What, how long ago was that and what happened?

Eric Gracieta: Oh, it was like a long time ago already, like a few version back, I think. Well, I am created for a client yoga online courses. Okay. With a lot, a lot of courses. And yeah, there has been up and down mostly the done, mostly route to hosting. So yes, that’s what what we gonna talk right now, I think. But yeah, and it begins there. And after that like some I have add some issue with hosting with, for other site and everything. And so this is why I created the, the broadband chain right now.

Chris Badgett: Well, tell us, tell us about WP Unchained. What, what is it?

Eric Gracieta: Basically it’s done for you hosting solution. Not, maybe not solution, but service. Like we look at your site, what, what are your main pain issue with that and your currenting? And we try to solve that. Mm, of course we do, but. But yeah, we, I I want to solve the hosting problem of many users that use lms CRM and stuff like that on that really taking off lately on WordPress.

Chris Badgett: So what kind of problems does your hosting solve? Like why did you go to the, all the effort to make it?

Eric Gracieta: I think maybe I, I had some client with Mar like major hosting solution. Maybe we can name those. I’m not sure. Yeah,

Chris Badgett: That’s fine. That’s.

Eric Gracieta: Fine. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Like the kinta and those sort of things. And despite like spending half a thousand or thousand dollar a per month and more, sometimes there was still some issue with Don time. And, and slow, not because of services bad per se. But because of like s site and other sites like that, you, you can have use, use spike of traffic. And sometime for that you need to have a plan like is like 4,000 a month or more.

And you don’t need that like the whole month of course, just maybe during the strike, but it’s end costing a lot of money and a lot of issue with downtime when you need to reach for someone to upgrade your account and everything. So, or find your issue, so yeah, this is why I credit that. So I take care of that for them and everyone is happy, I guess.

Chris Badgett: So that is very cool. Very cool. What what makes the, you know, the, the more complex sites like the l m s websites harder to host, or they need better, you know, more unique hosting?

Eric Gracieta: Yeah, sometime it’s maybe because of limitation per they in place by the hosting providers to upsell you sometimes is that, or sometimes it is. The issue is that, yeah, you just need more poor, poor effort, powerful servers to enter energy, your spike and, and maybe this provider doesn’t provide that by default, you need to go to an like country representative or salesperson, and then we got you, like your huge, huge crowd, all that. So yeah, sometime, sometime it’s not the best to go for those type of host.

Sometime it’s really good depend on your site and your use case. For example, if you, if we deviate from LMS site, like CRM site, like that allow you to send a lot of emails in short amount of time when you monitor that, it creates a use spike of traffic and of C P U utilization and ization of the server when you send it, because you need a lot of power to send that. And you need a lot of power to handle the visits that the campaign is giving you.

Because if you send the campaign, nobody is clicking and visiting, then you have another issue. But if the campaign is successful, yeah, you will have a huge spike of traffic and you need to under that properly. So of course you have ging caching solution for that. But if you sell something, obviously at, at, at a moment in your campaign, people will, will eat a non cage space, for example, cart

Chris Badgett: Dashboard, studio.

Eric Gracieta: Yeah. A dashboard. A course obviously will maybe not be cashed, depend on the, on the course or, or the dashboard of your lms if they, is there a lot of anchor active element or like start and everything you want, you don’t want that to be cashed. So Yeah. In, in case of lms Yeah. When a lot of people are taking one course at the same time or hitting that dashboard, or maybe you lost an event special event.

Yeah. You need those people to, to not have a cash version of the page. So this is where you can have issue with Spike because Yes. Asked, asked a lot of people as the same server, so they will right limit you so you don’t impact like the 10,000 or they asked on the same server. Yeah. So

Chris Badgett: That makes sense. And on the, on a CRM site, are you talking about a, a WordPress site that hosts the CRM with like Groundhog or fluent crm, something like that?

Eric Gracieta: Yeah, stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Other clients that like have 400 front hundred K contacts on Wow. On the crm. So when they send the campaign, yeah, it’s pretty hard.

Chris Badgett: Neat. Yeah,

Eric Gracieta: I’ve always traffic,

Chris Badgett: I’ve always been fascinated with the WordPress CRMs are good, you know, so like if you can do it on WordPress, maybe you don’t need the male champ or the active campaign or the convert kit or whatever. Yeah.

Eric Gracieta: That, that was the main issue was us with this client with front K contacts, like

Chris Badgett: That would be very expensive,

Eric Gracieta: Right? Yeah. Active campaign was not an option. Like, if you are, if you already have like a hundred K, it’s like you, you don’t even have a a section for that on, on the website. It’s like call and call is mean, mean, like we will take all your money.

Chris Badgett: Oh, call for price. Yeah.

Eric Gracieta: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s awesome. Well, for those of you out there listening and watching, go check out WP unchained.io. That’s really cool what you’ve done there to, you know, provide more value and serve those niche websites that are, are, they’re more complex, they’re heavier, like not all. When the website is a C R M or an L M S or an e-commerce store, you know, those websites need to do a lot. And w it is funny, like you said, when people get successful on some of the, the major popular hosts out there, the price goes up exponentially. Yeah. But does it really need to, you know, and yeah, I’m

Eric Gracieta: Not that sure. Yeah, because, because I I’m not sure that you need that, like more support or more anything. Yeah. Maybe it’s cost them a little bit more to us user and 10 K client, but you, I don’t think you need more support or more anything, because if you’re successful with the platform, you already know the platform in and in and out. So maybe you cost them even less on support and stuff like that. So I’m not sure why it’s so exponential, actually. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Well, tell us about Brockway production. When did you first, what year did you first start building websites?

Eric Gracieta: Oh, it’s almost 10 years ago, so I’m getting old, I guess. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And was that with WordPress right away?

Eric Gracieta: Yeah. Yeah. I, I kind of created, like when I was younger with Ash, like by hand.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Eric Gracieta: Like when I was maybe 15 or something like that. And so more than 15 years ago, so and after that, yeah, I was like, hmm. It’s kind of tedious to redo everything every time. So I found like WordPress and when it was a time, like you have to choose between WordPress dr or stuff like that, and I, I dunno, WordPress like ticket or the right box for me and like seeing that 10 years later, yeah, I think I made the right choice.

Chris Badgett: I actually started with Ruple in 2007 or something like that, but yeah, I came to WordPress in 2008 and never looked back. Tell us tell us about your agency. Like what kind of projects do you do there?

Eric Gracieta: The agency is mainly website building, like small website l m s website. And mostly, mostly since day we do eCommerce website. So yeah, sometime LMS and eCommerce mix up together also. But yeah, mostly that, and this is why I created Prevent Chain because this is basically a service that I was provided providing for those clients without, without really creating a page from my website or an official page to describe this service or any website to describe that. It was like, okay, I have I have clients that have this need. I created a service for them, like just for them. And no, I releasing that to the world.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s awesome. What do you love about WooCommerce or what are, what are, tell us some stories from your WooCommerce experience.

Eric Gracieta: Is, that’s something I like and some I don’t like for sure with WooCommerce. What I like, it’s a really ecosystem. Like, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. Like 99% of the time. Some, someone will have come with a solution for the problem that you are facing or your client is facing. So it’s great to have that big ecosystem that I can’t find anywhere else, like in Shopify, posta shop or stuff like that.

So yeah. And it’s really open, have a lot of s to work with write a great documentation. There’s a lot to love with w performance not Ready. Yeah, it’s improving finally. But yeah, there, there is a way to improve performance, I’m sure, further with w and I think they are on the right path, do that. But yeah, pretty much loving bu and think it was like with lms, current lms, like Lift LMS work, like it work great together. So nothing much to complain. Very.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Do you work with people all over the world or are they focused in, in France or Europe or in the US or what?

Eric Gracieta: Yeah, I have, I have a lot of client around the world, like in Europe, a lot of client in America also, and some at other places, but mostly Europe and America. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: I think you said you started with Lifter l m s on a yoga site what, with a lot of courses. What, what was going on there? Like what did the client want? Were they trying to go all online or they had a studio too, or what?

Eric Gracieta: No, actually they wanted to sell like yoga videos and they, yeah. And I kind of it was a, at first it was a failing project really, because the the developer before me that come to the project, like never deliver really anything concrete, and it was buggy and nothing was really working. So I come to the project like, and I was like, Hmm, not sure, like you want to sell videos like that.

People want to add to the download and everything, maybe do a online courses. So but much come with another business platform them, and they say, okay. And so we created with of the world learning experience with one courses for, and one courses for that kind of yoga Uganda and that develop into several Android courses actually.

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s a lot of courses.

Eric Gracieta: Yeah. And with a lot of, with dedicated like teachers and everything. And yes, I kind of work really well for them, so, and they, they were selling like course by course, and after a while we say, okay, maybe sell a subscription we with that was possible with Lift our MS also. So that was great. And yeah, so from there the project was sky rocketed.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s really cool. What what do you like most about Lifter l m s

Eric Gracieta: Sad to pick.

Chris Badgett: Or what are some things you really enjoy about it?

Eric Gracieta: One thing I really enjoy about it was like the flexibility of it. Like it work with, obviously it work with like all measure builders and you have, you don’t have to have everything in one plugin. Like you can add add-ons to the to lift LMS and only use what you want to use. So yeah, I like that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. What other go ahead.

Eric Gracieta: No, especially on the performance side of things like , the less you have and I think better performance you can get. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah, and especially with like a hundred courses or whatever, I mean, you start, you got, it’s gotta be performant. What what other tools do you love to use

Eric Gracieta: With Lifts?

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Or just in your webs, in your l m s websites in general. What else you like to use? Woocommerce what

Eric Gracieta: Else? Commerce. I like crm. Yeah. Because where I use CRM is maybe lot of the time with, for example, Dubble Fusions.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Eric Gracieta: But I, I’m sure you know about that. Yeah. And with Dubble Fusion, like you pretty much can create a membership with needing a membership plugin. So that’s what I like about that. And it worked really great with Lift lms. It worked great with crm, and with that you can create real, a membership repro, a phone membership system. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Or do you like a particular page builder or native WordPress or what?

Eric Gracieta: I used to used building with these really, like, really like Elementor?

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Eric Gracieta: Less than less this day because there are a lot of bugs issues and I raise like GI busy issues with some of measure bug that I, I had with Elementor, and maybe it takes sometimes two years, six months or whatever to fix them. So I tend to look at other builder. Right now I’m not like, decided if I want to permanently switch, but I like, for example, let test one break dance.

Chris Badgett: Break dance.

Eric Gracieta: Yeah. I like this one. I, I don’t choose that for client yet, but I’m starting to use it to get a feel of it. And I think I like it more and more, but yeah, final Elementor, maybe I’d switch to something else. I’m not sure. But yeah, I think, yeah, yeah, that is better than Elementor right now. It’s like maybe a turning point maybe. So this days, days lot of good solution coming up, so yeah, like D and WordPress like 15 years ago maybe. Right now there is a lot of competition and I think it’s good.

Chris Badgett: What for the other WordPress agency people out there what advice do you have for getting clients? So if you’ve been doing this for 10 years,

Eric Gracieta: You’ve

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Figured out how to build a business. Like how do you get clients or, and make your business profitable?

Eric Gracieta: Actually I finding the first client was like, really hard.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Eric Gracieta: And I guess take really good care of your client and they will recommend you because I, this day, obviously we are doing a podcast right now, and maybe I celebr doing some business, I don’t know. But mostly right now all my new client are a recommendation from existing clients. So yeah, I tend to take great care of my client and they are pretty, they really want to recommend me to their friend and other partner businesses. Yeah,

Chris Badgett: That’s great. Word of mouth. Yeah, it does spread. Like people talk to people, so take, take good care of your

Eric Gracieta: People, and people tend to want to ro to recommend something to their friend, or, or Yeah, if they, I don’t know. It’s, it’s like, do you know someone? And they are pretty proud to say, yeah, I’m never a guy.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. So be that guy that’s, that the, that they like. what do you remember when you were first shopping for an l m s, why you chose Lifter or, you know, there’s several WordPress LMSs, and I know. You know, you’re WP Unchained can also work with Learn Dash, but, and then when you first came on to Lifter, why why did you, why did you make that decision? Do you remember?

Eric Gracieta: I think like there were, there were a free tribe and I just try it and like it, so I say, okay, let’s go. And no, I asked a lot of clients and I tested a lot of lms, like yeah, Ronda and Ls like that, and they are great more. They are, yeah. I think in some case maybe you can choose one over the other, and it’s like, maybe you have, you have to really try to know what maybe which one is better for you, and one thing is great, then you can try lift medicine for free.

And yeah, it’s a great entry point actually. So, and after that, yeah your, your site is successful and so maybe you take an island because you want to add a tell bit more and another addon and yeah, you get like, you get the foot on the door, I think and yes, there was no like reason, like it was more performing or it was more something like just you give me the opportunity to try it for free. So I I took it.

Chris Badgett:

There you go. That’s awesome. Who is a perfect fit customer for WP unchained.io?

Eric Gracieta: Perfect fit would be someone with successful lms good. Like with someone with a EZ that a lot of hurdle and obviously someones that have a lot of contacts in their friends CRM, autonomy or whatever, crm, whatever CRM they use, because yeah, like builder CRM are like popping auto everywhere on WordPress. So if you have a, yeah, a lot of contact on your cm, you will face like issues for sure at some point or another, like the websites ring down or, or going or totally going down because you have to many requests or the database or, or engines or whatever issue can happen there.

Mostly if we look at and everything mostly it’s concurrent users because they limit you on the number of it’s maybe it’s a bit technical on p p workers, you have to them. And so yeah, with a limited amount of p p workers, you have a little, a limited amount of concurrent user you can serve at the same time. So if you have a lot of traffic and cash traffic, because cash traffic is itself like very, very fast and yeah, you, I think you are good potential customer because those company will charge a lot for like thousands sometimes of the from, yeah, I talk about a lot about price because I know, but yeah.

Chris Badgett: I’ve seen it too where people end up on, like, they start, you know, and then they grow and all of a sudden they’re on like this giant $4,000 a month or some really expensive for their WooCommerce Yeah. Or their lifter lms.

Eric Gracieta: Yeah. They don’t even have dedicated resources. That’s the worst about them. They’re still, like, when they’re on a thousand plan or thousand dollar month plant, they, they’re not even the only one on their server. There are like maybe 10 people, a hundred people on the same server than them. So yeah, not that great, in my opinion. So this is why with revenge China tend to change that. Like you get your own server, so nobody if wanna you, you think it’s not share nobody, but you can crush your server. Obviously we don’t, but Yeah, and you get dedicated resource, you don’t get like if we get some may, maybe let me get some example, but yeah, for example, king Star, you get 40 gigabyte, this, this space for 200 plan. I think it’s like not a lot really.

Like I have customer like with a database like that is 20 gigabyte, so already it’s argon and maybe your image and everything is like, you really pass that, so you get to go, I and I in the plan just because I put like limitation on art drive disc. And just because they want you to go, I where when you get toed server, like maybe you have a, you have a terabyte and vme drive, and so you are good really, what is that?

So you don’t have any limitation that you have to worry about, like constantly like, oh no, I can’t add too many image because it would take too much hard drive or Yeah, also like the limit limitation on visitors on visit per month and everything. And if you do the math, actually it’s kind of abuse that it’s not very, it’s, it’s, it’s fake limitation because there will not cut you off if people like it’s 250 K visit a month because if you, if you try to do a mass about it, so it’s like obviously they have no way to count that.

And if you do the math, like tw 250 K, if you divide that by the number of day and the number of hour and the number of minutes, it’s like zero, 0.5 visitor per minute, it’s like it, you, you, you see that. It’s like they have limitations there and there to upsell you at some point. So it’s unclear what what you get ready with that.

I, this is what I feel. So when I provide like a, a server to a client, it’s, this is really clear what they get. Like you get this server that has like this C P U Ram hard drive and everything, so they know what they get and they, they get, and obviously the goal here is that I monitor everything every day. So if so with for example, king start re everything, you will eat this limitation and something will go wrong.

And obviously it’s, it’s not really good for business because while you’re sorting that you may be losing orders potential subscription and everything like that. So what the time to do is, okay, like we eat I monitor racing, and once we get above a certain level, I get back to this client and say, okay you had used PI there we eat like maybe 70% of your capabilities. Do you want us to maybe upgrade to more or for server, like get preemptive with the flag that and not like, okay, there is an issue. What can we do right now? Preempt, do preemptive maintenance and upgrades so you don’t lose any business because of issues like that.

Chris Badgett: That is awesome. Awesome. WP unchained.io. Check it out. Eric, thanks for coming on the show and thank you for sharing your passion for WordPress and high quality hosting and scaling. You know, allowing professionals who have a serious website on WordPress to be able to scale with a peace of mind and to sleep at night and at a fair price. That’s

Eric Gracieta: All very, yeah. You say, you say better than me. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: I’m a marketer man. But yeah, you yeah, I, I love what you’ve built here at WP Unchained. So if you’re listening to this and your site is kind of becoming, your business is turning professional, you’re getting more and more concurrent users and you’re just scaling, you have lots of stuff going on, orders are increasing, you want to get on a high quality host like WP unchained.io. Is there any way else people can connect with you, Eric, and any final words for the people out there?

Eric Gracieta: Yes, they can hit me on Facebook also, and I think this is where we first chatted together a long time ago, but yeah. Okay. They can email on Facebook and yeah, best, but I think the best way is if they go to the re that io and obviously they have a question or anything, there is a quick form at the bottom of the page, say, just hit me up there and I will answer all your question. Whatever we go for something or not, I’m happy to help.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, thank you Eric, for coming on the show.

Eric Gracieta: Yeah. Thank you again for being me.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And for everybody out there, go check out WP unchained.io and that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep keep taking action and I’ll see you in the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post How to Build a Niche WordPress LMS Client Services and Hosting Company with Eric Gracieta appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this episode of the LMScast podcast, Ryan Lee shares his experience and knowledge running a simple, successful, family-friendly microbusiness that focuses on providing information to customers or clients.

Ryan Lee is a skilled entrepreneur, and business coach with over 23 years of expertise in membership sites, coaching, online business, and internet marketing. You may visit him at RYAN LEE. To get his renowned daily (ISH) Newsletter, anyone can sign up.

Through his coaching, training courses, and membership websites, he has assisted innumerable company owners and entrepreneurs in starting successful and lucrative companies. Ryan Lee is renowned for emphasizing simplicity and creating enterprises that are enduring and satisfying to manage. He just sold his nutritional firm, Rewind, and is now concentrating on assisting business owners in streamlining and expanding their operations.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of lifter l m s, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of L m s Cast. My name’s Chris, and I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Ryan Lee. He’s been in internet marketing, online business, entrepreneurship, coaching membership sites, all these things for approximately 23 years. I was just reminiscing on how I heard Ryan on a podcast that I was listening to in my early days of entrepreneurship back in the late two thousands. And I was I was very new to entrepreneurship and this was one of the first times I heard words like continuity and membership site and all this stuff. And here we are, like 15 years later and he’s on my show. Welcome Ryan, to the podcast.

Ryan Lee: Thanks, Chris. Yeah, I mean, I’m just on this show because you’re blackmailing me so you know, I’m gonna, I’m doing this under duress. No I thank you. I, I love coming on and just talking about business I’ve been on for a long time. I love teaching, I love helping people. And it’s cool cause I didn’t even know this was gonna be live, so it’s even more exciting. I love live stuff, so anything that’s real and just authentic and unedited, I’m ready to rock. So just bring it, let’s bring this stuff and everyone live. What’s going on?

Chris Badgett: All right, awesome. Well, let’s, let’s help the people out there, the course creator, the coaches, the community builders. I want you to define some terms. So if I were to say a one person family friend, friendly micro information business, what is that?

Chris Badgett: I’m kind of combining some of your concepts.

Ryan Lee: Yeah, yeah. That’s, that’s like all, all of the stuff I say. You know, it’s, it’s really, if you could define it, kind of all that with like one word, it’s just simple, right? It’s just ha we, I think there’s a lot of, of marketers and coaches, especially lately, maybe the past five years or so, that obsess over this word of scaling. Like everything is scale, scale, scale. And they’re putting a lot of pressure on people who have not hit a million dollars a month.

Like, oh my God, I’m failing. We’ll get everyone scaling and, and you, you just scaling is, means different things to different people and you have to do what feels right to you. Like for, I’ve had some of my most popular my most well-known clients, like this guy Jeff Cavalier, he started a, a YouTube channel called Alene X years ago.

And we, I was there, he was there in the room with me, like when we came up with the name and the concept, and he’s scaled to tens of millions a year. But there were some other people like, look, if I could just get to an extra two, 3000 a month, that, that’s great. So you have to kind of define what it is. And I’ve taken, and I’ve been down that road. I was there where I was trying to scale and working my butt off, and I grew, I had two different companies each hit seven figures a month in sales. Now here’s the thing, when you hear someone say, seven figure, seven figures a month, here’s the reality. I didn’t keep seven figures a month, okay. About, and not anyone. Most people can actually get to seven figures a month if you spend enough, right?

Like you could spend $2 million a month and make a and get to a million in sales, you lose a million. But and, and at the time though, I was growing the team. I had, I had a A C O O, I had a c e o, I had all this stuff and this operations, and it was killing me. And it wasn’t a ton of profit because you have a lot of bloat. So I’ve gone through this whole journey over these years and I’m back to, and I just sold as of this live recording, I just sold my most recent company, which is a nutritionist company called Rewind. I just sold it 10 days ago. So it was nice to kind of exit that company because it started to get that feel where I’m like, I’m waking up, I’m kind of getting stressed.

I’m like, all right, let me get back to simple. And I’d rather have a company run by me. Maybe you got a virtual assistant, maybe you don’t, that can do a couple million a year and keep most of it and just enjoy life. I have fourteens now not 14 kids, four teenagers, 13, 15, 17, and 19. And my oldest one’s a sophomore in college, and I just turned 50 and I just, I wanna enjoy life. Right? so that was my very short definition for what you said. I’d like to speak very short and to the point

Chris Badgett: Awesome. you mentioned that the Alene X guy, I was just talking to aspiring fitness coach who’s already doing it, kind of one-on-one and is looking to scale and, and just have more impact online. And I know he l he looks up to the Alene X guy as one of his like, kind of role models. What helped, what are the key variables that helped? Jeff, is that his name? Jeff? Yeah, Jeff. Jeff like launched that and I mean, I see him on YouTube. I, I end up on his videos. Yeah. And like, how did he pull that off? Like what’s the secret sauce or the, the special ingredients there?

Ryan Lee: The secret sauce is there is no secret sauce. Yeah, the secret sauce is that he picked one. Okay. So from the very beginning he said, look, I wanna build this business and I wanna build one brand. I want to build something that’s just beyond my name, that’s more of an actual brand that I could build products and services around this company name. That was the one thing. And the other thing was what’s my strength?

And his was just like, let me stick to YouTube and just do a video a day. He did it consistently for like 10 years straight, almost every day. That was the secret. He didn’t stop, he didn’t get distracted. He also, when he started to like, it was slow, like. And if you look back at his original videos, they weren’t that great, and he admits that, but he got better by doing it.

He got more comfortable. But he’s very, very disciplined. He’s very focused. And he just said, this is all I’m doing. And when other people say, oh, could you promote my product and I’ll promote yours, and, you know, I’ll be an affiliate? He said no to all that opportunity, even when they were bigger than him at the time. And he just stayed in his lane and was consistent and never stopped.

He’s so dis I, I mean, I’ve never met anyone that disciplined. We were, we were out at lunch and we were just talk and he’s, he, he’s just about my, I think he’s maybe a year or two younger than me. And he’s ripped 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, which is not normal. Most people diet for, so we’re talking about food and dessert. I said, what’s your favorite dessert? And he said, oh, I love carrot cake.

I said and he said, yeah, once a while, I’ll treat myself once a while, I said, how often? I thought he was gonna say, like, you know, once a week. He said, like, he said, I’ll have a piece like once a year. I mean, that’s the type of discipline. Now you don’t have to be that extreme like Jeff, but one thing and just never stopped. And I know everyone wants, what’s a sexy thing? Is it the titles of the keyword is N seo, it’s consistency is showing up.

I think the reason I’m still around alive and kicking is because I’ve been emailing like 20 years straight. Like just every day. Just non just you. And you get good at it. You just gotta keep doing it. I know we’re all looking for the shortcut and the hack, but the consistency is, is big. And just showing up day in, day out for your tribe and saying, this is me. This is my position. This is how I’m standing out in the world, and let’s just go, let’s just stick with it.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And we’re gonna come back to Ryan’s newsletter in a little bit, but go to ryan lee.com and sign up for it. It’s one of the few emails that I move from my promotions tab to my primary,

Ryan Lee: Because

Chris Badgett: Because you do it, you do it well, and it’s just such, and I get so much out of the content, it’s so well done.

Ryan Lee: Appreciate it. R y A n l e e.com for those who, who couldn’t spell it. Anyway, keep going Chris. That’s why I’m here. I’m here to plug.

Chris Badgett: All right. So you’ve been in the, you know, the online business information, product coaching space for 23, 25 years, something like that. A long time. What’s different now? And I know things have like changed the whole time through, and, but what if, if somebody, even if they weren’t from back in the day, like right, what’s, what’s, what’s kind of different today?

Ryan Lee: I think, well, a few things. Number one, the tools make it so easy. Now back then, I remember when I launched, I, I was, I was writing articles. I couldn’t do, there was no YouTube, you know, back in the late nineties. So you couldn’t do video, you could barely do any audio, even pictures. I remember they would, they’d go, it would take like five minutes to just see a picture. So now av the, the, the speed, the tools, your, your software, like, everything makes it so easy to build. It’s, there’s no excuse. And you could build for like very inexpensively. There’s also, there was really no social media back then either. So you can get, you could start up with YouTube, you could start up with Facebook and Instagram and TikTok. You could do for free, no cost to get started.

Obviously the big thing is mobile, right? Back then, no one really had mobile phones. Now everyone has smartphones and you could check everything. So everything has to be mobile optimized. So with all the good, there’s the other side of the coin. Because, because there’s such a low barrier to entry and there’s really no cost to get started, there’s now dozens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands competitors and just about every market.

So it is get, it is de it is definitely getting more competitive, which means, my advice on that is you gotta be a specialist. You have to be like micro, micro niche. You have to, you can’t just say, oh, I help people get fit. That’s not enough. Or I even, or I just help baseball players become better. Better. That’s not even enough. Like you have to say, I help baseball players become really fast on the field, you know?

And then on the other side too, there’s, there’s also, there’s just a lot of content. There’s millions of hours every month uploaded to YouTube. There’s just so much content, which, so when I started my first me paid membership site in 2001, back then it was about the fire hose. Give people as much content as possible and they’re gonna keep signing up cuz they, they couldn’t get enough.

I’ve almost seen the opposite. Like I think it’s not just about if you’re, you’re only positioning and the reasons to sign ’em shouldn’t be, here’s 1,001 webinar videos. Like that’s not gonna get people excited. That’s just gonna add to the overwhelm. You’re better off offering higher quality and less quantity. Right? Be really super specialized. Give people like direct answers, do curation, do summaries. Just give them really specific benefits as opposed to trying to throw a hundred things.

No one wants 500 run fricking worksheets. Like it’s just, it’s too much. So that’s what I’ve seen kind of over the years from back then to now. It’s also gotten more expensive to advertise. I remember I used to do paper click advertising. It was a penny a click, and then they raised with like two or three pennies a click, and people went nuts. Oh my God, no one’s ever gonna pay three or 4 cents a click now. I mean, you know, you’re paying a few dollars a click. So you got, so you gotta know your numbers.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. What one of the things I liked about you is you had a background in fitness and business. You weren’t like an internet marketer talking about internet marketing. You’ve, you’ve proven across like different niches and stuff like that. How is creating courses or coaching and in the fitness world different and the same as teaching business online?

Ryan Lee: Yeah, and I mean, the people who’ve known me since the beginning knows that I didn’t start out teaching business. I my like I got a graduate degree. I put myself, I, I worked for six years in a children’s hospital at, at, at a college. And I was a recreational therapist and then I put myself through night school to get a master’s in excess physiology. So that’s what I taught online. I taught sports training and I was, I ran track all through college.

So that was like my thing. I didn’t start teaching the business of it till years later when I started having success in other personal trainers and fitness pros. Who’ve now like Jeff Cavalier become household names. Back then, they didn’t know any business and they’re like, Ryan, could you teach me? I’m like, sure. I didn’t know. I didn’t, I even took a business course.

So, and I’m still active. I still, even though I sold one of my nutrition companies just a week and a half ago, I still own another one called Bone and Brew. So I’m, I’m still active in the health and nutrition and fitness space. So I, cuz I love it and I think it’s really, it’s hard to teach business when you only make money teaching business, right? It’s kind of like this, there’s like, coaches make money teaching coaches how to be a coach. It’s kind of this incestuous kind of thing. Like I’m not judging, but I want, if I’m gonna learn, I want someone who I know can apply the knowledge over multiple markets. Because it’s one thing to tell people how to make a million dollars online. It’s another to try to sell ’em how to lose 20 pounds. So there’s, there’s some commonalities.

Look, the, the, there’s the old saying, I don’t remember who came up with the original phrase is people can never be like too rich or too thin, right? like those, you’re pretty much gonna, those are usually the easiest to make money in. In, in terms of health and fitness in general, you’re going to charge a little bit less than you would anything that gives a return on investment. Like if you, if you say to someone, okay, you pay $500 and then it’s an internet marketing course, how to make 10,000, well, that’s a good deal. But if you’re saying, I’m gonna teach you how to, you know, lose 20 pounds to pay 500 bucks. So like it’s, it’s a little bit tougher. So you just, it’s a, it’s a harder sale, especially if you’re going direct to consumer and going, like mass population.

The, the numbers are a little bit different be because with internet marketing, you can charge higher numbers. You can charge $5,000 for like a coaching program, no one’s gonna blink. It’s very difficult to sell a $5,000 virtual health program. Not impossible, but harder. So the economics are different, meaning you can’t usually pay as much to get a customer. So it’s trickier, but you can do it. It tends to be in the health space, it tends to be lower per, per item ticket amounts, but higher volume. Even though we think internet marketing is a huge market, it’s not, there’s a lot more people that wanna lose weight than, you know, built an internet business. There is. And I’m sure as well as your company is doing, there’s a lot more people like in Beachbody than there are learning or Whole 30 or whatever platform.

Yeah, yeah. Or, or Whole 30 or whatever, or, or the keto group. You could start a keto group and have a million nuts, right? it’s, it’s just it’s a larger market, but in general, but again, generally speaking, lower price, just higher volume and, and you have to you gotta be a good marketer. Like use your personality. You can’t be gen, the generalists are, are struggling. You know, the whole here’s my six week health program.

Okay, what, like, how is it different than the 4,000 other six week health program? Well, I have my ACE certification, well, sort of 2000 others. It does, it doesn’t matter. It’s not enough. You gotta, you gotta come up with something. I call it like, what’s your really good sexy front end offer? It’s gotta be unique and different. It’s, it’s better to be different than better at this point. It, so we gotta find that something that’s unique.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And speaking of health and fitness and really just health and given your longevity in, in the industry and I know you, I heard somewhere a ways back, you lost some weight or had an autoimmune thing, or had a bunch, had some challenges with stress. How do ed, the education entrepreneurs out there, the internet entrepreneurs, what advice do you have in terms of managing stress and, and staying healthy over the long term?

Ryan Lee: Yeah. well first it, it kind of comes back to what we were talking about earlier with like, stop putting this pressure that you have to scale, right? Like, you gotta build a business that feels good to you and just know what you’re going for. Like, that’s number one is stop un unfollow everyone who doesn’t make you feel good, right? If they, if everyone’s holding up their, oh, here’s my nine figure trophy thing, and that you just feel like crap all the time, then, then you don’t have to follow them. Not saying you shouldn’t have nice goals to go for but I think figuring out what’s most important to you to, to me, it’s always been my family. I build, I’ve always built my business around my family. That’s it. Family comes first no matter what. Nothing, nothing is even a close second.

So getting your priority straight and then being, being super focused and productive so you can get stuff done quickly and then get moving. With all my background in fitness, here’s what I’ve learned. It doesn’t matter what the heck you do, j break a sweat. It doesn’t find something that you enjoy and It shouldn’t be tortured, It doesn’t have to be torture. My workouts are 25 minutes a day. I do it in my bedroom. I have a treadmill, a pull-up bar, and I do pushups and, and core stuff. That’s it. 25 minutes a day, probably five, six days a week. That’s it. I don’t need to spend three hours in gym. If you wanna spend three hours in gym and you love it or you love CrossFit or orange stick good. It should be something that you enjoy doing. And drink lots of water.

And in, in, again, in general, we eat too much. We just, there’s so many calories and every, and it doesn’t matter what, and I don’t want to talk, you know, everyone gets nuts with when it comes to their nutrition philosophies, oh, you gotta be, you know, you could only eat meat or you could only eat vegetables or you, you, you only have to inter intermittent fast. Just all that stuff has to do with the end of the day. It’s like your calories. So just eat less. It really is like, we just, we’re so used to eating all day. I tend to not have breakfast. I’ll have one of my companies bone and brew. I have the, the bone broth in the morning. Go to Amazon Bone and brew.com. Or it’s not bone and brew, just go to just type bone and brew on Amazon.

But I have that in the morning, so I tend not to have breakfast. And then I have, I have the same lunch every single day. And I, people think it’s disgusting, but it’s the greatest thing in the world. Mixed vegetables. It’s a combination of rice, cauliflower, broccoli, and carrots. It’s like a frozen thing. I, I heat it up and I put sardines in it. Nice. Every day, every single lunch. And it’s like my secret sauce. Like that’s the, it’s the gr it’s so good for you. The protein, the good fats fiber I’ve, everything. It’s just, I have that every, every single lunch. And I’ve been able to, I, so my autoimmune is called psoriatic arthritis, and I got it. I think I was diagnosed about seven, eight years ago. Thankfully because I’ve been t taking care of my, I exercise almost every day.

I eat well. I never had to go on medication. I’ve kind of, like, I could years I couldn’t even, I could barely walk. I remember I was limping. I couldn’t even snap my fingers. But now, like, I can move, I, I feel great just by taking care of nutritionally. But the nutrition is a biggie because if you’re eating crap all day, you’re gonna feel like crap. And you’re just not gonna be as feeling as good. And sleep. Get a lot of sleep. There’s no, you know, oh, I, I only slept two hours a night. That’s not a badge of honor. That’s actually, you’re, you’re doing more harm than good. Work hard, you know, do your burst of, of focused work. Stop screwing around on Facebook, expect, except if they’re watching your live things. But otherwise, like sit down and do the most important things first.

If I’m telling you, if you are really super focused and, and know what the biggest levers in your business are, you could work like an hour or two a day. Like, I’m pretty much done by like 10 in the morning. I really am. If I just want to kind of keep the status quo, keep as is, couple hours a day done, and then I could just freaking watch Netflix or coach my kid. Like I can do whatever the heck I want. So I, you don’t have to work 10 hours a day. Anyway, I’ll, I’ll get off my soapbox.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. I was reading your newsletter again. That’s it. Ryan lee.com. And you mentioned the, the getting started with courses coaching and community and like using that, thinking about that trifecta. How do those interact with each other? And do you have an advice on where to start? Or you know, you talk about micro versus mega courses, like yeah. How does the beginner kind of ease into it if they’re kind of new?

Ryan Lee: Yeah. And you were close. It was actually the three I I was, I was trying to simplify cuz I, people were getting overwhelmed, like, oh my God, there’s so many products. What do I create? So I I came up with these three Cs, the courses. Well, I I if you were talking about there were three Cs of continuity income, and I’m talking about like, you’re, you’re, you’re probably talking about the one I just mentioned where it was courses coaching or continuity programs. Oh, okay. Yeah.

But I was thinking about it. There’s actually a fourth, although I didn’t wanna overwhelm people. The fourth would probably be commerce, like e-commerce. Okay. Right? Like more like Shopify type sites. I, I like the idea fir first. If you kind of take a step back and look at it from a wide lens, you say, okay, in a perfect setting, the ideal world, you’d, you’d have multiple products in each. You’d have a nice suite of products, right? Multiple streams of income. But I would say out of those, you gotta focus on one, right? So again, there’s coaching, there’s courses, and there’s continuity.

Chris Badgett: Can you define continuity for somebody who doesn’t?

Ryan Lee: So, so continuity is recurring revenue, right? That’s the marketing term for recurring revenue. So membership sites is a pretty common thing. If you are paying Netflix, you’re, you’re 10 or $15 a month, that’s a continuity program. That’s a membership site, right? That’s recurring revenue. So that’s the type of thing I’m talking about. For, for mo for a lot of people that’s really highly desired.

We wanna create recurring revenue. We don’t want just one-off things, but here’s the thing, they are, they usually take a little bit more time to create than a one-off, right? And they’re, they’re in general tougher to sell because if people don’t really know you well, they’re like, well, am I gonna keep getting billed? Do I wanna have another subscription? I already have 15 subscriptions. I don’t think I want another one. So, and if you, and not everyone wants to coach, right?

Coaching was another C cause some people are like, I don’t wanna trade hours for dollars. So out of those three, I would say if you had to choose once to start, I would probably do a course, right? And when I say course, it’s, it’s in kind of a general thing. It could be, you could even say a one-time thing. You could maybe even say a book or like an ebook. There are full fledged courses. I I like to do what I call micro courses where they’re just smaller. They’re less in depth. They are not a six month, 350 webinar, you know, mammoth thing. So what most people do, Chris, is they say, okay, I want to create a course. So is there, are there some people on live now or do we could kind of like, if not,

Chris Badgett: We do have some people, we have some questions about paid advertising actually. So for someone who’s like, good at organic and, and, and word of mouth, is there a framework to kind of get into paid advertising? That’s one of our, our questions. Yeah.

Ryan Lee: So in terms of paid, well, I just want to say one quick thing though about the courses is that I would still, cuz I didn’t want to forget this point, I would still start there. And I, I, I would, I’d caution you to, to avoid the mistake of the someone, let’s say whatever. So Chris, gimme a topic. Any topic, any market keto, okay, keto. They say, okay, keto, I love keto. I’m gonna create a, I dunno, a 12 week keto course, right? It’s a 12 week keto course. And you’re gonna l and they’ll use words like this.

You’re gonna learn how to do, you’re gonna learn every nutritional thing, and they forget who they’re talking to. It’s like the end user. The end user. So maybe it’s a 30, 38 year old housewife in Indiana. She doesn’t want a six month course on like key. She just like, just tell me what to eat, right? So then you’ll end up spending months and months creating this course, maybe thousands of dollars, creating this course. Then you put it out, then you’re like, now what? And no one buys it. I don’t understand. Everyone said I could sell the course from 9 97 and you get no buyers.

So instead create like smaller versions of it. Create you know, how do you put, put the a number on it and how do you condense that? How do you get from a six month to a three month to a one month, to a one week? How do you create like this shortest version so you can get people some, some small wins. And then you get, you know, just test the waters. Let’s see if people like your headline, your hook, the, the differentiator between your keto idea and everyone else’s.

So that’s, that would be my advice for people looking to kind of start, just get started. We don’t know what’s gonna work. I think I might know based on all my experience and hundreds thousand hours of doing this, but I still can’t predict the future. So I would say give it a shot, but, but mitigate your risk and your time expenditure as much as possible. Put it out there. Put together a one hour training, record it, and let’s see if you could sell it for 50 bucks. Oh wow, I sold 50 of ’em. Great. Now I could start expanding. Now I can start looking at other things. In terms of paid traffic, paid traffic is really all about finding that offer. It’s the, because the, you could do paid traffic on Facebook, you could do it on Instagram, the same platform really.

You could do it on YouTube, you could do Google, you could do Google Display. You, there’s, there’s a million platforms you could do banner ads. But it’s all gonna come down to the quality of your offer. And I’m gonna ask you this, everyone who’s on live and everyone watched a recording, is your offer a no-brainer? Is it truly a no-brainer? And everyone is alive? I’m gonna ask you right now, whatever offer you’re thinking of, say, is it a no-brainer? Is the offer so good that if you saw it, you would run and take your wallet out and be like, I need this now. Most people, it’s not.

And Ryan, people say, well Ryan, you know, here’s my thing. Do you think it’s a no-brainer? And I say, if you have to ask, if it’s a no-brainer, it’s not. Most are not, they’ll like put together some half-assed course and like $97 and there’s nothing exciting. There’s nothing different. There’s nothing unique, There’s nothing sexy. It’s just like reiterated stuff that everyone else did. So the offer is everything. What’s that thing that’s gonna hook ’em in and make them go, oh my God, that’s different. That’s unique. And that, and that’s, to me, they’re speaking directly to me.

So, so you start there and then it’s about math, right? Paid advertising is math. Here’s my advice. Don’t try to make money. Okay? Here’s what I mean. If you have a front end course, let’s call it let’s say it’s, it’s a keto cookbook, okay? And you’re selling it for 20 bucks or let’s say $30. You’re selling your keto cookbook for $30 or your package of keto cookbooks for $30. Don’t do ads no matter where they are with the idea that, oh man, okay, I just need, you know, I only wanna spend $10 to get a customer so I can make 20.

That’s not the way you look at it. Your goal if is to spend as much as possible to get a customer to, so you can keep getting new people with the idea breaking even, right? If you can get a customer to, if it costs you $30 to get to, to make a $30 sale, you’re a millionaire. Because every single thing you sell on the backend is profit. You have zero customer acquisition cost. That’s the goal, right? Get, get there. Don’t try to make money on the front, cuz that’s really, really hard to do. Very, very few. The best marketers in the world don’t do it. They usually go negative. So try to break even. And by breaking even, it often means you have to do upsells and bumps.

So you get the $30, you, you get the $30 Keto cookbook. Maybe when they’re about to check out, hey, for just $10 more, you know, you get the audiobook. All right. So now if 20% buy, you increase your average order value a couple of dollars, now you have a couple more dollars to spend. Once they, once they check out one, after they buy, they put the credit card in. Hey, congratulations, this is Chris, I’m here recording this on the moon with your nice little background there. You just bought the Keto cookbook because you bought that. I have five more keto book, book cookbooks.

They’re normally $20 each. You can get them all five of ’em for just one payment at $29, right, you get 30% of people to take that. You just increase your average order value by almost $10, right? So now you could spend up to $40 to get a customer. That’s the game. Like, it’s really that simple. It just takes some time to crack that nut. But once you do, and you’re, you’re break even on the front, you could spend every dollar like I would.

And, and people are just so, it’s not that, I’m not gonna say they’re shortsighted, they just don’t know the economics of it. And they think, I spent 30 and I only made 30 back. I’m not making any money. You are gonna make money on the back end. And then they stop their ads or they don’t know their numbers. They’ll, I had one person I did a coaching call at, I said, okay, tell me about your last offer. She said, oh, it was, it was terrible. I only made three sales. I said, what’d you sell a $300 course? Okay, so you made, so you brought $900, it was digital, it’s all profit, $900, you know, minus some credit card process fees. I said, okay tell me about the ads you ran. Well you know, I ran the ads, but I only got three sales.

Okay, how much did you spend? Well, I only spent like 10 bucks a day for, you know, 20 days. Then I stopped it. I’m like, all right, so you spent $200, you, you spent $200 in ads, how much did you make back? 900? I said, okay, so you spent two and you got back nine. I said, if someone, if I said to you right now, give me $200 and I’ll give you 900 back, would you do that? She’s like, well, when you say it like that, well, how the hell else am I gonna say it? I mean, taking the emotion out, why would you stop that?

Because she only got, quote, unquote three sales. So you gotta know your numbers. If you hit something like that, you keep going until your break even. And just keep, just the, the way to quote unquote scale is to find an offer that works, or at least break even and just take every dollar and keep putting it back in. And eventually you have a list of 5, 10, 15, 20, 50, a hundred thousand buyers. You, you, hey, hey guys, I just, you go to your email list of a hundred thousand people. Hey, I just came out with a new thing. It’s my new, you know, ultimate remote.

It’s just $30. You get, you sell 3000 of ’em. Like you’re, it’s a hundred thousand dollars in profit. I know I’m making it sound simple, but it really is. It’s a, it’s, it’s simple, but it’s not always easy because the tough part is the strategy. Everyone wants the tactics, Chris, they’re all like, well what’s the, you know, what’s the I don’t know what autoresponder, yeah, what autoresponder or even something like, you know, what color should I make my button? Or you know, should I use ClickFunnels or cjab or your blah blah? Doesn’t freaking matter. Doesn’t matter. They all can work.

They all, I mean, I’ve done things where now, cuz once you have a list you can sell any way possible. So I have the last four offers I tested to my own list. Here’s what I used to sell it. You’re gonna love this. I know it’s against you cuz you’re like, oh my God, I’m the m l m S guy, I have the software and I get it. That’s awesome. But I’m just saying, if you wanna just test something quickly, if you don’t, if they didn’t have your software, now I put it on a Google doc.

I just wrote a sales letter on Google Doc and I, I connected it to my, to my yacht, to PayPal. That was it. Yeah. and they each brought in six figures. So, but that’s the key. That really is the key to advertising. That’s it. That’s the whole ballgame. There’s a lot of nuance in that. But that’s the, that’s the big overview of how it all works. Hopefully that, I know I just went through like five years of stuff in like a two minute rant, but hopefully if you guys run live, does that kind of make sense?

Chris Badgett: That’s resonating. We’re getting some questions from the audience. Kurt’s asking, how do you make your no-brainer front-end offer more understandable to your intended audience? So it sounds like there’s a little bit of a miss and maybe is it, you know, is it, how do we know if it’s like a copywriting issue or an avatar issue or when we are, or, or when do we reali when do we give up and be like, all right, I need to pivot and do something else.

Ryan Lee: Yeah. that’s a great question. You know, you can never get emotionally attached to like your product, your idea. And I think that is, you know, we, we listen to you know, Gary Vaynerchuk, just keep going. It’s gonna work. And, and that’s hustle. That’s not, yeah. You’re gonna hustle yourself into the grave. That’s not true. Because if you’re, if you’re hustling the wrong idea, it doesn’t matter. You could do it for 20 years, it’s not gonna work. You got, it’s got you gotta be hu like with Jeff Cavalier, his stuff was really good. Like he, he has a master’s degree in physical therapy. Like, his stuff is solid. If it was crap, he’d put out consistent crap and he wouldn’t have the following. Do you

Chris Badgett: Remember what he had for Signal in the early days? Like, oh, I think we got something here. Like, was it like, you know, video views or shares or comments

Ryan Lee: Or, yeah, he was getting, he was definitely getting more more views and it just kept going up. He’s like, oh my God, I just, you know, I have like 500 subscribers. Now he’s got like tens of millions. But and then he started selling. We, we took his ideas and packaged it as like, workouts and he started selling them and like, okay, now, now the money’s coming in. But in terms of like with the, no, what was his question again? In terms of like the no-brainer how do you know, what was the, the exact phrasing of it again,

Chris Badgett: How does he help his market understand? So it’s like, it’s missing? Yeah.

Ryan Lee: Yeah. It, it’s, it’s often we’re not, we’re not using their words. Here’s what happens. We start working on a page or copy, and all of a sudden we turn into someone we’re not, and we start sounding like a copywriter, right? We start saying, who else wants to blah, blah, blah, who else wants to lose 20 pounds and do, and we sound like just a bunch of dbags. My, the way I write and the way I do everything has always been just more of a naturalistic approach.

It’s like, I, you should write a imagine, first of all, imagine you’re speaking to one person. Because even if a million people are seeing it, only one person’s reading it at a time. So don’t say, hi everybody, or Hey y’all, if you’re from the south, I’m a New Yorker originally. So we don’t say y’all, but talk to one person and speak exactly how you would if you’re sitting at a coffee shop, if you’re sitting at the bar just having a conversation and just speak from the heart and just say, this is what I have.

This is what I believe in. I think it’s gonna help you use words that they use though, that, that’s why you have to talk to people. You shouldn’t just sit in a lab and try to use these scientific words. I remember you know, when I was deep in the fitness industry, I was, I remember I was training and there was a trainer standing next to me and he’s talking to the clients like, yeah, you gotta work your, you’re sartorious and you’re, you’re subscapularis. And I’m like, she doesn’t know what the hell, like, you’re trying to sound smart, but you sound, you’re j you’re losing her man. Like, this is gonna work your arms, right? Like, say that. So dumb it down. Stop, stop trying to market, stop trying to talk like you’re marketing to your colleagues unless you’re trying to sell to your colleagues.

And sometimes we get embarrassed because we’re like, oh, I sound like an idiot. It’s not sound like an idiot. Just, just talk and use their words. And it’s funny, the more you talk to people and you listen, not listening with the intent of, I hope they say what I want to hear, but actually truly listening. They’re going to say words that you’re gonna be like, oh my God, I never re or it’s gonna, it’s, it’s gonna hit. You’re gonna be like, that’s the word. It should be. So in terms of when to give up in term for, for pay traffic, what, what we’ll do is we will do one ad and we’ll spend the amount, whatever that cost is. So let’s say I’m selling a hundred dollars product. We’ll spend up to a hundred dollars and see if we can get one sale.

And if not, okay, the ad’s not working, let’s try something else. It’s usually the offer, right? Sometimes there’s a, there’s a lot of things you can tweak. Don’t tweak a hundred different things because then you don’t know what the problem was, right? If your thing isn’t working and you change the headline and the hook and the avatar and the price, and now it works a little better. Well, what was it, what was the change? We don’t really know. If you had to only change one thing to start, I would probably say like the headline slash hook, cuz that’s like the biggest thing people see. So that would be the first thing I would start. And sometimes the rest of your offer can be exactly the same, and it’s the hook. That’s the difference. And then I, after that, I’d probably say the pricing.

But if I ask you, who is this for? And you say, well, it’s really for everybody, you’re done. You’re, you’re just, you’re toast because try to speak to everybody. You speak to nobody. You, you, you’ve got to speak to someone specific and they have to say, oh my God, that’s for me. Right? If you’re teaching internet marketing, it can’t just be how to make money online. It has to be very, now it’s like co now it’s not just how to be a coach now, it’s how to be a high ticket coach, right?

And then soon it’s gonna be how to be a high ticket coach, how to sell high ticket coaching with chatbots. Or the next big thing right now is ai, right? How to create for, and it’s, it always starts, it’s funny, when there’s a new market, it always starts really general and gets more specific.

It’s gonna be how to make money with ai. And then it’s gonna be how to create a course with AI and how to create a membership site with ai. How to create a fitness membership site with ai. Like, it’s gonna get more narrow. So the, so the quicker you can get to that specialty, the better your chance of success. You’re speaking directly to a person. There’s, it’s, you know, the, the phrase that’s been around forever, I don’t know if Dan Kennedy came up with it or whoever did, but it’s, there’s riches and niches and there absolutely are. So get, get as specific as possible. Don’t worry about being narrow. I know we get nervous, we’re like, oh, we’re leaving money on the table. No, you’re not. You’re right where you need to be.

Chris Badgett: We got a question from Will in the audience who’s asking about failure. He’s launched eight offers, seven of them failed, one of them worked, and he just would like to be more efficient going forward. What would you say?

Chris Badgett: Or is it, or is failure part of the job? Like,

Ryan Lee: Yeah, I say congratulations. Okay, because you gotta hit, all you need is one, right? Like, what did you learn from the seven that failed? Why didn’t they fail? I, I think you’re doing great. Will most people would give up after like two or three fail, one failure. You know what, no, I’m gonna correct me. They give up before they even get to a failure because they’re freaking scared. And I get it, like, we’re so fearful, like, oh my God, what if it doesn’t work? What if no one buys it? What if no one likes it? You know, what if it just, I launch it and no one cares? So getting over that fear of not giving a shit is a biggie, but I think it’s great.

Like, you found a winner. Awesome. Hey, you strike out seven outta 10 times in the, in the major league baseball, you’re in the hall of fame, right? You get three hits outta 10, you’re doing pretty damn good. All you need is one hit. You need one hit. And then you take the emotion out of it and you just look, why did this work? Like, what’s the secret? What was so good about this? It works. Do it again. And depending on the type of offer, you either put more money into it or you say, okay, how do I replicate this and keep this going, keep the momentum going.

And if I’m, if I look at any mistakes I’ve made over the years, it’s getting distracted or bored too quickly and giving up on something that was like, I had these events that would get hundreds and hundreds of people and Damon John, like all before all my friends, and I just stopped. I’m like, eh, I’m gonna do something different. The hell was I thinking?

I mean, I had a, I had a newsletter. There was like 2,500 members and they were paying $97 a month. And after a while, like, I’m like, eh, like we get bored of our own stuff before other people do. So I would say find that whatever that’s working and keep doing it, I, I work with one client. I took ’em from zero and I was having him do these summits in a, in a cinematography niche. We got it to six figures and then he just stopped doing ’em. I’m like, why? He’s like, I don’t know, I’m gonna just keep doing it. So keep going. Will, I think that’s great. I think you be proud that you got that hit. Keep going.

Chris Badgett: We talk a lot about courses and coaching on this podcast, but not as much about continuity. Can you inspire the people with some ideas of recurring revenue opportunities? Particularly like, you know, some kind of niche expert, like what can, what else could they do for continuity?

Ryan Lee: Yeah, I mean,

Chris Badgett: Particularly from a WordPress website, but not necessarily just from that

Ryan Lee: Well, with a WordPress website, you’re talking about like within your software, it’s, it’s password protected type stuff, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, so years ago, so some of my biggest hits were like, I was, I was mentioning that newsletter, right? So I went from newsletter and then I created kind of big bulky sites and they both worked. But I would say

Chris Badgett: Like content sites, niche content sites. Yeah,

Ryan Lee: Exactly. Yeah. but I would say if you’re doing continuity and using WordPress, which I love, I love WordPress. There’s so much stuff you can do with it. If you’re going for like a full-fledged membership site, be as specific as possible. Offer like one good deliverable a week. You don’t have to update it every single day with stuff, because the reason pe most people leave is because they’re just overwhelmed and they can’t keep up.

So don’t try to be Netflix. I had a Netflix type site and you get high churn because people can’t keep up. But I would say the big trend right now that I’m seeing and that I’m doing is you doing a continuity program where you’re embracing less, you’re embracing lean. It’s about curation. It’s about, Hey, welcome to this, welcome to my membership, or welcome to my newsletter, and I’m gonna take all that stuff out there.

I’m gonna take the 200 podcasts in our market and the 5,000 YouTube videos and all these books, and I’m gonna give you exactly what you need, you know, every week, every other week, every month. Like hand wrapped right to you, right to your right, to your door. And I think there’s something about like, people just being able to take a breath and be like, that’s exactly what I need. Because we keep so many are just like of the more, more, more mentality. And when I, like, I have a membership right now, it’s just, it’s like once a month, just one, one virtual training and people love it.

They’re like, okay, I’m not over. And retention went down. I mean, retention went up, churn went down because they weren’t feeling overwhelmed. That’s the biggie. So I would say if you could wrap up some really good stuff in a newsletter, whether it’s a one voice newsletter, just your voice as the expert, or you’re curating and giving opinion and insight into other things that are happening or you’re summarizing there’s a lot of opportunity there. In just about any market

Chris Badgett: Newsletter, paid newsletter, or both, do you recommend you recommend?

Ryan Lee: Well, I do a free email newsletter. Yeah, right? And then I also have a paid one as well. It, if you’re gonna do a free newsletter, then there needs to be something you need to get paid somehow, right? Yeah. So if, if you, if your paid backend continuity program is a membership site, then okay, maybe you could do the free newsletter on the front. But I don’t know if I would necessarily do a free newsletter, I would do more free I mean, unless we’re just using the same word, different words for the same thing, I consider like a daily email, not necessarily a newsletter. I call it like an email newsletter verse, you know, like a, what feels like a print newsletter, you know, 12, 16, 18 page type thing that I give away free.

Chris Badgett: Any other creative continuity ideas even off the website that you see out there working?

Ryan Lee: Well, creative, not really. I mean, the, the basics, the stu obviously software. Look, software is, if you can get a good software program, that’s, that’s the greatest continuity program, especially something with a high a high paying and disconnect. You know, if you’re, if you’re all, if everything’s tied up in your email system, you can’t leave. It’s really hard to leave. There’s a lot of pain. But there, you know, be, because I think of keeping with the theme of people feeling overwhelmed, they’re just looking for answers. Small group coaching, you know, just getting them into a group.

So maybe if they had your system for the content and then there was a private group along with it, like, I don’t know if you have something built in or a WordPress private forum or even a Facebook group, something where you could be there and asking questions and there’s like a live type of group setting is a good ride along cuz you build in that community. That’s a good way to be sticky. If you are friends in this group and you’ve been in the group for a year, you don’t wanna leave, right? Even if you’re not even going through the content.

Chris Badgett: As a coach, do you have any kind of advice for somebody who’s kind of new to it and they’re coming to Zoom, they got their monthly group coaching call, like how do you get organized or framework for the call? Like what, what do you recommend there?

Ryan Lee: De it depends if you are the expert or you are more of the host. So it, it really does depend. If, if you are, I would say if, if you had to pick a structure or a format, I would, I would, if I would keep it really simple, I would not go live. I would do a live training. But I wouldn’t do it every week. I found every week live trainings. It starts off great. Like the first first 1, 85, 90% people attend. Next one 70%, you know, after two months you got like three people are like, hello. So I would say testing out the, the, the number I would either go every other week, so twice a month or once a month. It’s usually gonna be one of those.

If you’re going twice a month, then I would either structure it, you do a training. So, so there’s a few ways you can do it, Chris. Let’s say you’re doing it the first Monday and the third Monday of every month. The first can be pure Q and a where you’re just asking questions, right? Answering office hours, right? And the, the third Monday could be a pure training or flip flop. First one’s training, next one’s q and a or a hybrid where both of them are, the first 20 minutes is like a short training on a very specific topic and then q and a about that.

So you do the same thing for both. Or the first Monday is just you either workshopping or answering questions or a combo. And the third Monday is you have a guest on and workshop slash q and a. So there’s a lot of permutations you can do. It’s going to depend on where your market is and, and what’s resonating with them. And you’ll see based on feedback and just ask them, Hey guys, what do you want? And they may say, and, and if you’re really quick on your feet, like I, I think I’m, I don’t know, maybe I’m delusional. I think I’m pretty good live and thinking on my feet and answering questions. So people tend to like that first when I do a canned presentation.

But you might be much more structured and like maybe your, your workshops are really good and very, very specific and you love doing that and people love that. So there’s no right or wrong. It’s going to be based on you and your personality and kind of the vibe you’re setting and your audience and where they are. And the to, to reduce the stress right now because this is what’s gonna hold people up. They’re like, well, I don’t know what to do.

And then they end up doing nothing. No, it’s, I I use the analogy of cause I, I grew up, I just love tv. There’s pilot season, right? So with TV shows, they film a pilot and they know this is probably not gonna be what you’re gonna see later on, right? Like the first, the pilot of Seinfeld didn’t even have a lane and Kramer was called, I think something like Cosmo, I don’t remember what the heck his name was. But it, it changes and knowing that the first iteration of whatever you create, continuity program, of course whatever, it’s going to change. And that’s okay. Like be okay with that. Know, know that what you do right now, day one is not going to be even day 30 or or month five. Like, it’s going to change and be okay with that and say, you know what?

I’m coming in and tell your people. Look, let’s do this together. Let’s go in. I like, we’re gonna play. I am here to serve you. I’m here to help you. We’re gonna start with this and we might increase it, we might change it, but I promise ’em to do everything I can to help you and people are gonna go along for the ride. You are not locked in. They’re not locked in. It’s a very fluid relationship. It’s a give and take, and that’s, and it takes the pressure off saying, oh my God, it has to be perfect. It ha like, everyone’s like a robot. Like it must be one workshop every Monday and every Thursday is, it’s like, it’s not like that. It’s not, that’s not the real world. So that’s my philosophy. Awesome.

Chris Badgett: Well, Ryan, thank you for dropping so many knowledge bombs. I must say. I do get a lot of fun and value out of your gen X Entrepreneur Facebook group. I’m oh, thank you. Also a child of the eighties. So I dig it. And you’ve got ryan lee.com. How can the people connect with you? What’s the best stuff?

Ryan Lee: Yeah, if you like this, just go to my site. Go to Ryan, r y a n l e e.com, and just sign up for my newsletter. I call it a daily ish newsletter, I go on there pretty often. I mean, I, I email usually four or five times a week, but it’s all, it’s all content. Like, it’s just, I’m not pitching other stuff. I don’t do affiliate offers. It’s just me teaching. And then go in my Facebook group facebook.com/groups/entrepreneur. You could X P R E N E U R or X P R NR works as well. So awesome. Check me out.

Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming on. We really appreciate it.

Ryan Lee: Thank you, Chris, and, and everyone on and, and will with the, the one hit. Keep going man. And please, please sign up and let me know, like you could email me, Ryan Ryan leave.com and just say, Hey, I saw you on Chris, and I’m always up for little public shoutouts too.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post How to Create a Lucrative 1-Person Family First Micro Business with Ryan Lee appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, David Cole and Sama shares about their experience on building a website like edX. Also how they manage their learning management platform.

David Cole, the founder of The Tutor Resource. The platform is growing day by day, and now has around 1,000 users. Also Sama helps David to refine the site and make it more user friendly to give an easy solution to students. Websama is Sama’s website.

David explains that The Tutor Resource is a unique LMS platform that allows creators to embed and host their lessons on various platforms. They have used the best LMS plugin LifterLMS to control everything.

The Tutor Resource is used for language learning and other kinds of learning, and it empowers both teachers and learners. The site also allows creators to use various remote teaching platforms like Zoom, and others.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of Lifter l m s, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of L m S Cast. I’m joined by two very special guests. We’ve got David Cole and Sama from the tutor resource.com. Go to the tutor resource.com to find out what we’re talking about today. This is all about language learning and other kinds of learning and empowering teachers and learners, and using WordPress to make it happen. Sama helped put together an incredible site powered by WordPress, lifter Cadence, and a bunch of other cool stuff. Welcome to the show, guys.

David Cole: Thank you. Thank you, Chris.

Chris Badgett: I’m gonna start with you, David. You were you were on the podcast a ways back and we actually did a case study about your site, the tutor resource.com. We put it up on the Lifter LMS website. You reached out you’ve, you’ve increased your, your learner base, your subscriber base, your customer base, and your website looks even more awesome than it did the last time I talked to you. What happened in the past eight months or so, or however long it’s been?

David Cole: Well I mean, we’ve been growing by leaps and bounds. We’ve added a lot of curriculum, a lot of lessons from several different, I think I’ve got about 30 different vendors on the site right now, making lessons, uploading lessons. We went from back when we talked in May with 200 users. We were so excited at the time. Cause we literally hit it in the day you and I had the interview, and now we’re up to almost a thousand. And so that’s really cool. We were really loving that. And we just want, we, we were getting the same feedback over and over again. Sometimes it was harder to navigate, hard to find the lessons they’d wanted. They didn’t like the, the way that they, they had a search on it. ‘

And so I was reaching out and looking for someone to help me figure out how to work with what I’ve got to refine it and make it even better. And so since I had built everything by myself, but again, I, I finally found Sama and he really helped me refine and make it more user friendly. He’s got some experience with educational websites, and so he spent a couple of months going back and forth with me trying to figure out what my, my wants were, and then refining it once we did have it up and going. And I love the way it looks now and we’re gonna continue to make it work even better going forward. So,

Chris Badgett: And what, for the people that are just tuning in, what is the tutor resource? Like? What, what kind of e-learning website is this?

David Cole: All right. Well, I do it a little different than some of the other lifter users is I I decided that I wanted a learning platform that would allow people to embed their, their lessons host them wherever they want, and we can embed them on the site. So my site doesn’t have as much what is it site? It doesn’t have as much data on it. In fact, we’re just pulling it from other places. Like they have Google Docs they have ese, they have Ed Puzzles Canva. They use a lot of different platforms to put their site, their stuff on the site, and I don’t have to post there documents necessarily. So we can do a lot of it through embedding. And so the creator then has a lot more control. And then Lifter becomes the mode of displaying that.

So a lot of my users will then use zoom class in vu, a lot of these different types of platforms, remote hq to work with their students all around the world. And then they screen share, or however they want to do it, if it’s a shared browser feature that they use with like remote HQ to showcase the lesson. And the student can then interact with the lesson, whether it’s drawing on the screen, whether it’s doing what else. So this way we use the same lessons over and over and over again on a subscription type basis, a rental basis.

Before my site, a lot of these people were either selling their things on teachers pay teachers, and then once it’s out there, someone else can just sell and repurpose it or whatever, use it as many times as they want. And so a lot of ’em were creators were getting a little bit soft put by that and wanted bit more creative control. And that’s what I try to deliver, is give them that creative control on our sites so that they, they have, they retain control over the whole process and who can use it and when they can use it, and how they can repurpose it.

Chris Badgett: And before we hand it over to Sama, one more question to you, David. What, what do you use Lifter LMS for in the stack, primarily for how does it fit in?

David Cole: Lifter is primarily used to showcase the lessons. So we, we put them in there and we are able to organize the lessons, food courses. And that’s mainly the, the, the purpose that we use for, for Lifter in that end. And you have a few people that are trying to use it for more of the traditional way, but this is mainly for display purposes.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, Sama, tell us give, tell us your story and how you got involved with David and, and what we built here.

Sama: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Let me start again from Iran that it is about 12 years that I worked with WordPress. I designed websites with WordPress about 10 years I was in Iran, now I’m in Turkey. And as I said, that’s the reason my English is not that good. I have some mistakes in my pronunciation. So from the time that I came to Turkey, because in Iran, as you know, there are lots of different limitations in internet and, and especially these days because even inside around or WhatsApp and other things are filtered and people need to use proxy to use them. Because because of that, we had lots of limitation to work internationally. As the time, from the time that I came to Toki, I started working internationally and weed a business.

It was called consultants resource.com. We gave consultation to, to the consultants. We teach them how to use different things in digital marketing and improve their businesses. My niche is the learning e-learning websites and some coaching anything that is related to the educational field. And because of that, I found David’s website, the theater resource dot com website. It it was a, it could be a great portfolio. It would, could make a great portfolio new for me. So we had a conversation about that, and he asked me to work on the user experience. You know, David has designed that website and it makes the our work a bit harder because he knows about the WordPress and the most of my clients don’t know, and we can sometimes escape from their request. But there was no way to escape from David’s request.

And it was good. It forced me to do different things on the website. And the question that I always had in my mind was that, can we design a website like ude e like edX, and the other educational big educational websites like LinkedIn Learning and those websites. And now with working with Lift LMS and combining it with Jet and Gene, and sometimes with Elementor or with Cadence Tools I found it we can make designs even better than those websites. As you know there are lots of people who code to design a website, and they, some of the people, some of those grants are against using the tools like CMSs, like WordPress or Juna or the other cms. But and they always says that we have limitation in the, in them.

Sometimes they say that we have security problems in in them. And I was always searching for the limitations. How much is these limitations? And the tools like lifts reduces these limitations in the educational field and the, the tools slash jet engine or Jetta Smart filters, all the lightings reduce it completely. And sometimes I think that we can design websites even more professional than them because Udemy website, like Udemy is just for the courses and for teaching and the other aspects that we can design with Jet and Jean and other plugins. But in WordPress we can add shop to that, add different features to that.

So we are not limited now, and maybe we had limitations about five or six years ago, but now there are lots of lots of different leggings that reduce the limitation. So one of the websites that I am now proud of is that user resource.com and I think it shines in my portfolio because it uses powerful tools and it has more than two 2002 lessons or 200 courses. And there are about 30, 33, yes, 33 curators, and we can increase them. And we just finished the first phase of this website design and it would be more powerful in the future.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s really cool. Well, what do we want to do? Do we want to get into a, a demo, a live screen share?

Sama: Yes. Do you want me to share by your screen?

Chris Badgett: Yes. If you don’t mind. And while you’re getting set up, for those of you listening on the podcast, just head on over to the lifter l m s YouTube channel, and you’ll find the, the video version of this podcast episode where you can see the screen share. Just go to lifter l m s YouTube and do a search for the tutor resource, and you’ll find it.

Sama: Okay. Oh, I closed that here.

Chris Badgett: So while he is pulling that up anything else, David, you want to frame in from context of why you decided to hire somebody outside of, of yourself to help with the website?

David Cole: Yeah, cuz my, my experience was basically sales and marketing and education for this. And I knew that there was a need that needed to be filled. So I, I did my best and put something cool together, but I wanted to make something more for my customers so that they able to do more with it and have an easier time with it. So that’s why I put the feelers out to find somebody who could help me make it what my vision really was.

And I think that we’re, we’re, we’re there, we’re, we’re, we’re seeing a lot of what this is. There’s a lot of Sama in this and his ideas of functionality. There’s a lot of my marketing, my design, my design thoughts inside of it as well. And now the next thing I’m gonna be doing is putting together more courses, teaching my vendors how to upload and use the site even more effectively so that the users can benefit from their material easier.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. We’ll take it away. Sama, we’re, we’re looking at the site and what do you want to demo for us today?

Sama: First of all we can speak about the changes that we have made on the website. It had a bit complicated, Heather, and based on on different educational websites like edX and Udemy, Udemy websites, when we take a look at them the header is very simple and concentrated, focused on the search in all of them time to load. And we, we will have, they made it easy to have access to different sections, especially to the courses and by search or for example, like something like Explore here or on the Udemy have categories and the, and the other most important sections. So my first the first, my first priority was to design it in a way that it, it would have a good user experience.

So I asserted from the top part and we designed it and we focused on the search and the categories here. When the glitch opens, we can see the curriculum process, products and posts categories here. And we have a powerful search here. And we also can click on this cultivation. It goes to the advanced search. It is that the place that the plugin like light jet engine and Jet Smart filters with combination with lift elements show themself. We have some listings that I designed with listing feature of Jet Engine, and we have filters here that we should select and apply the filters.

David Cole: Yeah, let me cut in there as well with Samuel here. What Chris, one of the things that I had a problem with with Lifter originally was not being able to sort and filter. Anytime I used it with it, I would be finding on the site instead of just, just the course. We allowed to go to the course catalog, but then it was hard to navigate through, and it was always just in one static order of the next button to go to the next page.

So I told some, I wanna be able to wait, find a way that we don’t need to worry about the products as much. We can use those on downloadable pages, which we’ll get to in a little while. But I wanted to make, make it so that people could find the curriculum a course or a specific lesson that they wanted to. And so I put ’em to the task to do that. And that’s how these filters came about in these different search pages?

Sama: Yes, yes. That’s awesome. We can have, we can see that we separated them a bit. For example, this one is a lesson. This is a course, and when we come down, we can see curriculums. They are combined here. We can separate them in different searches. They have this section as well. First we have curriculums. When we click on that, we just see the list of curriculums and courses, lessons and downloadable resources. We separated them with with the use of Jet Engine and Jetta Smart filters. It was a bit complicated, but finally it wa it was good. And the good point was that lift LMUs worked well with these plugins. But I had some, some problems with using Lift LMUs that I will, didn’t you about that? Here we have, I added a curriculum.

It’s Jet and Jean. It is a custom post type. And here we have courses and we have lessons here. The only problem that we had with Lift elements was that the lesson is the lessons is in the sub menu of courses. I added some taxonomy to lessons because it shows the taxonomy on the sub menu. We cannot have another sub menu on the. It just goes one level after that. And because of that it doesn’t show the taxonomies here.

So we find the solution to add these taxonomies here under the pages. And if this type taxonomy, which is called lessons categories also works for pages now. But it was a limitation that we had an, I think if you bring that into the left menu we, it would be fixed by that. It would be easier to use jet engine with that and add taxonomy as specifically to lessons.

And we can see here that we had we added different listing items that work. We have product listing vendors listing that gets data from the users. And we have the lessons listings and course listings that gets data from lifts. And also the curriculum listings, which I combined the course and curriculum listings. I used one for both of them. And then we we used let me see. I added some taxonomies to them to courses and to curriculums. And I made the relationship between, let’s, let me open it here.

Chris Badgett: Sometimes Zoom gets slow when you’re sharing. So if you, if you ever need to stop, share and restart, feel free.

Sama: That’s okay. Okay. it is a curriculum page that we can see different courses here. It is listed with this style. And when we click on that, we can see the lessons. I customize that completely, I added the image here. I think one of the problems with the with some of my clients that’s open a course some of my, not Lion, some of my friends who use Board press, they think that the course page is not editable. They have limitations in editing, editing the website the course pages. But I customized it completely. We can see the features here. We can see the access plans here at the right side. And we have the information, which is not completed yet for David here. And we have more by this creators. It lists the creators courses here.

David Cole: Very nice.

Sama: And these are the related courses.

David Cole: Yeah, I really like how it was able to get the sidebar on there. It’s a little different than the normal sidebar options offered by Lifter, which is mainly to search the courses and things like that, which I still use inside the lesson feature. But on this one, I’m putting the the weekly access, the, the access plans on the sidebar here, so that it’s easier for people to see right next to the content. Ma makes it so much easier for my users. They, they, they won’t get confused. They don’t scroll through a lot just to see the price or anything like that. So yeah, so that really, that really helped out a lot. We did that on the curriculum and the course page.

Sama: Yeah. And another complicated course that was hard to design was the this creators page. And when we click, for example, on this creator, it opens a profile. I designed a profile for them. They show a big image of them. They can choose, select the image from their user dashboard. And here is their profile image, the name and the information here. And now here we separated again, their own courses, lessons, and curriculums.

David Cole: Very cool. So another great, another great feature for using it for if you have other vendors on your site. Like I have this multi-vendor site, and the vendors want people to find their stuff. So if somebody likes somebody, they can easily find all the stuff related to that particular vendor. We even added a, a a rule in there that we can click to exclude certain content from the searches, which is really nice as well. Cause sometimes, like you have a homework assignment or something that’s, you don’t want people to take in, in the right order or out of order so you can exclude it from the search results.

Sama: So yes, I, that’s good. I fixed that. I used a solution for that. For example, the, we have curriculums when we add new curriculum, justed curriculum, , it’s our fourth for me.

David Cole: You got that pronunciation, you’re good there.

Sama: Yeah. Now let me ask at the same time show you the courses the difference that we have now in courses.

David Cole: I’ll see that the ad course page has changed quite a bit, that new sections on it from what someone was able to modify here.

Chris Badgett: So are your are your instructors or your curriculum providers, your vendors, are they, they’re adding their own content?

David Cole: Correct. So yeah, some of them, like most of ’em are e ESL teachers and creators right now. We’ve got history in math and science teachers that are starting to join on because there’s so much need for online learning for various different things. I don’t know if there was an article recently I read about New York City not having snow days anymore to the dismay of many children out there. Due to the the way the environ the world has kind of gone, people have seen that they can take lessons online.

So those type of school systems, they need lessons that they can be able to teach these children online. That’s not just the, the teacher and them getting on a Zoom call. Sometimes it can be something interactive like what my teachers and my creators provide. And so that’s kind of what we, we envisioned is something where you can teach anything to somebody over the internet from one little site.

Sama: Now I’m in the curriculum at the new course page. As you can see, it has the features that we had with the lift element spot. We can see some new features here, we have the course in four here. We can add a subtitle heading that comes to the page. It shows the above, above all

David Cole: The, other than the banner. Yes.

Sama: Yes. Above the banner. Yeah. we have the subtitle here. If we feel that, we can see here the title is here and the other information. Then head in line would be below that. And we have the the banner and the portfolio, and we can add different buttons with repeater. Whenever we add a bottom title and it’s link, it would be shown here below the features. We also have a repeater for the features. We can add different features, the feature title. And feature value, and we can activate the membership area, which is here. We don’t have that

David Cole: No membership on that particular one.

Sama: Yes, yes. It’s not activated. We can activate and we can add a membership image title and other things that are needed.

David Cole: What’s in the membership area?

Sama: Let me share it in the,

David Cole: Right now. If you go to, you would see mostly with the teachers together, English one sama. So if somebody has a course that has a lot of different courses that are a part of it then they should show up into a membership. So you give, it gives people an option. Say you’re looking at this lesson like that when Lunar New Year, but we have more than that for holiday lessons, and you can join the membership, all the holiday lessons for X dollars or whatnot. And so it give a, it gives people an access to that membership, that subscription area. And so we take the advantage of the lifter features for adding different courses to a single membership to do that.

Sama: Yeah. I think it is a better sample. We have a call to action, a button here that we add that with repeater we can have lots of different buttons that is listed here and the features. This is the feature image, and this is the banner image, which completely they can edit that. They can change that for the membership area. We have this here. They can they can click on this action, it goes to the link that they have added. And we have added the, this section, it’s automatically gets the data after the author. And when we click on this you, you can see this, these are all dynamics sent a message to Megan. It gets the name from the WordPress dashboard, and we can complete a form that will send the, what we want to that exact author.

David Cole: Yeah. One Tuesday. A way for us to be able to not always have to send messages directly to me when they had a question about one of the creator’s lessons or maybe even a correction. So this way they can send a message directly to the creator and they can work with them to say, Hey, I love your lessons. Can you make this lesson? Or, I saw an error in your message. Can we, can you fix that so that I can use it next time? So that’s kind of thing that we were, we wanted to make sure it happened. Nice.

Sama: Yeah. Then we have, I forgot. Yes. Then we can activate and deactivate that section, that members membership section. And we have another section, which is four filters. It’s, it’s just for the filters on the pages, like the, the curriculum lists or courses list the advanced search they can check this filters, is it feature or not? What is, who is it made for, educators or learners? The age, the price, is it free or paid?

And the difficulty it separates them, separates all the courses or lessons or the other things by these features that they are shown in the filter session. And below that the other section that I have added is this section. It is we connect these courses to the curriculums so that it would be shown on the curriculum page. We click on the con connect curriculum and we search for that. And we can add different curriculums different courses to curriculums and it would be shown under a specific pages.

David Cole: Very nice.

Sama: And the other thing that is remain is the a special feature section that I have, add that just the admins cd section. And it is a feature of if it is a feature of content David can check that and it will be shown on the homepage. I will add a section or, or one another feature to that, that when he clicks, he would limit that a specific post to be shown on searches or not.

Chris Badgett: Very cool. Sam?

David Cole: Yeah, that’s one of my, that’s one of the really features I wanted on there because the homepage, I want to be able to feature like a holiday time that we just had New Year’s. I, I wanted New Year’s lessons to show up on the homepage. And and the easiest way to do that was to click a box and then un-click it when the holiday is over. We got Chinese New Year coming up soon. So I’m doing the same thing for our Chinese New Year lessons that I find on the site and things like that. So it’s just, it’s, it’s another quality control I would say.

I can make sure that the what’s on the web on the main page is something that I want displayed there. And in the future I mean, as the website owner, this could also be a feature that you could charge for your premium vendors could pay for. Basically its advertising spot on your main page. I want this cut course on there. Here’s X dollars a month or whatever to keep me on your, on your homepage. So another cool feature,

Chris Badgett: That is super cool.

Sama: Yeah, I spoke about all the things that say that we are not limited anymore. We can do different things. We can make different websites and I like to build new things and create new things that are different from the all the style websites. Specifically in the field of learning in the field of educational websites and for schools, for consultants and the other people who have something to teach.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Sama, if people want to get in touch with you, what’s the best way for people to find you?

Sama: Find me myself, you mean, or?

Chris Badgett: Yes. Yeah.

Sama: You can visit my website. It’s web site.

Chris Badgett: Say that one more time.

Sama: W E B S A M A web. Ah, that site. That site, yes.

Chris Badgett: So Web sama.site. There’ll be a link to that in the show notes. Yes, they

Sama: Can see my portfolio over there. And I like to help anyone who is working in this field.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Well, if you wanna stop sharing your screen. Sama.

Sama: Okay.

Chris Badgett: David, so on your education entrepreneur journey, you know, what’s next? Where do you go from here? Like what I know you’ve got the site more where you want it and, and functioning the way you want it. Like, what’s your plan from here?

David Cole: So, yeah, so the past year, the site’s been running for just over a year now. I started in November of last year before last, that’s what you were saying, 2021. November of 2021 and so it’s been running for about a year now. And I, and I’ve shown that it’s, it’s, it’s definitely needed. And it’s getting to where I want it.

I still make content but I am working on kind of like building it up, finding more vendors who can provide more of the content, marketing their material as much as I can on, on online so that we can get the word out there. Cause there’s a lot of people every once in a while I come up across people, I do another podcast and they say, oh, I hadn’t heard about this site yet. And definitely I want people to know about the site and be word of mouth for, for these types of sites. And now I think this new design is gonna make it user-friendly and find find a new group of people who want to use it.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Like,

David Cole: Love working with SAMA on on so far what we’ve got and what we’ve completed because, so Sama does not take, it can’t be done for for an answer. , he’s like, he figures it out. He’s always like, all right, let me go, let me go research and figure out how to make that happen. And it always seems to figure out how to make it happen.

Chris Badgett: So if a curriculum provider is listening, David, what’s the best way for them to get involved with the tutor resource?

David Cole: They could reach out to me directly at contact, the tutor resource. They can go to the website and go to the tutor resource for slash create which takes into our vendor page and it shows them information on becoming a vendor. There’s an FAQ on there, and they can click the button to become a vendor, which sends me an email. And I usually respond pretty quickly and ask ’em what kind of stuff that they’re looking at. We just go a little back and forth before they become a vendor. So there’s a little quality control. Not everybody can just throw anything on the site. I wanna make sure that it, it’s not too repetitive. And the ma the material is you know, you know, you’re not using a whole bunch of Disney content in your material for some reason or something like that.

So that type of thing. And so I also have a list of wanted content that, you know, that teachers have told me that they want. And I’m trying to figure out how right now to set that up. Someone. And I’ve talked about setting up a wishlist. Some, some websites you go to say, what are your wishlist items that you want to have us put out on the next plugin update or something like that. I wanna do something similar on the site where users we will say, I want a lesson on X. And then a creator can see that and fulfill that and click it fulfilled and put it on the site stuff like that. So

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Well, David and Sama, thank you for coming back on the podcast and thank you for sharing what you’ve been up to@thetutorresource.com. Go check that out. If you’re out there listening or watching and you’re looking for somebody who’s passionate about extending and doing custom development and design check out samas website, it’s do it’s web sama.site. So go check that out. Sama, thank you for being for building on top of Lifter and WordPress and, and making your client, our friend David happy and, and and, you know, helping build out the vision that he has in his head. We really appreciate it. But thank you guys for coming on the show.

Sama: Thank you for your great play in and

David Cole: Yeah, thank you Chris. This has been awesome.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, you bet. And I can’t take credit, there is a whole team at Lifter l Madison there a, a chunk of its mind. But I will pass that along to them and I’m actually gonna share portions or some of this video with them so they can see and be inspired and see what people are doing with lifts. It’s awesome. Thank you guys for doing what you do. Oh,

David Cole: Thank you too, cuz he’s always there when somebody needs anything online or the support forums. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post How to Build a Website Like edX with WordPress with The Tutor Resource appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Carla Meeske, discusses the definition and origins of shamanism, how one can discover their shamanic destiny, and her personal journey of integrating the worlds of online marketing and shamanism.

Carla Meeske is a shaman and teacher of shamanism owner of the website spirithealercircle.com and SpiritHealer. She offers courses and coaching through her website. She teaches people how to communicate with their spirit guides to bring about healing and enhancement in their energy medicine practice.

Carla describes shamanism as the ultimate energy medicine, where shamans are the people in a community who can cross between the worlds to speak to spirits and bring back healing and information for themselves and their community.

She discuss that people who feel drawn to some kind of metaphysical discipline are likely to discover that they have a shaman destiny within them, and that shamanism is the root of all things, allowing them direct access to the information they need from their spirit guides.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of lifter l m s, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of L m s Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Carla Meki. She’s from spirit healer circle.com. She’s a shaman. She teaches shamanism, she’s done it through the internet for a very long time. She’s using lifter l m s to power some of her online learning stuff. Welcome to the show, Carla.

Carla Meeske: Thank you Chris. It’s so lovely to be here.

Chris Badgett: I’m excited to get into it with you today. You know, there’s a lot of healing folks that come to lifter and do different things, and I just want to kind of unpack the niche just a little bit. Excuse me, in case people haven’t heard of it. How do you define shamanism to the uninitiated?

Carla Meeske: Well, shamanism is the ultimate woowoo. It’s the ultimate energy medicine. Shamans are the people in a community who can cross between the worlds, between the veil to speak to spirit and bring back healing and bring back information for themselves and for their community. And we’ve been doing it for how long? How old have people have been around now they think 20,000 years, 30, whatever it is, shamans were there at the beginning of human beings.

And all your, all your woo woo wallet arts, your reikis, your energy healings, all of these things have shamonic roots because we’re all working with spirit guides who are smarter, wiser, filled with compassion, and they’re coming through us physical form channels. And at Spirit Healer School, I teach you to have that direct communication with your spirit guides to bring through healing, to bring enhancement to whatever your energy medicine is. So that’s what shamanism is.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So it’s kind of like going back to the beginning of time for humans. Like there’s lots of different personalities and like archetypes of people, but humans have always had within the community a healer of sorts. The shaman is the original healer and it’s right the base of everything. That is so cool. Yeah. How did you find out that you were, that I read something on your side about soul retrieval and also just if somebody is ha is feeling called to becoming a healer, how does someone like kind of discover that they may in fact have that, that shaman destiny within them?

Carla Meeske Great question. Generally, a person feels drawn to some kind of metaphysical discipline. Maybe you like to read tarot, maybe you’re interested in talking to angels. Something, something pulls someone into the metaphysical arts and at that point, when they start exploring, they may begin to understand that their ancestry is speaking up through their bones, that they’re remembering something that their ancestors did or that they did in the past life. And as their curiosity grows, they start reaching out and dabbling in.

And eventually they’ll land on shamanism because that being the root of all things gives them direct access to the knowledge that they’re seeking from their spirit guides, not from a human guru. So that’s, that’s it. Mine started when I became interested in the eing in seventh grade. And that’s when I realized that I wanted to understand the mystical side of things, the truth behind the veil. And it’s that, that quest that led me to shamanism.

Chris Badgett: One more, we’re gonna, this is gonna be a meandering conversation. Sure. But one more thing kind of on your or origin story. You, you have a background in teaching online marketing and sometimes in my experience, these worlds of quote alternative healing and, you know, business like marketing, they don’t always mix. They’re like separate.

But you, for some some reason way like became very integrated between the, the online and the business and the marketing and the healing and the shamanism. There wasn’t like, they weren’t like separate worlds. Like some people tend to polarize these types of people or something like that. How did you become so integrated among those two very different disciplines?

Carla Meeske: You know, it’s a, that’s such a great question and it really is a life path question. When I started college, I wanted to study mystical arts. I wanted to understand what was behind. So I went to a crazy school called St. John’s College, and I studied the great books and that led me to a vast understanding of philosophy, religion, and all these things, and no ability to make a living at all. Right? So I’m, I am cutting salad at Chelsea’s restaurant in Salem, Oregon. During the recession in the seventies, nobody on my block had a job. We were all flat broke and I said, this has to end.

I have a college degree, I can’t get a job. I have to go to graduate school. So I had two choices, business school or law school, and business school is two years with no test. Law school is three years, and then you have to take a test. So I chose business school and that landed me at Columbia University. And I thought, oh, I’ll go into finance cuz I’ve always wanted to be a stock trader. Terrible at that. I looked at my resume, decided marketing would be it. And I ended up with a marketing degree at, in the toy business at Kenner Toys in Cincinnati, Ohio. And that’s where shamanism really took off.

I was in charge of running the Batman toy line among other toy lines. And we, I was given this, this edict by our president to develop a new Batman toy line and six months flat because there was this thing going on with toy Biz and they had the line and blah, blah, blah. So I would ride my bicycle doing intervals on the hills in Cincinnati and ask Batman to speak through me to tell me who he is, what he’s all about. Because I had to take one Batman figure and make eight different characters out of him.

You know, cuz you gotta collect them all. And that’s how it all started when I was driving, riding my bike, getting into this sort of metaphysical trance, doing intervals. And Batman would come through and I’d get all these different characters and we’d put ’em into the toy line. Huge success. And then I started to dabble in Shamanism. That’s when I started to really go further into it. So there’s my business, I’ve got an M B A from Columbia, I was marketing director at Hasbro.

Kenner became Hasbro, and then ding, ding ding. I got a calling to go to Eugene, Oregon. I was going to become a software person and get in on the.com. And that was a, a crashing failure from a business point of view, but it landed me in Eugene and in connection with a whole bunch of people who were studying shamanism. And so my shamanic life started to bloom then how do I make a living. I got hired at University of Oregon to teach marketing and there you go.

I always liked to be on the forefront, always like to be on top of the thing that’s coming. And I created internet marketing as a category of schooling at University of Oregon. I taught internet marketing. Teaching people how to use a dream weaver to make a website and affiliate websites so they could start their own businesses. A whole bunch of people went on to become important in the internet marketing world outta my courses.

I mean, crazy talk. And I realized I had a skill that I could apply to my burgeoning shamanism. And I, when I launched my, my my shamanism business, instead of just becoming a yet another healer in Eugene, I segmented into animal healing because I’m an animal person and I went on to the internet. So I started spirit healer.com way back in the day when you could could get a.com like that. And I have been teaching online ever since.

Chris Badgett: What year was that approximately?

Carla Meeske: I think that was 2000.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s cool. Yeah, when I saw

Carla Meeske: It was two, two,

Chris Badgett: When I saw that domain name, I’m like, wow, that’s a really good domain name you got on that early, so. Yeah. well, I kind of want to go to the end and then we’ll come back and fill in the story, or at least not the end, but where we’re at today. What are you doing with Lifter l m s on your website now? Like what is what’s happening there? And we’ll kind of connect the dots from you, you launching online and back in 2000, but what, what’s, what’s the site and the business look like? Now?

Carla Meeske: I’m gonna tell you that, excuse me, lifter is the dream. Lifter has made my dream come true. My dream was that I could have online classes where I could see everybody and we could all talk together. That was way before Zoom, but Zoom made that happen and that I could have a catalog of my courses with all of their iterations and all of that beautiful, everything Lifter gives me. And you made it come true. So where my business is now, since I finally launched my Lifter site, I have my membership where I am anchoring the people who are the most loyal customers and the most interactive customers.

And I have a variety of courses that can bring new people in and help people grow and develop. And I feel like I’m just getting started. I’ve got 58 I think courses right now, which is nuts, but almost none of them is on demand. So they’re all basically a course where somebody came to the course and then they can see the recording afterward. And in 2023, my mission is to create a series of five entry level on demand classes. Those will feed into intermediate Zoom classes and into the membership program.

Chris Badgett: Wow. Here we go. That’s awesome. And working backwards a little bit, how did you choose Lifter? L m s?

Carla Meeske: Oh my God, that was a search I dug through every one of the competition

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Carla Meeske: And you’re, you just, you were the best. That’s all. I mean, I did learn Dash for a while when Learn Dash was first starting. Nice guy. Really sweet guy. Yeah. but it wasn’t, it was awful because I can’t remember exactly why, but somehow the backend and the front end tangled and, and the user had to unwind that entanglement and yours was intuitive and you’ve been around for a while, and actually you wanna know the real answer. It’s you Chris, because you are the face of lifter, you’re brilliant. You answer the questions, you engage me the customer, and I trust you. And Will, let’s not forget Will Yeah. Who held my hand and still holds my hand every step of the way, will is my hero.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I definitely can’t take all the credit. There’s a, there’s a great team at Lifter is as well. But I appreciate you saying that, you know, business is people, you know, especially even tech, you know, there’s a lot of automation and everything, but there’s, there’s people on both sides using the software, making the software and, and yeah, we, we never forget that at Lifter lms. It’s kind of part of who we are. So thanks for saying that. Can you tell me how you got into WordPress? You mentioned Dream Weaver a ways back, and as you’re talking, I’m just gonna put a log on the fire, so when I disappear, keep talking. But tell me how you got into WordPress.

Carla Meeske: Don’t you love that? He’s putting a log on the fire. Dude’s in Maine, he’s putting a log on the fire next. He’s gonna bring out a lobster. Oh, what was the question? Why WordPress? Yes.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. How’d you get into WordPress as like a part of your technology stack? Because you’re obviously really good with it.

Carla Meeske: WordPress was primary to the, the other page builders to Wix and Squarespace and that sort of thing. So when I left building off of Dream Weaver, WordPress was the first data-based management wizzy wig that I could use. So I built a WordPress site and it was a nightmare to manage. It was a nightmare to manage the backend. So out of frustration, I moved to Squarespace, which seemed like a really great solution, but the reality is Squarespace is not a great solution.

God bless them, they’re sweet and lovely, but they are not a great solution for a whole bunch of reasons. And one of them is that my sight went stagnant and in order to upgrade it and make it fresh again, I had to completely rebuild it in Squarespace 2.3 point. I don’t even know. And there was no way to do any kind of a, the net spirit healer.com. My legacy site I’m talking about. And there was no way to do any kind of a learning management system integrated with Squarespace.

So then I look at learning management systems and everybody’s on Kajabi, but oh my God, talk about cookie cutter and expensive nuts. I have 58 courses. How in the world could I go on to Kajabi? I couldn’t do it. Can’t do it. So I went back to WordPress, realized that with Gutenberg blocks, everything had changed. It was super easy, super sweet, backend, way better than all those other builders. I mean, it’s just great. And then putting Lifter into it, bing butter, boom, I’m very happy.

I just closed just two weeks ago. I closed the Squarespace legacy site, I moved it over to my, oh, let’s take a plug Four Site Ground. Yay. Site Ground. They are the best hosting service hands down yet. And I’ve gone through a lot of them. Site ground is awesome. Any problem, you go to chat, they help you. It’s perfect. So I put spirit healer.com, my legacy site is now on my site ground account, along with Spirit Healer Circle and milky knight.com, which is my astrophotography website.

Chris Badgett: Wow.

Carla Meeske: That was, and I’m a totally hooked on WordPress now. I want everything in one place. This morning I finished moving my c r m from Convert Kit to fluent c r m hosted on my Spirit Healer Circle site. Yes.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. So you’re like, you’re really into owning the platform and the flexibility of WordPress and it can involve, it can evolve with you and, and stuff like that. What about, and

Carla Meeske: I can control my costs. Yeah. Holy cow.

Chris Badgett: Yeah,

Carla Meeske: I was gonna be looking at a thousand dollars a year on my Convert kit. Are you kidding me?

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. That’s

Carla Meeske: Who CRM is. $120. Thank you very much. Cha-Ching Chaun.

Chris Badgett: There you go. And tell us about especially just, I’m thinking of other healers out there who are looking to teach online or, or you know, be more online with their business. Are you doing this all yourself or do you have like a technology partner that, that helps? Or you, that’s you. And I mean, I, you’re a little special cuz you have this, this history with internet marketing and business and the, and the internet basically.

But what would your advice be to somebody who’s, you know, maybe they got, they’ve got their WordPress side and they know how to update some pages on it for their healing business or whatever. When can they do it? Like, a lot of people say WordPress is hard, you’re obviously proving that wrong. And sure it’s not always easy and there things get complicated sometimes, but when does it make sense for a healer to DIY or hire like a, a WordPress professional to do stuff for them?

Carla Meeske: I think it depends on the human being. Yeah. I’m right now hiring, I’m, I’m looking right now for a backend person because that has finally my, you’re busy. There’s no way I can grow where I wanna grow and do it all anymore. Yeah. But before then, you know, until now, I’ve, I’ve reached a breakthrough level of revenue and before that, there was no way I could afford somebody.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Carla Meeske: And the other thing is, oh, healers, your brain needs to do math. You need to do logic. It’s really, really important. If you’re in the healing arts, don’t let the math and logic side of your brain atrophy. It grounds you, it keeps you human. And there are nothing like wrangling a database to do your math. And that’s all WordPress is, is database. It’s just logic.

Chris Badgett: Could you, could you explain that to the uninitiated? What do you mean by it’s just database?

Carla Meeske: Well, every single thing in WordPress is, it’s all zeros and ones, it goes back to the, the basics of what a computer is. Th it’s either this or that. And every action that happens inside WordPress is a choice. You want this or that, this or that. That’s all a bunch of decision trees. And they get lumped together by the, by the backend framework to appear like a cluster of something. But it’s still just a bunch of this and that.

So if you look at it that way and you back up and you say, all I need to do is figure out the this and the that and the this and the that, and I’m, it’s like chaining together a beautiful chakra necklace, you can do it. Just take your time and realize it’s just a logic chain. That’s awesome. So my advice is try the learning that you’re going to get, the brain power you’re gonna get from trying is a hundred percent worth it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s great.

Carla Meeske: That alone is a gift. And that, other than that Upwork, I don’t know.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, there’s lots of places to get help, but it’s empowering to like, at least figure out the basics on your own makes you better capable of, you know, getting help and knowing what you want and that kind of thing. Let’s put our instructional design hat on a little bit. It sounds like a lot of what you d you’ve done is you deliver a lot of your trainings and sessions online in Zoom and then record it and it goes into the L m s and you have plans for some more on demand, more pre-recorded training. Yeah. you’ve got what you call courses, memberships and circles. Can you kind of explain how you think about creating the content?

Carla Meeske: Sure, yeah, yeah. The base content is well, I don’t know if there’s a base, I’m just gonna, I’ll just go through those like that. Membership, my membership is a monthly fee membership that gives people access to come to three Zoom events that I host four memberships only every month. Plus it gives them access to a pre-recorded catalog of my short little courses. So if a course is a, is three or four sessions long and it takes me a whole lot of work to do it and it’s, you know, 10 hours of training, that’s an extra fee.

But if it’s a one-time course, like I’m gonna have one January 3rd called calling in the Spirits one hour. How do you call in the spirits and how do you make that practice your own? That’s free to the Mastery Circle members, but it’s $29 to non-members. So I’m encouraging people to join Mastery Circle if you get that for free, and then be able to come into all the others. So tho those I call like mini classes or mini courses.

And what I have not done much of is on demand classes where you’ve got a little video. Some training, some questions, little video, some training, some questions. And I really didn’t understand how I wanted to structure that until recently. And so I’ve got an idea now, and believe it or not, I’m gonna base it on Yost on yo’s trainings.

Chris Badgett: All right.

Carla Meeske: Because as I went through Yost Pro in order to to do my search engine optimization their training is incredibly good.

Chris Badgett: What do you like about it? They have just

Carla Meeske: The right length video. They have just the right length conversation, just the right amount of quiz to make sure that the person gets it. It’s really good. So I’m gonna develop a whole bunch of entry level SHAMONIC classes on that format.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I’m also thinking about a healer who might be just getting started and one of the first things they might do in terms of an online business is actually do some of the healing work through the internet before they get into courses and stuff like that. Yeah. What have, you’ve obviously been doing that for a while, like, and maybe some people have a limiting belief about what’s possible through the internet, but how do you do healing online? And and how’s it different from doing it together in the same geographic location?

Carla Meeske: Oh, yeah. Well, I think that that I’m gonna break that into two different kinds of questions. One is remote healing. How does that work? And healers who feel comfortable doing remote healing will understand the answer to that, right? They’ll know that when they’re in non-ordinary reality, time and space disappears and they can appear spirit to spirit with their client. So that’s pretty straightforward. A bridge between totally remote and being together, but not in the same room is to do your sessions over zoom.

So the vast majority of my sessions now are done over Zoom, where the person just sees me drumming with my eyes shut, and talking. I speak out loud everything that happens in the spirit world. And I record it on Otter, oh, thank God for plug for Otter AI as a way of automating your recordings and getting a transcript of them and sending those to your customers. Awesome. Otter ai.

So that’s how I do that. But the other half of that question was how you use the internet for reaching clients. And the answer to that is Yost Pro. You’ve got to learn search engine optimization just by Yost Pro. I should have, I should have affiliate links on all of this, but I’ve, I’ve been through a lot of different stuff and Yost Pro I think is just excellent. If you can follow their steps, do their little training, follow their steps, optimize for your keywords, you will rank and Google and you will get customers.

Chris Badgett: That’s great.

Carla Meeske: I’m sure you use Google Local, all the local search stuff.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. There you go. Mm-Hmm. , what, what other technology do you, is kind of essential to you? You’ve mentioned Lifter, l m s, fluent crm, you’ve had some great success with Site ground hosting.

Carla Meeske: Hmm.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned Yost. What other, is there any other just essential tech that you know, really makes your business happen?

Carla Meeske: I would say groups io, but I want to switch from groups IO to using your online discussion platform.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Carla Meeske: Because

Chris Badgett: I’m not even familiar with what groups IO is. Is that like a sort of like a private Facebook group or something?

Carla Meeske: Yes. Yeah. Yes. I can’t stand Facebook groups. I just, I’m sorry, I just can’t stand them. It’s just, Ugh. But I remember back in the day when I started Yeah, no kidding. I started Animal Communication on one list, which became Yahoo Groups. Right. We, I started the first animal communication online discussion list.

Wow. It’s crazy, isn’t it? So Yahoo. That, that the people who started one list and then it eventually became Yahoo Groups started this new thing called Groups io. And it’s a very inexpensive discussion list platform, but it’s a pain in the neck for me now because now that I’m moving my whole database onto my Spirit Healer Circle, lifter site, I wanna have everything contained within that lifter site. So my next step is to buy more stuff from Chris

Chris Badgett: All right. Any like hardware stuff? Like, I just mean like video camera and stuff. Obviously when you get really busy, there’s only so much you can do for production value. You still gotta do all your, your work. And but like right now, just talking to you through Zoom, you have great lighting, great background, but what, what, what tech do you use for the video work and stuff? Is it you just keeping it simple with your webcam and a nice microphone and don’t, would your advice be just keep it simple or what would you say to that?

Carla Meeske: Well, you know, Mac, and don’t go back. I, I have a new M two at MacBook Air. I don’t even use my studio mic anymore.

Chris Badgett: All right. So it’s, it is just, I love this. I love this. So it’s just the MacBook Air, the newer one.

Carla Meeske: It’s my MacBook Air. I’ve got, this is a tapestry I bought off of tapestries.com or someplace.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah.

Carla Meeske: And when I wanna change my set,

Chris Badgett: There you go.

Carla Meeske: I’m an astrophotographer. That’s my hobby. Ah, yeah. It’s not a hobby. I, I, I sell, but I can switch my set to astrophotography background. So I just basically have a corner of my office that is my set and one studio light

Chris Badgett: Now. There you go.

Carla Meeske: Which is a simple light from B n h photo. That’s it.

Chris Badgett: Ooh, I love that. That’s some pro tip right there. A great computer, a decent studio light, a tapestry, and like some nice photography on the wall. And, and you’re good to go. That’s awesome.

Carla Meeske: You really are. I mean, yeah, I used to think you had to do all this stuff and you need a backlight, you need depths. So I have a backlight and it’s woowoo, it’s a,

Chris Badgett: Which is like a salt crystal or something. What is that?

Carla Meeske: Yeah, it’s a selenite crystal that I have a, an IKEA light in the bottom of it.

Chris Badgett: Nice. Nice. So if you’re listening to this on the podcast, just jump over to the Lift Rails YouTube channel. And this is, this is some awesome advice cuz a lot of people get hung up in all that studio stuff and green screen and all that stuff. Just keep it simple.

Carla Meeske: I have one more piece of advice for all of you who need to buy lifter. Start with your Woo commerce plugin for the, for the checkout.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Carla Meeske: If I had done that, I’d be happier right now because then I could be able to sell my healing sessions and have it on the same database. I could sell product and have it on the same database. But now I have to talk to Chris after here about how I convert from the Lifter checkout to the Woo Commerce checker out on a site that’s got 2000 customers.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, we can, we’ll make some time to chat about that. And for those of you that are listening so Lifter has a native e-commerce functionality which integrates with Stripe and PayPal and authorized.net. And it’s more simple, streamline one time recurring payments, but it also integrates with WooCommerce, which is the, you know, the leading shopping cart solution for WordPress.

If you’re gonna do, like, if you’re gonna have like physical products and a bunch of different types of things in addition to courses and memberships, it makes sense to go with the WooCommerce route. So we can, I can help you get sorted there. So we’ll, we’ll chat some more about that. It is an important decision at the beginning of your l m s is what are you gonna do with the shopping cart? Some people use even some something else offsite and then they just use the l m s for the learning.

But like you said, moving everything to WordPress, trying to consolidate, keep it simple, one, one kind of site to rule them all is, if I could start all over again. We’re actually doing that at Lifter right now. We’re, we’re moving some of our sites all into one site just for our, our software e-commerce and everything. Cause we have a bunch of sub-domains. But yeah, keeping it keeping it as simple as it’s easier to maintain one website and have the parts talk to each other than to do that across multiple websites.

Carla Meeske: Right.

Chris Badgett: What are, where are you going in the future? Like what what’s your vision for the, for the future of spirit healer circle.com?

Carla Meeske: Well, if my dream comes true this year, I will triple the membership in the Mastery Circle. And that will give me my base income. I will have a lot of downloads of free one onesies and twosies and lots of sales of on demand product. I don’t even know what lots means, but in the hundreds, that’s likely for me. And I will have freedom to go out and photograph the Milky Way more than I am right now.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. What else? Like, what else lights you up about your business? I know you have the astrophotography that you, that you do mm-hmm. but like, where does the, you know, these businesses can be hard and you’ve been doing it for a while and you know, sometimes there’s you, you know, you face new technology challenges and so on. Like, what keeps you motivated through all this for all these years?

Carla Meeske: That’s that. Yeah, it’s interesting. Some days I feel like I wanna quit, but then I wouldn’t know what to do. Where would I find my connection to my people? The, your lifter l m s has changed my life because by creating the membership circle and having that really tight group of people who I love and who love me, and we get together all the time and we back each other up, we support each other.

We are a, we’re a tribe and that became because of Lifter. And so for me, you know, I’m looking at when I might be able to retire and then I say, what would I retire? And so as a promise to myself I called up Will the other day and I ordered an either, I don’t know, three years or five years of Lifter in advance prepaid by Bill.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Awesome.

Carla Meeske: I locked myself into lifter and into site ground for at least five more years. So that’s where I’m headed.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. One more thing just to kind of land the plane on our conversation here. Education entrepreneurs one of the things they have to do is build community. And you’re talking about your tribe and these people that you serve other, other healers and aspiring shamans and, and people who need healing themselves and stuff like that. I understand after the people join your world and they, you know, buy more and more courses and memberships and circles and stuff like that.

what advice do you have for somebody before the sale or before they join your world to kind of build community of, of prospective buyers or learners from you that, you know, haven’t bought anything yet, but you, you’ve talked about Yost and SEO and stuff, but any other tips you have on building a community, like whether they’re doing, whether it’s of healers or any niche of people, like how do you kind of begin that, that flywheel of building up your, your community that you want to serve and attracting people into your world?

Carla Meeske: Well, you know, it’s gonna go back to basic marketing. The first thing is what, who are you and what is your core offering? And that, that’s is only, only valuable if it’s understood that it’s for whom. Otherwise you’re just talking to yourself. So when you’re talking about what you do, you have to step outside of yourself and put yourself into the role of the person you’re doing it for. And then you can look at yourself as a dynamic relationship between what you offer and who is your customer.

And as soon as you do that, you can start wrapping your hand around who the customer is, and you can start doing all the marketing techniques on target marketing. Why they are, what their demograph, all that stuff. And you can begin to focus on those people who are most likely to be attracted to what you’re doing. And so then you make your website to reach them with your search engine optimization, with your blog posts, with your photography, your images are critical, understanding copywriting so that you are getting to the point and not blah, blah, blah.

Having a good looking site, which is so easy on WordPress, don’t go, don’t work too hard, just download Astra, take some Gutenberg, throw it in there and don’t mess with it. Yes, simple is better. And I think the best advice I’ve heard is start local. Hmm. So use the Google local marketing stuff just web, text, Google, you know, Google, Google Local, and you’ll learn how to get a local listing and how to start building local clientele and offer something, offer something that you’re going to give away in exchange for getting people to sign up and then send them interesting emails that make them wanna stay on your list.

It’s very straightforward. It’s just a question of deciding what you are. Why are you different? So the best marketing slogan I work with is only this product, only Spirit healer Shamanism allows you an animal lover who’s a spiritual seeker to get this benefit to develop your ability to connect with your sacred spirit, your spirit guides. Because Carla, the teacher behind Spirit Healer School has 30 years of experience in the shamonic field, 20 years of experience teaching Shamanism and understands the animal shaman connection because she originated shamonic animal communication and has a form full of critters herself.

So that is a slogan of, of framework for creating your positioning from one of my mentors, a guy named Doug Hall, and he has a company called Eureka Marketing in Cincinnati. Hi, Doug . He’s fabulous. His books are fabulous. And that framework has been what I taught at University of Oregon and what I live by now. So I hope that helps.

Chris Badgett: Oh, that definitely helps. I love that you’re this mix of, of, of marketing and shamanism is so cool, so awesome. Any, and I’ll just ask for a little quick piece of marketing advice here. One of my challenges is like the people that we serve, or what I call education entrepreneurs like yourself, but they’re, it’s not as specific as somebody called to the healing arts who’s an animal lover and somebody who’s an education entrepreneur like yourself doesn’t call themselves I’m an education entrepreneur. Yeah. so I sometimes I wonder like, well, who am I helping?

Like how, and they’re often in all these different disciplines, like, you’re in healing this other person’s on this business topic, this other person helps people find their, their soulmate or whatever. Like there’s all these like different niches. What do you, what, so what do you like, what do you consider yourself a an example of? Some people would call it like a subject matter expert, you know, that’s kind of dry and plain, but that’s what it is, what it is. Like you said, you have 30 years in the shamonic arts. Any other words that you could throw my way

Carla Meeske: To be more broad scale on it. Someone who’s striving to make their voice be heard and to publish, publish in a way that they have ownership and a platform for broadcasting that they own. Something like that.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s some good stuff to work with. I appreciate that.

Carla Meeske: I mean, when I think about Lifter and I think about, for me, what was the key competition? It wasn’t learned Ash in any of those things. It was the choice between going with Cajabi, who, who tells you that they’re gonna hold your hand and give you the formula that’s gonna make you successful. And lifter doesn’t do that. Lifter says, we will give you all the tools for you to apply your wisdom to become successful yourself. We’re going to, we are the framework that allows you to be successful.

And you’ll, you’ll need to have some concept of funnels. You’ll need to have some concept of what it is that compels people to give a damn about what you’re saying. And to me that’s everything. Because if I ever find myself writing an email that starts with, if you are like me, you’ve suffered because of, and I have an answer that, ah,

The formulas are the your enemy, the, the, the truth of who you are and why your product is valuable to people. That seed, that core, that has to be given your own voice. And when it is and you make that the centerpiece of your marketing, that’s when you attract an audience that truly cares about you. That’s what I think.

Chris Badgett: I love that. Carla, this has been amazing. Any final words for the people that you wanna leave ’em with today?

Carla Meeske: Yes. Buy Lifter, first of all, buy Lifter. Mm-Hmm. . Second of all, buy Lifter for many years because you’re gonna need it. Third, use the Woo Commerce right up front, even though their shopping cart is so attractive, because as you grow, you’re gonna wish you had. And fourth, take Convert Kit. Take MailChimp, take all of it, toss it out the window, go with fluent c r m or Mail Poet or something like that. And run your own database. Own your own ship

Chris Badgett: Wise words. That’s Carla from spirit healer circle.com. Go check out what she’s been building over there. It’s amazing. Thank you for being a shining example of what people can create. And I like to think of Lifter as a tool that kind of sends out a positive ripple out in the world. So you take it and you apply your knowledge and expertise and wisdom to it, and then you help all these other people and this, you know, kind of positive ripple goes out in the world. So thanks for being a part of that story. And we’ll have to check in with you down the road and do this again sometime.

Carla Meeske: Thanks, Chris, I really appreciate it.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post How to Build an Online Business Doing Spiritual Healing through the Internet with Shaman Carla Meeske appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Daniel Levis shared his experiences about building and growing a successful business and online coaching. He talked about the importance of having a clear vision, a solid strategy, and a strong team.

Daniel Levis, founder of The Science of Client Getting, emphasizes the importance of developing systems to build automated client getting and client serving systems that allow businesses to grow and scale. He is a business consultant who helps coaches, consultants, advisors, and solution providers to grow their business.

Daniel believes that in business, one should aim to do something as few times as possible. And get paid as many times as possible for that work. He emphasizes the importance of systems that offer scalability, leverage, and repeatability.

He recommends combining toolsets. Information, and limited access to you or your team for additional help as the most highly leveraged offer. He suggests that almost every field has information that clients need to know that will benefit them. And that information can be used to craft a standardized. And advertisable offer that can position you as an authoritative expert.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode Transcript **Chris Badgett:** You've come to the right place if you're looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I'm your guide, Chris Badgett. I'm the co-founder of lifter l m s, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I've got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I'm joined by a special guest. His name is Daniel Levis. He's from daniel levis.com. Go to daniel leviis.com/lifter. We've got something for you over there. Welcome to the podcast, Daniel.**Daniel Levis:** Well, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.**Chris Badgett:** We're gonna get into one of my favorite subjects, which is marketing and sales and automation. And what underlies a lot of that, which is words and copywriting and messaging. Your website is the science of client getting, you've been added a while. Why didn't you call it the art of client Getting**Daniel Levis:** Well science versus art. Science is something you do once and art is something you do over and over and over again. What what we do at the science of client gettings, we help coaches and consultants and advisors, agencies, service pros, solution providers to build automated client getting and also client serving systems that empower you to grow and scale your business. And that's what business is about. Business is about doing, doing something as few times as possible and getting paid as many times as possible for that work. And those systems. Go ahead.**Chris Badgett:** So it's more about building a machine than making a masterpiece.**Daniel Levis:** Exactly, yeah. Very practical. Systems. Systems offer systems like what is the thing that you are exchanging money for? How to deliver your expertise in a way that's highly leveraged and profitable, and that's not contingent on you being essential to the business lead generation systems that are scalable and that do not depend on the artist on manual prospecting. In other words, traffic systems that fuel profitable growth, conversion systems that leverage a real-time sales conversation at the last mile and follow up systems that maximize r ROI and long-term client value. It's all about systems and repeatability.**Chris Badgett:** Let's start with the offer. I feel like in the, this industry, and I see it a lot as a software provider in the space, a lot of the folks that fail the, the offer's not there. It's not it's not solid, it's not well communicated. Maybe it hasn't even been defined. I've never really heard the word system put with offer, like the offers kind of like this little kind of core nugget of value. But what do you mean by offer systems and how do we really make sure we have a rock solid offer?**Daniel Levis:** So just to give you a little backstory science of Klein is all about selling intangibles. It's all about things like coaching, consulting, advisory, agency services, solutions and so on. And the problem for many of the folks in this, in those buckets is they're kind of stuck on this feaster famine rollercoaster. You know, they, they make a bunch of cold calls and cold emails and social media outreach, and they bag a few clients who keep them so busy that they no longer have time for prospecting. And then pretty soon the work is done and they don't have enough clients. And it's back to the prospecting again. And this happens over and over and over again. And, and what you gotta realize is that that is not a business that is a hustle. It's a hamster wheel. You can never get off and you can never grow because all you're really doing is trading hours for dollars.That is your offer, right? And, and that means that growth is painfully slow and brutally difficult because the only way you can grow is by hiring and training and trusting an army of employees. And you can't advertise, you know, I intangible sellers are notorious for asking the clients, so what do you need? And the client says, jump and the coach or the consultant or the advisor or the service provider says, how high? Well, you can't advertise that kind of an offer. It's not really an offer. It's not defined. And if your offer isn't defined, how do you advertise it? If you don't know what a client is actually worth to you before you get one? How do you know how much you can afford to spend to acquire a client you don't know? And so we help you to craft an offer that is standardized and therefore advertisable,**Chris Badgett:** Can you throw us an example?**Daniel Levis:** Well, it's always delivered via an L m s A learning management system such as lifter l m s, which is one of the best because the money is is not in the doing. The money is in the knowing. The most highly leveraged offer is a combination of tool sets and information and some manner of limited access to you or your team for additional help were needed because it allows you to earn passive leveraged income. And that frees you from this hamster wheel feaster famine, the dollars for hours trap, right? When you have an offer like that in place now you decide how much service work you take on and what kind of clients you accept. And that means you can entire you can automate that entire process, which allows you to earn revenue 24 7. It allows you to acquire clients from anywhere in the world.And even more importantly, an offer like that positions you as an authoritative expert, not just to potential clients, but also to the media and to other centers of influence, people who can help you gain even more exposure and new clients for your business. So what might a, an offer like that look like? Where do you begin? Well, in almost every field, doesn't matter what you're doing, there are things that your clients consumers need to know that will benefit them, right? And that information that might have to do with making a good decision about who to hire to do a given job, it might be information on how to work effectively with that person, company or organization. It might be information that allows you to allows them rather to do the job or part of the job themselves. It might even be information that they need in order to properly execute and utilize the work that you do for them. So to give you an example, let's say you're a graphic artist and you help businesses to look good on the web and in print. So you create a program that educates clients on the importance of graphic design, what works to increase sales and brand recognition and what doesn't, how to hire a graphic designer, how to work with a designer, how to leverage design, even how to create graphic designs in-house.And the consumers of such programs are exactly the kind of people who will hire and refer you to others who require design services or to bring you in as a consultant. They consume your program, they benefit from the advice that you provide, and they are sold on hiring you if they ever need a graphic designer. And since you're making money on that process, you dole out that higher level of access in the way and form that you see fit. You charge as much as you like, and you do as much or as little of it as you, like. A good part of your income happens systematically, scientifically, and automatically with minimal personal involvement on your part. And that automation serves up big fat backend engagements if you want them.**Chris Badgett:** That's awesome. And just to clarify, you, you said part of a strong offer could include tools, information, and access. So it's not always all about like automating yourself away. It's, you know, the piece that you are there for is like super high leverage, super high value. I mean, is that, I just kind of want to ask your opinion on that, or in your experience in an offer that is more higher priced, usually there is some kind of access in there, right? it's not just an info product that's a collection of videos, like, right? What, what are you saying as part of like a winning offer stack? You kind of just described it, but is there anything else you would put in there for somebody who's trying to come up with that winning offer?**Daniel Levis:** Basically, the way we typically engineer it is you would have, like, think of the typical info product. It maxes out at, at $1,997, right? Like**Chris Badgett:** Yeah.**Daniel Levis:** So it would be that, yeah. But then it would have maybe like a, a monthly group session where you would, you would provide hot seats to people who had made the investment. It might have some access to you or or somebody on your staff via email or via some sort of you know, electronic messaging integration into the l m s. It might have a tool set. So we have the graphic designer so that you can think of there, there would be like three or four different types of graphic design tools, whether they be in, you know, how to best hire a graphic designer or how to best conceptualized graphic design, et cetera. And there, there might be might be open office hours, perhaps. All of those things go together to create value in excess of 1000 $197. Typically, you're looking at, you know, at a bare minimum, 3000 maybe as high as 25,000 for something like that. It's essentially that same $1,997 course, except there's a backstop and you are the backstop or your staff is the backstop. So the better you can engineer that curriculum or that set of instruction or knowledge transfer, the less you're going, the less busy you're going to be as the backstop. Does that make sense?**Chris Badgett:** That totally makes sense. How about the system for feeding that, for lead generation, for feeding that offer? And I'll just say like, there's a kind of a couple different characters out there that I'm aware of. Some are like just pure content marketing, everything, you know, videos, podcasts, blogs, whatever, guest posts. And then there's this on the other end of the spectrum is like the fully automated advertising person, you know, and I've seen both those work or not. And I know there's a spectrum and a lot of other ways to do it, but how do we systematize client getting**Daniel Levis:** Well, the, the, the ultimate way to systematize is to, to, to build a funnel around a lead generation magnet that's capable of, of turning a dollar's worth of advertising into 3, 4, 5, or even $10 or more in revenue from your program. So I'm a big believer in advertising. If you can't advertise, you really don't have a business. That's kind of the definition of a real business or a scalable business, if you will. There's only so many hours in the day for, for creating content, and it's very time consuming and definitely worthwhile. It's all good and everything, but it's not scalable. The fact that you're, you're not, the fact that you're largely not physically present in time or space actually increases your credibility and the amount that you can charge for those higher touch services. And now you can advertise because you have a standardized widget with a fixed price. You know exactly what a client is worth because you, before you get that client, so you know how much you can afford to spend to a acquire that client. So why wouldn't you advertise?**Chris Badgett:** That makes sense. What why do you think so many coaches and consultants fail at advertising? I know that's a broad question, but like, what are some common, you know, failure causes?**Daniel Levis:** Well, it's, it's impossible to advertise a, a traditional sort of consulting coaching, service provision offer, right? And so you see, you see people advertising that kind of thing. It's kind of like the Farmer's Almanac, you know, we do this and we do that and we do the other thing. But if you don't know exactly what it is before you sell it, you really have no business advertising that because you lose your shirt no matter what. You just don't have a, you don't have a model. The other reason people fail at advertising, and a lot of people fail at advertising, there's no question about it, is they don't have a lead generation magnet.**Chris Badgett:** Yeah. What's a, what makes a good one? Like for, I mean, it's one thing to have like, oh, check out my ebook or whatever, but what makes a really strong lead magnet that's gonna perform in an advertising based funnel?**Daniel Levis:** Well, the, the biggest mistake that people make with lead generation magnets is they really don't understand what, what a lead generation magnet is and what it is supposed to do. They look at it as, okay, this is bait. This is gonna get people to sign up and they'll be on my email list. Well, that's not the proper definition of a lead generation magnet. A lead generation magnet if it's going to make advertising work, has to be, it has to be bait. People have to want it and give you their email address in exchange for it. But it has to be super effective at taking that lead and turning it into a call. And so most of the lead generation magnets that you see being advertised, you don't see them advertised for very long because they're ineffective in that sense.**Chris Badgett:** They're not driving sales. They might build the email list a little, but they're not driving sales**Daniel Levis:** Exactly, exactly. And nowadays, it is really difficult to make a P D F E-book. You call it an e-book, to make an e-book powerful enough to create a positive r o ROI on advertising. It's is just too much noise. It, it's probably the best bait people will give you their email address for a P D F. And why do they do that? Because, because they're looking for instant gratification, right? Versus a webinar, which is another type of lead generation magnet. You have less people wanting it, less people requesting it, your cost per subscriber will be higher. But probably more effective in terms of putting people on a sales call. What's even more effective than a webinar is a video. And again, your cost per subscriber is gonna be quite high, but your cost per real lead, someone who wants to talk to you is gonna be much lower, and your cost per sale is, is gonna be even lower again. And the way we use,**Chris Badgett:** What would that video be if we were doing the web designer example? Like what's a, what could a, could a video lead magnet be?**Daniel Levis:** Well, the, the best video lead magnets are interactive videos. Like if, when you go to the link that we'll give you at the end of the, I think you already gave the link, Daniel levs.com/lifter, you'll see an example of the kind of video that works best for lead generation. And it's, it's a video that asks questions. It's not a technology called video Ask actually is the name of it. And what it does, the first little segment of the video is only about 30, 40 seconds. And it, it presents a benefit and then asks a question. So if you're a graphic artist and you're doing design work, maybe you would, your first question would be, so what kind of design work do you need? Do you need xDesign work? Or do you need y design work? And so they answer the question, and then the next segment of video, which might be two or three minutes, would talk about X type of graphic design versus y type of graphic design, depending on how they answer the first question.And then it would move into another question and that question gets answered. And then on the fourth level of the, of the branching, you start telling them a story about one of your clients, a case study about how they had this graphic design problem and they suffered because of it, and then they found the solution, which is the solution you provided for them, and you them through how life is, is awesome as a result of having that solution. And that is the, the, that sets them up to become a lead. And then once they answer the next question is, tell me more. And then you talk about the value that they can get from hopping on a consultation or a discovery call or some sort of, of sales conversation. And so that's an L G M, but you can see that its purpose is far beyond getting somebody's email address or giving them some, some type of problem solving information, which it does all those things. But its main mission in life is to create a booking on your calendar.**Chris Badgett:** I like it. So the, the lead magnet itself connects to the sales conversion event or whatever. Like, there's no gap. It's not like, Hey, you're now on the email list, you're gonna get follow up one and then a day later follow up two then a day, and then four days later you get at invited to the, to the call. It's just more direct, but which if you direct it just makes sense that it's really well thought out funnel and everything. Connect A connects to b, b connects to C not that you wouldn't nurture the email list that didn't buy or whatever, but that's really interesting. As we kind of, as we kind of roll into the sales conversation or sales conversion event at what point does it make sense to do sales calls in your opinion, versus just sending somebody to a sales page with an offer on it?**Daniel Levis:** Well I would say if $3,000 is kind of the, the line between one and the other,**Chris Badgett:** Yeah.**Daniel Levis:** Anything above $3,000, you know, the, the conversion rate is gonna be pretty low.**Chris Badgett:** Nobody pays 10 grand without talking to somebody. It probably is what you mean.**Daniel Levis:** Yeah. Nobody pays 10 grand and you're probably, you're probably better off even at three grand talking to somebody.**Chris Badgett:** Yeah. Tell us about the systems for that conversation and like how people think about it, especially somebody who has no training in sales, like, what are the main jobs to be done on this call? What, and they're scared of sounding like a salesperson.**Daniel Levis:** Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question. There, there's basically like a six step process. The first step is we call it discovery. And that is like, you know, so why do you need to be able to do this? Why do you need to, why do you wanna get from here to there? And you're typ you're typically looking for some kind of personal motivation in that regard. So that's the first step. Second step, we, you, you would diagnose the problem. So you, you're having graphic design issues you know, what, what are they? And they tell you what they are and say, well, so does that mean that this other bad thing is happening? Oh, and what, what would happen if you were to tweak it like this in this way? How would that improve your business? That's diagnosis and then prescription, right?So you would, you would then tell 'em about the solution. So this is how we solve this problem and this is what it means, et cetera, et cetera. The, from there, you, you want to tell them why your solution is different, why it's better, why it will work when nothing else that you've tried before has. And then you move into what we call the the challenge. The challenge is like, so, you know, we know how to solve your problem, but you know, you gotta have this and you gotta have that, and you gotta be this and you gotta be that. Are you, do you have these things in place? And then the, the final step, well, the second, second last step would be actually presenting your offer. Like, this is what it is, kind of like you would see in a, in a sales letter, but just bullet points. And then you ask for the, for the business and then answer any questions. So those six steps, discovery, diagnosis, prescription challenge, present, enroll,**Chris Badgett:** You are a man of systems. Daniel, thank you for being so generous in sharing the, those with us today. That's awesome. As, as we get into the somebody becoming a client. You mentioned client kind of onboarding systems or, or offer delivery systems or whatever. One time I joined a coaching program. I ended up staying in it for two years, and it was multiple tens of thousands of dollars a year. And it was really good, but I was intimidated and scared because the, the sales system and the marketing was so dialed and fast and smooth. I was like, once I get over this paywall I sure hope there's just as much system as systems and value on the other side. And there, actually, there were, and it was awesome, and it was a really good program I was in for a long time. But how do we think about systemizing the, the offer delivery? Yeah. Like what, what can we do there so that there's so much overwhelm in our industry when we finally got a sale, a lot of people drop the ball. Okay. Okay. So how do we make sure our, our intangible product is world class?**Daniel Levis:** Yeah. Well, I mean, it's not gonna be world class the first time you, you do it. But the secret is to is to iterate, right? So as people are going through it, you're gonna see that they get confused in certain places. You're gonna see that they get stuck in certain places. And so you manually go and you help them through those rough spots. And then you, you pave the road after, after you've seen people falling into this rut and that rut, and you basically go back and you redo the content, whether it be a, a, a tool or a checklist or a video or whatever it happens to be. You go back and you redo it so that people don't get confused in that spot. And then when you do that, you have less manual handholding less. And, and that's another thing that people complain about, right? They buy these super expensive things and then they don't get the support that they were promised. Well, make sure you give the support, make sure that when they, you know, they come to the monthly coaching call that, you know, they don't have to wait for like three hours before it's their turn, that kind of thing. Just, just be a, just be a good shit, you know?**Chris Badgett:** That's awesome. I think part of it too, just listen to your talk and how everything, you know, the leg bones connected to the hip bone and stuff. I see a lot of coaches and creators just be like, well, once they're inside, I'm just gonna be constantly making all this new stuff. But that's not really a system. That's, that's you being an artist, right? So if they have a problem, how do you get 'em from A to B? And then as you do that over and over again, keep tweaking the path so it's easier, better, and better and less friction. So dangerous. I think that like infinite content creation thing.**Daniel Levis:** Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not, it's not a matter of you coming up with new stuff. It's a matter of, of iterating and making the stuff that's there better. You know, there's, there's a, a funnel is, is a funnel. It's principle based. However, we no longer use webinars, like automated webinars as the lead generation magnet. Why? Because these branch videos that ask questions and basically talk to people are more effective. We know that because we've tested it. We used automated webinars for many years. We know what they're capable of. When they first came out, they were awesome because it was, oh, what's this? This is new. Well, they're not new anymore. Everybody's been on like a dozen automated webinars, and now it's like, you know, yawn, I don't want to go there anymore. And so we, we iterate, instead of using an automated webinar, we use a video, ask video, and there'll come a time when people will be tired of video, ask videos, and they won't respond to them either. They'll come a time when, when all of the benefits of using that particular way of, of doing something it's not the best way anymore. And so that's what we go into the, into the l m s, and that's where we innovate, but we're really not adding anything new. We're just making things better, if you will.**Chris Badgett:** I love that. Now, I haven't seen the vi video ask thing, I'm gonna dig into that, but I often think of, think of creating I leverage a lot of video, but it's like you're automating a salesperson or automating a customer success person if it's like on the core side or post-purchase, and it's, you can automate yourself quite a lot, but leave a little bit of the real human in the machine, and that's where the, you know, the value really comes up.**Daniel Levis:** Yeah. I mean, if you look at, you know, the success rate of like a course, a $1,997 course, the success rate is really, really low.**Chris Badgett:** 10%. It's been studied**Daniel Levis:** Very low. Yeah. But if you add a coach to the mix and, and they really are, you know, they really care and they're conscientious and they know their stuff and they're not gonna, you know, they're not a pretend coach, then the success rate goes way up. I don't know what the, what the number is, but it's definitely much higher than 10%.**Chris Badgett:** Do you have any copywriting tips for the people? Because you're, you're like a direct marketer, right? Oh, I guess first could you explain that difference to people?**Daniel Levis:** Yeah.**Chris Badgett:** Direct versus brander, whatever.**Daniel Levis:** Yeah. Di direct marketing is, you're, you're writing with a very specific purpose and your, your copy either succeeds or it or it fails. So what's the purpose? Well, the purpose of an L G M is to get somebody to come to a sales call. So out of every a hundred people who request the L G m, we, we have a suc a success metric of, we know that five to 10 people who request a branched video ask five to 10 out of every a hundred will show up on a sales call. That's, that's a successful metric. If that was like one or two, and the cost of advertising is X, well that's, that's a failure. So direct response is not interested in, in art, it's more science where we measure, okay, well we spent a dollar on advertising today. We know that this month we got $5 back.And the way you get $5 back is you have this copy that has a definite purpose. Did it succeed or didn't it succeed? Same with an ad, right? You, you put an ad there, it's not there to create brand recognition. It's not there to to get somebody to remember you. Although all those things do happen, it's there to get you to give your email address. Did it, did you give your email address or did you not give your email address? And then once they get to the well, it's another step in between, right? They're, they, they click, they have to click on the ad, right? And then they come to the landing page and they have to be convinced to give you their email address. And so it is, it's like a incremental, gradual commitment moving towards the sale. And so each one of those steps is measured relative to the, to the investment or the expenditure in acquiring that client. Whereas brand advertising, it's kind of like, you know, I feel good about this brand. I remember the name of your company or your name, but it's not directly tied to money in your pocket.**Chris Badgett:** Love it. Is there anything you would say about the avatar conversation? Like, there's a lot of, I see it a lot, a lot of people talking about it, you know, you need to have your ideal customer profile or your avatar. Maybe certain avatars are really hard to sell to, some are easier. I know it's, there's a lot of, it depends out there. But in the, in the context of creating offer systems and designing all this and creating measurable copy that has a job to be done at each stage, how important is the avatar issue? And how do, how do we really like zero in on on that person?**Daniel Levis:** Yeah. Well, I mean, there's gonna be a a subset of the market who is going to be someone who could buy something like what you have. Although certain, certain people within that subset are going to be better clients. You're gonna enjoy working with them better. They're gonna see eye to eye with you. And so you want to create copy that resonates with that type of person versus the other type of person who could be a buyer, but it is not gonna be as good a fit. It's not gonna be as happy, and you're not gonna be as happy working with them. So the first step that we go through is we define, you know, what is that avatar, you know, psychographic elements, what are they interested in? What, how do they view the world? How do they look at their problem? Who, who are they influenced by all of these questions?As well as demographic considerations? How much money do they have? Or how much net worth do they have? What kind of age bracket are they in? All that stuff's critical, critically important because that tells you how do you speak to this person because it's really about empathy, right? How, how well do they feel you understand them. And that's one of the benefits of the video ask, because you're, you're not kind of taking a shotgun approach where you're talking more about the solution, you're talking about, you're also talking about the problem, right? You can't, you, you have to talk about the problem that they have, and you don't want to talk about the problem that they might have. The more specific that you can talk to the problem and to who they are and the way they view the world, the more they're gonna be inclined to hop on a call with you and invest in your solution. So avatar is, is very important.**Chris Badgett:** And is that avatar's primary problem, what we should focus that you could help solve what we focus the lead generation magnet on? And maybe our offer is like the complete solution and the lead magnet is a piece. Or how do we, or how do we look at the problem set?**Daniel Levis:** Well, the, the way, the way I look at it is the questions are there to identify who the person is, like, not, not like their name necessarily, or that they will give you your name eventually. But the, what you wanna do is you want to figure out what, what their problem is why they're looking for a solution, where they are on their journey to experiencing the problem and finding solutions to the problem. And so, like, when you go to our video, ask at daniel levis.com/lifter, I, the first question I ask you is, so are, are you doing B2B or are you doing b2c? And so if you choose b2b, which I imagine quite a few of you will, the next thing that I talk about is all about business to business. Now imagine if I were to talk generally, or if I had to, if I were to give you some sort of talk that dealt with something that was obviously about B two C, what's that gonna do to your level of interest?**Chris Badgett:** It would wane.**Daniel Levis:** It would wane, right? Yeah. And so the next question I ask you is, so how do you help your clients, your B2B clients? And so you answer that question while I help with this or help with that, or help with this other thing. And maybe one of the things is you, maybe you're involved with human resources, your HR type focus. Okay? So if the next video starts talking about finance or something like that, how interest are you gonna be? Again, your interest is gonna wane, but if the next thing I talk about is, oh, so you're a people builder, so you, you help to, to develop employees, you help them to, to, to stay engaged and to be more productive and feel like they're part of the team, et cetera. So now I'm talking your language. And then the next question I'll ask is actually at that, at that point, I'll tell a story and it will be a story about another company, another one of our clients who, who works in the B2B space and they help to build people within the organization that they're being hired, their client. And so the whole point of this exercise is to tell a story that is essentially your story. Cuz that's how people buy. They buy based on that's how they learn. That's how we learn. We learn by looking at other people who figured it out.It's much more convincing to see how somebody else figured something out than for me to tell you how to figure it out. Does that make sense?**Chris Badgett:** Yeah, that does. That's awesome. That's it. Daniel Leviis, you can find him at daniel leviis.com/lifter. Any other final words for the people or any ways else to connect with you?**Daniel Levis:** No, that's it. Just go there and, and you'll see real life examples of what I've been talking about. I talk about all of the things, all of those systems offer systems and we've focused on that quite a bit. Lead generation systems, you're actually in the lead generating system. When you go to that, to that site, I guess you won't see the traffic element, cuz that's before it. This is actually a this is a traffic system that we're on right now, right? So you have advertising and then you have joint ventures, right? Where you hop on people's podcasts and you do, you know, email swaps and things like that. That's a traffic element a a traffic system. And then if you like what you see and you want to come to do a strategy call, you'll see the six steps. One of, one of our consultants will walk you through those six, six steps. And of course you'll see the follow up systems as well regardless of whether you respond or, or not.**Chris Badgett:** Awesome. Well, that's again, as Daniel Leviis, go to daniel leviis.com/lifter. Daniel, thanks so much for coming on the show today and sharing so much of your wisdom with us.**Daniel Levis:** It's been my pleasure, Chris. Thanks for having me.**Chris Badgett:** And that's a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don't miss the next episode. And I've got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to https://lifterlms.com/gift/. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I'll see you in the next episode. Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post How to Get Coaching Clients Online with Daniel Levis appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Nancy shares her thoughts on how entrepreneurs can embrace change. And make the most of their circumstances, especially in light of the pandemic. She discusses how people can shift from delivering their message on stage to delivering it effectively in a virtual setting.

Nancy Giere is an expert in instructional design and helps entrepreneurs turn their expertise into profitable online programs. She is an entrepreneur herself and provides consulting services, coaching, and training to help others create effective online courses. Her website, NANCY GIERE, offers resources and information on her services.

She emphasized that entrepreneurs need to look at the opportunities and constraints of the new medium they are using, whether it’s virtual delivery or online courses, and think intentionally about how they can be effective and engaging. One tip she gave for creating engaging content is to change scenes frequently, whether it’s switching from on-camera to slides or using different camera angles. She also suggested leveraging more discussion and breakout rooms to avoid being in a constant telling mode.

She believes in creating engaging content through various methods, including changing scenes, leveraging discussions. Breakout rooms, and using interactive tools. Overall, Nancy is a valuable resource for entrepreneurs looking to create high-value online training programs.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode Transcript **Chris Badgett:** You've come to the right place if you're looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I'm your guide, Chris Badgett. I'm the co-founder of lifter l m s, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I've got something special for you. Enjoy the show.Hello, and welcome back to another episode of L m s Cast. I'm joined by a special guest. Her name is Nancy Geary. She helps entrepreneurs turn their expertise into profitable online programs. The topic near and dear to our heart here at lifter, l m s, and we're gonna get into a lot of stuff cuz Nancy covers instructional design. She, she's a smart entrepreneur herself, and we're just gonna kind of pull out as many tips and tricks and ideas to change your life and help you with your or your clients online course goals. Welcome to the show, Nancy.**Nancy Giere:** Well, thanks. I'm really happy to be here today.**Chris Badgett:** I was listening to something on your website and there was a message about change.**Nancy Giere:** Yes.**Chris Badgett:** And, you know, as a expert, subject matter expert, you know, in a job, maybe a dream of like starting your own business, having an online course, or maybe you're already an entrepreneur, but you want to, it's in a different kind of thing and you want to teach that and turn it into a course. There's like this change you have to go through as a person. What, what, what's kind of some counterintuitive advice or insights you have around change and how it helps entrepreneurs to actually break through and get momentum?**Nancy Giere:** Well, you know, change is, is constant, right? And the environment that we're in and the circumstances around us are ever changing. And so we have the choice of, well, how do we, how do we lean into what's going on and make the most of our current circumstances? You know? And I think the best example is something that we've all just lived through is so when the pandemic hit and people had to look at their businesses and say, well, what I've been doing up till now maybe isn't gonna work so well, you know, particularly if somebody was speaking on stages all around the country, well, there were no stages. So there needed to be a shift and go, well, what do I do to be able to deliver my best message in a virtual way? And how do I think at, think about it from a real intentional point of view about what do I need to do to be effective in this new medium?A lot of people, I think, panicked. They rushed, they just, they took a bunch of recordings. They put an intro and an outro on it and said, okay, now I have a course. Well, no, what you have is a recording and there's nothing wrong with that, but promoted as such. And if you're thinking about a course or you're thinking about delivering on Zoom instead of on a stage, you have to look at what are the opportunities in this new form and what are the constraints? And what can I do to show up in the best way possible so people see how brilliant I really am in instead of yet another recording. I think there's a, I think there's, I think that's what's taken up all the bandwidth on, on the web these days. Tons of recordings.**Chris Badgett:** Yeah. That's I love that. And you know, we hear today the concept of like zoom fatigue or whatever mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and people I've noticed, just as an online business person myself, less people are, are going to webinars and like these long presentations or whatever. So how do we create more engaging content, whether it's in our course or outside of it in our marketing? Like how do we, how do we make it not just a recording,**Nancy Giere:** Not just a recording? Well, <laugh> not just a recording. Well, it, it, it's kind of funny. It's not just a recording, but it ends up being recorded. So, okay, we gotta get, get out of this circular loop right away. There's, there's several different ways to make something engagement, and one of the first ways and the simplest ways is to think about how can you change the scenes if you're, if you watch anything from an entertainment point of view or a news point of view, the scenes are constantly changing. Now, not everybody is in a position where they can have a three camera shoot and have somebody, you know, at a mixer and putting it all together. But if you think about moving from being on camera to then having slides come up and invest in a tool like e a m if you're on a Mac where you can design scenes where you could have a lower third pop up.Any, anytime something changes on the screen that creates some level of interaction because it's like, oh wait, what's happening? I mean, our, our brain is just, is just tuned into that. The other part is, let's say if we're, if we're in the Zoom session, leverage more discussion and more ba breakout rooms. Try to avoid being in this, you know, telling mode all of the time. Several years ago I was working with a client and this was when everything was live, and they said to me, we want you to put together a course and you can do anything you want, but lecture. And that was a very tough thing to go through. I had to make everything discussion based, everything discovery learning. And it was, it was like, yeah, it was every single module I was challenged, okay, now how am I gonna make this work? How am I gonna make this work? So if you can, if you can have the courage to let your audience have some degree of control where they're involved in conversation, they're in a breakout room, you're asking them to put things into the chat, you're asking them for a thumbs up, you maybe looking for games that you can bring in that's gonna keep people interested. You know, the, and, and to move away from, I'm just gonna talk it to you for an hour.**Chris Badgett:** I love that. It's, it's a dance not a, a movie. Yeah,**Nancy Giere:** Yeah, exactly. And then when you go into the evergreen space and you wanna look at, well, what's available to me given whatever the, the platform that I'm on, wh what can I bring in and how can I break it up? And there it's, you know, keeping your videos short and to the point, bringing in opportunities for personal reflection, giving people activities to do, kind of thinking about, you know, they're starting here and I wanna get 'em here. What do I have to do to close that gap? And how quickly can I get them to be doing something and not just watching and listening.**Chris Badgett:** If somebody's trying to elevate their expertise and also kind of get past imposter syndrome and all that, how do they, how do they do that?**Nancy Giere:** Wow. Well, the best way I think to get around imposter syndrome is just start to put yourself out there and realize that your message is unique to you. You know, that, for example, there's a lot of people that are that are in the coaching space, but every coach has a different spin on how they're going to move people through their process and how they connect with people. So you wanna kind of think about what can, what can you look for where you can make a connection? Have somebody really kind of see you as you as you are, so that they're gonna, they're gonna want to engage with you. If there's, I think the other challenge, kind of tying back to zoom fatigue is it's not normal for us to look at ourselves all day. You know, right now we're talking, I can see you, but I can also see me.So I'm, you know, I'm thinking about, is my hair okay? Is this okay? Is that okay? And I have to like stop, not, not really think about that. If we were sitting in a room together, you'd be looking at me, I'd be looking at you. We wouldn't have this sense of, oh, there's also a fear, I think, to be on camera, like somehow, you know, if I shoot a video, oh, you know, am I gonna get it right? Am I gonna be okay? It can be interesting enough. And really we're in a point now where we all just have to get over it and just get on, get on video. I'm, I'm planning to do like a, a 12 days of, of time to the 12 days of Christmas. So I've challenged myself to do a video a day for 12 days <laugh> and get it out to my community. And it's just, it's just doing it and practicing. If you never put yourself out there, if you never practice, you can never improve. You can never get better if you don't take that first step.**Chris Badgett:** That's awesome. How do we help the entrepreneurs with no teacher training? Do instructional design? I'm, I'm looking at your website, which is nancy geary.com, that's n a n c y G i e R e.com. And you have a resource called eight Easy Steps to create training that sells. Yes. Like, how do we what, give us some of the steps or how do we kind of, if we don't know how to, you know, chunk into something that people can consume in a course, how do we do that?**Nancy Giere:** Okay, well, the A D Z steps is, is the high level process that I apply to every project that I work on, whether it's a solopreneur or a Fortune 50 company. The process is, is all the same. It's just the content and the complexity is what is what changes, what the, the first part is to think about who your audience is and what is the, the transformation that you can bring about. So to come up with this overarching statement about how your program is going to help somebody to, to, to, to, to change, kind of going back to where we were at the beginning, what's the change that's going to occur? Really get dialed in on that audience. What are their pain points? What are their problems? What are their challenges? Now, depending on the work that you do, one kind of clue is, are there things that you say over and over and over and over again, everybody you work with, there's a good chance that that's content that you could then extract and look at, well, now how can I organize this into, into an online course?Once you're kind of dialed in on your audience and what they need, you wanna kind of frame it and ask yourself this the most important question, which is, by the end of this course, what are they going to be able to do? What are they going to know that they didn't know before? And how are they going to feel? And that kind of becomes your kind of, your guiding light as you go through the whole process. Then the next step is to come up with an outline, and we're, we're like doing instructional design in 30 seconds. <Laugh> is to really think about in outline. So what is it that you wanna cover? You can do some brainstorming on your topics, but then kind of get, get like, okay, here's everything that I need to address in order to get people to that place that I wanna get them to come up.And then think about now how do I sequence it? And then step back and go, now what information here is really need to know versus nice to know and your training, you wanna focus on the need to know. One of the challenges that we have as experts is, I got a lot to say <laugh>. So you have to think about, well, what belongs in a course and what might you wanna deliver to people in another way through articles or here's, or kind of bonus content if you will, but you really wanna think about the main road and then the side road. And then you wanna bump that up against, well, what are your current assets that you have? So here's my list of topics, here's some assets that I have that I can repurpose. And then you also have a clear picture of what you don't have in place.So you kind of know, you get a sense of the, the scope of how to build it. Then you step back and you go, okay, given all of this content, what's the best way to teach it? And that's where the fun comes in, where you think about, well, do I wanna shoot a video here? Do I want to provide an interactive exercise? Am I going to incorporate a game or a quiz or whatever type of modality to kind of, to bring the content to life? And then you're ready to start to, to build it all out. And it, the building can be challenging depending on kind of where people are and what their expertise is. You know, are you, are you good with graphics? Are you good? Do you have a nice slide deck that you can leverage? Are you gonna need somebody to do video editing?What type of graphic elements are you gonna wanna bring into the videos? I mentioned I've been using E cam, which allows me to have the graphics come up while I'm recording, which saves time on the backend in terms of post-production. But then you may just wanna have a editor, editor come in and just do all of that for you. So that's like a real compressed kind of roadmap of, of how to get from end to end. And all along the way really just being, you know, there's instructional design, but I've coined the term intentional design in this work to really think about given the delivery platform, what can I do to be the most effective and engaging.**Chris Badgett:** Wow, that's awesome. Can you give us a like a, just a pro tip insight, if somebody's like, let's say working with a, a large company with some kind of training objective, what's an example you mentioned where it is the same process, there's just more complexity. Yes. What's an example of that complexity in this process?**Nancy Giere:** I, I think oftentimes the, the complexity is kind of ties into the content. So for example, I did some work as part of a team for Eastman Chemical, and it was, it was their supply chain management. That's a, that's a fairly involved process. There are lots of different departments that have to come into play. There's they were kind of, they were revamping the software that they were gonna be using. So they were going from a series of spreadsheets to a brand new application. So there's a huge change management component because you've got a lot of people that they were content to a certain extent with the way that they were working. And now I'm gonna have to put faith that this new software application is gonna do for me what I, what I did before. And then some. So you've got like this, when you're, when you're saying like there's a wholesale change through a whole division of a company about how they're going to work, that gets to be very complicated because even when change is a very positive thing and people can see, yeah, this is gonna be good, there's a little bit of a like, ah, but I'm used to doing it this other way and I, I gotta make the shift cuz.And, and so there, there's a whole like getting people on board and ready to, ready to move forward and, you know, feel good about where they're heading. So when you've got more people to train cross-functional teams, that's where the complexity can come in.**Chris Badgett:** That's awesome. I love what you said about you know, the transformation. How do you, how does somebody want to, what do they want to know, do and feel? and, and also like the transformation become, like, who do they want to become? That's a, that's just a really powerful focus, forcing function to focus the outcome. Cause I, yeah, I know a lot of experts get wrapped up and well, I know a lot of things, but if you really focus on the learner and those no do feel become aspects, it becomes a lot more clear. What about story? I know that's big for you and on the top of engagement, I was on your website and I saw a thing about, you know, a chameleon can like blend in or they can stand out. And I'm like, yes. Well that's cool. I, I was like getting into the story. I'm like, this is awesome. Which kind of, what kind of chameleon do you want to be? Tell us about a story, cuz I know we've all been around story, but we all, not everybody's a great storyteller or realizes that they can use it in an online learning program or marketing or whatever. So yeah, take us to school**Nancy Giere:** So well, okay, so another way to look at a story is an example.**Chris Badgett:** Okay.**Nancy Giere:** So if you, you know, I just gave you an example of what a, a complex training situation could be. And when you think about it, we all tell stories all the time. A lot of conversation is story I'm telling you about what I just did, you know, then you're, then you're gonna add to it and you're gonna tell me about kind of how your life relates to my life. And we're just kind of, I feel like a lot of conversation is trading stories. And we've been, I think, wired into story from the very beginning of time. <Laugh>, if you go back, you go way back into the day, think about cave paintings where that was telling a story of the hunt, or then you move forward in a lot of cathedrals. They had a visual storytelling. They had, you know, the, these are, these are the lessons from the Bible that everybody needs to know.And it was all visual because a lot of people couldn't read, you know, then books come into play. People sitting around at, around the fire and telling stories. People, you know, today or, or you know, sitting in, in bars and telling stories, family gatherings, everybody's, everybody's telling a story. So everybody's got a story, but there's, then we kind of go back to this imposter syndrome, you know, is my story going to be good enough? Is it going to be relatable? So a way to look at it when you're building out a training program is think about your clients and really get dialed into who they are and what their challenges have been and what, and how you help them overcome them. So it comes back to the, the, the whole idea of the hero's journey. You've got the heroes working their way through. And then there's, there's the guide that comes in the fairy, God, Cinderella had the fairy godmother, you know, here I got the glass shoes, you're ready to go.And we as course creators, we're the guides. So what you wanna do is put your content into the, into the co into context around what is life like for that person. So let's use sales training for an example. Sales of sales, of sales of sales. There's a, there's a process. But if I'm selling one of my clients, his, his market is luxury home builders. Okay? The way that you sell a luxury home is different than a software application or a coaching program. So what you wanna think about is, okay, how can I, how can I dig into who I've worked with, what they've done, and what they've accomplished and tell that story. And sometimes it's easier to tell somebody else's story than our own. Cuz I mean, you're like, we're bragging, you know So.**Chris Badgett:** Very cool. Very cool. How about training for lead generation? Like how do we think about learning as a tool for marketing?**Nancy Giere:** I think it's one of the, the best tools that you can use because what you're doing is you're giving people insight into who you are and what you can offer. And if you can, you can put it out in a, whether it's a, a sort of in a, in your marketing, in a drip marketing campaign, or oftentimes, you know, the, the webinar is the, the, the lead gen. You know, you, if I do a, a program about, I just did something about how to turn a book into an online course. So for me, that was a way I wanted to attract authors into my world, have them an, give them an opportunity to experience me. My teaching, kind of my personality more than anything else is like, I think she's fun, I wanna work with her, or man, I don't resonate with her at all.I'm, I'm moving on. But that's all it, it's all part of making the connection. I've worked with people in the past who've set up content around their business. So somebody who does e-commerce for example, if they put how to run a few courses free, how to set up an e-commerce business, somebody's gonna read that. And they're, and when they're ready, they'll go, you know what, I'm gonna go talk to him because he, he spoke to me. I got that free information from him and I'm ready to hire him. And it just, this morning, you know, I know that I had somebody say, and I had sent something out and she booked time with me. And my first question was, what prompted you to talk with me today? And she said, well, I've been thinking about creating a course for a while. And when I saw your email, I thought, yeah, it's time to talk. So it's, it doesn't always happen immediately, but it's just this, it's a way to stay in front of people in a way that's more interesting than just read this document, read this article, you know, if you come up with a little mini course can be a bit more fun.**Chris Badgett:** That's awesome. And memory, we do, we do that at our software company, at Lift All Mess, we have a free mini course about how to create your course really fast and it's, it's our largest lead generation.**Nancy Giere:** Oh, I bet. Course.**Chris Badgett:** What what are some of the classic mistakes that you see? Because I, I see a lot of pain. I've been in this market for about sure. 12 years, and I see a lot of failed dreams and projects that don't work out. There's a lot of great success out there too, but there's often, there's not enough attention put on the stories of what didn't work out. So what do, what do you see are some mistakes that kind of cause failure, either to launch or it launches and it doesn't work out?**Nancy Giere:** Well, the, the, one of the first mistakes that I see is people will think about, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna put this course together. And they'll, they start like, oh, I'm gonna write the introduction. And they kind of, they think about it from end to end of what the experience is going to be like for the client instead of stepping back and what I mentioned before about sort of what do you want them to do know and feel really the, the whole idea of begin with the end in mind. Think about where you want to take people, then plan the journey because it, it, I've, I liken it too. I'm was a big fan of, of Snoopy growing up. And when Snoopy was the author and he is on top of the doghouse and it was a dark and stormy night, a shot rang out and then he is like, well, now I don't know where to go.And then people kind of get stuck and it, it does and it ends up and they get frustrated because, well, why isn't this working? So you really want to kind of plan all your content out and then organize it into a, a logical flow with the idea of where am I gonna take someone? That's the first mistake that I see. The second one is this desire to tell people everything, you know, instead of really kind of, again, using that guideline that I've talked about, instead of stepping back and saying, what's the most critical information? What do they really need to be successful? And have that be what goes into the, into the course. There's this desire to tell everybody everything cuz it's so exciting. And then, but pe but it can be too much, it can be overwhelming or think about how to put something into, into a series, but really being mindful of how how much is, is enough to get people to where they need to go.So that, that's another problem. Lemme say something flying in outta my head. There's also this sense of my course will work for everyone, right? What product or service does somebody offer that you can really be effective When you say it works for everyone? So just like when you're doing your marketing, when you look at your training, you wanna be niched so that you're going after a particular target market, which then leads you into what's the problem that you're going to solve for that market. So it's, it's really, I think the stepping back and taking a moment to plan instead of just, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna go a little bit of planning and I'm not talking about months. If you just took a week to plan and then you'd be, you'd be in much better shape and you'd, you'd end up getting completed faster and getting to the success that you want faster too.**Chris Badgett:** That's awesome. I wanna talk about a blend of teaching methods, kind of like the dance versus a chopped up movie version of a course <laugh>. So like on the, on the low end, let's say there's like a, somebody has a 20, $30 go at your own pace course on you, Demi or something like that. There's no real support or interaction on the high end. There's a very immersive thing. There's a course, maybe there's co group coaching, private coaching, there's live events that people pull out together too, and there's assignments and masterminds and all kinds of stuff. Like, but without overwhelming, let's say a newer expert or coach, what's like a kind of a start or bundle they could think about to create a course that comes with some kind of success system that's more than just the content. Like what, what, what could they do? And, and maybe we could use an example like somebody who's doing a certain kind of business coaching, like I help, you know, real estate agents start and grow their, their businesses.**Nancy Giere:** Okay, well, I think the best way to start is to look at it from the angle of what is the kind of repetitive information and the real basic information. And to look at, you know, extracting that and building out, you know, a live program on Zoom or an Evergreen program from that very basic information. And then say, and then take a look and say, well, how can I integrate this into my larger business model? So maybe you have like a, there's the, there's the do-it-yourself path, then there's, if you have people that are working with you in a group, they get that content as well. I like to start things out thinking it from either the one-on-one perspective or the group and go, what, what do they need? And how could I support this group? Because that's, if you're doing business coaching already, you've already got people in your, your universe.So then you step back and you say, okay, what can I provide them that will make our whole relationship more efficient in terms of me providing them guidance and also having something that they can, that the client can have as a reference point. We talked about marketing in that session, let me go now and I can more like an on demand or, or as it's needed now, let me go back and review. I'm ready to implement, but I don't remember everything that we talked about. So then they've got a place to go and look it up as opposed to having to ask a question. So it kind of comes down to best use of everybody's time, best use of the, of the business coach in this example. And best use of the client too. They may decide like, it's eight o'clock on a Friday and I've got nothing else to do, so I'm gonna do this. Right.**Chris Badgett:** Do you have any input on like, pricing? I see a lot of people get hung up on like, well, what's it worth? And they just kind of, you know, stick a finger in the air, look at what the competitor's doing and how, how do we think about pricing our training programs.**Nancy Giere:** I've kind of come at looking at pricing from an two perspectives. One is, so what's happening in the competitive space? And one challenge there is a lot of people that perhaps, you know, are, are celebrity status and whatever the the domain is, they may have a mailing list of a hundred thousand people. If you have a hundred thousand people on your list, if you sell something for $47, there's a good chance you're gonna you're gonna do very well because just the, the law of numbers, you know, you might get 10,000 people that are gonna sign up. Hey, that's fantastic. So I think it's hard to compete some, you know, you've gotta look at what the different the different factors are. I've started encouraging people to not only look at what their competitors are doing, but look at who else do your clients buy from for whatever, whatever the services might be.So let's say we've got the same client base, they're gonna, they they're gonna buy some things from me, they're gonna buy some things from you. Well, if our price points are fairly close. So if I'm kind of, if I'm doing my investigation and I look at, okay, well Chris is at a thousand, I can be at a thousand. Chris is at 50 for this, I should, you know, so if they're willing to spend a thousand with you, they should be willing to spend a thousand with me. Which is another way to come at it. But at the end of the day, it all comes down to where's the perceived value? What am I, if I invest a thousand and I'm, am I gonna make 10 off my thousand dollars investment? Or am I gonna break even? I'm just gonna break even, eh, you know, maybe not, but if I have the chance to make 10. So I think it's putting it into that frame of if you do this, this is what your revenue potential is. And to kind of have that as part of the, of, of the conversation and to be real, to be realistic in, in, in what's possible and, and not overstate it. So I think some things are way overstated and then that just leads to disappointment and day drinking. So, <laugh>**Chris Badgett:** Related to pricing, do you have any tips on recurring revenue around online learning programs as opposed to like one and done sales?**Nancy Giere:** I think the, the recurring revenue membership sites I think are a great way to generate the recurring revenue. You need to be ready and be present to be continually giving people new, new content. You know, kind of can create a discipline that you're gonna have something new every week, every two weeks, every month, whatever that, that, whatever that cadence is going to be. The, the one and done is more of a, of a, I think a larger investment where people, it's a particular project that they want to complete. So I want to come up with a, my marketing strategy for 2023. So I'm going to, so there's a workshop to go to in December that's gonna help me get my strategy for 2023. I take that course, then I go in and I implement in 2023. That could be a one that could one example of a one and done, but then you could, then you could step back and say, well, then maybe they go from that into a membership or some ongoing support type of a program. So it all, I think depends on, on the content and kind of what's, what's the purpose of, of working through a particular type of content.**Chris Badgett:** All right. Shifting gears to technology <laugh>. Okay. If we're creating online learning programs, you mentioned like e cam recorder and you know, editing and there's all these things from hardware to software right, to just all the tech required to pull it off. Any advice for people wanting to get into this in terms of how to think about the tech without getting overwhelmed,**Nancy Giere:** Without getting crazy? Yeah, well I think the first thing is invest in a good microphone. Yeah. So that you have good sound quality. People will not, are not forgiving if sound is bad, if sound is bad, they're out. And then the next thing is to think about having a simple background. You know, you've got a very nice virtual background. You just, you just fit right in there. I have a background, I just gotta move that cuz I just really have a light in there. That is very simple. It's just not a picture behind me, not a lot of distraction. I can take that picture down and just have a plain white wall. I also, I I, you, you, you could use, I have a, a desk that allows me to stand or sit. You could also use, you know, boxes <laugh> to, to change the, the the point of view.So I think those are some of the, the first things. And then think about, well, how well about h how the lighting is, how, how are you showing up in the frame? And you can buy expensive lights or you can go to Home Depot get lights. So I think some of it is just kind of setting up that how are you going to look on, on screen? That's the first step. And then from here, you know, phase one, start doing recording in Zoom and switch between being on camera and having slides. That's a good place to start and get comfortable, get in the rhythm of doing it and then you can up your game. So for me one of the next steps, one I forgot to mention, you know, you can start with the camera on your computer, but then maybe upgrade to having like I have a Logitech Brio is what I'm, what I'm using these days.Then, so kind of this like the basics and then to just do things in Zoom and do the screen sharing kind of re related to the tech, but not related to the tech is when you, how are your graphics, how are your slides going to look? So consider investing in a graphic designer to come up with a nice branded template for you that you can then just work inside of because it'll have a a really nice look and feel for you. It's, I, I made that investment early on and it, it's been great. So then we get more into more technology and there's all kinds of things out there that you can do. So I happen to be on a Mac, which is why I purchased e a m. If I had it all hooked up here I could show it <laugh>, but I'm not, I'm not connected at this moment.But what that allows me to do is move between different types of visuals, different types of shots, and just with, by pushing a button I can, I can change the scenes that I'm in. So you can see me on camera, you can see me with a graphic overlay. I, I can have my slides come up and I can be in a little window on the slide. So it, it, it just makes it a bit more interesting. And it's not, the learning curve isn't that steep. Then you can look at adding in, if you show, so choose the next level up would be bring in a stream deck, which then allows you to program this. So you just push a button to move from scene to scene to scene. And it's very seamless. What's great about doing this is you can put in production values, like lower thirds graphics.Maybe I could have, if I had this white wall behind me, I could have a, a list for like an agenda item or something. And you have it all programmed in. So then when you do your recording, all of that comes together fairly nicely. And then the, the amount of editing on the backend isn't as much. Cuz the other side of it is, is then to really do post-production editing and the that, that's certainly, you know, an option too. But I think, you know, initially to keep it simple, because what's more important is how how excited are you about what you're talking about? How engaging are you? Are you really, you know, are you loving the camera? Are you really working the room? That's what's going to make a difference. Oftentimes, once people, the camera comes on, hello, my name is Nancy, I'm very happy to be here today. Right, <laugh>. And then, you know, then from there, then it's, you know, and this is more and, and your wheelhouse than mine is, then where are you gonna put the content? When you're, when you're ready to deliver.**Chris Badgett:** Yeah, and I'll just throw out there, it just depends on what you're doing. If you're like super beginner, you don't have a website, there's hosted platforms like Kajabi, teachable, think if things like that and there's many more. But if you have a WordPress site, you know, that's where we exist at Lifter l m s. If you already have a WordPress site, you can add it and make courses and coaching programs and host 'em yourself. I want to kind of zoom out with kind of a final question. It's kind of a hard one. Which is.**Chris Badgett:** If we're talking to an expert and they're just, they got that passion. They, you know, they had that middle of the night moment or they were on vacation, they, they decided they're gonna kind of come out from behind themselves and help around a certain topic or subject matter expertise. And they've figured out like the type of person they want to help. You mentioned helping book writers become course creators. So there's books, we can write books, we can create courses, we can do coaching programs, we can do consulting we can do public speaking. And I know it probably depends on the personality of the person, but I, I do see some people get a little paralyzed cuz they, they're like, oh, I gotta do all that. I'm, I'm working on my book, my course, trying to get speaking gigs. I'm, I'm doing coaching and I have services too. And they just explode. If, if you could wave a magic wand, what, what path would you send somebody down knowing that people can do it in different ways in terms of, you know, stepping into their power as an expert and, and, and delivering their value to the world through these different mediums, right? In what order would you suggest if you could get catch somebody at the beginning?**Nancy Giere:** At the beginning, I think the first step is to come up with a great presentation in whatever way you're comfortable doing it. Most people are comfortable doing something like that live. So start there and then take a look at it and then go, next phase is to be on Zoom like we are now, and do it live online and go, okay, this is what I did when I was in front of a room. This is what worked. These are the activity I brought people through. Now that I'm in this different platform, what do I need to do differently? What do I need to change to be effective here? And really get comfortable working in this environment? And then take then step back and say, all right, of this, what makes sense then to turn into something that's evergreen and extract that from it. And one thing that I think is, can be really a powerful shift for people is, you know, get comfortable on Zoom, get comfortable presenting the content and then look at it and how would I break it into more discreet modules?And do another live version really with clear transitions from topic one, topic two, topic three. Because what that does is it gives you the opportunity to have the energy of talking to a live audience. And then when you go to cut it into more discreet modules for Evergreen, you've created the space for the editor instead of just, I'm gonna just stop for 45 minutes. I think, I think that is a, is the easiest flow in because it's important that you get more and more comfortable with your content. It's not you've memorized something, but that you've embodied it in such a way that then you can speak to it, whether you're on a stage, whether you're live online or evergreen. Because the reality as we continue on here is you're going to need to be able to come out with all three. But I think the easiest and the most natural for people is to start in front of, of a live audience.**Chris Badgett:** Solid advice there. That's Nancy Geary, it's n a n c y g i e r e.com. What can they find at your website? Tell us how people can connect with you and any, you know, final words for the people.**Nancy Giere:** Well, on the, on the website, they can download my a easy steps to create training at sells, which is the whole framework of how I operate. And my email is out there and my phone number's out there, so you can call me if you want. I'm, I'm home ready to talk. I**Chris Badgett:** Love that by the way. Like not hiding behind the website or whatever, like the connection is, is rare. And so why not? If you're in the spirit of Service**Nancy Giere:** Connect. Yeah, why not? Yeah, I'm <laugh>. Yeah, I love to talk <laugh>, so it's not a problem. Then. I've just written a book called bundle Your Brilliance, turn Your Expertise into High Profit Online Programs, online Courses. And I'm just in the final phases, depending on the timing of all of this in having it available on Amazon and through my website. That will be around the middle of January. It, January 10th is actually my stake in the ground that I set where people can actually get the book, which then expands on what's in the, the eight easy steps.Chris Badgett: That's awesome. And this podcast will likely be out after that. So go to Amazon now and look for Bundle Your Brilliance. Nancy, I want to thank you for coming on the show. You dropped so many knowledge bonds and, and you know, hard one lessons from all your experience. Thanks. Thank you for being so generous and sharing with the community today. We really appreciate it.**Nancy Giere:** Oh, you're very welcome. I enjoyed it.**Chris Badgett:** And that's a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don't miss the next episode. And I've got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I'll see you in the next episode. 2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post How to Create an Online Training Program that Sells with Nancy Giere appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode Chris Davis shares several insights and tips for entrepreneurs and business owners. He discuss about marketing and business automation.

Chris Davis is the founder of Automation Bridge, an online education platform that offers training and resources for entrepreneurs and business owners looking to automate their marketing and sales processes. He is an experienced marketer and sales automation expert.

Chris Davis talks about how he realized the need to meet people where they are in terms of automation and not just talk at them with jargon. He emphasizes the importance of humility and aligning with the mission of education.

He also talk about the digital marketing landscape, the email automation landscape, and the marketing automation landscape, and how the industry is just getting comfortable with the idea of email and automation.

Chris Davis explains his mission of making automation accessible by equipping the industry with the right technologies and aligning with his mission of education.

Here’s Where To Go Next…Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideEpisode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of lifter l m s, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Chris Davis. He’s from automation bridge.com. We’re gonna talk about some of my favorite topics, and I know Chris is as well. You’ve got two Chrises here who both love marketing. They both love marketing automation. They both love WordPress. Welcome to the show. Chris.

Chris Davis: Chris, thank you for having me. I have been looking forward to this since I put it on your calendar, man. And we, we actually got started before you hit record, like on accident. It is just, I’m, I’m just so excited. Just started oozing out, man.

Chris Badgett: Well, I’m a, I’m a mission and vision guy like you are. And you know, my life mission is my company mission, which is to lift up others through education. Mm-Hmm. , yours is to make automation accessible. How do you do that?

Chris Davis: Yes, yes. So, so Chris, this was, this is a story of humility . Okay? Okay. And by that I say, you know, when you become an expert in your respective space, so for me, that’s marketing automation. I’ve worked for active campaign, I’ve done marketing automation at a high level for other startups to help them raise millions in capital. You get use to what others would look at. Unbelievable.

And super duper becomes the norm to you. Mm-Hmm. , right? And if you’re not careful, Chris, what you’ll do is you’ll go into the market with that mentality and you’ll talk at people, Hey, this is what you should be doing. This is what you could be doing. And, and they’ll love it cuz they’re like, yes, I want to do that. Ow, , you’re right. And then you, you leave them with this excitement, but you, they can’t really do anything with it.

And I realized that that’s what I was doing. And when, when I say humility is because when I, when I assess myself, there was a bit of pride in there to show people how much I know and show off automation. And I really had to say, you know what? Let me slow down and meet people where they’re, where they’re at. When I looked across the market, the, the digital marketing landscape, and then I looked at the email automation landscape and then the marketing automation landscape, right?

So real quick, digital marketing is the umbrella of all marketing online. Then you have email automation under that umbrella in marketing automation under that umbrella too. And I looked at those respective spaces and I saw that the industry is really just now, Chris, getting comfortable with the idea of email and automation. And, and, and I’ll prove it, he, here’s why. Because you now see platforms like MailChimp, that is a email marketing platform, offer automation, right? Finally, but they.

Chris Badgett: Right?

Chris Davis: Right. Finally, and their version of it is the automation of email sending. They’re not giving you, now you take that, we’ve got email automation, and you go to marketing automation with a platforms like Active Campaign where they do everything that MailChimp does, but they empower you with a much more robust automation experience and much more capabilities, right? So I look at that and I, from all my time working at Active Campaign, seeing how confused the users were.

I thought Active Campaign was fairly simple software, honestly. But I come from Infusion Soft Days where things were super complicated. So context there, and if you’re confused on this platform, that should be easy. And people still aren’t emailing effectively. But the email marketing platforms are telling you to not just email Automate, but they don’t want you to fully automate because they know that’ll be too confusing.

It hit me and said, well, wait a minute. I’m, I’m too far. I need to go to where the people are. People are just now getting comfortable with sending emails and then some automation of that sending of emails. So that’s where the entire mission of making automation accessible is that I said to myself, we are gonna be a company that no matter how much we know, we are going to meet the industry, we’re gonna meet our audience where they’re at and equip them with what they need immediately.

Right? Now, the benefit is the immediate equipping will scale. That’s, that’s the bonus, right? That’s where I get to use my superpower, Chris, right? And know, okay, I’ve seen scale. So what I’m recommending today will probably work not just today, but tomorrow and the tomorrow after that. But I’ve gotta make it accessible. So, so that’s one part, right?

Is meeting them where they’re at and, and, and equipping them with the right technologies. The second part is align with your mission, and that’s education. I, I have a, a voice that I’m working on amplifying, by the way. But it is a voice of agnostic reasoning. I’m, I’m in nobody’s pocket, particularly in terms of software, but I have to do, I have to partner, do better partnering with softwares like yourself to give you all that amplified voice so that people understand what’s available to them. That’s the second part of making it accessible. So that’s where it came from. That’s what it means. And that, that’s what we’re committed to. Man.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I love that. And it, you know, I re I re resonate with the story where you’re an early adopter. Like, I remember when lead Pages first launched and you know, I was early in the Infusionsoft community as well, and when you’re an early adopter, all of a sudden one day you end up with all these fancy terms and you’re in this room with just a small group of people that are talking about automated funnels and this and that, and then, but like, the market’s out there and they’re, they haven’t even heard about it yet.

That’s true. So that’s a, that’s a really cool insight you had. And my hat’s off to you as an early adopter and an innovator, but you’re right, the big opportunity is the, the rest of the curve, the majority of people and business owners and stuff out there.

Chris Davis: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Chris Badgett: Can you you touched on it a little bit, but can you expand on what you were saying? There’s email marketing and then marketing automation. How are those different? Like Yeah, yeah. Specifically the marketing automation piece.

Chris Davis: Yeah. Yeah. And, and this is, I, I love talking about this cuz part of my mission with education and I, I, I just released a podcast about it, is now what happens is when people are confused, they conflate. Okay, okay. So when, I don’t know what’s

Chris Badgett: The difference between

Chris Davis: Email marketing, email automation, marketing automation, I conflate it to one word. Automation.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Chris Davis: Now I can throw this word, this blanket word

Chris Davis: Out there, and hopefully it covers everything.

Chris Badgett: I’m just gonna automate my business, right?

Chris Davis: That’s it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Right?

Chris Davis: But what part, what part are we talking about? There’s many parts of, of your Business. Yeah. So a big portion of what I do is breaking down and, and, and, and com compartmentalizing what these things mean. So this is one of my favorite ones. So we’ll start with email marketing. Email marketing is the process of using email to market your, your, your products, right?

So we know that as building a list, the database of people that we can send emails to, and this is where email blasts come from and things of that nature. Automation at that level is essentially an autoresponder. Somebody opts in and they get a series of emails. We call ’em drip campaigns now and all of this, but it’s an autoresponder, it’s nothing new. Marketers took it from like Outlook outta office responders, right? and said, Hey, what if we added More emails to that and put it in the software?

We’ve got whole new software, right? So that’s email marketing, beginning and end as we have known it to be. It’s expanded a bit. Now where you have some tagging they may allow you to collect more custom fields, but usually it’s focused on getting an email address and sending emails to that email address, right? Then you say, okay, we’ve migrated from that. So that would be like our mail Chimps AWeber historically AWeber, eye contacts, vertical response, you know, things like that.

Constant Contact. If you look back three, four years ago, that’s exactly what they were. Now, I don’t see too many people playing in the email marketing space. Chris. All of these platforms have really migrated to the email automation space. And what that means is they’re realizing we need to give people more than just sending emails. And the first, the first two platforms that I saw do this a few years ago was Get Response.

Get Response was the first one that went from email marketing to email automation. Now they’re trying to do marketing automation and Convert Kit. Mm-Hmm. . Those were the two that came out the gate and was just like, Hey, look. And then shortly thereafter, that Drip came on the, on the scene with email automation. And what they did was they expanded a bit of the information that you could capture and what you could do, the automation that you can do with it.

So now I’m not limited to just maybe a auto-responder series. Perhaps I can have some dynamic on and off, like send people between automation series, if they finish one, send them to another one, right? If they’ve already done this one, don’t send it again. I’ve got more capabilities, right? Automation in, in a sense, right? However, I’m still limited to the management of the contacts that I’m capturing.

And the reason being is because the only proper way to manage contacts effectively is to use C R M software. So the introduction of the, the intersection, I should say, of C R M software and email automation is where marketing automation takes place. All right? It takes that email automation and says, Hey, let me ize you with c R M software. Now watch this, Chris. Now that you have a proper way to store your contacts, much more information to capture, now you can do way more automation.

Now we’re talking about marketing automation, not just email, because I can now automate sending a text message. I can now automate some internal things that maybe the customer never sees. Adding a note, adding a tag that triggers something else, that notifies someone and then they do something. I’ve got this whole backend orchestra that I can’t establish with email marketing or email automation. Now, I’m not here to tell you one is greater than the other. Your business needs and the stage of where your business is at is gonna determine which one you need. Myspace is the marketing automation space.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned your podcast, it’s called the All Systems Go Podcast. So if you’re listening to this, go load up some episodes of that. Yes. What, what I kind of have a brain like yours where when I look at a business, I can start seeing the gears and like, what am I gonna automate? What am I not gonna automate? Like, what’s this machine I want to try to build? And yeah, I know it won’t be perfect and I’ll make some mistakes and I’ll have to tweak it. It’s always a work in progress.

But I know for myself and a lot of people in, in the space, sometimes they especially in the early days, they make a lot of mistakes when building that marketing automation machine. What advice do you have around systems thinking or design Yes. To help people approach this animal without wasting a bunch of time or over complicating it or underdoing it.

Chris Davis: Yep. Chris, this is, oh my gosh, this answer is gonna sound so contradictory. It’s painful every time I say it, but they say it’s tight, but it’s right. Mm-Hmm. . And what I tell people is this automation is emulation. What is automation emulating? It’s emulating those tiresome but required tasks that are required to run your business. So what do I, oh, I’m embracing myself to say it. What do I tell people is the first thing you need to do? Go waste your time,

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s true. It’s true.

Chris Davis: That’s, and, and that one’s a heavy one that just sits. Cuz nobody wants to do that, Chris. Everybody wants to jump straight into automation. Hey, let’s time more money go waste your time. You have to figure, you have to feel the pain of the processes, Chris, right? You have to, oh, every day I’ve gotta log in and export this C S V and import it over here. Oh, this is so ti All right?

Once you’ve understood what all of the processes are and you feel that pain, you’ve wasted your time. The only way to waste time is to know the value of it. So, in the beginning, Chris, most people don’t even know the value of the time. So watch this. If I don’t value my time, I can’t properly value automation. Because one of the gifts of automation, the big gift is not money.

It’s time. Literally. It’s time. And for those who know, time is money, right? Automation gives you the gift of your time, but if you don’t value your time, you then have a cheapened respect and honor for automation. So you’ll go and buy the latest app AppSumo technology, you’ll, you’ll, you’ll go and just do what the cheapest marketing product says do. And the best sales funnel that you can buy for $30 off theme forest or something like that, right? You have no respect for your time.

So if you don’t respect your time, you can’t respect automation that’s gonna give you more of the thing you don’t respect , right? So go waste your time, and by wasting it, you’ll find value in it and say, you know what? I can’t afford to do this anymore. I I can’t keep operating like this, but I need to get this done. Now it’s time to have a conversation. Now it’s time to think about automating some stuff.

Chris Badgett: I love that I give, you know, I talk to a lot of course creators and coaches, and I often give the advice of put your to new ones, especially without an audience. Or they’re just getting started to put their phone number, their, their real cell phone number on the website and , you know, and let people call you. And ooh, and even even on lifter l m s, we had, I mean, you can get these services to run it through a one 800 number.

But we, we had a number on our site, like for so long that rang my cell phone directly. And it’s through that the market told me, all right, this is the 10th time I’m doing this time to build some automation or make, but you gotta hear the voice of the customer. If you’re just like an inventor and you’re like, oh, wouldn’t that be cool? Oh, wouldn’t that be cool? How you get a little messy? Right?

Chris Davis: Yep. I love that, Chris, because for someone like myself, I’m a, I’m a overthinker. I’m, I’m, I’m always thinking, and I’m an over builder mm-hmm. . So I always vacillate between, Hmm, should I build this to, oh, did I build enough, right? That that’s my life, man. Yeah. And, and discipline and business and success has taught me b, my first version, it’s okay, don’t, Chris, don’t you touch it unless it proves that it needs more, right? So that a lot of times that’s what we have to do is it’s okay to your point, if you have a capture system to where all the leads go to you personally in the beginning, right? Yeah. Work that until it exhausts you, it’s.

Chris Badgett: A good problem to have.

Chris Davis: Right? It’s a great problem to have. But Chris, watch this. What if I, what reverse it? What if I spend all this money in this fancy funnel and this, this and that, and all this automation on the back end and no leads are coming in?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s a waste of time, right?

Chris Davis: No waste of time. So go have the problem, create the problem that automation will solve for you if your phone is ringing every hour on the hour, all right, now we’re ready for some automated team support on the back end. Maybe those 1-800-NUMBERS do some routing, some questions up front you, you know? Yeah. But a lot of times it’s premature and it, and it comes from the conflation of the word automation and the sloppiness around the teaching and implementation of it.

Let me say the expectations around it. People are now starting to use it as industry jargon to get into your pockets. And what they ex, what they’re doing is they’re becoming profitable off your ignorance. And that’s just not right. So what we can do is remove the ignorance. It’s gonna hurt the profit of those who were making money off of your ignorance, but it’s gonna put you in a position to where you can properly grow your business through the use of applying technology to your processes that are ne necessary in producing a profit to truly get the full, the full experience of automation.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I wanna ask a, a more detailed question. I was on your website and I was checking out the automation checklist, which is something we call like a lead magnet. Somebody enters their email and they get the checklist. It’s a pdf, but so if somebody, if you’re a course creator and you’re doing this kind of top of the funnel lead magnet thing and they get the checklist, how long should a nurture sequence go?

I get asked this question a lot, and I’m, I’m an overbuild, I’ll, I’ll put a year’s worth of emails in there. Yep. Yep. But I guess more broadly, when it comes to a nurture campaign Yep. How long should it go? And how should we think about it? Like strategically?

Chris Davis: Yeah. So, so embrace yourselves again for this one. Yeah. it should never end

Chris Badgett: Okay?

Chris Davis: It should never, now, wait a minute. Every slow, whoa, whoa, whoa. I felt it, Chris, I felt your audience judging me real quick. Hold on, on, let me explain , time out. Time out. Let me explain myself. This is what I mean. You have what I call that is a follow-up framework, and there are different phases in the follow-up framework, right? Mm-Hmm. , your initial phase is delivery. That means whatever that person asks for, get it to them.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Chris Davis: Once they’ve received it. And, and the, the logic behind how to do this, I call it my single double once and only once they’ve received and engaged with it, do you then activate the next phase, which is your follow up, your lead magnet follow up. Now, this is usually what I like to do, Chris, is three to five email sequence relative to what you opted into to connect whatever the next step is.

I want you to take mm-hmm. . So for me I’ve got, I do have a five point automation checklist. From there, let’s say I wanted you to subscribe to my podcast. So with those three to five emails, I will be using what I’m mentioning in the five point automation checklist and connecting the dots. So you can see that the next step to subscribe to the podcast is like a no-brainer.

Right? Now, that’s my framework, three to five emails for that next phase. Okay? What’s the next phase? The, the phase after that is a transitionary phase. I’ve heard this be called other things by other marketers, but what essentially it is, is saying, Hey, look, I’m now transitioning from talking about that thing that you just opted in for. And the thing that I want you to do, I still want you to do it, but I’m gonna transition a bit. I’m no longer gonna talk about that thing, but I’m gonna continue to send you valuable information actually about more things than, than, than just this one thing too.

Right? So it’s a what to expect going forward email, right? So or one to two emails of that. And then the final phase is your long-term nurture. This is what I mean. It never ends. You, you’ve gotta have some kind of nurture campaign, whether it’s weekly, monthly, or whatever the frequency in your business is, where you’re always staying on top of mine until somebody says, I no longer want to hear from you in they unsubscribe.

Chris Badgett: I’ve seen people write our email list for two years before they buy something. Like it happens Yes. All the time. Now watch this. And I say, six months is the normal for us.

Chris Davis: Yes. Now, do you feel that? Do you, do you, at time you’re like, man, they’ve been on my list for four months,

Chris Badgett: Is just, yeah. Right? Yeah.

Chris Davis: You don’t feel any of it because you’ve done your due diligence and you have your nurture built in. So they come around when they’re ready to come around.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And podcasting, you mentioned you have a podcast again, it’s the also some SCO podcast. Yes. Sometimes I’ll get on the phone with somebody or on a Zoom call and they’ll be like, I’ve been listening to your podcast for like five years and I got a couple questions for you. And I’m like, this is awesome. Like, just because you don’t hear anything coming back at you, you can’t always track everything, is what I’m saying that Yeah. It’s still, still works. It’s still out there.

Chris Davis: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Can you give us some tips on designing that? You mentioned like there’s the lead magnet, and then maybe you want to get him on the podcast, and then maybe there’s this customer journey or whatever you you want to call it. Yeah. How do you design that and map that out? Are you a big whiteboard guy, or how do you figure out what that is?

Chris Davis: Huge, huge, Chris. So what I’ve done is I’m, so I’ve got a big whiteboard on my wall over here that’s like the majority of my wall. And then two is I can’t be limited to my office for a whiteboard. So I also have like, note taking apps on my iPad that emulates a whiteboard. Okay. So I I I’m a analog first individual.

So analog first and end first. So I always start analog, and I always start with the end in mind. Stephen Covey, begin with the end in mind. Seven habits, a highly effective people. When you apply that to, to, to marketing and business, what is the product that I essentially want people to buy? And then I reverse engineer it. I build, I I strategize it in reverse. Mm-Hmm. and I build it in sequence. Yeah. You know so that’s

Chris Badgett: Really hat mart. I wanna write that down. . Yeah. All

Chris Davis: Right. So that ensures the customer journey is aligned and my messaging is in sync, Chris.

Chris Badgett: And it saves me from the trap of not what could I build, it’s more like, what should I build to get to the where I’m going? Yes.

Chris Davis: Yes. Right? And, and when you do this, what it allows me to do you know, I mentor marketers. I, I, I teach marketers. I’m an educator. I, I, I do a lot of training. What it allows me to do is get them to focus. Once we identify this is the target, okay, you said you wanted to sell your book. That alone lets me now know what the customer journey should entail. Now the question is, what type of customer journey?

Do you want somebody to have a fully immersive, do you want to take the first three chapters and give it away as a P D F that’s less immersive and kind of like you’re on your own? Or what if we take those three chapters and turn ’em into some kind of minicourse that’s much more immersive. Maybe we can do some tracking of what people are consuming and then be better at o in an automated fashion, getting them to purchase the book based on their consumption.

It all depends. But you see, just by defining and, and say, I wanna sell my book that controls everything in my messaging. Hey, what’s in the book? What are you talking about in the book? What, what transformation does the book give? Now I have ideas for content lead magnets, what quizzes, right? But it’s all aligned, Chris, and, and we don’t talk about anything now. It’s like if somebody comes say, Hey, I had an idea for a lead magnet that for t-shirts. Okay. That, how does the t-shirt connect with the book ?

Just, just, if you can prove that to me, I’m a, I’ll go for it. But most people can’t. They’re like, okay, so, so then what I say is this, Chris, and this is a mind trick that you have to do to yourself. You have to say, you don’t say no, cuz No, in a lot of people’s mind triggers an ultimatum. It triggers a either or. I like to give people a both and in their mind so that they can rest assured that, okay, it’s a no, it’s not a forever.

No. Cuz that’s all people hear when they say no. So I replace no with not now. Mm. That’s it. Not now. . Okay. Can we do this, Chris? Not now. I didn’t say no. Just if we’re looking at now, no. But later, maybe let’s get profitable here and with some money in your pocket. Let’s see if that idea still looks enticing.

Chris Badgett: Most, I wish I have sound effects on this show, so I could make you’re dropping all these knowledge bombs here.

Chris Davis: Yes,

Chris Badgett: Man, let me ask you another detailed one that I personally run into, and I know a lot of people do, which is the idea of segments. Yes. So that you have like a couple different types of customers mm-hmm. , and I know there’s like the ideal customer profile that’s like singular, but for my business, for example, at lifter l m s, we work with subject matter experts and then like WordPress professionals who build sites for clients or that kind of thing. Sure, sure. So very different people.

And, and there’s actually a third group that does both. They like make courses, , they do client sites. Yep. but how do we deal with se how do we think about that? Because especially if you get a lot of segments, sometimes it can be overwhelming. Oh, now I gotta build everything like twice or five times Yeah. Or whatever. Any advice around that challenge with businesses attracting different types of people.

Chris Davis: Yep. I, I love segmentation and I have been a huge abuser of segmentation,

Chris Badgett: Like overlay segmenting. Yep,

Chris Davis: Yep. Absolutely. Yeah, because, because here, here’s what happens. You give people tools to play with and they build stuff, and then you come and look and say, Hey, what’s that? You like, you know, I don’t quite remember what that was supposed to be. . Yeah. But it was fun building it. Right. And that’s what I, that’s what happens to me. Especially in a platform that’s really flexible, like active campaign where you can really build any segment that you want. It’s like, okay, let me make sure this, this and that.

And I fell into that a for a, for a long time. And what got me out of it, Chris was actually tracking mm-hmm. when I realized I could not track the effectiveness of my marketing because I just had too many paths. I I had too many segments, too many outcomes. So segmentation, the, it looks different in, in many ways, right? Segmentation, pre optin, pre optin is really your avatar, right? It’s who am I targeting? And for every target here, here’s what’s interesting. You could have one product for three different avatars, but your lead magnet to that product is probably gonna be different for all three avatars.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned active campaign itself, like it’s for SaaS founders, which is kind of like me, but it’s also for, they have like five solution pages or whatever,

Chris Davis: Right? Yeah. There you go. And that’s the beginning of their segmentation. Yeah. Is depending on who you are, they have custom pages built for that. A lot of the more savvy startups who are familiar with marketing are doing that, right? Yeah. Dedicated pages for their audiences. That’s the pre opt-in, that’s what segmentation looks like.

So it could be the same product, but you’re just gonna position it differently, right. For one audience, like you said, you have the builders. Yeah. They’re probably gonna want something more technical, right? Right. Then you have the subject matter experts. They just need to know that this is the tool that will, that they can trust with their expertise.

Chris Badgett: Right.

Chris Davis: That’s a different approach. And then you got the Boers . Yeah. Like I’m a the

Chris Badgett: Power users. Yeah.

Chris Davis: Right? And they’re probably leaning more towards like an agency model where they’re an influencer and then they have a done for you service on the backend. Yeah. So then they’re looking for, how, how can I use this, this this software to really scale my agency? So those, that’s different language, Chris, same product, right? Yeah. So pre-op in, you have to understand, you know, what those avatars are. Now, once they opt in, they are a known segment.

They’re no longer an avatar. They’re se you named that segment something. And based on where they opt in, they are a segment and they go through the framework, as I mentioned. But here’s the thing, Chris, here’s the thing. Once they don’t take action, they’re no longer, you, I would recommend you no longer market to them as the initial segment that they came into because that didn’t work for whatever reason.

So they’re going into the long term general nurture. Yes. Yeah. Right? Yeah. But look, what we have, Chris, we have behavior that we have tracked to let us know what the next segment that they are in. Yeah. And, and this is critical with marketing automation, because what I’m introducing to a lot of people right now, and I know I’m high level, Chris and I, and I know I’m making automation accessible. So I, but I just wanna speak here for a minute. People think that a segment is one dimensional, monolithic.

You, if you are this, you’re always that. No no, they are not. So when you draft your journey, you have to do such that you know what segments they can fall into. If they don’t, if their initial segment does not convert, where have you heard the term initial segment? You don’t hear it. We just say segment your audience.

And once they’re in there, we do it up here, Chris, they’re in that segment. When are they not? Oh, when they opt out? No, they can still be out of that segment and still be on your list. They’re in a whole nother segment. So again, I, I love it. Most of the, the, when I say love it segmentation, most of the advanced segmentation takes place in the long-term nurture, right? Because you’re, you’re, you’ve got, the more information you have, the, the better the position, the more effective you are with segmentation. And, and guess what, Chris? That’s all pre customer people also forget, you’ve got post customer segments, , everybody has these two. One-Time buyer, repeat buyer.

Mm. You every show me a business that doesn’t, right? And if they don’t have it, I’ll show you a business that will be out of business shortly. Right? So you have those two segments, and then within those, what, what are those sub segments there?

The one time buyer, okay, what’s going on with them? Maybe I, we need to throw ’em back into the marketing nurture and figure out more information so we can get ’em back in to become a, a, a multi-buyer. If, if, if they, if they are a repeat buyer, all right, now I need to look at the lifetime customer value. Maybe I’m segmenting based on that. You know, you’ve got other criteria when you get to the customer side, but you’re always segmenting and you, and you can see easily how it can get overwhelming. So let me break, bring it all the way down. Keep your segments as singular as possible, right?

If you’ve got two audiences, you’ve got two segments, they come in. If they don’t convert, then they go into your long-term nurture and just nurture them. Okay? Just send your emails. I like to send e even though you may have two segments, I like to send it to one segment and I like to talk to one person in that segment. Mm-Hmm. , let me, I, I gotta, I have to give this away, Chris. I have to give this away. Okay. So I did this, I did this, Chris I don’t, I don’t want to give it away too much cuz a person may actually be listening. So, so watch this. I saw in my list that there was a particular profession,

Chris Badgett: Okay?

Chris Davis: I kept seeing, cuz I go to people’s websites. I look at my list. Yeah. I’m not one of those people that just look at the number. Oh, I’m at 5,000, oh, I’m at 10,000. No . I go and look and say, Hey, who’s opting in? Right? And I went and I saw a particular industry and I say, you know what, I’ve got about four top industries from my business. It’s e-commerce, web developers, VAs, and, and operation managers and then marketers.

Those are the primary four that come to me to learn marketing automation. I’ve got outliers, but those are the primary four. So outta that four, I saw one that was really picking up on trends. This is what I did. Chris, I intentionally wrote email copy and recorded an entire episode to the one person in one of those audiences. I had their website up.

Everything that I was talking about was literally to them without saying the name of their business. I just wanted to see how it converted Chris. It converted like immediately. immediate. I was like, whoa, that was fast. Right? So what I’m saying is, even though you have this is to make segmentation simple, everybody, you don’t have to go and say, okay, I’ve got four segments, so I need four different messages. You can literally take the time. The good thing about great marketing and great messaging is it works on the people. It’s for and the people. It’s not for become really good bystanders and fans of it.

Like, oh wow, that was really well written. I mean, I’m not gonna buy, but wow, that, that really made, I like that email, right? It’s a nolo situation. So to keep it simple, just pick one, one person in one of, in one of your segments and write to them, right? I love that. Record a podcast about them. You get what I’m saying? Like, don’t make it specific where you say their name and their business, but talk about the industry, talk about the need, right? And from there you’ll start to see other opportunities to use segmentation based on data and based on how people are responding. You know,

Chris Badgett: That’s a big insight around keeping things simple. Like you don’t need to have four different podcasts. No, but maybe one episode is for the marketers and another episode is for the other person. Yes. And it’s just same for me, one’s for the builders, one’s for the experts, you know, and so on. Yep. Keep it simple.

Chris Davis: Absolutely. And, and sometimes when you’re in your zone, Chris, and you know it, you know when you’re recording an episode and you just, it’s just firing. Actually, this, this podcast kind of feels like it. Chris, you got me at the right time. Yeah. Sometimes you could pepper that in. So what I like to do is if I’m talking to the digital marketer Yeah, I’ll say something like this. Hey, hey, hey, CEOs and founders, listen to how I’m talking to them. Yeah. I just include them.

I’m not, I’m still not talking to them though. . Yeah. Chris, this is for the digital marketer. Hey, digital marketer, do this and that. Hey, founders, did you hear what I said? So, because I’m telling them to do it now, that’s what you need to look for in your next digital marketer. So there’s ways that you can even tie it in once you get good. Right? Don’t try to do all these all these things out the gate. Keep it simple.

Talk to your people like you would, again, automation is emulation. Chris, if I’m, if I met one of the people that were on my list in person, what would that conversation be? Yeah. What would I ask them? What would I tell them about myself? That’s what I want to emulate. You know.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned tracking performance and results, and I forget that famous marketing quote that like something about, yeah, marketing’s awesome, I just don’t know which half’s working or whatever. , what’s your, what’s your take on it? Like, and, and sometimes, you know, there’s friction among you know, business partners or whatever where like, Hey, is the marketing working? It’s kind of hard to tell. Like there’s brand awareness. There’s all these like, kind of intangibles going Yeah. How, how tight can we get our tracking? Especially with market marketing automation and and the things that you help out with.

Chris Davis: Yeah. The good thing is this, I’ve, I am a over implementer of pretty much everything.

Chris Badgett: Okay? So

Chris Davis: Just like I’ve over implemented on segments before, I’ve overdone analytics to where I tracked everything, had a data layer and Google Analytics to push anonymous data down and then tie the cookie to a known user and and it, and initially it sounds like heaven. Oh my gosh, I would love that insight. But truth be told Chris, it, if we’re just gonna be honest, most people not only don’t know what to do with that level of insight.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Chris Davis: The other side is they don’t even need that deep of a level of insight. So what I found is that there’s just some key indicators that people really need to measure for business success. And I am a huge fan of source attribution, Chris, huge fan. If there’s anything that I do, I make sure every form that I’ve created has hidden fields for sources. You know, by default I just do UTMs for everything because you can train anybody off of five or free any freelance website of how to put UTMs on a U R L and it automatically capture. But I, I use some other, some other other means. I’ll just say that. I don’t wanna get too technical, but essentially,

Chris Badgett: So you try hard to track the source.

Chris Davis: The source. I want the source for everything. Yeah. So and, and it gets technical how to do that. Like redirects and auto, auto populating, hidden fields, things like that. Just know it’s possible everyone. But if I am looking at my leads this month, Chris, let’s say Chris, let’s say I’ve been on five podcasts,

Chris Badgett: Okay?

Chris Davis: And every podcast I offer the same thing, which by the way, I do. And at the end of the month I see I have a hundred leads, a hundred leads, and I look and see, whoa, 80 of those leads came from Podcast one 20 were amongst podcasts two through five. Yeah. And I had, I had an idea to partner with a particular person, software, whatever. I now at least know where to start.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Chris Davis: Right? Like, this was a great source if they would have me back on the podcast. It’s an automatic Yes. , right? That’s one, that’s what source attribution does. If you’re, if you’re posting online in various ways, various social media platforms, I can, I can I, can I take my clothes off and be transparent, get naked. I just looked at my, my analytics for social media and my social traction was not what I thought it was. I’ll just say it. And a lot of it was garbage. And I say, look, we’re posting all these links on these platforms and getting two and three clicks. This is not working. . Yeah. . These are not good sources for us of leads. Right? But then I saw my.

Chris Badgett: Do you, lemme ask a question there on social media, do you take the time to create a trackable link or are you more just looking at the Google analytics, like, oh, Facebook traffic or whatever.

Chris Davis: No, I, I created trackable link. Now it is for those of you who are non-techy, now Google Analytics is good enough to tell you where they came from, like LinkedIn and all of that. If you don’t have it. But yeah, we’ve got an Airtable database that auto populates it and then it even, I’ve got some automation magic where it’ll go through make and create the shorten r url. So my VA clicks a button, the shorten URL just pops up in the next field and she’s like, oh, okay.

Chris Badgett:, oh Awesome.

Chris Davis: The face that with the post. But yeah, I track everything cuz it allows me to just more granularity. But once I know the source, the next thing I’m doing is I want to track the performance of those leads per source. I’m, oh, I’m about to mess everybody up. Chris, watch this. Sticking with the podcast 80 leads came from podcast A. Yeah. 20 word distributed out pod, let’s say podcast c I had eight leads come from. All right. Yeah. Now that could give me a false positive, Chris, it could gimme a false positive. I’ve got to monitor what they do. Yeah. So the next thing that I want to do is look at my sales system and see how many of the people from that source showed up in my sales system.

Chris Badgett: Right?

Chris Davis: Okay. That’s it. So now once they show up over here, I can now say, okay, this was a good lead source, but was it a good sales source? Right? And then I may find that even though podcast C only had eight people, it generated five sales where podcast 20, podcast eight, it had 80 generated three sales. We’ve got, we’ve got some, some solid data here, right? Although I only got eight from podcast C, if podcast A s C reaches out to me, I might prioritize c because it gave me more customers. Right? Right.

So these are just two metrics, Chris, while everybody’s like, but what about this? And if we just keep it simple, man, we have to keep it simple leads from what source did they show up in my sales system? And of those who showed up in my sales system, how many of them converted? If you just tracked those four, just those four consistently, you’ll know which others to add. But you should always have those four that you’re tracking.

Chris Badgett: I love that. I would, I would cue the apo, the applause sound if I had it. I know we’re coming up on time. I wanted to ask you in the spirit of making automation accessible yeah. But can you kind of inspire some people to think beyond email or, or the, the website, like you mentioned in our pre-chat, you were talking about WP Fusion and WordPress and like here at Lifter LMS making courses and we’ve got like other apps and stuff that we can put together.

Like what let’s inspire the people of just some ideas for like a course creator or coach type person. Or if you are building that, those type of websites for clients, if you want to add on some marketing automation services, like what, what can we do when we can actually go beyond individual apps or channels like email? Ooh,

Chris Davis: Yes. Chris.

Chris Badgett: And See what I did there. By the way, I mentioned the builders and the experts , right?

Chris Davis: Look at that immediate implementation, right? Yeah. Chris, oh, this question is so great because you are part of the solution. Yeah. The future, everyone is online learning. It just is what it is. There’s no, the online course industry, I wish I had a number, honestly, this is anecdotal from what I see in terms of the amount of features and amount of players that we have in the l m s space.

Oh my, I mean, it’s blowing up because everybody sees money in online learning and teaching. I would say this, you’re, you’re, when you have a course platform, I’m gonna take lifter for for instance, okay, lifter integrates with WordPress and you all have a freemium model. This means are you listening to this, everybody? This means for a f for whatever it costs for me to get a website hosting and domain, I can be in position to offer my expertise in the form of a course.

Why would I do that, Chris? Because a online course creates a learning environment that is disarming and it allows me to get to know my audience just as much as they’re getting to know me. What do I mean by that? I cannot, I can track performance, I can track progression, I can incentivize them to complete a lesson within a certain amount of time and in an automated way, start a countdown timer and if they’ve done it within that allotted time, give them a gift.

Right? There’s so much more that you can do to create a personalized learning experience. And if you want to take your marketing beyond email, that is the way to go, right? That like all roads point to a more personalized marketing and education experience. You can’t do it without an l m s. The best thing that I’ve done is add training to my business model and tracking training and tracking.

Perhaps this is another episode where we talk about the tracking capabilities of lifter l m s in a platform like WP Fusion because we’ve ne Chris, I’m this is not hyperbolic statements I’m making. This is real. We’ve never been in a time where combining the two has been more accessible and more effective. It, the effectiveness of being able to track what people are doing into my C R M system and be able to trigger internal stuff as well as messaging externally. I’m not doing it to make, I’m not doing it trying to get more money, Chris. It’s money is gonna be a byproduct.

What I want, I want the transformation that I know my education is gonna provide. And if I can use technology and tracking and software to make sure you complete and consume all of that content, I know you’ll get the transformation.

And then, and only then is when I, I want to receive compensation for it, right? So beyond email for, especially for subject matter experts, you’ve, you have to, everybody, you have to get into the game of learning, right? You have to give people that learning experience. People are ready, they’re looking, they’re no covid helped us out. People are looking online for solutions. Youtube is, is is is the, the best indicator because everybody has taken video in some form and added it to their social platforms because that’s what people are looking for. They’re looking to learn, give it to ’em, , give people that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And one thing I’d add too is that like, even if courses aren’t the main business, like any business may benefit from some kind of education, for example, hundred percent. If you sell a product and you can have like when they buy the product, create an automation to enroll ’em in this course that shows ’em how to use the product and that can actually save you money and customer support and stuff like that. Yes. Education’s everywhere. You can do education based marketing. It can be in front of the sale. It’s, it can be the product, it can be after the sale. Yep. It’s what makes us human.

Chris Davis: Absolutely. I, I wish I could it because it’s fairly complex, but I wish I could just give that gift of a L M S synced with your C R M software. I really wish no knock against like the cajabi and carts and all that. It’s not the same man. Yeah, it’s not the same. But yes. Anyways, you, you guys are getting me going down all kinds of technical tangents. I’m trying to, I’m trying to be good Chris.

Chris Badgett: Well, Chris is@automationbridge.com, he’s also got a podcast. All systems go. So go subscribe to that. Go check out some of the episodes. And I actually just went through your deal where you had to, on your website, you had to opt in, subscribe to get some of the episodes. Yes. So you got me on your list again. And it’s it was, they’re good. I was listening to some of the recent ones. They were awesome.

Chris Davis: Great. Thank you.

Chris Badgett: What final words do you have for the people? Any or any other places you want to point ’em or ways for them to connect with you?

Chris Davis: Yeah, I want to encourage everyone, I want to encourage everyone that automation, let me, let me be specific. Marketing automation can work for you and there’s a good chance you’re in. I if you’re experiencing any kind of pain with your process, that’s not a bad thing. That’s a good thing. Yeah. We need that pain. We need that pain. So what I would say is the best way to get started is just understanding how to build and nurture an email list.

If, if we, if we keep it that simple, Chris, I believe it will begin to open up doors for other areas of automation. But I like to just slowly walk people through that. And, and, and again, a a word of encouragement is don’t be afraid of the pain that the process is produced that you have to do manually. Don’t shy away from it.

That is going to be the indicator of your success for automation when you implement it. So if anybody wants to get a starter course in email marketing and, and, and automation, I do have a, a, a link specific for you, Chris as automation bridge.com/lifter automationbridge.com/lifter.

And that’ll take you to a a page where you can opt in and get the, get the vi video series. It’s like a minicourse where you can learn about the, the framework that I mentioned with email marketing. And you’ll be connected with me. If you want to continue and learn more and more, you can do that too. But I think that’s the best way to encourage people to, to approach automation appropriately and equip them with a resource to, to allow them to do that as well.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s automation bridge.com. Chris, I could talk to you for hours. We’ll have to do it again down the road. Absolut. Absolutely. Man, I, I learned a lot listening to you today. And I just love how you’re making what you’re doing accessible because it’s easy to go deep down the rabbit hole and like get into, the super advanced stuff. But what the people need and the business owners need out there is they need to get in the door. And like you said, just cuz you’re, you’re an early adopter, there’s still a lot of people that are just coming to this party, right? Yeah,

Chris Davis: You’re right. You’re right Chris.

Chris Badgett: Well, thanks for coming on the show and we’ll see you down the road.

Chris Davis: Yes, thank you for having me, Chris. Greatly appreciate it.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

2023 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech.

Download the Buyer’s GuideThe post Chris Davis Makes Marketing and Business Automation Accessible appeared first on LMScast.

View Details

Aaron Edwards is a special guest on the LMScast, a podcast about creating, launching, and scaling online training programs. He shares about university website creation, Web3 and AI image generation.

Aaron Edwards is the founder of Web3 WP . He is the CTO of WPMU DEV, a company that offers premium WordPress plugins, themes, and hosting services. He has expertise in WordPress development, customization, and maintenance.

Aaron discuss the latest developments in Web 3, digital assets, and the recent collapse of the FTX exchange and FTT token. Aaron believes that the underlying technology of Web 3 is what matters and not speculation and investment. He founded Web 3 WP, a community that experiments with Web 3 technology and learns how it could apply to WordPress or open-source.

Aaron thinks that there are always bad actors in any technology, especially in newer ones that people don’t understand well. In his opinion, the centralized players or third parties that handle the tokens are the main culprits. People who have their own wallets and store their tokens themselves are safer.

Aaron still believes in the technology and where it’s going. He thinks that it’s a great time to build and invest in Web 3. And the people who are building tools honestly based on technology and not speculation and investment will be the ones who will shape the future of Web 3.

At LifterLMS.com, you can learn more about new developments and how to use LifterLMS to build online courses and membership sites. If you like this episode of LMScast, you can browse more episodes here. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Thank you for joining us!

Episode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of Lifter l m s, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of L m S Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Aaron Edwards. He has a bunch of cool tools and stuff to check out. He’s from WPMU Dev, but he’s got this awesome project called Imagine you wanna spell that for us, Aaron?

Aaron Edwards: Sure. It’s U r l i . It’s I M A J I N N dot a ai. What’s So Imagine ai,

Chris Badgett: What’s the quick pitch on what that is?

Aaron Edwards: The quick pitch is we’re using like the latest AI technology for image generation, but so we have kind of two subproducts using that technology. The first is the Imagine Plugin and WordPress, and that is basically a, like a Gutenberg block or admin page in your admin, and you can just type in any kind of image that you wanna generate, and then it uses AI to generate that for you and you can save it to your library or insert it into your post or page or course, whatever it may be. And yeah, pretty amazing.

And then we just launched a new kind of side project off of that technology tour where you can actually train your own a AI model with something like your face or a pet, or a couple photo, or even like product shots for e-commerce or even like a style. Like if we have a brand style, you can train the AI in that and then you can generate any kind of images, including those subjects. It’s pretty amazing technology.

Chris Badgett: That is awesome. You’re also known for infinite uploads. What’s that?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah infinite Uploads is a, a plugin that I launched with a friend a few years back in. It gives you, basically extends your WordPress media library to cloud storage. So it gives you infinite amount of storage, essentially. So if you’re like running outta storage or your media’s running slow, you can just connect that plugin and we make it super simple to connect to our cloud storage. And then you don’t have to upgrade your hosting plan or anything like that. You can just seamlessly expand your storage and it just goes straight to our cloud and it’s served from our cdn. So that’s infinite uploads.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And we’re gonna get back to both those, but let’s start just with some current news. You and I both are into Web three and digital assets and figuring out this whole next next chapter and technology that’s been happening. Recently there was a collapse of the F T X exchange and F F T T token which is called into question. A lot of people are, you know, scared or worried or getting out of Web three or crypto.

What, what’s your view on you know, this new technology in the context of what we’re seeing in the news right now in terms of is this all a scam or is there a real technology here? How do you, for somebody who’s not down the rabbit hole like you or I, how do you explain where we are on this current evolution of this new technology?

Aaron Edwards: Sure. Well I guess like from the beginning I, I’ve found like this technology as, as being not really about like speculation and investment. Like I was more focused on like the underlying technology and what it could achieve. And actually playing with and, and building tools and projects off of that Web three Tech. So actually last year founded web3 WP.com. And just kind of a group of people community where we’re just experimenting with web, web three technology and learning about it more and seeing how it could apply to like WordPress or open source.

So we’ve gotten to do a lot in building and playing with tools like that, NFTs smart contracts and stuff like that. But I still really strongly believe like in the underlying technology the fact that centralized players or whatever people, bad actors, you know, or using this technology to scam people.

I mean, that’s always gonna be the case with any technology, especially newer ones that people don’t understand as well. And in all these cases, it’s usually like some centralized actor. You know, so it’s, it’s not even like an exchange like F T X, they’re a centralization authority. So you’re depositing your tokens and everything with them and then trusting them to not mess around with it. Which of course, greed got the better them, it seems like. And caused a lot of people to lose a lot of money and the smart people are. They know that they need their own wallet and they can store it themselves, you know, and not trust some other third party to, to handle it for them.

And those people are still safe, but , yeah, I still very much believe in the technology and where it’s gonna go. Of course, right now with prices crashed and, and all this stuff in the news and things like that is shaking out a lot of the bad actors. I think what we’ll see over the years is, is the people who are building now and are building tools, honestly, and, and, and based on the technology, instead of just speculation and investment, they’re the ones that are gonna be the next Google and Facebook or whatever, you know, in the coming years. So I think it’s a great time to build and invest even.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And at a high level, what do you think makes is special at the intersection of WordPress and Web three? You know, web three touches a lot of things. It touches findings, it touches identity, it touches contracts you know, all kinds of things. But what about word, the intersection of WordPress and web Web three? What’s the opportunity set there.

Aaron Edwards: For sure. Well, I think like Web 2.0 was kind of the revolution to where you could create your own content on the internet easily, you know, whether that’s social media or blogging. And WordPress was one of the tools that popped up during that Web 2.0 revolution. And it actually has stood out up till now because it allows you to have ownership of your own content still. So you’re hosting it yourself. And this is the wordpress.org not.com, right? Yeah, So instead of it being centralized and whatever you write or type or your blog posts or whatever being owned by some centralized big corporation, tech corporation or something you can actually host and, and own that data yourself.

And, and WordPress through its open source kind of foundations allows you to do that, which was revolutionary and I think still is a real standout among the regular Web 2.0 crowd. But I think that overall like ethos of just open source and owning your own data, I think that ties in really well with Web three. And that’s what it’s about. It’s about decentralization and ownership and using like new technologies that allow you to do that in, in new and exciting ways, digital ownership of content, you know, whether it’s through NFTs or, or tokens to, to handle voting rights and things like that. So I think it’s really interesting to explore, explore those intersections of technology.

Chris Badgett: You think there’s, like, how do you think about like a website being decentralized? Is that even possible? Like it seems like with WordPress, you know, you still have like hosting, you have to have a centralized host, but you know, there’s things like Filecoin and all this technology behind that mm-hmm. for decentralized file storage or whatever, but I mean, not everything needs to be decentralized, I guess. And maybe, I don’t know, I just kind of wanted to, if we look at WordPress specifically, where most people are building websites and web applications mm-hmm. , how will that be impacted the most by Web three? And, and will they, can a, can a website or a web application become truly decentralized coming at it from a WordPress angle?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, I mean, there’s some ways, like for example, right now there’s still a lot of centralization if you’re hosting your own WordPress site. So you got to buy a domain in a domain, you’re buying from some organization, some corporation, and you’re trusting that they’re not gonna take it away or remove it, or the government is not gonna have it taken down, you know? So that’s one issue. I’ve had domains that have been taken offline just because someone filed a false report that it had malware on it, and that crashed like thousands of our customer websites. Oh, wow. It’s like, oh my gosh. It’s like there’s no contr. You don’t really own it. You know, people say you own domains, but you don’t truly, and in web three, there’s already some solutions people trying to solve that like the

Chris Badgett: E n s.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. E n s domain to where it’s actually decentralized and those domains are actually on the blockchain and immutable, and no one can take them away from you, you know? It can’t be changed. And then you have the whole centralization layer of, even though maybe you own the data, you still, you’re probably not spinning up your own server, like in your house, right? To host your website. You’re probably renting servers from some web host, and so you’re trusting them that they’re not gonna take it down because their terms of service or whatever, because they don’t like what you’re posting or because people filed D M C A claims or whatever, or fake legal threats against them, you know, for hosting your content.

We’ve seen big trend for censorship, you know, lately on the internet. And whether you like it or not, or you think that it should have been censored or not, it’s kind of scary when anyone on a, on a whim can, can decide to de platform you, you know? So you could own your data. But you definitely can be scrub from the internet, so there are things with web three, like you mentioned file coin of stuff I P F S, that’s, that’s a decentralized file storage, and it’s actually possible to host websites with that now at least static websites. So you can point your e n s domain at your static website that’s hosted in actual decentralized storage, and that’s, it can’t be taken down, you know, it can’t be stopped, basically.

Chris Badgett: And it’s actually spread out, if I understand this correctly, across a bunch of people’s unused computer processing space Yeah. That have opted Exactly. The network, right? Yeah, exactly. Which is fascinating cuz that’s kind of efficient or environmental or whatever. It’s like it’s using unused resources for a purpose. It’s kind of cool.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, for sure. I’m also excited about, there’s, there is one blockchain called desso short for decentralized social. Basically they kind of built a new blockchain from the ground up that could handle like large amounts of media, like, so, like, for example, Twitter equivalent or blogging equivalent of data. And that’s actually all stored directly on the blockchain where it’s essentially a centralized, I mean a decentralized database.

So when you write a blog post or your tweet or whatever it is, it actually goes on the DSO blockchain where it can’t be removed, where it can’t be scrubbed or anything like that. And where anyone can spin up their own Twitter or their own Facebook or their own wordpress.com and pull from that data that, that, that decentralized database, you know, there’s, it’s permissionless. Anyone can access it and index it and create their own front end. So I think that’ll be really interesting to see if we can integrate like WordPress using that as a database backend of some sort.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. That’s super cool. And, and drill an end to what you’ve been up to at Web three. Wp as of this recording, there were two main projects. One is the wuss, which if you don’t know, is a it’s basically like, kind of like the mascot of WordPress little character and individuals and companies and certain events kind of make their own character with their own branding and style and stuff like that. That’s what a wpu is. But can you tell us about that and the core contributor N F T project?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, sure. So you may have seen, like on the WordPress news or whatever, last year we actually took the Wpu concept and kind of design and then we, we had some designers and stuff and we actually created 2,222 completely unique Wahoos . Yeah. and we minted them as NFTs and, and, and sold them as NFTs so people could collect them and stuff. And that was kind of a fun way to both for me to learn like smart contract development and, and some of those underlying web three technology of NFTs and educate people. Like we released all that code, open source and tutorials and everything like that.

And also to raise a little bit of funds just to spark that, kick that project off web three wp.com. So that was a lot of fun. And then the next project that we’ve been working on is the core contributor, N F T, with the idea of being a rewarding people who contribute code to WordPress. So right now, if you contribute on that WordPress about page and the announcement post, you can see like your name there, you know, and sometimes your, your avatar just saying, Hey, you know, the way of thanking people or recognizing people’s contribution to open source.

But we were thinking it’d be really cool to use web three tools like NFTs or tokens to be able to re reward, reward those contributors so they can mint like a collectible N F T for each WordPress release that they contributed to. So we’ve been working on that, and actually just last month I had all the commemorative 3D commemorative coins, you know, that will be the NFTs. So we had those completed by a designer and so hopefully should be rolling that out in the next few months where people can actually mint for free the collectible NFTs. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. Any hints for the future of the next web three wp idea or concept or not yet?

Aaron Edwards: There, there is another one. We actually started work already on like a web three plugin or WordPress. Okay. so right now it allows you like single sign on, so you can use your web three wallet, like meta mask to sign in to WordPress and create to create a user account. So that’s really cool. So you’re actually using your own private secret keys, you know, that only, you know, to, to actually sign in to WordPress.

And that can work across any number of WordPress installs. So that was kinda like the first feature we added. And the next ones are probably gonna be token G to where you can use it kind of like a membership site. So if people own a certain N F T collectible or whatever, or token then they would get, get access to private content or things like that. So that way you can use like NFTs as like a membership thing.

Chris Badgett: Is that, would that be a plugin or would that involve a third party?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, that would be part of the plugin

Chris Badgett: I’ve heard of I heard an interview with somebody at the unlock protocol sounded like Yes. Something similar.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. They’re doing something similar. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: But I know they kind of mentioned WordPress, but they weren’t like exclusively focused on it and

Aaron Edwards: Right.

Chris Badgett: I think that token dating concept, especially for course craters and training based membership sites, the we’re in and a lot of listeners here is a really interesting concept.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, I think so too.

Chris Badgett: And one of the cool things about token gating is, correct me if I’m wrong here, I guess it depends how you set it up, but like, let’s say you, you’ve got a, a token, so now you have access to this course, you can then sell that token to somebody else, right? Or transfer. Yeah,

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, yeah. Usually NFTs are transferrable and they have kind of built in financial plumbing so you can trustless like buy and sell and trade them yeah. In really unique ways. And so it’s a way of being able to, like, whether it’s a ticket or a pass or, or, or you purchase the membership to lift your l m s or whatever it is, you know. Yeah. Then that NFT is kind of like your, your ticket, you know, proving ownership of that and it can be transferrable, which is kind of cool.

Chris Badgett: You you’ve mentioned like lifter LMS as an example, I, I see in the future plug-in licensing being like that, like software licensing being NFTs that, you know, are more easily managed and transferred around. And I think it really changes the game and how we think about affiliate marketing and, and all kinds of things. But most importantly, just access to the software or rights

Aaron Edwards: For sure. And you could do cool things like coding royalties into them. So say someone bought your Black Friday deal mm-hmm. as an N F T, and then later on they wanna sell it, like when they’re not using it, then they can sell it for more. And then every time someone sells that membership, like to perpetuity, perpetuity, either you get a commission on each sale or they get a commission on each sale. Yeah. Or some combination, you know, you can actually tie that into the code so it’s enforceable in just the way it works is kind of cool.

Chris Badgett: I think. That’s fascinating. How far out do you think this future is? Where NFTs are more mainstream, like and more used for just kind of normal things outside of like, art that we see a lot? People think of it as like, art now, but Yeah. Like more utility tickets, licensing, things like that.

Aaron Edwards: I mean, I think it’s starting to happen a lot. Yeah. I mean, besides every major brand having their own N F T already, you know, during kind of the boom in the last year. Yeah. there are a lot that are doing different tickets and things tied to that. A lot of it is gonna be kind of simplified where you might not even realize that it’s A N F T in the backend that it just seems like a normal digital thing that you purchased or whatever. Especially gaming is, is a huge area where, where that’s really taking off right now.

So a lot of games, whether you know it or not, like when you buy assets in them well, there’s like a skin or a dance or whatever it is, you know, Yeah. In that game, it’s actually an N F T, so it’s could actually be like traded or portable or whatever within that game or even potentially between different games as compatibility layers are figured out. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I think that’s part of the challenge is like N F T is a, and then nonfunctional token, and then these wallets and things are a little hard to use for the mainstream or whatever. Right. And when that, when it kind of fades into the background and just powers reality Yeah. Is when it really goes off big. And like you said, it’s already in a lot of places and we don’t realize it.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: One, could you kind of, since you understand the space, so well, one of the things online educators run into is certificates, like certificates of completion, and maybe also the whole trust issue. Like if an employer is trying to hire somebody and they, they see a certificate, but they wanna make sure it’s real, or their education history is real proof of merit you know, certificates on the blockchain. Can you kind of speak to the future of where we’re heading, of what’s possible with, with like somebody’s educational history and how they, how that works in web three or could work?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, that’s actually a really great use case. I haven’t thought much about it, but definitely there’s, there’s things that are being worked on called like a decentralized identity, and that would be a way to use the blockchain to prove like your real identity or even a online identity, like a pseudonym identity to where, for example, a lot of times now you have someone on Twitter or something, they may have a huge audience, whatever, people trust them, but they don’t know who they’re, who they are in real life, you know, know, they know their Twitter handle username, although that could be taken away and it can be easily copied by anyone, you know who are, who are trying to pretend to be you.

But using Web three technology and things like, like e n s is is one kind of early attempt at that. But you can prove ownership by signing things, or like when you create like an MT or things like that, you can prove that you are the true creator because it’s all tied to your cryptographic key and no one has your cryptographic key. So you’re the only one that can sign messages and prove that you are that true person or true owner, true identity. So when it comes to any kind of like organization or educational institution, they could definitely do that.

When they create credentials and things like that, those can go on the blockchain. And NFTs are kind of like a, a great use case or something like that because you can store a lot of metadata and different things with that. And you can tie that to like that specific person or whatever, so they can prove that they’re the true owner and you could even turn off transferability, things like that. So there’s something called a, a Soul bound N F T. Have you heard of that?

Chris Badgett: I haven’t heard of that One.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, so it’s, that’s kind of a great use case for that. So the idea of being that it’s an N F T and that it’s one of a kind and only one person or one wallet can own it at a time, but that once it’s issued, it’s tied to a specific identity or, or cryptographic key. So it’s non-transferable. That’s something great for any kind of credentials or things like that where you don’t want someone to be able to, you know, sell their diploma to someone else, or, or transfer ownership on the blockchain. So that’s, that’s, that would be called a so bound N F T. So that’d be like a great use case for that kind of thing that you’re talking about. For sure.

Chris Badgett: One of the things to share just that really opened my mind to this whole world is like, we already kind of live in it. Like when you’re born, you get like a social security number, and then you have a driver’s license, right? Like these contracts and these credentials already exist in a very centralized way in some database mm-hmm. . And this is just like an evolution of that technology for the better, in my view.

Aaron Edwards: For sure.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, This is a, is what I’m saying is it’s not like this, everything here is all new. It’s actually better ways of doing things from even like real estate deeds. It’s a contract or mm-hmm. or, or relationship at work, like an employment agreement. It is a contract that we’re trying to make these things better through this tech.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. I think like if I, I was the president or whatever, the government,

Chris Badgett: I’ll write You in, man.

Aaron Edwards: I would def I’ll write you in, I would definitely like create some of these things that can tie like credentials and stuff to the blockchain, and you can do it in a, what’s really cool, you can do it in a privacy protecting way. So for example, say you have a website that needs to restrict access to a certain age group, right? Mm-Hmm. like you, you can’t, you have to be over 13 or whatever to access or buy this or whatever it is. Right now, the only way they can do that is by some weird clunky thing where you like, take a screenshot of your face and hold up your driver’s license.

You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. And even that is subject to all kinds of abuse. But with something like decentralized identity, you can actually just have them sign a message with their wallet, with their cryptographic key, and then that can release not how old they are or what their birthday is or what their name is. It could release only the data that, that they need a yes or no, are you of age or not? You know, so you’re protecting identity, privacy, all those kinds of things like that.

Chris Badgett: You’re just getting the variable that mattered right

Aaron Edwards: There. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And so you can do that with any kind of thing that needs to be verified, whether it’s diplomas, credentials, whatever, like that you can maintain privacy in some really cool ways because you both trust that that source of truth, whether it’s a government thing where they’re putting that on the blockchain, you know, or what, whatever it may be. So

Chris Badgett: What in terms of blockchain, you know, outside of there’s, there’s Bitcoin and then you have the layer one s like Ethereum, solana, polka dot cardan, like how much, do you have a view on the underlying chains of like, where we’re going? Or is this just kind of like a massive experi experimentation phase where a lot of these will die and we don’t really know Ethereum’s really big right now, but it might change, might not. Like what, how does the underlying chain matter?

Aaron Edwards: I mean, I think it does, like, especially when you want like we’re gonna look for that central source, you know, it’s like what database are you using? Is what you’re asking, you know? Yeah. so Bitcoin I think has proven to be quite lasting, even though it’s the original technology. But that’s part of his draw is that it’s unchanged and it’s been proven over so many years to be resilient. And so that’s kind of seen as like the digital gold or whatever as you’re, as your like most trusted kind of source or whatever. And it’s fully decentralized and that no one owns it. There’s no, there’s no benevolent dictator or whatever, you know?

Yeah. It’s really difficult. He’s managing that product, which is as decentralized and open source as you can get. And then you have kind of like all these new fancy stuff where it’s kind of questionable how decentralized they are because like the nodes and things are controlled by a majority of people that have like certain invested stakes in it. You know? Ethereum is kind of my, that’s my bet more long term just because they’re the originator of like smart contracts, which have, which has basically enabled what is web three and yeah, they’re not super scalable and can be expensive to like, build things on.

But there’s already tons of solutions there that utilize that as the source of truth, like layer twos and, and rollups and things like that, that allow you to scale that to unlimited numbers, but still trust in the basic underlying decentralization of, of the Ethereum network itself. So, cool. That’s what, that’s what I’m betting on both in, both in building, like when I code new things, and also like if I’m gonna put money into it, I do it in, in the Bitcoin and Ethereum kind of for long term.

Chris Badgett: We’re gonna go back to web two in a second, but if somebody out there is kind of getting curious about Web three, for you as a developer or as a WordPress professional, like what are some places you go to learn about this new world? And I mean, you’ve been in it for a while, but what, what are some resources that you could point people to?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah. Well, first there’s web three, wp.com. We have a bunch of stuff on there example code and things like that. And then, gosh, I, you caught me up. Mostly like, since me being a developer,

Chris Badgett: You got a GitHub, like open source projects.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, open source projects. There’s some really good like like people that are on YouTube and, and Twitter and stuff, they’re just doing good, like CONT tutorials and things like that. So there is a whole lot of noise out there about the investing side mm-hmm. . but I think more important is understanding like the technology side that will get you a lot further in the long run. So that’s what I would look for. And there is plenty of good, good sources of content out there for that.

Chris Badgett: And I’ll just say for the for, I’m, I’m a not a developer myself. The I really have learned a lot by some interviews on the, the real vision crypto channel. They, they do get into the investing stuff, but they also have a lot of interviews that are purely around the technology and what’s happening. Mm-Hmm. let’s go to web two a little bit.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, different, everything.

Chris Badgett: So this, this podcast helps WordPress professionals and education entrepreneurs. And you’ve, you’ve got a lot going on in, in the education space. Tell us about campus press and edgy blogs. What are they and

Aaron Edwards: Sure.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, tell us more.

Aaron Edwards: Well, my, well, my day job, I’m the CTO O of Insub, which is a weird name that no one knows. And it basically, it’s main product is W P M U Dev, which a lot of people are familiar with, cuz it’s one of the largest WordPress businesses

Chris Badgett: Out there. And just real quick on that, you guys sell, do you sell all the plugins as one subscription or how does that work? And you have hosting too?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, there’s one off. Basically our idea is to create like all the core things that you need for WordPress. So whether it’s managed hosting, whether it’s all your core plug-ins that include SEO and forms and security image optimization. There’s a core suite of like eight plug-ins that, that are included with that membership. And we do sell like, plans of, of one-off, you know, if that’s really all you need. But we also provide hosting and a lot of like really cool, like a real focus is on agencies and, and people who are kind of like running WordPress sites.

And so we provide a, a whole suite of really useful tools for agencies all in one, one spot. So you can use our hub to manage all your sites remotely, automatic updates uptime management, basically everything you need, including manage hosting, including reselling. That’s a big thing we’ve been focusing on. So we have all these really cool tools where you can white label our hub for your clients embedded on your own website, so you can do all your reselling and and management of everything like that all under your own brand.

And even our plug-ins can be white labeled that way too, so we don’t have learning management, so you still gotta use , Lifter for that. But yeah, so that, so that’s what we do. And then we have kind of some side things campus press that you mentioned, which is enterprise hosting for mostly higher education. Some

Chris Badgett: Tell us about that kind of client like education. What do they need? Like what are they, what makes their, their need? Like is each department have its own website or it’s a giant multi-site, or what is it?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, we have different things. When we originally started out really we are the like multi-site experts, so and that was used a lot in education and so kind of focus on, on enterprise multi-site hosting for that. And so we’ll have, you know, big name universities we have. I’m not sure which ones I’m allowed to mention, but yeah, if, if you know the name of the university, there’s a good chance we host them. And

Chris Badgett: Can you describe, can you describe what multisite is if somebody doesn’t know?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, sure. Multisite is basically something that’s kind of secret and hidden away in WordPress that you can, can enable. And it allows one WordPress install to manage an unlimited amount of WordPress sites. So they share the user base. So like your same user login can be used across hundreds of different blogs or, or, or sites. And they share the same code base. So if you have one set of plug-ins and themes installed, then all those sites all share that same code base.

So if you need to update WordPress, instead of updating a hundred thousand, we have clients with a hundred thousand blogs, you know, or more hosted on us. And so obviously that’s not really scalable to be updating or managing your plugin updates for a hundred thousand sites. Yeah. Like that. So multi-site allows you to do that with one WordPress install. But of course that scale you need, you need a pretty big powerful hosting provider. And that’s what we provide,

Chris Badgett: Which you offer as well. What, what’s an example like structure of a university’s web property? Like Yeah, yeah. Like what do they have?

Aaron Edwards: So we have different ones. We have one that they have basically it’s under their main domain, I think. And then like they have students that can each set up their own kind of portfolio site blog, and that uses like a predefined template theme and it’s all powered by their single sign-ons. They’re still using their university login to create their blog and to sign in and stuff like that. And they create their own little portfolio site when they start as a student. And then throughout their time as a student, they’re actually updating their portfolio there.

So that’s one use use case. Probably our most popular is it’ll be like one setup and they’ll use it for all, like the subsites for like different departments or, or groups or organizations like sub-organization. So, cause a lot of times school or the, yeah, a lot of department in the higher ed, they’ll have every like little group, whatever they’re say we need our own website, you know, or we need to be able to like, have our own blog or updates or whatever it may be. That way they can just create one big install and then it’s super easy for them to use like a shared theme and design style and, and plugins and stuff like that. So that they can create their own like little branded like sub portals, you know, for the different sites for the university.

Chris Badgett: How’s that does like the university typically have like a IT department with some WordPress pros in there? The interface with you or you guys doing all of it? Or how does that work?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, usually there’s, there’s someone, the, the geek, you know, the resident geek , and they’re kind of, they interface with us, so we manage the hosting and then at that, at that level, it’s very much kinda like WordPress v i p to where we’re reviewing and vetting every like, line of code that they want to commit or, or push customization, you know, to make sure that it can scale and that it has the security that the customer needs and things like that. So they’re kind of interfacing with, with our developers and we do some custom client work for them too. Sometimes if they need like a, a customization or theme built or things like that, then we do that.

Chris Badgett: That’s neat. WordPresses scale in, in universities and edgy blogs, is that what you said? The thing where the students have their own blog? Is that, is that what edgy blogs is or is that something else?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, edgy blogs is kind of like our WordPress.com but for education. Okay. So that’s targeted at mostly like individual teachers. So if like a campus isn’t trying to have their own custom thing mm-hmm. , then a teacher can, can spin up an edgy blog and they can have their students like register like underneath it and they each have their own little blogs and use that for teaching and things like that.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s awesome. Well, let’s get, let’s round the land the plane back to where we started, which Is.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: The imagine ai and then let’s start with infinite uploads since that’s more just as we talk about WordPress site management and stuff like that, what does, tell us about that and, and, and also how much of that can, can get involved in video? Yeah, hosting, like, cuz I get this question from course graders who mm-hmm. , you know, they don’t, they may not wanna put their stuff on Vimeo Vimeo or whatever.

Aaron Edwards: Exactly.

Chris Badgett: But then there’s the challenge. Yeah. Yeah. So tell us about it or, and Amazon’s like, too hard to manage or whatever, so,

Aaron Edwards: Right. Yeah. So like kind of the idea is infinite of Infinites was just making like cloud storage accessible to the masses. Cuz there have been other plug-ins like S3 offload plug-in and things like that, that allow you to extend WordPress to like cloud storage, but it’s very complicated to set up and you have to get all the permissions, then you have to get a CDN somewhere else and configure that and all the DNS and it’s, it’s gonna be a mess if you’re not really technical person, you know.

So our idea, our idea was just to make a super simple where you just click connect and then that creates all the storage and secures it and sets up a CDN for you and handles the syncing of media back and forth to the cloud and all that, you know, just with, just with a few clicks. So that’s kind of the idea of infinite uploads and that is a huge pain point for large sites, whether it’s like a multi-site or especially probably learning management sites that have courses and stuff. They can have a lot of media and

Chris Badgett: Pdfs.

Aaron Edwards: They need, yeah. Pdfs, whatever it may be, you know, and be able need to be able to handle all that. So I think Inpo is pretty helpful with that as far as video. It works great for that too and that it serves, it uploads it and serves it from our cloud. But a lot of things, a lot of our customers, that’s one of the things that they’ve probably are most asked for features that say, oh, we want, we don’t want like to use Vimeo or something like that.

Because yes, you can upload, you can encode your own video, then upload it and then embed it in your plugin or video player or whatever. But that’s really technical, you know, people want a YouTube like solution or you can just upload any file size and then it converts it to all the different sizes and embeds it for you. So we’re actually working on that right now. It’s in development, so that’s gonna be an add-on for infinite uploads to make it’s super easy to where you can just upload your video file and then it creates.

You know, five or six different versions for all different sizes and, and, and browsers and devices and everything like that and, and has a fully customizable player and different things like that. So that’ll be great for people who are doing online courses, cuz I know that’s a huge need for them. They can do that without, so not only it’s it encoding, it’s hosting and embedding and, and customization and all that. Yeah, that’s coming soon.

Chris Badgett: All right, well that’s infinite uploads.com and let’s go back into imagine that’s Im a j I n n.ai. So this, there’s a challenge with WordPress sites where we wanna put it in a picture, but we don’t want to get stuck with some copyright infringement or we don’t know where to get high quality pictures.

Aaron Edwards: Right.

Chris Badgett: Tell us, tell us what we can do with imagine.

Aaron Edwards: Well, I’m sure it’s, you’d have to be under a rock to not have seen like, all the developments in the last few months. It’s been crazy, you know, starting with Dolly from Open AI and then Google showing, demoing their own stuff. There’s this called Image gin, I think, and Facebook has their own. And basically these are large AI models that have been created using billions and billions of images scraped from the internet and labeling them, tagging them, connecting them to text that describes them, and then training these giant AI models that allow you to just by typing in what you wanna see, create an image or, or artwork. And it’s just magical the first time you try it. there’s, there’s no other way to describe it that you can type in what you wanna see.

Chris Badgett: I tried it, and this is on my phone. I just typed in like shaman in the forest in this. Oh wow. This, this, this really cool picture came up and I was just like, yeah, it, it is. The first time you see it, you’re like, whoa. That’s wild.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, , it’s magical. There isn’t any other way to describe it. Yeah. and so these other models that have, that were developed and kind of announced and showed off and stuff, they’ve been closed this year. Open AI gave, like, they had a wait list access, everyone was trying to get in, you know but they’re very restrictive of what you could do with it and how you could use it. In fact, it was only, I think last week that they finally created an api unlimited API so that you could start to try to integrate it into other products.

But what actually happened is a some millionaire was like, I love AI is really cool. I think he’s actually like some hedge fund guy. He a few months back he’s like seeing what’s going on and he is like, I’m just gonna donate a bunch of money and to a group of kind of an open source group of AI researchers and say, okay, I want you to build your own model that we’re gonna release open source to the public.

Because, and this is called Stable Diffusion. And see, the, the problem with AI is it hasn’t been accessible to the masses except through big tech corporations. Because first of all, this technology is like so new and revolutionary. But also like to train a model of that size, it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars in compute time for paying for all those GPUs in the cloud to be crunching all those images and, and to train the models. You know, so it’s not accessible like for someone just to create that themselves , cuz it costs a lot of time and a lot of money to do it. Even if you can gather enough data when you have tech giants like Google and Facebook, I mean, they have unlimited amounts of access to data that they can use to train this stuff, you know, in huge budgets.

So anyways, so he donated bunch of money to be able to, to be able to train this model called stable Diffusion. And so it was released at the end of August very beginning of September. The minute that came out, it was like off to the races, you know, the power of open source Yeah. And of people building products, of developing new technologies and ways to adapt and, and use that, that model, that base model to do new and exciting things has been amazing. You know. So as soon as that came out, I was frantically looking, okay, this is amazing. It’s the new Gold Rush, you know, the AI gold rush , how, how can I get that to run like in WordPress, you know, or be useful for WordPress. And so that’s when we dropped that plugin called Imagine which you can use right now.

It’s on the WordPress is on the, is on the repository. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. And the only downside is that it takes a lot of compute power to run this, you know? Mm-Hmm. we actually have to spin up like cloud servers with a 100 GPUs, which are like a $20,000 gpu, you know, to run it at any kind of like useful speed, you know like even if like they’ve only recently gotten it to work on like the latest max, you know? Okay. And that takes like one minute for one image. That’s comparison, you know, and the compute power that it takes to, to do this.

So, what what we do is for the plug-in is we actually give you a certain amount of free credits, so you can try it, you can generate a whole bunch of images see how it likes, and then we have some paid plans if you want to get more credits or, or subscribe to a certain amount of like, credits to use. But the idea is that you have this right within WordPress. When you’re creating a post or page or course, you can just click that button to insert that new Gutenberg block or use our admin page where you can do it, and then you can just type in the, what you wanna see as an image. So whatever it may be, you’re only limited by your imagination, you know,

Chris Badgett: Empowering the visionaries. I love that.

Aaron Edwards: Exactly.

Chris Badgett: And Do you have some statement that’s like a lot of people kind of sometimes make fun of the Metaverse , or, I mean, it’s like a, it’s a term, you know you know, like Facebook or Meta’s thing where the people don’t have legs or whatever. But if we actually think optimistically about the future of online learning and the Metaverse or whatever, like what do you see out, like where’s, what is the big opportunity with the Metaverse and how is it different from you know, perhaps just websites or yeah. What, what, what, yeah. Metaverse the metaverse of learning. What, what would you like to see happen?

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, I think a lot of that is still to play out. Like yeah, of course, like with Facebook or Zuckerberg and all this Tang kind of metaverse to being VR necessarily. Like, to me, like I have my own definition of metaverse. Like, to me, think about how much percentage of your time you spend behind a screen now, right? Mm-Hmm. and compared to 10 years ago or whatever. And to me, like the Metaverse really just is just a continuation of us moving our lives into a digital world. So, I mean, now your job is through a screen, you know, your, your friends are through a screen. Your social life is through a screen. Your entertainment is through a screen.

And so I, I think that already in some respects, living in a metaverse. And so it’s just a matter of, of where you’re gonna be spending that time hanging out or working or whatever it may be. So I’m not convinced that that’s gonna be vr. I mean, I think that’ll be part of it, but I don’t think that anytime soon we’re all gonna be living and doing our work and everything goggles. Some Yeah, , in goggles, you know? But I think as a trend, yeah, that’s where we’re going. And that’s where like, like l m s is, that’s, that’s just time, that’s just a part of that, you know, when it comes to learning in the metaverse, you know, in that digital world and being able to make that accessible to more people without geographic restrictions, time restrictions, things like that.

So yeah, I’m sure there’ll be like, new developments like being able to do learning through VR or things like that. There’s, there’s stuff that are gonna be really powerful, you know, using those, those tools and stuff. But I think more in general, it’s, it’s better to think of it as just the overall trend of us living more and more in the digital world, you know, and interacting more in a digital world.

Chris Badgett: And one piece of advice, it’s good to get outta the building and not spend full time in the Metaverse as a WordPress professional, we go to these things sometimes called Word camps. And I actually met Aaron in person recently outside of the Metaverse. And that was that was good to see in person. Cuz you’re right, we do spend, you know, I probably spend at least my work life, 99% of it online, right? Yeah. That 1% is cool to get out, maybe more than 1%, but well that’s Aaron Edwards. He’s at Infinite Uploads. You can find him@imagine.ai. You wanna spell that for us one more time?

Aaron Edwards: Sure. I m a j i n n.ai.

Chris Badgett: Aaron’s also a, a, you know, has a lot of cool stuff going on. You can find us home site@uglyrobot.com. It kind of links out to a lot of things. I hope you enjoyed this episode. We went into the web three, we went into ai, we went into WordPress, multisite, the education niche, WordPress and universities. Yeah. creating images from your mind, profile pictures and and you know, how to manage media for course creators. So Aaron, thanks for coming on the show. Any final words for the people or anywhere else you wanna send them? Aaron’s also on Twitter. It’s ugly robot on Twitter or ugly robot.

Aaron Edwards: Robot dev. Yeah. To Evie on Twitter.

Chris Badgett: Any final words for the people?

Aaron Edwards: No, I just I guess just, I’m interesting to see how people use AI and some of these AI tools that I’ve been building for learning management. I think that’ll be really cool to see people find some like interesting cool use cases for that. So show me what you got and hit me up at Twitter at Ugly Robot Dev.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, thanks for coming to the show, Aaron. We really appreciate It.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post Create University Websites, Web3 for WordPress, and AI Image Generation with Aaron Edwards appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

In this episode Mark shares about his background in web development and how he got into WordPress. He talks about his experience with building an online wedding planning website and WordPress Forms. And then getting into licensing and white-labeling that product for sale through companies like Conde Nast.

Mark Westguard is the co-founder of WS Form. A WordPress form plugin that provides an easier platform for building complex forms. He has been in the web agency business for over 26 years and adopted WordPress about eight to ten years ago.

He mentions that WS Form is capable of building more complex forms with conditional logic. Order forms for complex products, and integration with WooCommerce. Finally, he discusses the integration with Lifter LMS and how WS Form can be used to create quizzes and surveys for online courses.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of L m s Cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Mark West Guard. He’s from the incredible form plugin w s form. Welcome to the show, mark. Hey

Mark Westguard: Chris, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Chris Badgett: Mark and I just caught up in person recently at work camp us. It was a lot of fun and I wanted to get him out here in front of you all and look at his story in the WordPress community, but also WS Forum and the integration he’s doing with lifter l m s related to it. But maybe take us to the beginning. You know, there’s so many different form options and how did you kind of come in on the WS form? Like what’s the angle there and and what year did, what year was that that you, you started?

Mark Westguard: That was, I would wanna say about four years ago now. So around about 2018. I’ve had a, a web agency for about 26 years, so I’m you know, the Netscape Navigator type of guy from way, way back. And yeah, we, we adopted WordPress. I want to say probably about eight to 10 years ago. It, I was introduced to to it by my team. They went off to a work camp, came back, told me all about it. We adopted it as a, a, a new, basically a content management system for our customers. I used to write content management software many years ago. I actually wrote one of Sony’s first websites. And they wanted a, a way by which to sort of modify products on their websites.

So adopting WordPress was a good move for us because you’ve got an existing platform there. Open source. We really enjoyed working with it. And I’ve always had a sideline business. I’ve always had something on the side that I work with. I used to own a a wedding company that used to do wedding websites and wedding planning. And we were one of the first companies out there to give brides and grooms the ability to actually build an online wedding website. We originally tried to go direct to consumer with it found it was absolutely saturated.

And in the end we white labeled it and sold it through Conde Nest, who, who owned Brides Magazine. They did like Vati Fair Magazine, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. once we got them signed up, we signed up, you know, the rest of the wedding planet out there. And it was a, you know, a good time and that was kind of my forte into the, the licensing world.

And then few, you know, a few years later I wanted to get back into it again and decided, look, let’s build a WordPress plugin. So spoke to the team, said, you know, where were, where are we having challenges and forms came up and it was really just a case of we wanted a, an easier platform for building complex forms. Yeah, contact us forms. There’s plenty of plug-ins out there for doing that, but the types of clients that we work with were a little bit more advanced. They had more of a complex need for a form and building those things were a challenge. So, you know, you usually had to install 2, 3, 4 plugins to, to get it to do what we wanted starting.

It was always a challenge. So off we went and decided, okay, we’re gonna build a form plugin, which we thought was gonna be a five, six month project. And here we are still developing it to this day and growing it and building it. But yeah, we’ve, we’ve, it’s, it’s definitely a, it’s a saturated area of WordPress. There’s a, a lot of WordPress form plugins out there. But we’ve been fortunate that we’ve been picked up and we’re, you know, slowly gaining traction in the WordPress world. So that’s kind of the story. It’s, it was really came from a need from an agency to, to build a, a better form platform.

Chris Badgett: I know my mind was kind of opened as a, as I got into websites and WordPress of what forms can actually do and like what they are and what they’re capable of. Cuz at first you just think of like the contact form or a comment form or something like that. But what, you mentioned an advanced use of a form. Like what are some way non-obvious ways that a beginner may not realize a form could power?

Mark Westguard: Yeah, so you’ve got things like obviously you, your basic contact task form, but then you’ve got things like maybe a sales inquiry form where if you’re an agency, you could potentially ask a lot of questions before the person actually can send that inquiry through to you. So you’ve got things like conditional logic that enable you to switch things on and off on a form so that you can make the form appear smaller and it’ll grow over time. So things like maybe an order form for a complex product is, is another, another idea. We also integrate in with WooCommerce as well. So you can put our forms on WooCommerce products.

So you can actually use a form to customize a product on the front end. That might be something like choosing a color adding some text to a product even signing off on a custom product for it’s submitted through to the car on commerce. So that’s, you know, another solution. And then we have a lot of people using it for quite complex calculations, so maybe they want to order something online that requires kind of width, height, length material types and things like that. That’s another area that a complex form can come into to do that. And then you’ve got the back end of it as well, which is, where’s that data gonna go?

You know, a regular contact task form is gonna send you an email but you may want to tie it into Salesforce or to HubSpot or to Groundhog. You may want to push it through to MailChimp, you may wanna create a post in WordPress. So these are all the types of things that WS form can do. So a lot of form plugins out there, we’ll have like a notification system where you can send an email to somebody.

We have an action system where you can add as many different actions as you want. So you can send as many emails out as you want. You can even run custom php so you can run a WordPress book do pretty much anything that you want with it. So the, the, the challenge with the plugin has been to build a platform that is diverse enough to build as pretty much anything that you want with it. But we’ve tried to do that as much as possible within a no-code environment. So really the idea is for a developer to be able to build a complex form very quickly. So, you know, we, just to give you an example, we, we used to charge $600 to maybe $2,000 for a form because we were custom building those forms.

And it would take quite a lot, lot of time. With this platform, you can build those complex forms very, very quickly. And it just speeds up the process and just makes it easier. But I think there’s a tendency with contact task forms for them to be a little bit neglected in the, the WordPress development cycle. But there are just a vital part of getting communication from your customers. So if we can make that easier for people to build, I think all better.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I’m on your website now and there’s 60 plus integrations. Yes. I know you’re, I know you’re working on a lifter LMS integration as of this recording. Yeah. Those of you live, but if you’re listening in your earbuds, it’s likely already out. Yeah. Tell us your philosophy around integrations and then tell us about what your plans for lifter are specifically.

Mark Westguard: Sure. Yeah. So what we wanted to do with our integrations is go a bit further than what’s currently available. So mo most form plugins will take the content of the form and then push that through maybe as a contact in MailChimp, maybe as a contact in, I dunno, pipe drive, whatever it may be. What we wanted to do is go full by direction or so you can push data to these integrations and sub data out and populate a form with that data.

But we also, on pretty much every integration that we have, we have a template system built in for them. So, to give you an example with MailChimp, you would click on MailChimp and you would look at the templates within that MailChimp and what it’ll do is it’ll pull down your lists from MailChimp and build a template for every list that you have.

And then you just click on that template and WS form builds a form for you. So it’ll, it’ll put all the main fields in there, like name, email, any custom fields that you’ve got, any tag in that you’ve got in MailChimp. And that’s all automatically. So again, speeding up that process so you don’t have to manually build that form out, pull the filter in, do the mapping testing, et cetera. It’s, it’s all done in one click. The other thing that we have is a debug consult, which comes up when you are developing the forms and it appears at the bottom of the screen. It’s a little bit like the browser inspector and what that enables you to do. We have a populate button on that, which is actually one of the first things we ever built for WS form was this magic populate button.

And when you click on that, it fills the format for you. So it’ll put example data in there, it’ll put example telephone numbers, it will choose colors. It’ll actually do signatures for you, everything in one click. So you just go populate and submit and it’ll submit that form so you can test that form super quick with that integration. So really try to go to town on those integrations. Most of them are o and if your viewers aren’t aware of what O is, it’s just a super easy way of connecting one system to another. So they can just go connect to MailChimp. It’ll go off to MailChimp, they’ll log in, say, yes, I wanna connect to WS form, and that’s it. So there’s no messing around with API keys or anything like that. We just try and make that that process simple.

So we’ve lifter we wanna make sure that we’ve got all of the core functionality that’s there that you have with other form integrations. You’re gonna be able to basically lock courses with, with forms. So, and you’ll be able to put any of the fields that we support on that form. If you wanna do signatures, repeaters, any kind of e-commerce, that’s all gonna be wrapped into it. So you’ll be able to build pretty much anything you want and then tie that in with Lifter. And then we also have user management functionality as well. So you can do user registration, you can do edit profile and that will all be tied in with, with Lifter as well. So yeah, we’re gonna, we’re gonna go go to town on it and make sure that we cover everything that we can with Lifter for sure.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s super exciting. And I love the user registration stuff cuz you know, not everybody just comes to a site and maybe buys a course or a membership right away, right? Maybe they need to come in through a user registration form or whatever. Like it’s there’s so many different ways you could, you could use that.

Mark Westguard: Yeah, And all the our post manage, so we, we have another add-on, which is a post management add-on, which enables you to create posts you know, any kind of custom post site you want, and the user management. And both of those add-ons are also tied in with a c f tool set pods and MeBox as well. So we if you, if you have a custom post site that you want to create and you’ve got some ACF custom fields associated with that, you can literally go into our templates, choose your post type from the template library, click on it, and it’ll build you a four.

And that will include all the standard post fields that you would expect, like title excerpt slug, you know, the usual fields that you see on the post. And it will actually create fields for all the custom fields that you have in a CF madox tool set and poles as well. That’s fully bidirectional too and those, again, those forms aren’t fixed. You can remove fields, remove mappings, ad fields it’s fully responsive. So we’re actually one of the only form plugins that, that has a fully responsive layout editor, which means you can change the layout per breakpoint, a breakpoint being, you know, the kind of the width, the screen or device that you’re using. So it’s, it’s totally flexible and you can build pretty much anything that you want with it.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. What’s in the future for WS form? Like where are you going with it and, you know, what’s next?

Mark Westguard: You want more?

Chris Badgett: Well, it sounds like it, it does a lot. I’m just curious. Like Yeah,

Mark Westguard: I, I think so one of the things we are working on right now is we want to, we’re kind of waiting a little bit with some of the new starting stuff that’s in the block editor in, in WordPress. Yeah, So we wanna bring some of that forward into, into WS form that a lot of that’s still in beta, so we just wanna wait until that kind of calms down. And we’re clear on where the starting is going with WordPress and in terms of the, the block editor. But starting is a big thing that we wanna put a lot of focus on and just make that easier for people. So right now you can obviously change, you know, fonts and background colors and padding and things like that. A lot of our developers will use custom CSS for light for modifying that.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Mark Westguard: If we can bring that into the, the block editor itself, that would be be awesome. We originally worked with the customized tool cause that’s kind of where we would

Chris Badgett: Where we’re,

Mark Westguard: Yeah, And that’s now becoming less and less important. They’re, they’re bringing in that, starting into the actual blocks themselves. So that’s something that we’re working on right now. Yeah, and then also I wanna do some more visual stuff with it. So being able to take, you know, submissions at the moment most people will just push submissions into a post if they wanna present them, and then just use custom PHP coding, like get posts or WP Query to show those posts. Or they’ll use a standard template, they’ll use like an archive template to do that.

But I think it’ll be nice to have some kind of visual stuff that we can do with submissions maybe for polling and, and things like that, like pie charts and other graph features. So there, there’s a couple of ideas there, some of the stuff that we’re going with.But a lot of the time it’s, you know, new integrations that are coming out, new products that are coming out. We’ve just recently did an integration with Cloudflare’s Turn Style products, which is a new capture product which I really like because it’s accessible.

It’s, you don’t have to like click on all the traffic lights to, to get through the, the spa filter. It just does it all. I dunno how it works. There’s some kind of AI going on there that detects if you’re a human or not. But that one I like is, is accessible. There’s no need for the user to interact with it. It just says yes or no. And that can be invisible as well. So they launched that in beta I think a week ago. We’ve already got an integration for it. And so you could use Recapture H Capture or Turns Style on Ws form now.

So it’s keeping up with the industry, basically, you know, what, what new toys are coming out and what can, can we integrate with and what’s the demand. So we’re always listening to our customers. That’s really where the, how we steer the product. I’m sure, you know, you guys do too. Feedback through customer support. We have a feature request page on our site where people can go and say, Hey, this will be a cool feature, and people can vote on that as well. So it’s really about listening to the customer and giving them what they’re after about as opposed to what I’m necessarily interested in . But yeah,

Chris Badgett: That’s how the best products are built. Like, they’ll they’ll literally pull it out of you. .

Mark Westguard: Yeah, . Exactly.

Chris Badgett: Could you I know it took me a while to get it, so but could you explain some of the form terminology to someone who’s maybe newer to forms? Like what is a repeater and why do we want one of those?

Mark Westguard: Yeah, so usually on a form you’re just gonna have a set of standard fields that just stick there. You’re gonna have your first name, your last name, maybe a, an inquiry field with a repeater. Let’s just say for example, you wanted to have a form where you could put in the guest list of people coming to an event. So with a repeater, you could have maybe first name, last name, perhaps age, and you could make that a repeater. So they could add a new row to that repeater so you could,

Chris Badgett: The user on the front end is, is increasing the num the number of inputs.

Mark Westguard: Yeah. Yeah. So they could dynamically increase the number of fields on that form. I e the number of rows for the guests. Other people use it for maybe an order form. So you may have, you know, a dropdown list of here’s the products, the quantity, it may be a price and subtotal, and they can use that repeater to add new rows to that, to that order. And then those repeaters can be used and actually, you know, they tie with our integration. For example, if you’ve got a custom post and you’ve got an ACF repeater, we can actually push that form data into an ACF repeater. So it will appear carbon copy basically from the form to, to what you see on the post.

So yeah, that’s basically what a repeater is. We call ’em repeatable sections. So you, we, we have sections within the sections You have fields and you can just say, yep, I want this section to be repeated. It’s just a checkbox. So that’s, you know, another thing that we’ve tried to do is just make that functionality work. Other four plugin, you have to write breams a code to get it, to get it to work. Ours is just a checkbox. And conditional logic works within that, you know, there’s an another term

Chris Badgett: Conditional. That was my next question. You anticipated that . So what, what can people do with conditional logic and what is it?

Mark Westguard: Oh yeah. Conditional logic is making your form interactive. So based upon what people are typing in or maybe even the page that they’re on and, and values that relate to the page that you’re on, you can make condition logic do different things. So an example may be simple example, maybe you have a form with a bidding and a shipping address, and you may want a checkbox to show that shipping address. You see, you may have a checkbox that says, Hey do you wanna ship this to a different address?

And if they check that, we can then show that shipping section. So that’s conditional logic would be used for that. So we would say something like, if that checkbox is checked, then show this particular section. If not hide dissection. So conditional logic is typically an if that’s the, the condition, and then you have a then and a else. So the then will be, okay, yeah, if that condition’s met, we’ll do this and the else is, otherwise we’ll do something else. Our conditional logic is quite frankly, ridiculous. So what you can do with it well,

Chris Badgett: I’m gonna put you on the spot then, cuz I don’t know the, if the answer’s yes or not. But some people wanna make these like personality quizzes, like Yeah. Where if they enter this answer, they, they, they like this rockstar and this cat then yeah. Like what per what, who are you or whatever.

Mark Westguard: Yeah, yeah. Is that possible? You can do that? Yeah, you can do that. So cause, so cuz so a lot of form plugins out there, they’ll, they’ll have a field and then within that there’ll be a condition that says, if, if this value here equals this, then show this field. I call that field centric conditional logic. Ours is form centric conditional logic. So you’ve got the whole, the whole form to play with. For example, you can say if the form, the sec, the tab, the section or the field is doing something, then do any number of different things that you want.

So, you know, you could say, if the answer to this question is A, and the answer to this question is B and the answer to this question is C, then show this. Yeah. but you could also use that to maybe increment score somehow, you know, see, and then you can say, if this has

Chris Badgett: Like IQ test.

Mark Westguard: Yeah, yeah. That kind thing. So it’s, it’s very, very flexible. We, you know, you can go so far as we have this demo on our WooCommerce site, which is WooCommerce dos form.com, which is like a t-shirt customizer. Okay, and that looks, we actually use our additional logic on that to look at the brightness of the color that you’ve chosen and based upon the color, it will then change the text on the t-shirt from black to to white and white to black. So you can, there’s all kinds of stuff that you, you can do with that.

You can check whether it feels validated, you can check whether the value is greater or less than something. We’re also tied in with things like mouse events as well. So you can even do stuff like if this person does a mouseover event on a field, do a save in the background or any anything you wanna do. Or if they click on this button, then run some PHP on the server site. Yeah, So there’s, there’s a great deal that you can do with the conditional logic and, and make the form interactive.

Chris Badgett: What about for the 55 plus field types? I mean, I think people think of short text, long text, maybe an email address or something, a number. What, what are some field types that people may not even realize they could add to a form?

Mark Westguard: Yeah, so we’ve got all of the core html fire field types in there. So you’ve got things like a progress bar, you’ve got rain sliders and then we’ve got some more custom fields as well that people ask for things like rating fields. So

Chris Badgett: You can wait for a testimonial or, or like a review

Mark Westguard: Kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. And you can choose, you know, how many stars you want. You can even change the star character. If you wanna do smiley faces or whatever you wanna do, or what colors you want. That effectively is like a number field in the background. So you can then use that in conditional logic. So you can say, if the rating is less than five, then show a box saying, oh, you know, we’re sorry we didn’t meet your expectations. Give us some feedback. So yeah, you’ve got rating fields, we’ve got signature fields, we have a bunch of e-commerce fields in there as well. So you can actually build order forms with it.

You can tie that in with Stripe. You can tie that in with PayPal to actually take payment online as well. We have navigation fields in there. If you’re doing a multi-step form, maybe with tabs, we’ve got like next tab, previous tab a lot of different fields for just navigating through the form, making that easier.

We’ve got a lot of different validation options as well. You know we’ve got things like tab validation. Where you can’t progress to the next tab unless the current tab is validated. And you can make it so that when that next button’s clicked. It’ll show you all the fields that aren’t validated to, to help the user through that process. But yeah, there’s, there’s a lot of field types in there and some of the add-ons add additional field types as well. So for example, our WooCommerce integration what that does is it adds fields for quantity for the add to cart feature for the cart total for subtotal.

And, you know, we just, you know, one very simple example, sometimes people wanna put the a to cart bun above the, the the price and things like that. Okay. So you can do that with this, this feature. You can actually move the components around if you, if you add an ATO cart button to our format, it’ll actually hide the work, almost add tocar button by default to enable you to move that round wherever you want. And that just behaves like a regular acar button. So yeah, I mean, I could go on for hours about the, the different field types that we have.

And then one of the cool field types that we do have, obviously for like selects check boxes and radios oh. You wanna be able to control the, the list that is, is, is shown the list of items, but with that as you can actually drag a spreadsheet into that select field and then you can map which columns you want. So for example, the label that’s shown to the user, you can choose which column will be used for that.

You can choose which column will u be used for the value that actually gets submitted for the form. And you can even pull out additional columns based upon the selection they’ve made. So if they choose a particular product from a select dropdown. You could then show elsewhere on the form the width and the height of the selection that they’ve made. So it kind of does look up, it’s almost like a Excel spreadsheet or a Google sheet. And you can populate that select actually with a Google sheet if you want. So we have a thing called data sources that lets you pull in data into that field. And you can pull that data from Google Sheets, from even from a, a PHP filter. So you can fully customize how that looks.

Chris Badgett: What are some of your pro add-ons that are the most popular? Is it people like connecting to email marketing tools or Yeah,

Mark Westguard: Yeah. I would say probably the most popular ones we have are the post management and the user management. We have a lot of people wanting to create users and create post content. And then

Chris Badgett: What’s an example, what’s an example post management? Like what’s something like somebody making a directory listing or something?

Mark Westguard: Yeah, So maybe, maybe they’re creating a directory of businesses, for example, and they built some custom fields out. So they probably use something like CPT ui, right, to create a custom post type and then they would use a CF to then add some fill for that, like business address, maybe their logo any other number of fill that they would want for that business. And then the post management add-on would be used to create a form to populate that.

Yeah, and when the post is created, you can say, look, I want that post to be associated with the user that’s logged in. Right. and it should, it’ll actually create posts against that user. So yeah, that’s an example of the post management stuff. The user management is, you know, register, edit, profile, forgotten password and things like that. And then after those, it would be the integrations. It’ll be things like MailChimps very popular. We have a PDF add-on as well, which is quite popular. So that’s actually convert. So converting a form submission into a pdf.

Chris Badgett: What’s the use case for that? Like

Mark Westguard: We have people that have these quite complex pdf d forms that they’ve already got and they want use a form to populate that, so they’ll build that out in html. And then it’ll do like an HTML to PDF conversion. Some people just, they just want a PDF attachment on, on their emails for some reason, I guess. Cuz they, at the end of the day, I suspect that it’s coming out of the printer and someone’s putting it in a filing cabinet still to this day, you know. So yeah, that, that’s, that’s quite popular as well. But as you can see, there’s, there’s a lot of different integrations on there. Some of those integrations are part of the field as well.

Like Google places for example. So that’s a field what that you can pull onto the form and someone can start typing out an address partly, and it will then give you suggestions on the address. And then when they click on address, that will fill out the address part of the form. So you’ve got kind of the auto complete address functionality there. And I could even pinpoint it on a map as well. So yeah, there’s there’s a lot of plugins there out I’d say the email kind of marketing integrations are the most popular in the CRM integrations for sure.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. What was this other thing I saw here? It was your you had a bunch of examples. What did you call ’em?

Mark Westguard: Is that the template library?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, What, tell us about that.

Mark Westguard: Yeah, so we have there’s over a hundred different templates in WS form to get you started with a form. So we’ve got everything from your usual contact us form. We have surveys in there. We’ve actually got integration with the WordPress GDPR functionality as well, which a lot, a lot of people don’t realize is actually there . But in WordPress you can, if somebody, you know, if you, if you wanna be GDPR compliant people need to be able to make data erasure requests and data export requests.

And WordPress has functionality built in for that. So we have some form templates for initiating that process that you can just put on a page and people can just put, type in their email address and it’ll trigger that process. And I think there’s a bit of email back and forth that goes on with WordPress with that, with that feature.

And then you’ve got stuff like calculated fields. So we’ve got some demos in there for like building a mortgage calculator, a loan calculator just showing you how all of that kind of stuff can be built. And then when you install the add-ons like post management, you’re gonna get templates for every single custom post type you have. If you install Salesforce, it’s gonna give you templates through all the objects that you have. So the template library just grows and grows and grows just based upon the, the content that you’ve got.

If you have the Google Sheets add-on, it’ll actually list all the sheets that you have in Google Drive. You just click on one of those, it builds a form for you when they submit the form, it’ll start putting rows into that Google sheet. So yeah, the template library there is, just to get people started, we have a bunch of demos in there as well that show you some of the more complex stuff like the Google places to look up color selectors.

And then, you know, there’s, there’s also with the work commerce integration the work commerce integration’s pretty cool. You just go to a product, you click on the WS form tab on the left hand side under your product details, say, yep. I want to customize this, this product. And it’ll give you a bunch of templates you can work with. So things like product configurators color swatches, multi-step forms, you can choose one of those templates to, to get yourself started. Or you can start from a blank form. So there’s more templates in there, . So yeah, it’s it keeps going.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Mark, this is incredible. He’s at WS form.com. He’s got a lifter integration if you’re a lifter LMS user. So go check that out. Yeah, Any other final words for the people who are either beginners at forums or advanced users or just general WordPress folks? Any, any final words for the people?

Mark Westguard: Yeah, I mean, mean, I would say if you wanna check us out and try us out. We’ve got a demo on the site. You can just click on that at the top right hand site, click on demo. We’ve got a fully working demo that you can play around with. We, and, you know, if you, if you wanna build just a, a basic contact to us from. We have a light edition as well. So we’ve got a light edition which has all the spam features we just spoke about, you know, the new CloudFlare turns style field is in there. So I’ll definitely, yeah, check, check that out and, and give it a go.

Chris Badgett: All right. Well that’s Mark from WS form.com. Thanks for coming on the show. We’ll have to do it again sometime.

Mark Westguard: Absolutely. Let’s do it.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post How to Use Forms on Your WordPress LMS Website with Mark Westguard from WS Form appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

In this LMS cast episode, Matt shares his background in the membership site niche and how he accidentally discovered his interest in building membership sites while helping clients with digital products.

Matt Inglot is the owner of Tilted Pixel and producer of the Freelance Transformation. He is a entrepreneur, speaker, and business coach who has over 15 years of experience in the web development industry. He has also authored several books and courses.

Matt is passionate about helping other freelancers and business owners achieve success and has been recognized as a thought leader in the industry. He regularly speaks at conferences and events and has been featured in publications such as Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Inc. Magazine.

Episode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch and scale, a high value online training program. I’m your guide Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special repeat guest, his name is Matt Inglot. He’s from tilted pixel.com. We’re going to be getting into some hard won membership growth playbooks that Matt has learned over the years in the membership site niche. This is you’re you’re live, you’re listening to us in your earbuds or you’re watching this on YouTube. You’ve got to pretty hardcore membership site geeks here who are really into this kind of stuff have been around it for a while. And we’re gonna go deep on to something really special, which is what’s actually working in the space these days. Welcome back to the podcast, Matt.

Matt Inglot: Thanks so much for having me, Chris. I’m so excited to geek out on all things membership.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And we were also both on the membership Success Summit. So if you go over to the membership success summit.com It happened recently. You can go find our talks there with some other great people like Pat Flynn and many others. So go check out the membership Success Summit. Just to kind of cue up the audience. Matt, what’s your background in the membership site space? You know, what brought you to your position here, having seen what works? Seeing what doesn’t all your work around freelancing and helping membership sites? What’s the backstory?

Matt Inglot: Yeah, it was all one big accident that got me here. I started building websites for people back in university to get me through school, like many of us, more web Deep Web geek type people do. But I quickly discovered that there were many different types of clients out there, and they weren’t all the same. So I built my share of websites for like lots of local businesses. But then I got very fortunate and I had a few clients that had various types of digital product and membership businesses.

And what I found from that is that they ended up working with me for a lot longer. They got a lot more benefit from working with me. And they just really clicked because it was the same stuff that I was interested in. I love digital products. I’ve sold a few of my own over the years. So I was able to work with these clients very effectively building very custom solutions that allowed them to build a membership site of their dreams. And when I had that realization. I eventually pivoted my agency to only focus on membership sites and see at this point had an agency it wasn’t just me building sites from University.

And I realized, hey, wait a minute, this is the market that we have to go after. And as time went by, not only have we been building these things. But we’ve actually been able to figure out well, what actually works for growing a membership site, what makes it successful, and what allows it to take off because we’ve got the data now we’ve gotten into work with many different types of memberships, we’ve been able to see what growth levers exist to multiply your membership revenue.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And we’ll mention it again at the end. But just to plant the seed over it tilted pixel.com forward slash course, what can the listener go find over there.

Matt Inglot: They can find tons of Strategies for Growing your membership revenue, it’s an email series you’ll get where we’ll share some of the ones that are sort of the most tactical, and that you can go and you can start applying to your membership site. And this is again just based on what we ourselves have seen actually has worked on client sites over and over again. So we’re pulling the good stuff out of our playbook.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Well we’re gonna get in and reveal some of those in a little bit but first I want to square up with you on terms I’ve noticed over lifter LMS you know where people kind of get hung up on terms whether they call it a course a coaching program a membership site a membership and Academy and online school? A subscription a you know paywall premium content, how do you kind of just to kind of base the audience as we talk about memberships in your world? How do you define a membership site?

Matt Inglot: Man, you’re hitting close to home because I struggle with that every day to be honest a few because of that exact reason. There’s actually so much terminology for the same thing. And at the same time membership can also mean a lot of different other things like stuff scription boxes, right? Subscription boxes are cool. It’s not what we do. So what I’ve sort of tried to do to clarify it a little bit is think about gated content. Right? So you’re accessing a membership site in order to get something more. And that seems to resonate with people gated content. But membership site owners do seem to sort of self identify more broadly as membership site owners.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah, I love that. And that’s something I use a little bit is to clarify membership, I’ll say training base membership site, at least in my world, there’s usually some kind of learning to be had inside the membership, whether that’s course coaching, other like templates and resources. Other kinds of, as you said, kind of gated content. What’s a counterintuitive membership site growth playbook that you’ve kind of uncovered through all your data and experience that is somewhat counterintuitive, or just not very obvious, or was a surprise when you found out hey, this thing over here actually helps.

Matt Inglot: Yeah, I’ll give you my most surprising one. And it is surprising, because we’re first of all, a lot of what we focus on is customer lifetime value of it’s basically that in conversions are sort of the two things you want to focus on. If you want to grow your membership site, you want more people signing up for their membership, but you also want those customers to be as valuable as possible, right, you want them to stick around longer, you want them to pay more, you want to give them more value, so that they’re willing to pay more all of that good stuff.

So none of that’s controversial. The part that was surprising to me is that almost all membership sites out there have a monthly plan. It’s just the accepted norm, that when you build a membership site, you have a monthly plan, and then maybe have a quarterly maybe have an annual, but people always think about their membership site in terms of Oh, it’s $19, a month, $29 a month, whatever it may be. And after working with a lot of clients, and really focusing on this idea of customer lifetime value, we realized that in a lot of cases, this monthly plan is fundamentally flawed, because monthly customers just typically don’t stick around that long.

So we we sifted through tons of data through 1000s and 10s, to 1000s and 10s, of 1000s of customer records on lots of different sites. And we found out that when you have a monthly plan, that person may stick around three months, they may stick around six months, there’s an average, there’s an average lifetime for those customers. And it’s somewhere in that range. So if someone’s paying you $20 a month, times five months, they’re probably paying you about $100 for the privilege of accessing your content, on average.

And that’s probably it. Versus if someone signs up for a year an annual plan, well, they’re gonna pay you at least for a year of content. And as long as you’re delivering enough value, then that’s a very fair exchange, because a lot of our membership sites, they’re kind of front loaded, people are most excited to join at the beginning, and they have the most to learn. But now let’s say that annual plan, you know, gives you a bit of a discount. So it’s $200 a year, or 20 bucks a month, well, those annual customers are going to be worth at least $200. And on average, probably more, versus the monthly plan customers that are only worth $100. And that’s a huge gap, right?

Because even if all your annual customers were to stay for only one year, which is not true, but let’s say they did, you actually they’re worth literally double that of a monthly customer. It is crazy. And what we found when we discovered this is we could remove the monthly plan. And in almost every case, your revenue actually skyrockets. Because yes, a few people might not convert to that annual price. But a whole heck of a lot of them do enough that it certainly makes up for whatever conversion loss you have.

Because your customers worth double, literally double. Right or more oftentimes, it’s a lot more, it’s usually like a three to one or four to one spread between the value of a monthly customer and an annual customer. So it’s counterintuitive. And whenever I tell people that their first like first reaction is like No, this cannot work this way. This is this is not how the world works. I can’t apply this to my site. I can’t it can’t be done. But sure enough, you go and you test it and most of the time it works. And when it doesn’t, there’s usually a few specific factors that prevent it from working.

Chris Badgett: Well, that’s awesome. I love that and I’ve seen that a lot just in my experience with course creators and coaches setting up what we call access plans and lifter LMS a lot of people are really focused on the monthly and they almost think about the annual is like Well, I’m just gonna put that there but If you actually start with that, it just changes the way you think about it.

And I agree with you that for somebody to pay monthly, they have to make the sale 12 times you’re making the sale 12 times a year as opposed to like an annual, all you really need to worry about is the next sale a year from now, which is actually as an entrepreneur a lot easier to plan for in the sense that, of course, we want to add as much value as possible. And if we have 365 days, as we get to this renewal that we want to try and get like, what can we do in that last month to make sure people are getting the value and understand the value of the product? I love that?

Matt Inglot: Yeah. And a lot of times, it sets for you a more fair price, a more fair floor price for your content. Because when I find a lot of membership sites is they give and they give and they give, right? Like usually people are delivering tons of value. It’s not that they’re not delivering enough value. But like, the problem is a lot of content can be consumed in three months. And in which case, there’s sort of a very low minimum fee that people pay to consume everything. If they’re at least paying annual, then they’re at least paying as much as if they had bought it as a course or something.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s awesome. And over the course of a year, you might you have just a lot more time as an entrepreneur to create more value that when it comes time for that renewal decision, you have 300 days to add value plus, not just 30 that’s a that’s an awesome What else have you found in your data? What other membership playbooks can the course creators, coaches and community builders out there? Learn from from your data, your history?

Matt Inglot: Yeah, there’s a lot something else we can talk about as cancellations because people hate cancellations. Right? Yeah. So our response and all that, right, yeah. So a lot of times, they just don’t want to deal with them. Right. It’s the bad thing. That’s the unspoken thing. But I think that’s the wrong way to go about it. Because there’s just so much opportunity when members are canceling to improve your business and to increase their lifetime value, ironically. So I embrace cancellations, I want less cancellations, but I don’t want to ignore the cancellation workflow. So it’s something that we always look at very carefully.

And I can give you a couple things that have worked really well for us one, one is sort of it sounds obvious, but people are not doing this. If someone is canceling find out why. Right? Yeah, make that part of a cancellation process, if possible, make putting something in a form even mandatory, right? Like, we’re not gonna sit there and force you to write you know, the works of Shakespeare and while you’re canceling, but just tell us something, right. And then people will tell you, and that way, you are good at gathering the data that you need to find out why people are canceling. And then the next step, of course, is to act on it.

But then, if you have this data, and you know, like, why people are canceling, the beautiful second step of that, as you can offer a down sell, that is built custom to address some of these objections that people have, right, a lot of a time, let’s face it, people put down price. Well, we just talked about eliminating monthly plans. But you know, what I’ve seen work really, really well is giving them a down sell to a monthly plan, right? Because maybe they they can’t renew at the annual rate or it’s too much of an ask at that point. That’s when you can offer them the monthly and say, Okay, no problem. It’s a little bit more per month.

But here’s a monthly plan, or it’s a little bit less per month than what you’re paying now. But it’s missing these three features, or something else, but basically make the down sell match sort of the typical objections that you’re seeing. So that that’s a second chance to win that customer back, they might not have been willing to spend $200, or they wouldn’t have been able to spend $200 Right now, for $20. And like these benefits, okay, I’ll stay and it’s amazing how much revenue you can recover how much customer lifetime value, you can extend. And some of these members then eventually do upgrade again, especially if you gate down that monthly plan.

So there’s a few things missing, so that there is an incentive to go annual again, when you can. So we’ve turned your cancellation workflow from a leaky bucket to something that’s actually like a revenue generator for you a customer lifetime value extender, and that’s just based on focusing on your cancellations instead of ignoring them.

Chris Badgett: I love that, just a quick pro lifter LMS tip out there we have the ability to hide what we call access plans so that down sell to the monthly if you didn’t want the public to be able to see it but you want to send somebody an email to be able to buy in that way. It’s totally possible. You know what made me fall in love with I’m refund requests. And I 100% agree like ghosts, create a form. Don’t make it too burdensome that they start getting angry at you.

But like, let’s say you had three to five questions that you could ask, besides your name and email, and maybe some of them are just checkboxes or radio buttons. But the thing that made me fall in love with it oftentimes is sometimes fuel. For me as a software guy, if we’re just talking about software memberships, or subscriptions. That reason like why why would you like to cancel? And what made me fall in love with refund requests as sometimes they would say, well, your product doesn’t do X, but it actually does.

And they just didn’t know or couldn’t find the documentation or didn’t know how to do it in that way. So we ended up, you know, like, I don’t know, maybe 30% of our refund requests we actually save, just by helping them realize that they could do exactly what they were trying to do. They just didn’t know how so becomes a customer success challenge over Oh, it doesn’t, it doesn’t do that. But it’s always fun to get those saves in there.

Matt Inglot: That’s actually an amazing tip for sure. Yeah. And that’s, again, the benefit of getting that customer data versus not.

Chris Badgett: And that’s the challenge is, the more successful you are as a coach or a content, get content creators, your library of stuffs gonna get so big, that people are going to have a harder time finding the stuff or connecting the dots to exactly what they need in the moment right then. So that’s why I highly recommend customer success is just as important to sales, especially if you have like a large, you know, body of work, so that you can kind of guide people to the result they want through your content as quickly as possible.

Matt Inglot: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just on that point as well that you can front load as well, like Absolutely agree if that should be part of the cancellation, and they tell you something’s missing. Go after it, find it. But you can do that as part of the onboarding sequence to like, I’m stealing this a little bit from Lyon, Ryan Levesque, from ask, but I use it a little bit differently. He shared with me this really cool strategy years ago, where when someone signs up for something like your email list, or in this case, your membership, after they receive like the normal welcome email, send them another email, like a few hours later, but don’t brand it right.

Don’t make it like you know, your logo and all the pretty graphics, just use the plain text feature. And just like put a simple subject line, like literally, you could put Hey, right, that’s sort of our typical is put Hey, and and just write it in your own tone as the founder and just say, Hey, I saw you just signed up for you know, such and such membership, we’re really glad to have here, have you can you just hit reply and confirm that you’ve been able to access the material? Right? Yeah, it’s brilliant, because it’s asking for an action.

But then you put one more, you put a little PS. By the way, I’d also love to know what you’re looking to get out of the membership or similar question. Because what you’ve just done is you’ve you’ve created this opportunity for them to engage with you, or your your customer success team, as you were mentioning, and this way, like when you’re gathering very valuable data, why the heck did this person join, but to it gives you that opportunity to point them in that right direction and give them that personalized service right away. And that’s also something that people are also sometimes reluctant to do is engage with their customers.

And to me, that’s completely crazy, right? Like the cost to you to respond to that email is nothing. And if you don’t have enough time to hire someone, right, someone’s just paying you $20 a month for this membership, you can afford an hour of someone’s time to speak to that member to make sure that they’re on the right track. And so that they stick around. That’s part of the broader strategy of onboarding. We find a lot of membership sites we look at, it’s that onboarding experience. That’s also a huge leaky bucket. Right, because they get excited, they join and then not enough stuff happens and not enough onboarding happens. And then they just sort of put that membership in the later pile. And then they end up canceling three months later.

Chris Badgett: Just to drive that point home. I was in a membership for two years, that was 10s of 1000s of dollars a year to help software companies of my size scale. And you know, when I joined there was like a 60 day love it or leave it refund policy. Right? So I was like, Alright, this is super expensive, but I’m taking a risk. And when I got into the membership, I had a one hour call with the founder.

I think it’s gotten bigger now where it’s there’s a team of people that do those calls, but that one one hour call for this 10s of 1000s of membership in this person had tons of stuff behind the behind the membership. He helped match my challenges and goals to the exact path through through his stuff in a specific order tailored to me, and what my business needed in a one hour call. So in one hour, he basically sealed the deal. And I ended up staying for not just one year, but two. But that one call that onboarding call was just so important. I just want to, to mention that like, it’s okay to talk to people.

Matt Inglot: Absolutely. That could have been the difference between you feeling this is the right fit for you. And you taking advantage of that love it or leave a guarantee.

Chris Badgett: Exactly. And he helped me navigate a huge library of content, like instead of just being like, Okay, I’m gonna go into consumption mode forever. I knew what to do and what order you also meant mentioned on tilted pixel.com conversion rate, how to how can membership site people increase their conversion rate?

Matt Inglot: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s a lot of ways that they can increase their conversion rates. There’s a couple that come to mind. I mean, one is the sales page itself often has a lot of work that needs to be done.

Chris Badgett: Is there a model that you can think of, or like, I don’t know, maybe somebody that you know of that has like a good member sales page to model or just even if it’s not even a membership site, per se, it will probably should be a membership site, but like, what are people missing? Like, is it Are they too long? Or they’re too short? Are they just not spending enough time on it? What?

Matt Inglot: Yeah, well, I can take I take you through what you what you should and shouldn’t be doing? And I’ll see if I can think of one, it’s almost like the problem of having too many. Yeah, right. But like the general thing that I think membership sites sales pages fail to do over and over again. And it sounds simple, but it’s speak to the problem that your customers have. And make sure that it’s a recurring problem, which is also a business model issue. If your membership doesn’t solve a recurring problem, it’s a problem itself.

But really speak to a recurring problem that they have. And make sure that sort of what your sales page is focused on first and foremost, and then show them what’s the after effect of that. So here’s what things look like with a membership. Here’s everything that we solve for you. And then make sure you have clear plans that actually speak to who your different audiences are, which was going to be sort of the point that I was going to get to what a lot of membership sites on their sales page, they’ll have sometimes more than one tear. But those tears were kind of arbitrarily made up by the owner, right? They were never connected to anything in reality. Whereas if you actually survey your audience, and segment them properly, it’s the kind of stuff that we do for our clients.

You can actually restructure those tier so that they speak to speak to different audience segments, and are priced according to the value that those audience segments are, are going to get out of your membership. And that makes it super easy for someone that’s on your sales page to see, okay, well, here’s the problem you’re solving for me. You know, here’s what solving this looks like. And then hey, wait a minute, this plan actually makes sense for me. I’m going to go ahead, I’m going to sign up now.

And the easiest way to understand why this isn’t happening is to look at the contrast, where what I see on a surprising amount of membership sites instead is a headline that says something like join now for 2995 a month. Yeah, what am I joining? What is this? And like right away like the visitor shuts off, right? Doesn’t matter how many cool things like they’re trying to sell a membership, they’re not trying to solve the solution to the problem. And it seems particularly endemic to the membership community because they feel like they have to sell you on this idea of paying the monthly you don’t have to sell you your customer on that.

You have to solve sell them that they have a problem they have a really strong pain and that you can alleviate it and only then do you worry about the mechanics that it’s yeah it’s it’s a monthly thing or yearly thing that you pay for. And a lot of sales pages can be rescued and transformed just by going from that one model to model where you actually speaking to the customers pain points, and you’re presenting tears that actually speak to who they are.

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s, that’s awesome. I really love that and I know a membership site people get really into the weeds of like, well, what’s inside, there’s like 50 courses, there’s group coaching calls, there’s these templates, which is important, but it’s only part of the story. It’s the you know that clear cut Customer with that clear pain. The one I was in, that I’ve mentioned earlier was about helping you scale. Your software company, which, you know, if you’re, if you’re in software, what happens to b2b SaaS founders, which is where I kind of slot in is, over time you that’s what you’re trying to do.

You’re trying to scale. And I didn’t even really know how many courses or anything were inside. It’s just the person his name’s Dan Martell, who’s by the way, he’s got a great YouTube channel, please check them out. If you’re listening, Dan’s awesome. I learned a ton from him. But his sales process had what was in the box had very little to do about it. It was more about the pain and identifying with this type of customer with these problem every time he was, it was like, he was like, psychic, you know? So yeah, good.

Matt Inglot: And imagine if it worked the other way, where he told you, oh, we have 500 videos in our vault? Very common wording like, Yeah, I mean, your credit card would get scared away. Because like, you don’t want to go through 500 videos necessarily. That sounds like a so much work.

Chris Badgett: But I want my problem solved. And I want to do with somebody who’s been there done that has a track record, which is the other thing I think on the membership, conversion rates is the social proof element is important. I mean, we all know, we need testimonials and case studies and stuff. But any tips for people on the in that social proof category? Like how to get them or what kinds they should get or whatever?

Matt Inglot: Yeah, absolutely. So I think of it as part of your general customer, customer knowledge engine, right where we talked about emailing them as soon as they join. For example, right, and getting the information about why they joined, we talked about surveying them when they’re leaving, there’s different touch points that you can have where you survey people, and you find out more about them.

And that should be part of their membership experience. That should be part of how you manage your list. You should always be trying to learn more about your audience. So we find the easiest way to get some of these, like really good testimonials, is to just slot them into this process. Where someone gives you a really good piece of feedback, like your membership did this for me, or I just had this huge win. If you’re monitoring all of that info coming in, anytime you see something like this, coming to you reach back out to that person and say, Okay, great.

I’m so thrilled that you were able to get this outcome, would you be willing to hop on a 15 minute call with me. And we could just make a short case study video demonstrating to others what you’re able to achieve. And it doesn’t have to be a video, I mean, videos, or I like videos, they’re sort of becoming more and more trendy. People don’t like like, the owners of sites don’t like doing videos because it’s more work. It feels weird, whatever. But customers love them because then they they can relate to them more than written testimonials, written testimonial, any like anyone can write that. And it’s not that we all approach those testimonials with complete suspicion. But there’s always that thought in the back of your head. Is this a real customer? You know, Joe, Joanne from Atlanta, says this.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s fake. It’s harder to fake a video.

Matt Inglot: Yeah. But it’s just part of our process. Right.

Chris Badgett: And they are. One of the things that helped in a sales process I was in was they actually sent me testimonial videos by or case study videos by email, short ones. Based on the exact main challenges I said I had as part of the sales process, there was not even a heart closed, they just sent the videos about this person and that person that were a lot like me that had the same challenge. And now they don’t. It was it was I was kind of blown away. Just, you know, because I’m self aware. Like, wow, this is how sales should be. There’s nothing pushy here. It’s more about relevance match. Commitment offer. I mean, it was just the fundamentals were so good.

Matt Inglot: Yeah, I mean, that that’s great that you bring that up, because see, they’re putting all of these things into practice, right? The reason they knew which case studies to send to you was because they surveyed you, right? Right. It doesn’t have to be like a literal Survey Monkey survey either. But you’re asking people questions, and you’re gathering the data, and then you’re using it in order to create a better member experience.

Chris Badgett: I like that and in sales. I think about that. The first thing any salesperson should do is ask a question like before before like, actually trying to sell like, well, what’s your biggest challenge or what are you trying to accomplish? These are like very important open enters for a sales conversation, whether it’s a webinar or one on one or even inside of content, a bounce bounce rate, how do we keep people from bouncing? And I saw that on your site? Are you saying particularly around like, during the sales process? Or once they’re in the membership? How can we improve bounce rate? And can you also describe what it is? in case somebody doesn’t know?

Matt Inglot: Yeah, I mean, I know you’re referencing our website. So there, we were specifically referencing bounce rate, the metric, which is someone comes to your website, and then they leave right away, right. And they don’t actually pursue it further. And I feel like we’ve touched on on some of those concepts. Because there, you really want your whole site, just like your sales page, to be focused on a person’s pain point. And not all this other stuff. That’s not their pain point.

But there is another related concept, which is churn, which is probably what membership site owners probably especially want to know about. Because you don’t want your members canceling, right? There’s this whole promise of recurring revenue from a membership. It’s not very recurring, if you got people leaving after three months, right? Yeah. So we can definitely focus in a little bit on that. And we touched a little bit on this before, but probably the most important thing is fundamental, make sure that you’re actually solving a recurring problem.

So that’s sort of the first thing that’s the very strategic, not the very crunchy thing. But if you fundamentally built a membership, or someone can join with a painful problem, but then they solve that problem in three months, and then they they don’t have use for your content anymore, then you don’t really have a membership based business. Right? You’re probably better off selling a course. So now your challenge is to figure out how to fix that model.

Chris Badgett: So you say that sorry, I think that’s so important. And this is we run into this a lot. Yeah. So if somebody’s like, really, at the beginning of the journey, let’s say they’re an expert in some kind of fitness thing. And they want to do a course or a membership site, and they’re not really sure which way to go. Or perhaps like, but both like courses inside of membership. How do you? How do they know? Could you kind of set it but I just really want to, if people can waste a lot of time building a course that should be a membership or building a membership. That should be a course how do we kind of crystallize that fork in the road?

Matt Inglot: Yeah, absolutely. Especially because getting that wrong is extremely painful. Nothing seems to be working. Right? Right. So if you have a specific thing you’re planning to teach somebody how to do. And that’s it, that’s called a course, right? And no matter how much you want recurring revenue, people are not going to pay for forever, for ongoing access to learn the same thing over and over.

Chris Badgett: Here’s an example like, how to attract your soulmate. Like that’s gonna happen. But once it happens, they’re gonna get married. And that’s it, right? That’s like a, it’s not a recurring. It’s an important problem. But it’s not a recurring problem for most people, I guess.

Matt Inglot: Yeah, exactly. If you have a bunch of content and finding your soulmate, and that’s where things end, then yeah, you’re right. Absolutely. Again, that’s a course, or like, How To Play Chess. And you have your course on how to play chess. And that’s it. That’s a course. But a membership means that there’s some sort of challenge that they have possibly related to those things like soulmates and chess and whatever else that isn’t necessarily solved as a one and done. So for example, with chess, there could be a component of ongoing coaching, like you don’t become great at chess overnight. Right? So some way where you can study games, you can play puzzles, right?

So you could you could have like a daily chess puzzle newsletter, right? That would be a membership, because you always want the next chess puzzle, and the next one and the next one. Or maybe you take people through famous chess games, right? And you explain one every week or something like that, that’s ongoing content, because you’re helping me on the progression towards becoming a better and better chess player. That’s an ongoing pain point. Whereas learning the mechanics of how to play chess, that’s a course because there’s a start and there’s an end.

And once I know how to play chess, I don’t need your information and content anymore, right? And it’s going to be the same thing with the soulmate example, right? Like dating takes time. So I actually think there’s a lot of membership opportunity there. Right? You’re probably not going to find your soulmate next week, unless you get super lucky. But there’s a difference between teaching people you know how to find the right people connect with them and so on.

Versus like, providing like something ongoing, like virtual speed dating, I don’t know. I’m spitballing here. But there’s something that you can do to help them solve that problem. And that’s kind of the good news for core sites, or sorry for membership sites that are really courses. Sometimes you can you can fix this model. If you can broaden from going. I’m going to teach you acts to figure out what’s the broader pain point that someone’s trying to solve? And how, how can I help them solve that in an ongoing fashion?

Chris Badgett: So for example, like, example. I don’t, I’m not very good at chess, or I’m having a hard time talking to the type of people I want to meet, like, these are recurring problems that need time to develop.

Matt Inglot: Yeah, Precisely, precisely. And then you have a membership business and you have a group of customers that are hungry for solving this problem on an ongoing basis. And you can, it’s totally fair game, to charge them for ongoing access.

Chris Badgett: If we have a good recurring problem slash product match. How do we continue to fight churn?

Matt Inglot: Yeah, absolutely. So there’s a lot of things that you can do. But we like to focus on the fundamentals, which is make sure that we close the gap between what we’re offering and what the people are actually trying to solve. And that sounds kind of abstract. But I find a lot of membership sites struggle with that, right? Because it’s hard to make a good membership site that does that. So part of it is first of all, surveying your audience’s comes up over and over, see how they’re doing? And when you’re speaking with them start identifying Well, what’s missing, that’s preventing them from moving forward. Right.

And there’s some common things that tend to come up like time is a big one, right? And time is, a lot of the answers people give you are codes for something else. So time is a code for priority. For example, this isn’t really priority enough, right? So how can you make this higher priority. So for example, if it’s chess, going back to that example, I would guess that a chess site would have a lot of success. If they try to make learning chess, something that’s very bite size, tackling the time part, but also make it really fun, because people always make time for fun, right?

That seems to be an ongoing theme. Like actually Duolingo has put crazy amounts of time and money into exactly that they gamified their systems. Because they recognize that learning a language is incredibly hard, fundamentally, and it’s an incredibly big commitment you’re signing up for so you’re gonna have this crazy churn because someone goes on a whim and says, I want to learn Spanish. And then if you make them sit there and repeat, over and over how to say beer, in Spanish, it’s gonna get old really fast. So they found lots of ways to gamify it, make it fun, give you progress bars, and really help you build up this winning streak that you don’t want to break.

Right. So that’s an example of really finding a way to help your audience actually get to the finish line with their problem or actually make progress. And a lot of membership sites where they struggle is they just throw tons of content that people and then say, Okay, here’s the content, you’re on your own Sia, right. And like you were saying, like, one of the things that like Dan was doing was you were getting a customized lesson plan, right? Focus on exactly these things. So that’s an example of where they very smartly said, We got to close that gap. Right. And then they did that. So if you actually want to know how to solve churn, those are the things that you got to be doing.

There’s also more tactical things that you can do, like having some sort of regular communication with your members. Which again, sounds so easy, so simple, so obvious, but then it doesn’t get done, right. So there should be some sort of weekly or something like that email newsletter. Or some other means of communicating with your members. That sort of nudging them, and giving them value, right? It’s not just emailing them for the sake of emailing them, but just kind of reminding them that this thing exists.

Chris Badgett: My favorite one there is office hours. Because as a membership site owner, you don’t even have to prepare, you just need to show up as an expert, and help the people with what they have. It’s like the quickest way to add recurring value is office hours. I mean, there’s there’s other things you can do, but I always loved that trick.

Matt Inglot: Yeah, I love office hours. I mean, on a personal level. I love office hours I used to do tons of and it was just so rewarding both ways, right? Because like the students get a lot out of it. You get a lot out. You get to deliver a lot of value in a very compressed period of time. It’s just a win win situation. And the only challenge with Office Hours that I’ve discovered over and over, it’s usually becomes the same people showing up each and every time.

I have noticed that, always Yeah. And it’s just, I think it’s a good thing to offer, but you want it probably one very to times to make it more accessible. And just more broadly, you never want to hinge a student’s success on one medium if you can. So, office hours not are not going to work for everyone for all sorts of reasons. What are the other ways that we can pull them in. So even if they don’t do office hours, there’s other recurring stuff that they will get value out of,

Chris Badgett: I want to ask you about the community aspect. You know, it lifter, we have a social learning thing, some people do Facebook groups, there’s forums, Slack, circle.so, there’s all kinds of like community tools that people use. But I see a lot of friction around community. Myself, I’ve joined a lot of memberships. Where the community was one of the best parts, but it’s really hard to pull off well. Any tips you have around to community or not to community or when to add that and how to kind of make it actually work? So there’s a lot of negative things that can happen if you build a community and nobody uses it, or people start spamming it or whatever. Like, how can we do membership communities better?

Matt Inglot: Yeah, I think the biggest thing I should say is that community should never be an afterthought. Meaning if you’re gonna do it, then go all in and build it into your membership such that, like, it’s expected that you participate. And that it’s it’s part of the program. Yeah, it’s part of a program, and there’s real value being delivered. If you have a membership that’s not based around community and you slap on a Facebook group. Or like you turn on a forum on your LMS, or something like that.

It’s just most of the time. It’s going to be a ghost town, unless you already have a crazy amount of members. And then you’re gonna get some discussion just because with enough members, anything, I’ll get used, right, but it’s not going to be very rewarding. So it should be baked deeply into basically, the curriculum, let’s call it even though it’s a membership site and not a course. And it should involve a lot of participation from you. Right? This isn’t something where you can just start a community and expect people to hire a community manager.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it’s not gonna, it’s not going to pan out the way that you want it to. Because members can help each other. And you’re trying to encourage that, and you’re trying to encourage people to grow. But the only way they’re going to keep visiting this thing is if they start getting value out of it, right. And that’s where a lot of these communities failed, or members is that there’s no value happening.

And it’s a chicken and egg thing. Because for value to happen, people have to post, but people aren’t going to post if there’s not value happening. So you need to sort of take that initiative, get some posts going get like ideally, like a core group of involved people really posting. And then the biggest thing to me is also picking the right platform. And a lot of things, I don’t think platform is that important. But for communities, it is so important. And in my opinion, the best thing you can do is figure out where people where your particular audience, again, serving hangs out and use that platform. I don’t care what it is. But use it right.

It could be Facebook, it could be slack, it could Discord is getting a ton of popularity now. But it’s very hard to get people to use a new social network. And that’s always the struggle with forums. There’s some amazing forums out there, I participate in a few forums. But it is an uphill battle versus making a Facebook group where people are already on Facebook group or on Facebook, and they’re going to see your post, right? And they don’t have to check something else. And then it’s going to come to their phone, and they’re going to see it when they’re sort of bored and scrolling, you know, at two in the afternoon. It’s it just removes a massive obstacle to building community. If you go where the audience already is.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, sometimes I’m sad when I see somebody which I totally get take a philosophical stand against Facebook and their membership site, enter and like there’s like all these Facebook groups around their topic. And they’re like, Yeah, I don’t do Facebook. Oh, boy. Well, your people are on Facebook. So yeah, I get that. Oft

Matt Inglot: Yeah. And you’ll get that pushback from your members too, by the way. Yeah, it can be very disheartening, because you’ll get some that just won’t participate for that reason. And again, it doesn’t have to be Facebook, it could be anything. All I can say is you’re never going to make everyone happy. So don’t don’t let the really squeaky wheel Let cause you to guide your site down on to something that’s not actually going to work for you.

Because I’ve seen that I’ve made that mistake. You know, or people have told me all Facebook’s terrible, don’t use it, well, maybe maybe all those things are true. But the reality is 95% of our members actually don’t care if you use Facebook. And if you use this other like obscure thing, they’re just not going to participate. And you’re gonna, you’re gonna save the minority but lose the majority.

Chris Badgett: Well, so many insights today. This is Matt Inglot. He’s from tilted pixel.com Go to tilted pixel.com forward slash course. And you’ll get more counterintuitive, hard won, data driven membership insights, any final words for the people met?

Matt Inglot: Yeah, I mean, data is the big one. I think data is everything that we do. It’s all data driven. So survey your audience. If there’s nothing else that you’ve taken out of this episode, find out from them the value that they want created, how they wanted created, and so on. And just pay attention to that. Pay attention to your membership metrics, like customer lifetime value, churn, and so on. And then just build your memberships step by step with data as the foundation.

Chris Badgett: Any other places to connect. We’ve got tilted pixel.com forward slash course, any social media or other ways to track you down? Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Matt Inglot: If you want to find me on social media, I try to be on LinkedIn a lot more. Now. I’ve historically not done a great job of that. But I’ve really changed that the last few months. And I think as a platform, it’s kind of really exciting, the changes that they’ve made to it. So I would love if people connected with me on LinkedIn. You can also find me on Twitter and Facebook as well. And just Matt Inglot there’s not too many of those out there.

Chris Badgett: Recurring revenue through memberships, one of our favorite most coveted topics on this podcast, and thanks for adding so much value value today Matt he’s at tilted pixel.com forward slash course. Thanks for coming back on the show. We’ll have to do this again down the road.

Matt Inglot: Thanks so much Chris. Really appreciate you really appreciate lifter LMS and hope people got a lot out of it.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifter lms.com For slash gift go to lifter lms.com forward slash gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post How to Build a Recurring Revenue Membership Site with Matt Inglot appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

In this episode, Bri Seeley owners of The Entrepreneur Coach Bri Seeley shares her background as a former fashion designer. And her journey to becoming a coach who helps entrepreneurs start and grow their businesses. She talks about her passion for entrepreneurship and how she believes it is the path to freedom.

Bri Seeley is an entrepreneur and coach who is passionate about entrepreneurship and helping other people be successful through it. She believes that entrepreneurship is the path to freedom, and loves helping other people walk that path.

Bri Seeley has a YouTube channel where she shares inspiring and empowering content on topics such as entrepreneurship, personal growth, mindset, and self-care. On her channel, she provides insights and advice based on her experience as a coach, author, and speaker.

Bri started her coaching business in 2015 but only niched down into helping entrepreneurs specifically in 2019. She loves entrepreneurship because it is all about waking up every day and creating something from nothing.

She believes that not everyone has the ability, vision, and faith to be an entrepreneur. Because it takes a lot of trust in oneself and the willingness to do uncomfortable things. Entrepreneurs have the ability to create anything they want without limitations and that is what makes them special and unique.

Episode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch and scale, a high value online training program. I’m your guide Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of lifter LMS the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest, her name is Bree Seeley. She helps entrepreneurs start and grow. She’s a coach. She’s been around the entrepreneurial block a few times. If you look at our website, Brees cle.com. One of the things that really blew me away was like the amount of testimonials. And positive things people were saying about you in text and the videos and people getting all emotional about how much you believe in them and help people grow. So I’m really excited to share some of that magic today. Welcome to the show. Bri.

Bri Seeley: Thank you for having me. Yes, I really passionate I mean, well, we’ll dive into it. But entrepreneurship is like the soapbox that I stand on. I’m very passionate about entrepreneurship, and specifically helping people just be more successful through it. I firmly believe entrepreneurship is the path to freedom. And the more that I can help other people walk that path for me. I’m like, I’m gonna I’m gonna die a happy lady. So I love what I do. And and yeah, I’m really passionate about it. So I’m excited to be here.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, I’m super aligned with you, the kind of the target audience we help I call education entrepreneurs. They have something to teach, you know, so here I am an entrepreneur helping other entrepreneurs, how did you find yourself in those same shoes and entrepreneur who really wants to focus on entrepreneurs as well?

Bri Seeley: Yeah, it’s interesting. Like you said, I’ve been around the block a little bit. So my first eight years of business, I was a fashion designer, I’m on fashion label. I was showing on runways all around the country, I was dressing Toni Braxton. I was on The Bachelorette, buy my stuff on zappos.com, like all this stuff, and realize that the product based business thing just wasn’t my jam. Like, you know, you mentioned that the education aspect, that was really more where I wanted to be. And I didn’t really know it at the time. But I basically just kept following the breadcrumbs that were laid out in front of me and came to it.

But when I started my coaching business, I wasn’t just coaching entrepreneurs but what happened was a lot of entrepreneurs came to work with me. And learn under me, because I’m so passionate about being an entrepreneur, that other people would then be like, oh, like thought about it, but like, I don’t really know. And it sounds scary, and there’s more security with having a job and so little by little I started this business in 2015. I only niched down into helping entrepreneurs specifically in 2019. So I didn’t start there.

I think had I tried to start there. My imposter syndrome just would have been raging and I would have had the like. Who do you think you are? You just walked away from an eight year business, you’re a failure? Why do you think you can teach other people this right? So like, I just had a little bit more of my journey. And then the more and more and more and more I did it. I realized I was really good at it. This is what people were coming to me for I was helping people get really great results. I even started ranking on Google organically without doing any SEO on my website. And so I was like, Alright, I’m gonna take all these things is like signs that this is the direction I need to be moving in.

Chris Badgett: What makes the entrepreneur special. What I mean is, sometimes when you have a certain disposition or personality or calling, you can’t read the label from inside the bottle. And you mentioned like kind of, okay, now, I’m focused in 2019 on entrepreneurs exclusively. What makes them special and unique that they may not be aware of that lights you up and makes you so passionate about helping them.

Bri Seeley: The reason why I love entrepreneurship is because our job every single day is to wake up and create something from nothing. And because we have the ability to do that, that means we can create anything we want. We have absolutely no limitations. If you want to create a billion dollar business, you can do that. You might not be there yet. But our job as entrepreneurs is to wake up again tomorrow and build more and to create more. And we get to basically, like I said, Take nothing and turn it into whatever we want.

And not everyone has that ability. Not everyone has that vision. And to be quite frank, not everyone has that faith. Because when you’re waking up every morning and you have nothing foot, and it’s on your shoulders to be the one to create it into something right, you don’t have someone there just handing you a to do list or handing you a paycheck. It’s, it comes from you, like there takes a certain amount of faith that has to go into that. You have to trust yourself, you have to be willing to do uncomfortable things.

And I mean, there’s just there’s so much that goes into it. But it really, truly is that willingness to wake up to a blank slate every single day, and continue taking steps forward. Because you know, that vision that you have is way too important. And way bigger than any of your present day like little bumps in the road you’re facing and you just keep you just keep going.

Chris Badgett: As a coach, how do you help people find or ignite the faith or make it stronger? Because I call it I’m, in the early days of an entrepreneurial venture, actually called the valley of despair. There’s all this like stuff you’re working for free, it’s hard. Nobody believes in you. negative self talk all that stuff. Don’t know what you’re doing or just kind of winging it. How do you help people as a coach, believe in themselves, so they have nothing out there to show for it yet?

Bri Seeley: Yep. To two things that I really rely on to help people. So the first thing is just me, right? Like, sometimes when you don’t have the faith in yourself, you just need someone else to have that faith in you. And so a lot of days, that’s just my job is being that cheerleader or and or kicking people in the butt to remind them who they are and what they’re here for and why they started in the first place. And so that’s part of it is just strengthening them from the outside in. Another part of it is I help them start looking for the little thing.

So oftentimes, when we’re creating a big vision, we are looking for, like the big overt, you know, like, I went viral and got 1.4 million new subscribers, right? But we forget about the five new subscribers we got today. Right? Well, that’s not five isn’t enough to build a business on, right. But if you get five every day, for a month, then you’ve gotten 150, right. So like, I really help them look at the little wins.

And we start compounding those little wins. Because if you can get one little win a day for a year, you can look back in that year, and you have 365 wins, and very likely they’re adding up to some sort of bigger win in general. So it’s that combination of two things, I get to be their cheerleader cheerleader, I get to kick them in the butt, I get to remind them who they are and why they started. And we get to start amassing proof that the steps they’re taking are working so that they then refuel themselves to continue taking more steps every day.

Chris Badgett: What would you advise and you I know, you’re in the education too, and helping people learn, particularly here in the entrepreneur niche? What would you advise a new entrepreneur course creator? And as far as getting off the starting blocks? Like where should they focus? You know, they have a dream, maybe they bought some software? You know, they’ve taken some courses themselves, but how do they get that momentum that’s going to carry on through?

Bri Seeley: So again, I’m gonna give you two different answers here. So the first one is No, and I will preface this by saying no one likes this answer, myself included, I got given this answer in 2015. And was like, Absolutely not. And it’s what helped me create my first six figures in business. So the first answer is your preliminary customers are going to be people that you already know. And everyone gets so uncomfortable by that, because they’re like, Well, I don’t want to sell the people I know. And I don’t want to, the thing about selling to people you already know is that they already have an established no love trust factor with you.

So if you’re coming out the gate, and you have no social proof on your side, and you have no testimonials, and you have no sales, you’ve got to rely on something and that something is that no love trust factor. So start with the people you know, and maybe it’s that you offer it to a select group of those people for free to begin with in exchange for some social proof so that then you can build on top of that. Right? So that’s the first thing. The other thing I would say, and this is hands down the one thing I wish I would have done starting in 2015.

Might I try not to have 20 like 2020 hindsight, but this is one of those things where I’m like, Oh, if I’d been doing this for seven years, my whole life would look different. establishing partnerships. So seeing how maybe some people that are one, two or three steps ahead of you have built their audience already and then providing your knowledge, wisdom and expertise to their audience, because what’s going to happen is If you’re waking up every day, and you don’t have an audience, and you’re talking and talking and talking and talking to no one, all day, every day, it gets really hard to continue showing up.

If you partner with someone that even has an audience of 500 people, that’s 500 People you didn’t have access to yesterday. So how can you provide value to them? To want them to then share you with those 500 people? Right? And then what what value do you have that that that you could then offer that other person to come on, if even if you don’t have an audience, you still have some sort of value. So forming partnerships like that Win Win partnerships, where you can get in front of other people’s audiences, it’s going to be the quickest and easiest way to grow your reach and your influence.

Chris Badgett: So device there, if we, if we have a course creator, aspiring course creator, or coach, or let’s say, a, a talented web person who’s trying to help, because they know this markets hot? You you kind of have these phases of the entrepreneur, the solopreneur, the entrepreneur, how do these blocks of time and the journey work?

Bri Seeley: Yeah, so the entrepreneur is really someone who either has an idea and hasn’t gotten started yet, or maybe has started as a side hustle, but still, like, doesn’t believe in their power to actually like, create it into a full time business. And so a lot of what I do with people in those areas, like yes, there are some nuts and bolts around, you know, filing your paperwork, getting a business bank account, you developing your website, right, like, there’s some nuts and bolts, but honestly, a lot of the work I do with those people is mindset work.

It’s really like we talked about strengthening that resolve that, like, can I even do this? Can I replace my salary with my business? Can I support myself, can I become the foundation for wealth in my life. So that’s, that’s a lot of that. And that can take anywhere from, you know, three months to three years, just depending on who the person is, and how they show up and what they’re willing to do. And all of those things. You know, I’ve had clients go through an entire six month program and not launch anything, and not make a dime.

I’ve had clients, I had a woman who runs a dog treat company, she launched her her stuff, I think within three months, and within six weeks of launch, she’d done 13 grand and profits. So like up dog treats, right? So like, there’s it’s definitely how much you’re willing to put into it, how much work you’re willing to do. The solopreneur is someone who has started, probably has left their job is working full time in their business, but just doesn’t have any help. Maybe they have a VA. But for the most part, if anything’s getting done in their business, it’s them.

And a lot of those people honestly, too, are trading time for money. Which means if they want to make more money in their business, they have to somehow find a way to create more time, which either means you’re sleeping less, you’re not taking care of yourself, you’re not showering, you’re not getting your daily step counts in, you’re not eating whatever that looks like. And so a lot of the solopreneurs their opportunity is to start looking at, okay, how can I start to leverage my service to be more of a one to many versus a one to one.

And then the entrepreneurs honestly are people who have grown their businesses, they have full teams, and they just might not know how to keep that going, or how to keep their team satisfied, or even how to grow to the next level. So I’ve had several people in that level go from like multiple, six to seven figures, which is completely different conversations, completely different structures, operations, systems, etc. So that’s kind of how those three that the progression of those three levels.

Chris Badgett: If we’re in the middle, like as a coach solopreneur, like we’ve got some clients, we have a niche, we help people, but we’re maxing out and we’ve we’ve heard the idea of like kind of productizing your service, maybe making an online course, how could further code for a coach specifically, what can they do to get more of that one to many besides like, group coaching and stuff like that? What else can they leverage?

Bri Seeley: Yeah, I mean, I will say I’m a huge fan of group coaching. It’s, it’s honestly what I built my business on. I do almost very little, almost no private coaching. Everything I do is group based. And it’s a few different things. One, I’m able to then, like my work entrepreneur course is all modules. And so that’s been built, so I could have 100 people enroll in that program tomorrow and only put in one extra hour of work each month.

One hour coaching, life coaching I do live group coaching still for people like so for me my three pillars of business or education, which is that module part coaching because no matter how much education you get, if you don’t know how to apply it in your business, like knowledge, no Let’s listen capital.

It’s just not. So you get the knowledge you get on a coaching call, we figure out how to apply it to your business. And then there’s a community element as well. So like I said, I’m big into group coaching. Some of the other things I’m looking at, honestly, I’m starting a women’s conference. Again, that one too many. And then also using some of the speakers to help come on as partners, to then bring in their audiences for the conference as well, which alludes back to one of my other answers, right?

I think if you’re going to be doing online courses. And things like that, looking into, is there a way that you could partner with some other online course creators. And create maybe a bundle and get all of the online course creators to then market it to their people. So that, again, you’re expanding the reach past just trying to build it on your own?

Right? So there’s, there are some really creative ways that you can begin to pull in some different things you could host. Just a single weekend mastermind retreat, get 20 people in the same spot you know, blow through all sorts of content, get them to a place where they’re ready to take that next step. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. What a tactical question for you, if we’ve got a course creator, who’s, you know, kind of done the course. And they’re realizing that you know, people are hard people are different. And they want to add that one hour you mentioned of group coaching to the offer, maybe raise the price, since they’re adding that and try to get their their customers better results. What’s that hour look like? If you were to advise a new expert who’s doing group coaching on top of their kind? Of course, office hours? Or how did that? How should they run it? What happens on the call?

Bri Seeley: Yep. So the way I do it is I let everyone know, upfront, like I am preparing nothing for that call. If I show up to that call, and no one has questions, we don’t have a call. So I put the onus on the attendees and say, My job on this call, sorry, we’re in a thunderstorm. I know. It’s okay. My job on this call is simply to serve you. So you need to come with questions. The way I do it, is I just do popcorn style and let everyone have, you know, a time with the mic. You could do it where I’ve seen it where people have to submit questions to you beforehand, and then you answer them in the order that they came in.

You could have people drop them in the chat box, when you first get in to the coaching call and then just you know, one after the other, you could hot seat people you could like there’s just a few different options. I am a little more casual. And so everyone just knows we all show up to the call. You know, I open it up and say all right, who wants to start? We just go around and everyone has an opportunity to ask a question or comment about a challenge they’re facing, talk through it with them. And then at the end of the call, this is really important.

And I this is like my favorite part of the call, I make everyone go back around and say what their biggest takeaway was from the call, and what their next action step is, as a result of that hour. Because and I say this on my podcast all the time, sitting around and listening to me talk for an hour isn’t going to do anything for your business, right? It’s all about what are you doing on the other side of that. So I always cap it with a takeaway, and an action step from everyone.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Any other advice around getting people not just learning the acting.

Bri Seeley: I also have an online community portal. So my entire all my clients, but I also have a free version, I got rid of my Facebook group A while back because I just like saw the writing on the wall for that one. But I so I keep everyone in a platform called circle. And it’s branded with my branding, my name, my business, my everything. And so then what I do is I go into each, it’s like a bunch of different groups, right?

So I have a group that’s free. I have a group that’s my entrepreneurs, I have a group that’s my solopreneurs. And I you know, I keep everything separate. So I can go in and say, All right, so we’re entrepreneurs, we had a call last week. Here were your takeaway action items. How are they coming? What do you need help with? So and So you said you were going to do the hypnosis, did you do it? What was your What was your outcome?

How can I help you? Right? And so there is a level of accountability still there. I say I work an hour a month and that I work more than an hour a month, I do an hour of coaching. There’s still like online support to because for me, it’s really important. A lot of the reasons that people don’t take action is because they don’t have that accountability. But when they have someone checking in on them and saying, Hey, we’re gonna do this big scary thing. Did you do it? And if not, how can I support you in taking that step?

Chris Badgett: I love that. For your segments the entrepreneur the soul Under the entrepreneur, you know this, some people say like you should pick one. I personally liked the way you’re doing it where you have like same person full journey. Right. But any advice that you have around like the segments, like you mentioned, for example, that they have separate groups. And I think you have separate separate offerings on your website based on that, like, how do you do this kind of segmentation? Well.

Bri Seeley: So I will say it’s been a learning process. I don’t have everything perfect from the get go, I try, I try really hard, but it doesn’t always happen. I am actually in the process right now. So I’ve had two different options. One has been for the entrepreneur, one has been for like the solopreneur. The entrepreneur, the first one’s about getting started. The second one’s about growing. I got on a call with one of my coaches the other day, and she was like, Absolutely not one opt in.

And I was like, oh, oh, ah, what am I going to do? So I had to really sit down and do the work, which is the exact same work I teach around, you know, honing in on, even though those people are at different stages in their journey, they all still have a common issue or a common problem. What is that common problem? Right? So it was honing in on that, identifying that now I’m creating an opt in one singular opt in that can be marketed to every stage. And then from there, takes them into an application.

And from the application, I ask a question. What level on your journey are you at, and then from there, we can tell, okay, this person needs to go in this program. This person needs to go in this program. And the cool part, I’ll announce this, we’re a few days early. But I’ll I’ll ask for or beg for forgiveness later. The cool part about all this too, is that I have some big things coming up in my business. I am giving a TED talk in November. And as it turns out, the main problem that my clients have, is what my TED talk is about, right.

So I’ve kind of distilled down all of the fluff around what people come to me for and honed in on okay. But this is the crux of like the problem that people are facing. Like the biggest problem that stops them from moving forward. And so now I’m gonna have an opt in about it. I’m gonna have a TED talk about it. I’m gonna have a conference about it, I’m going to have I’m pursuing a book deal about like, so all of these things are kind of distilling down. And then just depending on where people are on their path, or their journey, is then kind of where they’ll drop in.

Chris Badgett: When’s your TED talk coming out?

Bri Seeley: So it’s going to it’s happening on November 12? But I don’t know when they get real, I don’t know how soon after you give it? Do they go on YouTube?

Chris Badgett: I’m just curious. Because when, when this episode comes out, it’s gonna be a little bit so it might be getting close to that or whatever. So go check it out. Are you able to tease with us what the topic is? Are you keeping it under wraps for now on this what this primary problem is?

Bri Seeley: I’ll tell you a little bit. The biggest thing I see with entrepreneurs is that, and it’s similar. We talked, I touched on it a little bit in the beginning, is this idea that I need a paycheck in order to have stability in my life. So a lot of especially new entrepreneurs. But I’ll say even solopreneurs that I work with have this like. Well, how am I going to how am I going to pay my pay myself? Or how am I going to pay a team? Or how could I possibly bring in enough money in my business to create profits or you know, grow my business or whatever, whatever.

And so, really, and a lot, I will say a lot of the audience’s I talked to are women. And one of the biggest things is we look for security outside of us, we look for an employer to give us a paycheck, rather than becoming that security for ourselves and building ourselves as that foundation for well. So really, that’s the biggest thing is like how do you for me? It’s it’s a combination of mindset, habits, an actions, and how do you build yourself as that solid foundation so that you can create consistent income in your business?

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Well, everybody, go check out the TED Talk. And if it’s not up yet, go find it. We have a comment under the live stream. Somebody’s saying that they love how your site opens up with entrepreneurship isn’t supposed to be so damn difficult. How do you help with that? Or how do you like break that? That myth or that idea, which probably ties into what we were just discussing, but it’s hard out there, but how do you help remove some friction for these people?

Bri Seeley: Yeah, I think some of it is that we make it harder than it needs to be. And I’ll lot of it is, honestly, a lot of entrepreneurs focus on the wrong actions. I had a call with a woman who had had her business, I think for three years, and she had never made a single penny in her business. And I was like, that’s not how it’s supposed to work. I was like, So what are you doing every day, and she told me what her actions were. And I was like, well, obviously, you’re not making any money in your business, you’re focused on all of the wrong actions, not a single action you’re taking is a revenue generating action.

You want to make money in your business. One, you got to change yourself. Especially women, but I know men that do that tell the same story, I’m bad at sales, you keep telling that story, you’re gonna continue to be bad at sales, you’re not gonna make any money in your business, you’re gonna be real fed up after three years when you haven’t made a single penny. So mindset wise, you got to change your mindset. Habits wise, you need to put really good habits into your business, I have a whole system and structure that I use in my business, every Monday, every Friday, every end of the month.

Every beginning of the month, every end of the corner, every beginning of the quarter, every end of the year, ever beginning of the year, like I have habits built into my business that support me and showing up in a way that successful, and then also the actions that you take. Are you taking revenue generating actions in your business every day? Are you just posting on Instagram hoping that someone sees it and reaches out to you? Right? So So yeah, I that’s, that’s kind of my whole thing is like those, those three levels? What are some counterpart?

Chris Badgett: What are some examples of for like a course creator or coach of revenue generating actions?

Bri Seeley: So I’m harping on it again, the partnership thing, like you need to be five new partners a week? Um, who are you reaching out to to become affiliates for you to be promoting your stuff? Who How are you pitching yourself to be on podcasts or to share your knowledge and expertise outside of the audiences that you currently have?

Are you offering webinars? Are you making offers to your list to your people to I mean, there’s so many ways that you can get in front of people and say. Hey, listen, this is how you hire me. And if you’re not doing at least one of those a day. You have to change the entire foundation for what you’re doing in your business on a daily basis.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned, Instagram, or some social media content can sometimes be a distraction. I mean, it’s important to do social media marketing, but where else do people kind of focus too much sometimes, and not doing revenue generating activities.

Bri Seeley: I see a lot of people who get really stuck in like the building phases of things. And forget that like, yes, even though I’m developing a new opt in right now. And I’m taking you know, an hour a day or whatever to work with my copywriter on like getting this opt in, ready, and the sales pages ready, and the funnels ready and all these things, still taking revenue generating actions, I’m on the other side of that, right. So I always recommend to people you front load your day, your day doesn’t start with those maintenance actions.

It doesn’t start posting on Instagram, it doesn’t start with, you know, the back end stuff. It starts with a revenue generating, generating action, first thing every day. And you You know, I get mine for meditation. So I drop into meditation, and I expand, and I like, connect in like, kind of like your background with the universe with all that is with the quantum field, get myself into that state where I’m resonating with my bigger vision. This is how I manifested a TED talk for anyone that’s wondering, did this for two and a half years.

And then I started asking, Okay, knowing that this is my vision, what is one action I could take today to help me help me take another step towards that.

And so it’s just getting in the habit getting in the practice of prioritizing those revenue generating actions every day, and then you can do the passive maintenance actions, then you can post on Instagram, then you can get on Facebook. The hard thing about those platforms is, it’s like in the olden days, when you would hang a sign outside your store window, and just hope and pray that the right person walked by at the right time with the right amount of money in their pocket and felt compelled to walk through that front door. Right. It’s like I always say there is no hope in business strategy. There’s just not.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Any other tips? You’re talking about really getting strong and your your vision and and spending some time there not being busy, but like really crystallizing your vision and focusing on it. You mentioned meditation. Is there anything else you recommend to help entrepreneurs develop a strong vision and stay in alignment with it?

Bri Seeley: Yeah, I think so. The biggest thing for me with like meditating and visualization is that it’s not even see yet, but it’s feeling it. And so I take my meditations past my mind, and I drop them down into my body. And I let myself feel the way that, you know, a seven figure, book deal. TED Talk, did it at a successful female entrepreneur feels right. So I start my day with that stuff almost every day today was an anomaly. I’m having an off day, but whatever, it’s fine, I will get up tomorrow morning and do it all over again.

But the thing is, so you start your day, that way, you have to do something to maintain it throughout the day as well. So I do I mean, I even do silly little things I have, I actually had a candle line. This one says, I was effing born for this. And so this sits on my desk next to me, I have a little note here that says what is the best that could happen?

I actually have a bobblehead that I got from speaking at a conference and I want speaking to be more and more of my like business vision. So I have my bobbleheads sitting here to remind me that like, I am a highly sought after and paid public speaker, I surround myself with things that remind me of the vision I’m building, rather than the reality I’m living in.

And then I find ways throughout the day to like, even if it’s a five minute walk around the block, just to like, get myself back into that feeling state of feeling like I felt in that vision as well. Because you don’t want to like peak in the morning. And then just like feel like shit for the rest of the day. Right? You want to make sure that you’re getting yourself into that energetic vibration, and then finding ways even if you slip a little bit to pick yourself back up through the day over and over again.

So whether it’s setting an alarm, and giving yourself two minutes to simply breathe and feel into your vision, every hour, every two hours, whether it’s you know, scheduling in little breaks, or doing whatever you need to do to remind yourself and just tap back into that vision. And remember that it does it’s not overnight, I the TED Talk thing, I literally had the vision of giving a TED talk in January 2020. I found out in June of 2022, that I had been accepted to one. Like I said, I’ll give it in November of 2022. So almost three years from the vision coming to me and meditation did it materialize.

Chris Badgett: I love the feeling is it’s contagious to I mean, I can even feel it through the Zoom call, like your passion, your energy, like when you when you get in that energetic state. It’s other people feel it too, which is part of the entrepreneur momentum. Yeah. Another thing that a lot of experts want to do to help with their business is write a book you’ve done that permission to leap is the title. What’s it about? And how did you get the book done? That’s, that’s, that’s a thing a lot of people want to do. That’s on the dream bucket list, especially as an entrepreneur, but it’s one I see a lot of friction with. So tell us about that.

Bri Seeley : Yep. So this was another thing. January of 2017. I was in meditation, and I heard a very clear you’re writing a book this year, and I was like, really like, okay, and then it was like, and you’re you’re leaving la for three weeks to write it. Like, three weeks. It came with like very specific things. But also I was like, What am I writing about? Like, I don’t? Where am I going? I’m leaving. I was living in LA at the time. Where am I going? I’m living in LA, where am I going? So as the universe mysteriously works this way, I got a text from some friends saying, Hey, we’re going out of town.

Do you want to Cat sit for us in Seattle for three weeks in June? And I was like, Oh, do I? Why? Yes, I do. And so I went to Seattle for three weeks. And I will say, the reason the thing that got me through writing the book was that I never wanted to write the book. I knew from the get go, that I was writing the book. So there’s a difference between wanting to do something and doing something. So if you’re someone that’s wanted to write a book for a while, my invitation for you would be stop wanting. And start doing right like, schedule it into your calendar.

Start taking Friday mornings as a creative block. Set aside for hours, leave the house, go to a cafe, bring a notebook, start jotting down your ideas, make an outline from the outline, start writing chapters, don’t write them in order. Write them in order of excitement that day. If something’s really on your mind, write that chapter. Maybe it’s chapter 10. You write it first. But like go into it knowing that you are a published author. Not that you’re wanting to write a book because there’s a very big difference between those two things and then schedule it in make time for it. If you do not make time for it, you will not do it.

Chris Badgett: So did you write it in three weeks? This is a 308 page book Which is awesome. And it looks, I’m just I haven’t read it yet. But I’m scanning the outline. It’s this is like solid work here. This is awesome.

Bri Seeley : Yeah, I So to be fair, I had the outline done before I left, they kind of knew like the NIV, like some of the stories I was going to tell within it. And then I had that three weeks just blocked off. I had no other commitments I was in someone else’s home was taking care of their three cats. So I had to get up at certain time every single day, make my team do my thing. And then I just I had an empty house.

And I used to live in Seattle. So like I knew people, but I had very strict parameters around like, I’m not planning anything, or scheduling anything until after a certain hour each day. And this block of time, every day for three weeks is me writing my book. And then at the same time I was working with editors were then giving me feedback, and I would do rewrites and edits and then there was more editing and rewriting that like happened after the three weeks, but the three weeks was the bulk of like getting it out.

Chris Badgett: That’s amazing. When course creators do that I call it the course creator cave, sometimes you you have to kind of sign out from the world and do your thing. That’s That’s pretty amazing.

Bri Seeley : And if you sign out from the world, just setting aside chunks like blocks like undisturbed, you do not take any calls you do not set any meetings your phone goes on Do Not Disturb the door gets locked your significant other your kids, your cats or dogs don’t come in the room, or you leave it you leave the room, go get a co working pass for a day, every Friday, I don’t care but like you have to protect that time.

Otherwise, it’s amazing how many things like sneak in I looked at my calendar this week. I was like I was I have how many coffees this week what people have that happen, right? So just make sure that you’re protecting that time if you’re really truly serious about not wanting to do something and actually doing it.

Chris Badgett: Anyway, just quick tips tactically on the publishing, did you self publish? Or did you use some service or whatever it was.

Bri Seeley: That when I self published, I did hire these two guys to help me launch it. So they had a whole thing around, you know, having I had a launch team. So I had people that were pre reading it to give reviews prior to or like the day it launched. And then I think I did a 99 cent deal for like two days and then went up to full price. And so did kind of that whole launch plan. The one thing I will say is that my end goal in my mind was book launch day.

And by the time book launch day came, I was done. Like I basically speaking of holes, I basically went into a hole for at least six weeks after that, and like couldn’t function, I wish that I would have set my well either not set a marker or like set another marker further out or something. Because what happens is the launch of your book, unfortunately, might be the closing of the production. But it’s the opening of the kind of promotion going on. So yeah, I that is the one mistake I made with that was that I didn’t plan for the time after the launch.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s, that’s amazing. What tell us about I kind of have a two part question for you. It’s about like who the perfect client is for you. But also, you know, in this industry, you’re working with entrepreneurs, we see a lot of success, failure, middle of the road kind of stuff. What makes a perfect client for you that’s going to embody those traits, whether they’re at the entrepreneur stage, or they’re already established and trying to scale. What are the qualities of the ones that are, do really well with you and just in their own business?

Bri Seeley: Yeah, I the women, well, I do work with men as well. But the humans, I guess I work with, I’m so used to saying women, the humans that I work with, for the most part are really determined, and really tenacious, and really ambitious, like, they know that entrepreneurship is the thing. And they may not know how, but that’s okay. Because that’s what I’m here for. I love putting a good puzzle together. And so for me figuring out the how is like sitting down with a puzzle and a cup of tea, it’s my happy place. So they know what they want, or at least and have a general idea, right?

They may not know the exact vision. But they know that there’s something that they’re aiming towards that’s big and they’re open to finding out what it is. And they just need some help getting there. So they’re ambitious, they’re hungry, their vision, you know, they have some sort of vision or know that there’s a vision out there for them. And they’re willing to hire someone to help them bring that to life so that they can stop again wanting to or thinking about it and actually build it so that they can start living it every day.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. If somebody’s earlier on the journey at the entrepreneur stage, what what do you have to offer them?

Bri Seeley: Yeah, so my one printer course is whether you have an idea, or you just know you want to become an entrepreneur. That I have a six month program that takes them from that ideation all the way through revenue generation. So we go through your avatar, we go through, like literally every single building block you need in month for you launch your business.

And then in month five, and six, we help you with that kind of consistent habits and actions like I talked about earlier. So that you can keep going after that six months is over. That’s one way said that woman who own the dog tree company launched and did like 13 grand and profits in a few weeks. And so that one really takes you from that, that seed all the way through starting to make your money in your business.

Chris Badgett: And what do you have for the solopreneurs?

Bri Seeley: The solopreneurs is a 90 day experience, we start with that custom strategy. So like we’re gonna sit down, we’re gonna go through everything in your business, what’s working, what’s not working, and figure out what that next step is, so that you can double and triple your operations in your business. And then the 90 days is there you have me alternating weeks of coaching, and alternating weeks of action blocks.

So the idea is we figure out what that next step is for you. What’s that strategy that’s going to work for you. I don’t believe in templated, generic five step anything’s custom to you what’s gonna work for you. And then you get 90 days of building it with me on your side to help you every step of the way. So that you can get that horse that book, that podcast, that speaking career, that whatever that next step is for you out so that you can then grow that revenue.

Chris Badgett: And finally, for the entrepreneurs.

Bri Seeley: Entrepreneurs, the scale is all private. That’s that’s like the bigger. That’s the bigger commitment. And so that one for me, it just depends on what they’re aiming towards where they’re at. It could be anywhere from six months to 12 months, and it’s all completely custom. So it still includes the education. The coaching the community, it still includes the mindset. The habits, the actions, but it’s completely custom based on where they’re at and what they’re aiming towards.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s it Bri sealy.com. br i s e l ey.com. One funny question, or just a side question before we sign off here today. What is something that entrepreneurs could learn from a fashion designer? That is kind of counterintuitive? What’s that? What’s a neat thing you brought from your former life?

Bri Seeley: Oh, that is a good question. I think, you know, one of the things that I really learned was that as much as so when you’re making a garment. You have what’s called a pattern, I realized that not everyone speaks fashion. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna go to the basics, you have a pattern. And what the pattern is, is that every single if you look at what you’re wearing, right now, wherever the seam is, so wherever there’s a line of stitching, that means two different pieces of fabric were brought together and sewn together, right? So you have all these different pieces.

And so as a designer, what you do is you sit down. And you have to sketch out the finished product. But then you also have to sketch out, okay, what is each piece going to look like so that each of those pieces pieces fits together to then create that final final vision, right? So one of the things I learned well, that in and of itself is one thing I learned, right? Like what are all the ingredients that go together to create that final vision. And then no matter how much I tried to perfectly pattern the dress, from that first try, right.

You cut the fabric you sew it together, inevitably you put it on a model or a mannequin, and there are always tweaks that have to be made. You never get it perfect. The first time, or maybe the model’s measurements are a little different than you were expecting or her proportions are a little different than you were expecting.

And you just have to make tweaks and alterations. I feel like that’s so appropriate for entrepreneurship because we may think that we have the perfect pattern. And we try to execute that pattern. And then we get in and we’re like, oh, but like this thing didn’t work the way I wanted it to or like this needs to be changed a little bit here. Or I need to try this thing over there. And it’s not that you get it on the model and it’s like shit and you have to throw it away.

Right it’s that it just is going to take a few more tweaks and a little more adjustment to get it to work the way that you initially saw it in your head. So it is amazing. One of at some point someone was like. You need to go with the tagline, like, from fashion designer to business designer, and I’m like, it’s true. But also I was like, I don’t think people. I don’t think that’s the thing people are really gonna like resonate with or like, you know, the audience is just not really gonna.

But a lot of the things within fashion were very similar to, it’s the act of creation, right? Entrepreneurship, we started at the beginning we talking about you take nothing. And you turn it into something. I took nothing but an idea in my head, sketched it on a piece of paper, made the pattern, cut it into the fabric, constructed it and then put it on the body and had to make all of the tweaks and things I mean, that’s just in general, the act of creation, entrepreneurs go through the same process.

Chris Badgett: I love that. I love that. You mentioned the, you know, the visionary entrepreneur, who’s ambitious and tenacious. And that’s something I’ve noticed as well is that tweak that ability to tweak on the fly to like, fix the pattern on the vision as you go. Like, there’s a lot of tweaks that happen before the runway of for the fashion model or whatever. And sometimes all we see is the runway, but there’s all that work in the back right?

Bri Seeley: Well, and sometimes you don’t even know the model is pinned together on the runway. Because the zipper broke backstage. Like, it might look great on the runway. But you will know what’s holding it together on the back end, I had that happen. My mom used to help me out at some of my fashion shows.

And she’s zipped a girl into a into a skirt, and the zipper just went. So we just had to pin her in because that’s just what you do. And you got to try and hide the pins as much as you can so that people don’t see them. But, you know, you make it look good. And people see the finished product and it’s great. They love it. And they have no idea what’s going on behind the stage.

Chris Badgett: Fashion designer to business designer, it does happen where you know, the webinar system breaks or somebody doesn’t show up to the conference or organizing or whatever happens on your website. There’s a lot of pinning and tucking and just making it work.

Bri Seeley: I mean, it’s you have to be a problem solver as an entrepreneur because it’s never gonna go the way that you think it’s gonna go. So you have to be quick on your feet to say like, Okay, well, this didn’t work. Well, let’s try that. Or, you know, like, you just, you have to if you’re stuck in, like, if you get paralyzed by things not going right. It’s gonna be really hard. Because then you can’t move and you can’t make any you can’t find a better solution. You can’t make a change. You can’t tweak it like yeah, definitely. Being malleable is also a great trait.

Chris Badgett: We’ll tell the good people of the internet, how they can find you. We’ve got recently.com I know you’re big on Instagram. Where else can people find you and connect?

Bri Seeley: Yep, I’m on Instagram at Bri Seeley I just started the TIC tock trend a few months ago. All right, not really sold on it yet. But you can come hang out with me if that’s your place at Bri Sealy as well. I’m pretty much like on every platform LinkedIn Facebook at Bracy. Lee across the board.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, Bri, thank you for coming on the show sharing all your insights with us. It’s been amazing. We’ll have to catch up down the road sometime.

Bri Seeley: Yeah, thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifter lms.com For slash gift go to lifter lms.com forward slash gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post How to Coach Entrepreneurs with Bri Seeley appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

In this episode, Susan Wos shares how she helps people hire compatible employees for their businesses using enlightened hiring methods. By providing expert advice and guidance, she helps businesses maximize success by attracting the right fit for their company.

Susan Wos is the owner of a software called “Enlightened Hire” which helps licensed professionals and students take control of their job search. Her focus is on the spa niche, including salons, spas, barbershops, and other related industries. She has a YouTube channel.

Susan is a 28-year veteran hairstylist and former salon owner. She started offering personal advice and job listings for licensed professionals in the salon, spa and barbershop industry in 2018. The main issue surrounding high turnover in these industries is miscommunication and not being able to clarify what the job entails and what the employer offers.

Susan’s software aims to resolve this issue and help licensed professionals and employers find each other more easily.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest, her name is Susan Wos. She has a software called enlightened hire, that’s a light enlightened hire.com. Which helps licensed professionals and students take control of their job search. She’s big in the spa niche. Welcome to the show. Susan.

Susan Wos: I really am excited to be here today. Thank you.

Chris Badgett: You know, one of the biggest problems that entrepreneurs face and, you know, young people face or not necessarily young people making a career change is finding each other. And I know I struggle with this a lot. In terms of hiring, I’ve always been amazed at the challenge of, you know, companies wanting to hire, they can’t find good people and people wanting to get jobs and they can’t get the job. There’s like this friction there. And you’ve done some really cool unlocks in that area with your software. But before we get into that, take us back to your focus on the spot niche. How did that happen for you? What’s your spa backstory,

Susan Wos: So it’s salon, spas and barbershops. Those are the niche that I work with. And I am a 28 year veteran hairstylist, former salon owner, I became a salon owner when I was 25. So some time ago and in that process, you know, it was before, really all of our long online offerings were happening, however, not much has changed. And so I realized as a salon owner, that all of my resources were, you know, from product companies, and really, their main goal was just to get you to buy more. So their education and their website, I mean, everything, you know, sent you back to them.

And so you weren’t really communicating with anyone in the industry, except for your sales consultant and your employees. So it was quite lonely. And this is something that I’ve learned most salon owners here. And after salon ownership. I did that for five years and realized a lot of you know, getting that exposure for myself. And my opportunities as a very small business owner was difficult. You know, there’s salons are like churches, they’re all over the place. And you everybody’s very unique and different.

And so I kind of took those ideas, and in sort of a life change. I decided that, you know, maybe hair wasn’t something I wanted to do full time. I really wanted to help people. That’s my goal. And so I just started offering a personal service really advice for salon owners, hair stylists, estheticians, massage therapists, barbers nail techs. And so that’s really where I started and that was in 2018. So that’s an it became kind of problematic. So I needed to find some solutions to my own problems to my clients

Chris Badgett: So how are you helping them you are helping them find each other, like creating the like, kind of like the marketplace for job opportunities?

Susan Wos: Our industry largely goes on referrals, who you know, you know, location, that kind of thing, but we have such a high turnover that people are starting to realize that’s not really the way to go. You know, there’s job sites like indeed and zip recruiter. And people really just don’t use them in our in our industry for whatever reason. And so I just wanted to be able to kind of direct traffic. You know, if someone wanted advice owner was open to me sending people I go in, get to know them, and then the licensed professionals that will come talk to me. I would get to know them. And then I would just sort of give them a list.

Okay, here is salon A, B and C, this is who I think you should go talk to let me know what you think. So that’s really where it started. And then I had to get the website. And I had so much interest, including from corporations, but they didn’t necessarily want to have the personal advice. They just wanted to market with me. Because they saw that I was you know, tapping into who they wanted to talk to. And so that that’s where it grew was from personal advice and then job listings just like a standard type of job format, and that’s where it stayed for a while I had to kind of get away from the personalization while I worked on enlightened higher just because it was it was a lot to handle.

Chris Badgett: What’s the what’s the main issues surrounding the high to turnover weather I mean in May have you generalize it for any, any kind of niche? Like what? What causes that in some places?

Susan Wos: I feel as if it’s largely miscommunication. And that miscommunication is based on not being able to really clarify not only what you want. But what you offer. And so that ends up, you know, in hurt feelings, it ends up in disappointment, it ends up in all kinds of difficulties. It’s a lot of well, I didn’t know, well, had I known this, had I known that. And while you can’t resolve all of those issues, you definitely can resolve a lot of them and not even thinking about, you know, there’s people that don’t even think about what goes into what would make them happy.

And on both sides employment, and booth rental and independent contractors. So if you’re doing that manually or with software, how do you how do you surface that stuff, so that the connection is much better and a better fit? So those are my questions. That’s what I did for enlightened higher is I took everything I have encountered, and everything I felt was important.

And I broke them down into wants, needs and preferences. So the software asks users these questions, and then it computes how compatible they are based on individual answers. And so, you know, it really gets them thinking about, wow, yeah, I’ve had this reaction over and over one of the first people I had go through the software, the owner said, Man, some of this stuff I didn’t even think about, I’m like, great, that’s great, because it is important. These are things that the licensed professional wants to know, in order for long term happiness to be more probable.

Chris Badgett: What’s like an example that the, you know, question or answer that gives that kind of signal that the, they may not have even thought about?

Susan Wos: Marketing expectations, a big one. So, you know, it’s really all across the board. And so we definitely detail that out and lighten higher. And what that means is the salon owner, if they’re expecting someone who comes to work for them, or rent for them, to market themselves, that’s very problematic, sometimes, you know, there, that is a huge expectation that causes a lot of friction in our industry, you know, and so clarifying that, like, Hey, you’re coming to work for me, and I do expect you to post on Instagram, and I do expect you to go out and build your own clientele.

Or, hey, we’re gonna do it all for you, you don’t have to worry about that. Two very, very different things. And so that causes some issues, you know, I have many licensed professionals who don’t want to be bothered with that, you know, they want to come in, they want to work, they don’t want to have to do this social media grind. And so someone who doesn’t want to do that, who gets into a salon, where that’s not discussed, that’s a deal breaker,

Chris Badgett: Educate us about the niche of salons that when an owner may want the professional to do some of the marketing? Is it kind of like a business within a business? Or it’s more just like, it’s just an expectation?

Susan Wos: Well, it’s, again, it’s quite different across the board. And so it’s a matter of, yes, social media, or going out and building your clientele kind of like footwork, like going and creating relationships, you know, basically referrals, I mean, it can mean a lot of different things to different people.

Chris Badgett: How, um, how did you go about building software? This is your first time, I’m guessing your first time building software? That’s a it’s a challenge to do that. So how did you go from practitioner to software developer,

Susan Wos: So that all evolved because of Salon Spa connection, and the site that I had, you know, it’s it’s a good site, but it’s, it was never going to do what I wanted to do. And so I needed to evaluate, and I didn’t know that at the time. You know, now, I’m not a tech person. I’ve learned a lot, of course, since 2018 and so really, enlightened hire was the system that I always needed, but I never knew. And so just getting into, you know, asking questions, talking to developers and saying, you know, what’s it going to take to make this thing that I want?

And when it came down to oh, this is a custom software build? I’m like, Oh, well, what does that mean? So it’s, it’s really neat. It’s really exciting. It’s so very different than building a website, you know, you have to think about every little thing. Everything very detailed, very, lots of moving parts. And so it’s been exciting. I happen to meet someone a couple of years ago, actually on a dating website, which is funny. And he was a software developer. I talked to him about it. And I said, What do you think? So he said, he gave me a little detail and then kind of checked out and then he called, several months later, we were getting ready to make some decisions.

And he said, because I want to talk to you about that project again. And so that’s really who I chose because he went over all of the different things like I didn’t know and he was like, This is why you don’t want to do this. This is why, like, Okay, so that’s kind of where that happened. And he’s just taking the lead and direction and told me what’s possible, what I should do what I shouldn’t do. And so I kind of just hand it off, and then they run with it on my on my team.

Chris Badgett: Sounds great. Sounds great. What? How long did it take you? I know, some people are interested in building a software, like, what was the, you know, from idea or the successful relationship there to the product out in the wild? Connecting people?

Susan Wos: I’m sorry, how long would it take? Is that what you said?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, how long did it take you to kind of get this software developed for the initial launch?

Susan Wos: Um, I have been working on it for about two years. And so what that means is anywhere from business plan to design to implementation, we have recently launched and so I will see the actual coding and the design work as far as like, you know, here’s the processes. Here’s what we need to do that’s been going on for a full year.

Chris Badgett: That’s awsome.

Susan Wos: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And how do you connect the two sides? Like how it because you almost have to people you have to market to here? So how do you? How do you do that? That’s one of the hardest things in software to build a marketplace that connects to people.

Susan Wos: So that’s what I have learned with Salon Spa connection. You know, the licensed professional is hard to reach. And so really our owner, or our customer is the salon spa and barber shop owner who needs that pre qualification, and, you know, kind of filtration help, and some something to organize all of their applicants. Yes, definitely hair stylists, barbers, they’re our customers. Well, however, their needs are very fleeting. And so they go, you know, they’re looking for jobs, or they’re looking for opportunities, really not often, not often enough to really call them our customer, our customer is the salon owner.

Chris Badgett: And you have the schools and the students on there tell us more about how those players fit into this?

Susan Wos: Pool. This is huge, though, they have a lot of issues, just because it’s I mean, it’s difficult to run any school, let’s face it. And then you’ve got cosmetology, school and aesthetic school and barber school. So schools use it as kind of an administrative role. And so what they can do is they can invite students in, and they can help coach them on the answers that they’re providing, in order to get that right fit. Students can use it, as, you know, obviously, a job application, it is a digital job application. And they also use it as kind of benchmarking, you know, they’re kind of looking at how they’re responding to things. And as they grow, they can change those things as well.

They also have the ability to compare themselves to models, which is something we’re working on now. So students can go in and take their own profile, and kind of do a mass comparison to salon owners all over the United States. And so they see like, Okay, this might fit with this one, this one not so much. And this is why. So when they go out to search, they’re really clarifying what it is they want, and they’re able to get what they want, and what they need a lot faster. And so, you know, hope, hoping that’s going to lead to long term employment and happiness, and we can reduce, we can reduce turnover.

Chris Badgett: So students are on their way to being licensed professionals. Is that how that works? Very cool. Very cool. What plans do you have for the future? To like, grow this out? Or, or add more stuff? Like, what are you? Where are you going with it?

Susan Wos: Well, there’s a lot there. I mean, it’s, you know, this is what I’ve learned with software development. You get an MVP, and that’s what we have, which is a minimum viable product. And so it is, it does everything I want for my owners and my licensed professionals as far as the application process. So that we’re building the model feature. We’re also building a culture check feature for owners. Where they can go in and they can use it as a team comparison. So they can really kind of detail, you know, where their team is not really aligning and either work with them or implement some strategies, you know, to increase overall happiness. We’re working on a working style assessment. So owners can go in and that’s shitted additional evaluation that they can use.

For the people they’re considering hiring which coaches them how to work with this person like we’ve got. Okay, we’ve got the preferences, like alright, if we have issues this may be where we have some issues, and this is how you work with this person. We will have a digital job board at some point and so it’s, that’s kind of off in the future right now. We have to absorb salons spa connections technology.

And so when a user logs in, they’ll be able to see how they fit with everyone, rather than filtering through all these different jobs. So that is that and we’re also building our matchmaking program right now we have kind of basic offerings for back matchmaking. But these are people, you know, this is what I built my business on was people asking me for help. So these are licensed professionals who are like, I don’t really know where to go, I don’t know where to start.

And so we have actually matchmakers right now across the United States who are advising licensed pros, and basically connecting them with owners who are compatible. And so that’s just at the beginning. And that’s just going to grow and grow and grow. It is such a unique opportunity to help people in that way. And I think that maybe the thing I’m most excited about, I’m not sure. But I love that personalized service that we can provide yet being a software company. I love that I love how niche this is, it’s, it’s like, it’s kind of like a personality test. But it’s more like niche specific to the, what goes on in this industry.

What how much? How much does, do you think of the assessment as a personality thing versus a preference thing? Like what what kind of comprises all that it’s all of that, you know, I think with the insightful person, the insightful user. If they’re going to go in and, and use their answers, you know, in comparison to someone else, and see how those people are answering. They’re going to be able to make some predictions. You know, if a licensed professional is is responding, that they want to be independent, yet they’re applying for an employee base type of environment. You know, that’s, that’s definitely prediction that owners can make on like, okay, this person may not be long term, they really have a desire to be independent, they have the wherewithal to be independent, they, they can market themselves, they can build their own clientele.

And so I think that yeah, kind of a prediction on, you know, what this personality is, and supplying is, is a fair assessment, for sure. You have to really think about though, and so we’ll see how owners really, really dialed down on their own responses. Yeah, that’s, that’s really cool. How does it how do you think about expansion with? You know, there’s, like you said, like, churches, salon, barber shops are everywhere. What? How do you think about going to market with your software? So like, Man, I’m sure you did a lot locally in your area.

But I mean, there’s this these kinds of businesses are all over the world, it seems like a giant opportunity here. Agreed. And I’ve been asked about that many times. And it’s such a compliment, because I think people see the need, you know, for this niche in really many fields. So this is what I say is that if anyone has an innate understanding of their own industry and feels like this would benefit their industry, give me a call. I understand.

And the salon spawned barbershop industry, that’s what I understand. And so I don’t understand, you know, I’m friend that is a lifetime bartender and so he’s talked about. You know, his, his industry could really use something like that. So I think it takes a really, boots on the ground innate understanding of industry in order to implement something like this as an offering for other industries. But yes, I’d love it. That would be super neat. It is very different concept. And I know that is something that people are going to love. Because there’s nothing like it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s really cool. Yeah, I mean, the best products just come out of your own pain or just something you’re doing manually that you see this big scaling opportunity. And you have all these great people skills and emotional intelligence to recognize the friction. And then how do you slice and dice that and to? Assessments? It’s really fascinating.

Susan Wos: What do you do for marketing, like for? How do you think about getting more owners on board? I’m sure word of mouth works. And once you have an owner, and it works, they’re probably a fan for life. Right. So but how else do you grow? So once again, I’m implementing some of the strategy that I’ve used with Salon Spa connection as far as getting owners attention so that is social media. We actually have salespeople. We have eight salespeople that are now working across the United States and connecting states and so they have,

you know, they’ll be walking into salons, you know, bringing something tangible. They have social media outreach, they are emailing, they’re calling. And so that is really our marketing strategy right now. It’s just creating that awareness. We do offer a free trial and so there’s no reason for owners not to try it. It’s like hey, even screen one of your own People if you’re not, if you’re not hiring at the moment, and so, really, you know, our industry is really heavy on social media.

You know, if you look at salons, Instagrams and Facebook’s, it’s all about, you know, putting the hair pics up and oh, look at the, you know, beautiful eyebrow wax or the badass haircut, you know. And so social media really is our biggest concentration right now. And so we will see as it develops, you know, really what works and what doesn’t work. I’m just implementing the strategies of what I’ve already done here in Kansas City, just on a larger scale. Super smart. How do you think about the pricing with I think you said, or in your, in when you used to do it just kind of manually, you only got paid if the connection was made? Does the software work the same way? Or is it is it different, different, because what I realized with that business model is that it’s extraordinarily difficult to do.

And so what I did was I based pricing on how many applicants owners will screen and so they can buy, I mean, even a $10 a month subscription, if they’re only if they have really minimal hiring needs, if they’re not screening many applicants, if they’re not, you know, getting many applications. And so, you know, $10 month for two applicants is a hell of a deal too easily. And then, you know, if they don’t want the subscription model, that’s fine, too. We have what we call bundles. And so you can just kind of buy a set number of applicants, and then when you run out of that, you can buy more.

And so we I designed it because there’s owners have so many different needs, and I didn’t want to, you know, I wanted to provide something that everybody could use. And so no, they don’t start paying for it until they go past the free trial. So they get the free one, no matter what they don’t ever have to pay for it, they can see how it works. They don’t like it, they don’t have to use it. If they love it, they can just base you know how much they pay on how much they use it.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. A couple of customer success questions for you just with people onboarding into the software. If some of these salon owners perhaps are not super techy, maybe some are but how do you help people kind of get into the software and really learn it, make sure they set it up, right and all that.

Susan Wos: So you know, that will likely be an issue for people just because we don’t have a very tech savvy industry. However, the software does walk them through the entire process with no deviation. I learned that early on, you’ve got to have it go from A to Z with no breaks. You know, and so we’re doing videos right now, we’ll have first time user hints. And so when they come in, you know, once they’ve completed the signup process, and when they go to their dashboard, they’ll have all these different, you know, things that are gonna tell them, hey, you do this here, you do this here, it is pretty obvious, you know, when you get in there, you can see where all of your applicants are, or as a licensed professional, you can see where your owners are.

And so it is relatively self explanatory. However, you know, the more people that use it, the more feedback we get, the more we’re going to know, okay, we have to do this, this and this. And it didn’t take very long for us to resolve those issues. Because I’m quite sure that. You know, they’ll, they’ll there will be sound, but we’re very hands on, you know, we’re very responsive with customer service. And so when people have issues, all of our emails come right to us, you know, we from the email server, so it’s very easy to reach us contact page.

So if anyone has any trouble, it’s our utmost priority to make sure that it gets resolved. If somebody has a serving and kind of a Main Street business, what advice do you have for setting up sales folks to go out into the world and try to bring in leads like, what’s what works for you? It’s always I can tell you what doesn’t work. I mean, man, I get a lot of solicitation. And it’s kind of that pepper spray of, you know, stuff like just Oh, not like you’re spamming.

I just had one today spamming my LinkedIn, that doesn’t work, harassing people, and just kind of, you know, let’s, let’s just throw it see what happens if we just, you know, DM people into the app, you know, I would say that the personal touch, you know, you start there, you start with a really, really engaged, listening to people finding out what their pain points are. And then you design a program around that and

reach people, you know, salon owners, and spa owners are busy and they usually have a gatekeeper. And so you would have to get past the gatekeeper to get to that salon owner. And so it’s figuring out where your customers live and how to access them and building it around them. You know, marketing changes all the time. And believe it or not, even a postcard works very well because in the days of email, you know, people aren’t touching things as much. It’s like oh, hey, look at this. I got this cool post or what is this? I mean, it works with me actually. And so I think, you know, experimenting on a very, very

Small scale and finding out what works and then just kind of growing from there is the best piece of advice that I have. Because it’s easy to spend a bunch of money on ads and like I’ve done Google ads, I’ve done Facebook ads. And while that can be effective for my business, I haven’t found it to be overly effective.

Chris Badgett: Solid advice there. What are the main pain points for a salon owner? Like you mentioned, the high turnover? Like what, what else is there? Where’s the pain?

When somebody’s trying to recruit for their business? What else? What else? I’m just thinking with a marketing hat on like, there’s high turnover, but what else is going on that that makes the desire for your software? Interesting.

Susan Wos: I mean, there’s, there’s so many really. I mean, obviously, it’s the same for all people right now, all business owners. which is the amount of applicants, that’s the size. Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, I would say, just understanding who you’re interviewing, and knowing how to move through that process faster. As far as like, getting, like, okay, so if you don’t use the software, you’re onboarding from connection to hiring is, is very intense. And so to shrink that and make it better and more efficient and keep all your stuff in one place. I would say that’s going to be the most attractive thing, because it’s difficult. I mean, you’re talking most salon owners are most independent salon owners are doing all this themselves.

And the marketing and the business stuff, and hair or makeup or whatever, all the time. And so that sort of time spent on you know, moving through the Africa process, they get ghosted all the time, my software, you click a button, and it sends a message, no, ghosting, I think ghosting is the rudest thing. But so there’s, there’s just it’s multi layered, you know, quality of applicants to so that’s an issue, I can’t really help.

I’d like to I’d like to create some mentoring, you know, a good mentorship program. But the quality of applicants, right now, you know, I don’t know if it’s a generational thing or, or what it is, but, and understanding how to work with those people, the ones that don’t know how to talk on the phone, you know, or, or Yeah, or just totally checked out, I don’t know how to talk to people after COVID. And so I would say that’s also an issue. And I’d love to be able to help resolve that too. So I’m sure that will come to me, at some point, what advice you have for business owners, you have an opening, and they’re trying to get eyeballs and traffic to their application?

Chris Badgett: Oh, I think we’re back. What advice do you have for business owners who are trying to get traffic or eyeballs on their application?

Susan Wos: Well, I have a whole course on that actually. Because of that very issue. They, you know, there’s two kinds of owners, there’s the owner who just throw some stuff out there. And he’s like, where’s the applicants? You know, where are they? Where are they? And then there’s the owner who’s like, okay, there’s a way to get to them. And I need to find out how to do that. So I actually offer a course for those women for the ladder owners who want to be better self recruiters. Who want to learn, you know, how to get the attention to those applicants, you know, or to their social media or to their website. And it’s really, you know, it’s complicated to get it’s not like it’s a process, you know, you have to have, visuals are big.

If you don’t have a website, if you don’t have updated social media, those are, those are basic principles for most people. But not everyone. And you’d be really surprised it’s across the board. And so if they want more attention to their application. If they want more attention to their business, there are definite great processes and recruiting their ethical that I have a whole course on it’s called recruit like a pro.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah, this uh, this audience here in particular, is really into course creation and online learning and teaching and that kind of thing. What, what tell us about the idea to create that course, as opposed to a blog post or a video or whatever, like, how to where did the course come from

Susan Wos: Two places, the first of all my consulting with owners. That was the biggest thing is that they were asking over and over and over again. Of course, I’m doing everything I can with Salon Spa connection to get as many applicants for them as possible. However, my attitude is they are their own best advocate. Truly, I mean, they have more power as an individual than I do as someone who’s helping everyone as far as recruiting is concerned. And then I would say

Chris Badgett: Based on what I’ve learned with Salon Spa connection, what gets the licensed professionals attention? What is their language? What where’s it they’re going, What are they looking for? And so those two things, yeah, my consulting, and then my abilities because I started softball connection with nothing. I mean, I didn’t even have social media, I didn’t know how to work social media. And now we’re up to almost 5000 followers just in Kansas City. And so I’m really proud of that, because it’s, you know, we’ve got about 3 million people. So if you kind of segment that down to our industry. I’m really proud of that, you know, we’ve worked our butts off and learn where they are, how to reach them. You know, created those relationships that get results. And so I think owners need to know, based on what

I’ve done here in Kansas City, as far as getting licensed professionals to take action. That’s what they need to understand and implement into their own businesses. So that is why I created a course, because it would be m is long, it’s six weeks long. It is you know, several videos per week, you get a download, that you can take and have forever. It’s just kind of that evergreen opportunity for owners who are who are proactive. If you’re not proactive, you won’t like the course.

Chris Badgett: And so if you are proactive and you want to grow your business, and you don’t know how or where to start with getting recruiting going, this is the course for you. Wow, that’s awesome. That’s Susan Voss. She’s from enlightened higher.com Where else can the good people of the internet connect with you?

Susan Wos: Well, we try to be all over the place. Our social media bios, you know, on Facebook and Instagram, we have that multilink bio. And it’s got all kinds of options. We also have freebies and if owners are interested in trying our software, definitely just send us a message in DM you know, we have really proactive people who are helpful on social media and so it’s at enlightened, higher, or even on Facebook, enlightened, higher. And of course, you can send me a friend request or connect with me on LinkedIn. And my last name spelled W O S.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Susan, thank you for coming on the show. And thank you for sharing your wisdom with us. We really appreciate it.

Susan Wos: It was a pleasure talking to you. I really appreciate the opportunity and I hope to connect you again.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifter lms.com For slash gift go to lifter lms.com forward slash gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post How to Hire Compatible People into your Business with Enlightened Hire Entrepreneur Susan Wos appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

In this Episode, Melinda Kitto shares how she helps people communicate their offerings in a way that resonates with their audience. According to her, the fundamental block people have with messaging is that they are too focused on promoting what they have to offer and not thinking about what will make their audience care and want to act.

Melinda Kitto is a copywriting and messaging expert. She offers services such as writing, editing, and content creation through her website, melindakitto.com. Melinda also has a YouTube channel where she shares tips and insights on effective messaging and communication.

Her motivation is to help people overcome the challenge of messaging and crafting offers for their online training programs, courses or coaching programs. She wants to help people find their voice and effectively communicate the value of their offerings to their target audience.

She says that the mistake most people make is leading with the course, coaching or their methodology, instead of making the audience feel seen and showing them how the offering can help solve their specific problem.

Melinda encourages people to dig deeper into the emotions of their ideal clients and understand how those emotions show up for them. This helps people create messaging that makes their audience feel seen and heard and that their offering is relevant to them.

Episode TranscriptChris Badgett: That’s awesome. Do you have any like tips around kind of calling the avatar specifically, in in the sense that, you know, you mentioned like a sales professional and executive corporate sales professional or a first time mother with a newborn? Or how do we how do we know if we’re going to specific or not enough when we’re, when we kind of call the avatar in our messaging?

Melinda Kitto: It’s a really good question. I think, like, you can have multiple avatars, I think, I think the thing to remember is that the more specific that you get, not only will that speak to the exact person that you’re trying to reach. But it also captures people around that, like, if you think of a dartboard, if we have your ideal client right at the center of that dartboard. And every time you speak to them, if you’re trying to aim that dart right at that sent a person. First of all, you’re far more likely to hit the exact person you want to target.

But what can happen is sometimes your Dart will land just slightly to the left or to the right. And so you know, you asked me earlier whether I worked with women. Initially, I was really targeting women, I was really speaking to women. So my dark was aimed at women. But sometimes the dark lands outside exactly where you were aiming. So I would have men who would go, Well, I’m not a woman, but what you’ve said about messaging, what you’ve said about struggling with copywriting or whatever, that really resonated with me, like do you work with with guys as well. And so that’s what happens like we can have somebody in our mind that we’re trying to attract. But we’re far more likely to hit them if we’re specific.

But also if we land just outside that circle. The point is that your darts still lands, because when people are trying to be everything to everyone, and they’re trying to attract all different types of clients, what we’re doing instead is we’re picking up a handful of 100 darts, and we’re trying to throw them all at the dartboard at once. And of course, most of those darts are going to bounce right off. Whereas if you’re just picking up one at a time, and you’re really aiming for that specific person and being as specific as you can, your formula Then, but you’re also likely to hit people who are, you know, one or two degrees outside of that as well.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I joined a coaching program for software founders. And the guy that put that on his name is Dan Martell, I just watched myself fall into his content is marketing. I was in this high end coaching program in two weeks. And then I stayed in there for two years. But not only was the the marketing and the product was really for exactly my type of business, and even certain niches within software. That was, that was a bit on the receiving end of really good messaging and, and product and it works.

Melinda Kitto: The creepy spooky thing about this is, it often actually doesn’t matter what you’re selling, if you can reflect that person’s experience. If you can describe their situation better than they can, there’s just this automatic sense that like, well, you must have this solution like, how did you know? Are you looking through my window? Like, you know, we have this sense that if you know my problem that well, then surely you must know how to fix it.

So similar experience as a coach I’m following on Instagram at the moment, and every one of her posts, I’m like, That’s me. Holy shit like that. Exactly. And to the detail of like, what I’m doing in in this particular moment, what I’m thinking about, like, across all of her posts, she’s just reflecting me, so I automatically assume that whatever she’s selling must be for me. Right?

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s awesome. Well, well, if somebody is, let’s say, less crystallized, they’re an expert, or they’re thinking about getting into this kind of line of work. Where do they start? And maybe, maybe let’s pull it back even. Maybe they haven’t even decided what to where to focus on for their niche. Because they’re a little stuck there. You know, maybe they have like a professional background and an add some personal thing they’re super happy about like, it’s a little bit of a chicken and egg problem of like your niche and the messaging and what’s best for you as a person like helpless it that that very fragile early moment.

Melinda Kitto: Yeah. That can often be a problem when you do have this expertise, but it’s like, okay, who would I sell this to? Who’s going to want this? So a lot of this is about, okay, well, how do we position that thing as a purchasable profitable offer? So, if you’re thinking about how to whether it’s niche down or choose a target audience, the first thing I would say is, it’s a great place to start. If I tell a quick story about my own experience, like when I first dabbled into kind of this phase of my business, I guess I was broadly positioning myself as a business coach, I was wanting to help people with their marketing. But I was like, Hey, guys, I’m a business coach who wants a business coaching Haissam free strategy calls and I was very vague in my offer.

And I just figured, well, if I offered a few free strategy calls, and surely people would want to give me money. And so I was like, hey, whatever you’re struggling with, with the business, I can help. Which was probably not true. But that’s how my messaging was starting. And my coach at the time was like, Look, you got to niche down, you’ve got to pick an angle, you’ve got to pick like a specialty that you can really, like, hang that sign on the door and say. This is what I’m an expert in. And so I really thought about that for a while and the questions that were coming up for me was like, Okay, well, what am I naturally really good at? What are my natural skill set?

What’s the thing that comes easily to me that that doesn’t seem to come as easily to other people? What do I love to talk about? What do I see people really struggling with? And what would make a huge difference to those people if they could get it right? So it’s kind of those four key questions. What do I what am I really good at, what do I love to talk about? What do I see people struggling with? And what would make a really big difference? And I don’t know how this one came forward, but because at the time I was really struggling with my own messaging, but I realized that actually, this messaging thing was something that I am naturally good at.

I was always the person who like, back in my corporate days, people would say, I’ve got to send this email to Betty in accounts like I needed to pay the damn invoice like Mel, can you help me like right busy? Like Yeah, no worries. So I was always naturally good at using words to get results. And and I also notice that this was the thing that people seem to struggle with that. That they were so good at their passion. They were so good at what they what they do, but they just didn’t know how to talk about it in a An interesting way but be in a compelling way that would actually get people to do something. And what was so fascinating to me is that the minute literally the minute that I niched down and said, Okay.

I’m gonna hang my hat on being a messaging specialists, this is going to be the thing that I lead with as being my expertise. The minute I did that, I started having people say, Oh, my God, that is exactly what I need. So instead of me saying, Hey, I’m a business coach, when I said, I’m a messaging specialist. And if you are struggling with how to talk about your offer in a way that makes people want it, that, that little bit more specificity that little bit more of telling people exactly what I can help with in the realm of business, was the absolute turning point for my business where people suddenly got why I was relevant for them what exactly I could help them with.

And so we I took the guesswork out of them having to go okay, well, what problems am I struggling with in my business, I wonder if she could help. I was literally telling them, this is the thing I can I can help you with. And so if you have a course, it’s the same kind of thing, like we have to think about, you have this expertise. But how can I position that in a way that makes it appealing to somebody, right? Like, it’s where it’s not just transformation, it’s transformation for this type of person, or this specific type of transformation? That takes the guesswork out of your audience having to figure out whether you’re right for them. And that just being so obvious that of course, this course is right. For me.

Chris Badgett: That’s very well said, What’s the difference between copywriting and messaging?

Melinda Kitto: I get that question a lot, actually. So there’s a lot of crossover. But for me, messaging is all of the ingredients that you need to get clear on, like all of your talking points, all of the key ingredients that go into connecting with somebody, helping them realize you’re the right one for them. And breaking down any barriers to them feeling like your course or program is exactly right for them. So messaging is understanding all of those ingredients. copywriting is one way that you communicate those ingredients.

Right? So okay, well, how do I take those ingredients and turn it into a sales page or into an email sequence or anything like that? So, but messaging is how you’re communicating this in all forms, so on a podcast interview, how do I talk about my expertise, and a podcast interview that makes anyone who’s listening go, oh, maybe I should go and follow her on. It’s how you show up in a video. It’s how you communicate on a sales call, like, your messaging goes through all of those different channels. And so what I see people doing a lot is they’re like, Oh, I really suck at this, I’m gonna hire a copywriter. And they end up with this great looking sales page.

But I get them on the phone. I’m like, Okay, so tell me about your offer? And they say, um, well, it’s kind of hard to explain, but it’s sort of like, they can’t give me an answer, right. Now they go, Oh, here’s the sales page. Look at that, because that that will tell you, it said really nicely over here. Right. So if you want to sell really well, you need to be really clear on on what your messaging is. And I’m often talking to my clients. And it’s like, part of this is getting your potential clients to understand. But a huge part of this is getting you to understand like, You need to feel confident enough. It exactly what you do, why people should care, and how to communicate that effectively. Because if you don’t get it, How is anybody else going to eat that?

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Can you? Can you give us some more frameworks, I think people kind of start with an elevator pitch something like I help X target mark market achieve y result without Z objection or something like that. Yeah. But there’s so much more to messaging than kind of that elevator pitch statement. And I know like some, like in design work, we have something like a style guide, or we have like these resources to kind of capture all of the key ingredients for like a brand as an example. How do we do that with messaging and get it all together in one place? And what are all those pieces?

Melinda Kitto: Yeah, look at as a few pieces. I have a tool that I use for our coaching clients, we call it the messaging manifesto. And it’s really about collecting those different ingredients and thinking about messaging for me. It’s telling a story. It’s telling a narrative, it’s thinking about okay, so that first point of contact, how do I reach that person through the internet and get them to pay attention to me in the first place? But then how do I take them on a bit of a journey? where this story is unfolding as we go, and they are getting this bit of information, and then this realization, and then this perspective shifts. So we like to let that journey unfold.

And so there’s, there’s a number of ingredients along the way. So part of it is that hill and the heaven that I talked about. But if we go back to that cliff analogy, if they’re on this side of the cliff, and they want to get over to this side, your offer or your course has to be the bridge between the two. Right? Your offer has to be the thing that will take them from where they are, to where they want to be. But one of the key things that I like, like I said, there’s a number of ingredients, but one of the key ingredients that I see is missing for a lot of people is that there are a number of bridges that this person could potentially cross to get to the other side.

So if I use a really like, simple analogy of weight loss, right, if I’m currently overweight and struggling in my body, and I really want to be this fit, healthy, toned, amazing, strong person. If I’m standing on that cliff, how many different bridges are available to me? There’s diagonals and the shapes and the keto diet and the whatever else diet or their mindset work, right. And so let’s say you’re the mindset person, and you know, the only way for that person to lose weight is if they can get their mindset. Right. You are one of many bridges. And we need to think about, okay, well, what bridges, what pathways is that? What solutions? Are your people already looking at?

What what do they think they need to do to get from this side to that side? Right? So this person might be thinking, Oh, look, I just need to be in calorie deficit.

And you’re like, Yeah, great. But how long is that going to last? Right? We need to think about what is this person currently bought into? At least mentally? What do they believe, what do they think it takes? What do they think they need to do to accomplish that result? And if what they think they need is not what we know, they actually need. A big part of your messaging is shifting that perspective is shifting those beliefs. Because if that person currently believes that the only way to lose weight is this bridge, and you’re over here going, but if you don’t get your mindset, right, they are never going to buy your offer, they are never going to even look your way.

Chris Badgett: So how do you do that? Where you meet them where they are, but help through your messaging, a shift in, in worldview or Outlook happen? Yeah, look, it’s

Melinda Kitto: Just just pretty easy, right? You just say, Hey, I mean, so the first part is to meet them where they are in their current health. So we do need to speak to their current experience. But then we need to use your messaging and your content, too, to start to chip away at that. And I want to be clear that we need to think about where we’re having these conversations, right? Because we can’t communicate all of this in one Instagram post. So sometimes, we need to capture people’s attention and say, I’m going to teach you the secret to weight loss that actually lasts so you can get off the yo yo diet roller coaster.

So we need to pull people in with what they’re actually desiring. But maybe in a webinar, maybe in a workshop or something where you have a bit more time and space to explain. You can talk about these are the beliefs that you’re currently, like hooked into. And here’s why that thinking is getting you nowhere. Here’s why that thinking is keeping to get this is getting you these results consistently. But if we think about it this way, can you see how that makes sense? And what we’re trying to do there is really help them see oh, like no one that like that. That’s that makes so much sense. No wonder I haven’t been getting those results.

But what you’re talking about, of course, like that, that just that feels right, it makes sense, right? So I’ll give you a quick little example. I actually have a client who is in a really interesting niche. She works with early childhood educators. So in preschools and things like that, and she teaches them how to run really fun and engaging music lessons. And she has a program where people can can purchase that and this woman runs such amazing workshops, such amazing webinars where she’s super high vibe, she gives so much value so much content, and she really blows people away in those workshops, but they weren’t converting as well as she wanted them to.

They people weren’t moving on to the next step, but she was getting so much amazing feedback about the webinar, but people weren’t necessarily taking the next step. And so we talked about this idea of beliefs, like what are your audience currently believe? Giving what are the myths or the mistaken beliefs that they are caught up in, that is preventing them from moving forward.

And we thought about it for a while and she realized, like, one of the reasons why people don’t buy or worry about buying is because they think, Well, I’m not a very good singer. And to be able to run a really good music program, I need to be a good singer, so they’d be the kind of teacher that always pops off the music lesson to the to the one teacher in the room who can hold a tune. So if we think about that, that person, it wouldn’t matter how high vibe she was, as a presenter, how much value how many teaching points how blown away, she could make that student, they would never buy the next thing, because they believe I’m not a good singer, therefore, there’s no point me doing the next thing.

So part of her webinar needed to be talking about how your singing voice doesn’t actually matter. We’re dealing with three and four year olds here, they don’t care about perfect pitch, they care about whether they’re having a good time. So part of her webinar has been breaking down that belief that people had, and showing them that this is a different way of seeing things. And when you see it this way, can you see how actually, because you’re the happiest and brightest face in the room, you’re going to capture their attention no matter how good your singing voice is. Right. But if she doesn’t overcome that belief, if she doesn’t shift that perspective, that person who could be their biggest fan will still not buy.

Chris Badgett: And that’s what you’re saying is often missing in our messaging is we’re not meeting people where they are, or and we’re not acknowledging that there are other bridges around that. Yeah, yeah.

Melinda Kitto: Yeah. Or, or we’re just not taking the time. We’re just hoping that, but surely, they’ll see why mine is better. No, they won’t. Like you have to, you have to, they’ve got their attention fixed on this part of that is what they think is is the result. And it’s only when you say like, it’s partly disconnecting them from the beliefs that they already have. But it’s giving them that perspective shift of why these beliefs, or why this perspective just makes so much more sense.

Like if I give another quick example of, you know, part of my work is convincing people that forget your branding, forget your website, forget that fancy funnel like these are all these ways that my competitors will be selling you or or making you feel like for me to be selling my course on autopilot for me to be hitting those 10k 20k 50k months, whatever, I need to have all these things in place. I need to say, Actually, none of that matters. If you can’t answer the question, Why should I buy your course.

Chris Badgett: That’s what I was really excited to talk to you. Because I think the offer is so fundamental and so often overlooked. Which includes a lot of the core messaging and Avatar work. What do you what do you say to people that are crafting their messaging, and we’ve kind of touched on it, and there’s multiple bridges. But sometimes these experts are aspiring coaches feel like the market is too crowded, who am I to, you know, compete with this famous person or something like that? How do you help somebody find their messaging in a way that’s authentic to them. So that they can kind of shed that belief that it’s already all been done before, there’s just too many people in this niche already? How can you help those people?

Melinda Kitto: The only way for you to share that belief is for you to start talking. Right? Like your voice, right? Yeah. And you know what, it’s. It’s a bit of a challenge for me and my work, because when people come into my program. I am trying to give them formulas, I am trying to give them all these ingredients. But what can sometimes happen is people get so focused on following the formulas or doing it right or, or, like getting the perfect mix of all these ingredients. And what can sometimes happen is that process actually stifles their voice a little bit. Because they’re trying so hard to incorporate all of these things.

So what I like to kind of encourage people to do is like we think of one ingredient at a time. And I’m like, Okay, well how can we just start to sprinkle that into what you’re already doing? Like, if we come up with your elevator pitch or your your core message statement? It’s like, Okay, keep on sharing the content that you’re already sharing, but how can you just like slot that in? How can you just add this little bit of that? In every post like, that’s, it’s often just practicing like adding these little touches into what you’re already doing. But I think in terms of feeling like your niche is overcrowded, it sounds it sounds so cool. cliche.

But it’s really true that nobody’s ever said it exactly like you, nobody has your voice. Nobody has your unique way of saying this. But you actually have to let yourself use that voice, right? If you are in that niche, and you’re looking around at everybody else, and exactly how they’re doing it, and you’re going Well, how do I fit in here, then you’re ignoring the fundamental thing that will actually make you stand out. Which is your unique spin on this your unique view.

And the simplest way to even start doing that, is to just write like you talk. You know, like, we’re having this conversation, if you jumped on a coaching call with me, this is my exact voice. If you read an email of mine, you would read it in my voice, like my voice would come through your head. Because I, I write like I speak, I write in a conversational way. And I just remember that I’m talking to humans. I’m not talking to algorithms. I’m not talking to bots, I’m talking to Sarah on the other end of my Instagram post. Who I’m hoping will realize that this is the thing that she’s been missing.

Chris Badgett: Tell us more about the manifesto. The messaging manifesto, like the work with that, what is that like?

Melinda Kitto: So it kind of comes at the end of. So in my program, we do a lot of the foundational work of okay, well, who is your ideal client? What are they thinking? What are they feeling? What’s going on for them? What’s your offer? How are we positioning that. And the manifesto, kind of, if you think of it like a branding guide, right, where it pulls together all of those elements of your messaging. And so if you want to hand this off to a copywriter. They would have all the ingredients, they need to craft all of your emails. And all of those sorts of things. Much like a branding guide, you need that to be able to hand that off to a graphic designer for them to bring your vision to life so yeah, we we look at messaging from a few different perspectives.

So I call one the macro. So we look at the whole big picture of your business and who you are what you do, like what is your overall brand messaging. But then we also drill that down into offer by offer. So if you have your signature course, okay, well, what’s the messaging around this particular course? And it really goes down to the level as well, of what’s my messaging for this course? How do I make people want that? But then, what, what is the trail that I leave from first contact on social media? To them buying that signature course? What’s that little trail of breadcrumbs that we leave that makes them want the next piece and want the next space?

So we need to think about what’s our messaging around our content? What’s our messaging around that introductory offer, where they download my freebie or where they come along to my webinar? So each one of those little pieces, we need to think about your messaging as a whole at the macro level. But we also need to think about your messaging at the micro level. Okay, when I’m talking about this offer, how do I make that sound as juicy and compelling as possible? And how am I leaving that trail, and making each of those crumbs be as enticing as possible? Because we want to create the kind of experience with your sales funnel. Where people actually want the next piece, they want to see what’s next. Rather than feeling like they’re being dragged kicking and screaming through us through an automated, you know, while

Chris Badgett: You’ve, you’ve kind of touched on it a bunch, but I just want to ask the question. How do we know when our messaging is working? Like what are some some some obvious and also non obvious signals that like, Hey, I think I’m heading in the right direction.

Melinda Kitto: Here. The most obvious one, and this is actually where the name of my program was born from. My program was called Oh, my God, I need that. Okay, because I knew I hid my messaging. When I started getting that comment. People replied that, yeah, yeah. Literally, like so I mentioned before how as soon as I narrowed in on a on a specialty of messaging, I immediately got results. I literally jumped into like, I was begging Facebook groups. At that time, like I was connected. That was my way of growing my business. And I jumped into one particular Facebook group, and I just did a two minute livestream. I was running out the door to get my kids from school.

And I was like, Oh, I finally figured out like, I really feel like I’ve nailed it. Like, I’m going to specialize in helping people to get really clear about how they talk about what they do. I said, it’d be better than that. But I just said, I’m really excited. Like, this is what I’m going to specialize in. And I didn’t think about it was such an offhand thing. But later that night, I went back to the comments. And there’s all these people going, Oh my God, that’s exactly what I’ve struggled with. That’s what I need help with.

That’s exactly where I’m going wrong. And I was like, Huh, that’s interesting. And what really blew my mind is from that livestream. There was three people that went to my website, I didn’t give any call to action. I just said, this is what I’m going to do. Three people went to my website, my website didn’t even mention messaging. Because I’d literally just decided. But three of those people found a booking link somewhere. We had a conversation, and all three of them became my first ever premium level clients, from a two minute off the cuff live stream. Where I just said, this is what I’m going to help people with.

So how do you know if your messaging is working? People saying, Oh, my gosh, that’s exactly what I need. That’s exactly what I struggle with. Or then reflecting back to you. Wow, it’s like you’re in my head. This is so me, like guilty. Anybody who’s reflecting that your post has described me in my situation. Then I think you’re definitely on the right track. Because we all do it, right. Like we’ve read a post where we’re like, cool, like, Ouch, that hurt. Like I feel called out. If you’re getting any of those kinds of comments, I think you’re on the right track.

Chris Badgett: I have like a pro tip question for you. I’m just thinking about the process I went through when I fell into a coaching program that I actually loved and got a lot out of the messaging landed. And then I was in the sales process. And then there was the like the guarantee, or the risk reversal thing or whatever. In my mind, I’m thinking, and I think he called it the love it or leave it 60 day guarantee or something like that.

And unless like, there’s like, it just removed all the risk of my I know. This is really good messaging or whatever, as I’m in the sales process, and then the free content here. But I’m still like, you know, I want to make sure everything’s good to go on the other side of the paywall. Yeah, Is there any advice you have on how to communicate in ways that remove risk or particularly around guaranteeing your course or your coaching program?

Melinda Kitto: That’s a really interesting one. Because I think, I think that sometimes we feel like we have to give guarantees, or we have to offer this money back guarantee. And you’re right, like it does remove that final barrier. I personally am in a different camp that I don’t offer that kind of guarantee. Because I mean, that’s after a little bit of experience that some people will come in and not do anything with my program. And it doesn’t necessarily reflect the quality of the program or their ability to get those results. Sometimes people were like this is this is a bit hard. So I need to come at that from a different perspective. So you can obviously offer something like that. But you might not want to do that. And that’s perfectly fine as well.

But we do need to think about what are their objections going to be? And if I just go, Oh, well just just buy it. And if you don’t like it, sorry to to like then I’m, I’m, of course, I’m going to leave people with that fear, which is probably going to stop them from buying. So I need to think about what objections are they going to have? What concerns or fears are going to come up for them as they’re thinking about this? And how can I build in? That’s one of the messaging ingredients as well? How am I going to build in addressing those objections into my messaging into my communications, so that they can feel really good about making this decision? Whether or not there’s a guarantee? So we try to preempt people’s objections.

And there’s a few ways that you can approach that either you can think about, okay. Either way that I can do this objection around so that it’s actually seen as a positive like, again, this is another perspective shift. Is there something you might be worried about which I can actually show you? This could be a positive if you say it in a different way. A simple example was. I have a client who one of his objections was, people worry that I’m not the right coach for them if I don’t have their specific industry experience. And so that could be an objection, but a different way that you could see that as well.

I’m not tied into all the rules and restrictions or the limited thinking that you might have from that industry. I’m bringing experience from other industries. So maybe I can give you a whole new perspective you’ve never thought of before. So sometimes it might just be shifting their perspective. Or sometimes it might be using case studies or testimonials to help specifically address that objection of like, I’m not sure if, if I’ll get my money back. Well, he had a case study from somebody who had that exact concern. And these are the specific things that they did and this was the result they were able to get.

Chris Badgett: I love that. So like the the better the messaging, the less need there is for guarantees and whatnot because the trust is and the objections have already been handled, but it’s amazing.

Melinda Kitto: And this really comes down to the know, like and trust factor, right? Like, I actually say, on my sales page, I’ve got a lot of free content out there, I’ve got a YouTube channel, you can binge all of all of my videos on there. If you love that content, you’re gonna love this program, because it’s even better. And that’s like, maybe I would make more sales if I had a money back guarantee. But I kind of I like to stand behind the integrity and the content and the value that I provide before the paywall and trust that the right people like I’m so much a gut instinct type of person, I trust that the right people will see me and go, she’s the one I need to work with. And then that does a lot of the selling. For me.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Can you describe somebody who’s like kind of at a perfect fit to be ready to do this messaging work? What’s like, what are what’s their life, like at the moment, they become a perfect fit for what you offer?

Melinda Kitto: I mean, the perfect fit is somebody who is just starting, and they want to get everything right from the get go.

Chris Badgett: So they’re not trying to clean up anything that’s gone wrong. They’re like, well, I want to actually, yeah,

Melinda Kitto: That’s not the case at all right? Because, you know, in a perfect world, somebody right at the start of the journey would realize they need somebody like me, and they would speak to me before they could do anything else, right. But we don’t live in a perfect world. And a lot of courses and a lot of programs will go Yeah, messaging, I do client tick, tick, tick. And they, they flip through that, that stuff and go, let’s get on to the real work of making you money.

So often, my clients are the ones who need a bit of a cleanup. Who have been at this for a while, who have tried launching that course who have built out their course funnel. Who have been doing sales calls left, right and center. And look, they’re probably getting results. They’re probably doing okay, but they just No, either, I could be getting a hell of a lot better results from this funnel or from the sales calls like this. Something that’s just not working as well as it could. Or they just feel like they’re this robotic salesy version that they’re following all these formulas, and they just don’t feel like it’s them. They don’t feel like it’s their own voice coming through.

So often people are coming to me when they’ve been at this for a little while. They just know, they’re not hitting the mark, they just know that their messaging isn’t as powerful or effective as it could be. They’re like, I just had, how do I say this? And I guess my zone of genius is going well, what if you just said it like this? And like, don’t get that like, because it’s often quite simple. But we if we just like, shift the lens that little bit. That’s what makes your messaging finally land. And and it’s that simple tweak between? Oh, yeah, I guess that sounds cool, too. Oh, my gosh, that is exactly what I’ve been looking for.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome work. What is the besides like getting a more functioning business with like clients coming in, or leads or customers or sales? What are some of the other kind of ancillary benefits of having good messaging,

Melinda Kitto: Or you can just start having a lot more fun. Like, I can have so much more fun with my content. And I can add in my sarcastic humor and be be myself and I can do silly reels. And whatever else it is, because I know at the end of the day. I know what I need to communicate. I know when to slip in this little ingredient, oh, this liberal ingredient. So I think you can just relax because like, you don’t have to worry about every, like every element of your strategy being perfectly executed. You can just open your mouth and like people will go, oh, that’s what I need. So like we can simplify things. We don’t have to have like a 50 piece orchestra to sell your course.

We can just like start having conversations with people and they say what do you do? And you answer and they go, Well, that’s exactly what I need. Like, we just simplify all of it so that you can relax, just open your mouth. And let let the results come through. I’m oversimplifying it there because obviously there’s work and their strategy and execution and all that kind of thing. But like the real ancillary benefit of getting this right, is that you can trust that you know what you’re talking about, and that the right people will hear it and realize you’re exactly what they’ve been looking for.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s Melinda kitto. It’s Melinda kitto.com. The offer the messaging is fundamental to being successful as a course creator coach. Thanks for shining the light today on all this amazing foundational messaging stuff, which is so important. Where can the good people connect with you? What are the best ways for people looking to start With or clean up their messaging to engage with you.

Melinda Kitto: Yeah, absolutely. Well, you can head to my website, which is Melinda kitto.com k i t t o. You can also find me on YouTube. That’s a really great place to start. Because like I said, there’s a few bit videos on there that you can binge watch. So we talk more in detail about some of the foundations of your messaging and copywriting and There’s just plenty on there that you can have a look at. So they’re probably the best ways to follow and see more about what I do. But of course, if this kind of is resonating with you, then feel free to reach out on Instagram at Melinda kitto. And you can send me a DM and happy to have you to help you like craft that that foundation of your messaging so feel free to reach

Chris Badgett: Out. Thanks, Melinda. I really appreciate it.

Melinda Kitto: Thanks for having me so much. It’s been great.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifter lms.com For slash gift go to https://lifterlms.com/gift/ . keep learning keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post How to Craft Powerful Messaging as a Course Creator with Melinda Kitto appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

In this episode, Funk Roberts owner of Funk Roberts Fitness Inc and YouTube Channel helps people by providing them with fitness and business advice through his various fitness programs and businesses.

Funk Roberts is a 53-year-old fitness entrepreneur who has successfully run two 7-figure businesses. He is also a recent recipient of the 2-Comma Club Award, an award given to entrepreneurs who have achieved a minimum of one million dollars in a single funnel.

Funk offers a variety of workout programs, fitness tips and advice, and motivational content to help people improve their health and fitness. He runs a monthly membership website called Over 40 Alpha Membership for Men Over 40, with over 14,000 members, dedicated to helping men over 40 excel in health, fitness, weight loss, business, and life. He has over 20 years of experience and has helped over 1 million fitness enthusiasts, combat fighters, trainers, and coaches reach their fitness goals.

Funk’s mission is to help another one million men in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and beyond regain their manhood, boost testosterone, build their best body, and live a healthy, happy, and productive life. He is a certified master metabolic trainer, certified MMA conditioning coach, fitness nutrition coach, core conditioning specialist, kettlebell training specialist, pain-free performance specialist, and mindset coach. He has also released an online kettlebell workshop and course for beginners.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest, his name is funk Roberts, he’s over at www dot over 40 alpha.com funk is building an online fitness Empire for men over 40 looking to go through health transformations I recently came across you and our community of users and lifter LMS I found your story and everything super inspiring. Welcome to the show funk.

Funk Roberts: Thanks so much for having me, Chris. I appreciate it. Yeah, I’m excited to to share whatever knowledge or whatever I can with.

Chris Badgett: Awesome, man. Well, there’s a couple of things that really jumped out at me One is you’re prolific like you, you make tons of videos, you gotta you got to subscribe to funks YouTube channel, it’s funk Roberts fitness you have as of this recording over 710,000 subscribers. Some of your most popular workout videos, or videos are about like 10 minute workouts doing burpees specific like kinds of workout, but bring it bring us back to the origin story here. What happened for you to kind of become this guy that’s going to lead other men and his fitness transformation, which you’ve obviously come back up with your own results in your own health and stuff. How did this start?

Funk Roberts: Yeah, so I used to be a professional athlete growing up. So I played professional, indoor and beach volleyball, like, at the highest level. So if you see, you know, the beach volleyball and on, you know, the Olympics, or whatever I used to play that with, I don’t know if there’s any other players still there. But, you know, this was in the 80s and early 90s. And so I’m 53 Right now, I’m from Toronto. And so fitness has always been in health, and everything has always been in my life. My parents were amazing role models, because, you know, they worked every day, they, they, my dad or my mom, my dad had two jobs at work, they came home, they would go out practice their sports, and then every single week, it seemed like they would be coming home with trophies or medals.

And it’s just, they never really said anything. To me, I just saw the hard work because they’re still cooking and cleaning the house and fixing things and going out and practicing and then playing and coming back. It’s just, it was just a constant thing that I saw and wanted to emulate. So I was accelerated in all sports that I did, of course, professional beach volleyball and indoor volleyball came what I did. And so, you know, I was I was always enamored with bodybuilding and and you know, like, flex magazine and Muscle and Fitness as I was growing up.

So I knew that after I retired from volleyball, I would do something in the fitness industry, but obviously, you know, you retire from volleyball, you’ve got a family, you got, you know, got kids and, you know, I started the corporate life, right, you got your nine to five is sitting at a computer. And that’s basically what my 30s were, you know, just just that grind, right? I still did dabbled in some personal training here and there. But it wasn’t until later on in my 30s when YouTube started, I think my first YouTube video is like 20 Sep 2007 or something 2007. But I, you know, I, I saw an opportunity and a platform to be able to reach more than just, you know, one on one personal training, which I hated. And, you know, bootcamps.

Which were pretty good, because I’d have, you know, 100 200 or 100 to like, you know, 80 to 100 people at a boot camp, because I was one of the first people to do these boot camps here in Toronto.

But again, just having to lug all that all that equipment and then putting it back in the car and then have to go home and then sleep and get up at night. You know, seven to go to a nine to FiVER, I was too much. But then when when YouTube came up, I saw that opportunity. And I just started to post videos on YouTube. You know, I didn’t know what you know, no one really knew what they were doing. Just yeah, here’s a couple of shoulder exercises, you know, very basic. Literally, I had I had videos, some of my earliest videos, I’m in my basement.

Now a dark skinned man. So I’m in my basement, no lighting, barely see me. I’m doing this volatile, long workout. And you know, it’s it’s so funny when I look back. But that was my passion. You know, I found my passion which was, you know, health and fitness.

And so, you know, dating back probably, you know, in my late 30s I started to post but then also in my late 30s Things were starting to happen to my body that I wasn’t really, you know, used to like I was going to the gym six days a week I was working hard At the gym, but my body wasn’t changing. I was big and puffy. I was like, I’m right now about 187 pounds 511 Then I was 215 270 pounds, and I was very puffy. And so I started to you know, I had a really big belly. And I didn’t know what was going on, I started to, you know, my workout partner looked at me and he’s like, you know, doesn’t piss you off that you’re like, the hardest worker in this gym.

Like, you come here six days a week, you work hard, and you still look the same. And that really like, you know, I got pretty defensive. And I went home that night, and I took off my shirt because I really never looked in the mirror. Right? Like, I was always living in the past, like, oh, I used to be a professional volleyball player, you know, like that, that persona you hang on to, you know, and it’s like, it’s like, Al Bundy, when he used to always talk about being a quarterback and polkadot I mean, even though he’s sitting on the couch, it’s the same thing.

Got we do that we live, we, you know, we highlight things that we used to do and not really live in the in the now when, you know, it’s you know, taking off the shirt, seeing exactly what was going on big belly big and puffy, not liking what I saw. And so what do you do? You go to the gym harder? What do you do you go on low carb diets, you go on, on all kinds of different low carb, no fat, I was going to everything intermittent fasting, but it was crazy trying to figure out what, what what would work and still nothing would work.

And then I started to get get injuries. So at that point, you know, I’m just I’m just kind of going along. And then I think the you know, the last part of what set me down in a spiral was the girl that I was seeing at the time, she left me because I had no sex drive. She literally told me I’m leaving you because we’re not having sex. Because I didn’t have any I didn’t have a sex. I didn’t have sex drive and I didn’t have anything I just wasn’t, I was just there. I felt like I was just there. Even though I was posting on YouTube. Internally, I wasn’t who I want it to be. And as soon as she left that sent me down a spiral, I started going out the strip joints and, and partying and doing drugs.

It really sent me down into a very, very, very deep hole. And I was masking my manhood by going to strip joints by, you know, partying all night by trying to you know, oh, yeah, look at me, I’m here. Meanwhile, internally, I wasn’t, I was feeling horrible. I was depressed, I had no drive, I had nothing. I was just, I didn’t know what’s going on, then I started to get injured. So now I’m getting injured. Because I’m working out so much. And I’m partying so much. I’m sitting in my, you know, my, my basement and just hating myself.

And so when I went to the doctor, my doctor told me, you know, we took blood tests, and then I went back to get the results like, Hey, dude, your, your testosterone levels are like 190. And I’m like, why? First of all, I didn’t really, I thought because I was big. I must have tons of testosterone. Hey, man, I party with strippers, I must have testosterone. You know, I’m big on the loud guy in the bar I party with, you know, I must have been he’s like, No, your testosterone levels are the levels of an eight year old man. And then he explained to me what testosterone actually does for our bodies, and how it relates to everything.

My depression, my sex drive my mind not being able to lose weight, the belly fat, the no muscle not getting injured, your feeling of of being depressed, you know, and everything and not having the drive, the energy levels, all of that stuff was due to my testosterone levels being so low. And so of course, he wanted to put me on testosterone replacement therapy, but I was like, No, there’s no way I’m doing that. I’m going to look and find out how I can naturally increase testosterone.

But the cool thing about it was, I saw hope, because I’m like, Okay, there’s hope. There’s a reason why I feel like this. There’s a reason why all of this is happening. So I literally like, I just like hit the pavement, did a lot of research, talk to some hormone specialist. When I’m telling you this is when I was 40. This is when I was 40. So I’m 5313 years ago, and I literally in six months transformed. My body completely transformed my body 235 pounds ripped, because I changed the foods I ate, I changed my workouts like you know, I focus a little bit more in recovery. And I felt so good.

I felt so vibrant. But here’s the thing here now I feel like I’m 20 So now I’m I’m doing 20 year old things like I started to train Muay Thai and I fought professionally in Thailand, you know, and, and I got married in my 40s. And, you know, I started my business in my 40s I left my six figure job and said, You know what, I want to do fitness. And you know, my present like, literally my I walked in my president presidents, I remember this vividly, and I said, You know what, I’m gonna leave. You know, you guys have been great.

He’s like, Yeah, I was waiting for this this moment, because everyone in my place I was working was on my newsletter, my fitness newsletter, so they’re always asking me a funk. How do I do this? Or how do I build muscle? How do I lose weight so it wasn’t I wasn’t hot. writing that I was doing a lot of stuff on the back, like, you know, when I came home from work and I loved what I was doing as a passion to write blog posts and post videos, and I was what I loved.

But I knew that if I wanted to, if I needed to do that, and make money from it, I’d have to leave this and, and jump right in. And I didn’t even tell my wife at the time. Well, I didn’t tell my wife that I that I quit. So I literally went came home and said, I don’t I quit my job.

Chris Badgett: She’s like, What?

Funk Roberts: Do you better get your ass upstairs? Because you’re gonna start working? So

Chris Badgett: What year was this? Where’s

Funk Roberts: This? Yeah, this is 2015 Probably 2015, like seven years ago, seven years, seven or eight years, the timings kind of you know, it’s all it’s a little bit blurry, the longer I’ve done this alone, but yeah, I was about 2015 2014. And, yeah, and I just, I just really, really set set my, my sights on launching workout programs and that sort of thing. But then, about four years ago, I almost died because I had something called crypto organizing pneumonia, which is a very rare lung disorder. And it just, you know, just a long story short, the doctor literally said to me at one point, you better come back to the hospital, and stay here because we don’t know what you have. And if you’re gonna die, he might as well die here.

Because we you have people here. And you know, that was, that was a huge moment for me because I was in good shape up to up to the point where I started to develop this. Anyways, they found out what it was crypto organizing pneumonia, and part of the recovery was going on prednisone, which is a horrible, catabolic steroid that kills your testosterone kills your muscles, makes your head frickin 10 times the size that it’s supposed to be. It’s a very and messes up with your hormones. And so at that time, during this recovery, I said, Okay, I’m gonna go back and really, truly put this program that I developed before to the test to see if I can keep my T levels high to keep everything high.

If I do, and if this works, we’re going to we’re going to watch this. And it did like, six months later, I was off the prednisone three months from that I tripled my testosterone levels which had dropped. And from there, I started my over 40 Alpha brotherhood, because that’s because I know what these guys are going through. I went through it. Well, I went through exactly I looked at not only once, but then I did it again. And I knew that this this, this program that I developed will work. And lo and behold, that’s that’s where we’re at right now. 40,000 men in this program, they they’re changing their lives or changing their health. And that’s, that’s that’s the origin story.

Chris Badgett: That is so cool. That is such an awesome story. Let’s let’s talk about like the tribe, the avatar, the ideal customer profile, this this over 40 Man that’s in a similar spot that you were and you mentioned, like testosterone is kind of a mechanism of where a lot of the problem lies. What is what is the pain? Like where’s the pain coming from whether they’re working out and not getting results? Or they’re not working out and things are just downward spiral in terms of belly fat, fatty liver, whatever. How, like, what did you discover, to fix testosterone naturally? And I know you have a ton in the program, but what are some insights to get the men out there excited?

Funk Roberts: Yeah, you know, you’re you hit goosebumps every time when I when I hear this, because when I first launched this, I launched it as okay, we’re going to increase your testosterone naturally. And that was what I that was my hook. Right? And so my avatars men over 4040s 50s 60s 70s who struggle with belly fat loss who struggle with no energy who struggle with maybe not being able to, you know, the low sex drive, who struggle with not knowing what workouts to do and what to eat because they’re tried everything that they used to do. But I was leading with testosterone.

And and what I realize is the connection between testosterone and everything else I just told you, there is no connection there for most men, there still is because there’s no information out there about how testosterone affects men our age, right? Because it’s all about testosterone, testosterone, bodybuilders, testosterone, testosterone, testosterone replacement therapy. That’s what that’s what all you hear, you don’t hear, Oh, well, this testosterone helps with all of these things.

You’ll fight loss, strength, muscle, et cetera, et cetera, all the things I talked about. So it was a little bit difficult, because not everyone understood the testosterone thing. So I had to go back and do a survey and ask what is your number number one struggle and so we have this massive sheet. I had about 10,000 men respond. Lo and behold, belly fat, no energy, not knowing what workouts to do, what to eat, you know, kind of like the basic things. And so I’m like, okay, perfect, that’s what we’re going to lead with, we’re going to help you lose belly fat, we’re going to help you lose weight, we’re going to help you with your, your pre diabetes, those things that are prevalent that guys actually know that they have, the Sun enters the symptoms.

And so once we once what as soon as they come into program, they it’s all testosterone, like I tell them that this is, this is why you’re getting these symptoms, and here is the solution, we’re gonna work on a pillar, like a full holistic solution. That’s not difficult, because, you know, there’s a lot of information but there isn’t, it is very, just follow the program, I make it very simple because again, we’re older guys, we don’t have time a we don’t have the time, B, we don’t have the margin for error, we can’t just do eat whatever we want, and expect to recover. We can’t just work out five days a week and expect to recover because we’re not the same as we are.

And you know, the science and you know, as we get older, we not only suffer from low testosterone, because here’s the thing, testosterone levels naturally decreased one to 2%, every year after the age of 30. So no one knows that or not. Well, no one really know these guys, never none of these guys knew before they came into the program. Also, we suffer from sarcopenia, which is a natural loss of muscle due to aging. So I have, I have men who are skinny, but have a belly who are skinny, and try everything. And just you know, they just, they still have the you know, the they may have a little bit of manboobs, they may just have no energy, they can’t understand it.

So it’s not like I need to lose 200 pounds are 100 pounds, because I’m already skinny, but I can’t put on muscle, I still have this belly, I don’t have energy. It’s Yes, it’s your T levels are high, or are sorry, levels are low, your estrogen levels are high because belly fat and estrogen are co related, you know, and then and then it’s all about balancing hormones. So it’s not just a testosterone, it’s balancing hormones. So that’s basically it’s the symptoms that I learned that we have to lead with. And once we lead with those symptoms, once they come in, it’s the education.

That’s that’s the key because I’m very, very big on educating these guys. So they understand why am I waiting? Why am I not eating? Soy? Oh, that’s right, because it increases my cortisol or Arcos my estrogen, or why am I eating you know, sweet potato because sweet potato is great for my thyroid, which will kickstart my metabolism. It’s got boron, which is great for my testosterone. And it’s a healthy, complex car. They know this stuff, they learn it so that they have the power with food, they have the power with workouts, they have the power with the recovery, they have the power to make the decision, the right decision.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I could talk to you forever about fitness because I find your target market but yeah, I want to kind of talk about funk the entrepreneur. Yes. Tell us about YouTube. Like your YouTube success. You have a lot of videos I’m sure it drives leads into your your products and programs and stuff. What are some kind of counterintuitive or non obvious things that you’ve learned? Kind of developing YouTube as an entrepreneur?

Funk Roberts: Yeah, that’s great. Great. So yes, so for YouTube for me, YouTube. It just became something because I am comfortable in front of a camera. I learned to be comfortable in front of a camera I learned to be comfortable speaking. So and YouTube was the only thing at that point. There was no Facebook actually, I don’t think I’m pretty sure there was no Facebook. When I started YouTube, or it was very, it was in its infancy. It might have been just in the universities or something but it definitely wasn’t so it was more MySpace at that time. And so I just latched on to YouTube because I figured I can get a message home I can get workouts done because my goal at first because when I first came into this into my my business.

I was a I’m a strength conditioning coach for fighters because I used to fight so again I used to fight I thought so I and I used to develop strength and conditioning workouts for fighters because I realized that fighters were still doing the buys and tries the back and shoulders the old type of workout. So I decided, Okay, I’m gonna make this cycle funk MMA, and it’s going to be all videos and it’s just gonna be workouts so if you’re a martial artist, or you know jiu jitsu Muay Thai, MMA, whatever, you know that you could go to funk MMA, see a workout and you know that that workout is gonna help you with your conditioning. That was my goal. So I was just about content and YouTube was obviously the best way to do that.

But as we as things started to progress, YouTube’s algorithms change and so you’ve got to start changing with those algorithms and start changing, you know, as more people were on YouTube and searching, you got to make sure the thumbnails are right now you got to make sure your tags are right so that people can see your videos when I was posting at the very beginning. I mean, everyone is seeing the video. It’s not a lot of people at that time. But now there’s so much so I learned throughout that, okay, what is a? I just want to be me.

So I’m not I’m not going to I’m not going to try to be someone who I’m not because I started that way. I’m like, Okay, I’m funk Roberts, I have to be this, like, the superhero brand. Right? I have to be the suit. But then I realized none of that. And that’s too much work for me. I’m not, I’m not I just want to be me. And if you’d like me, like me, if you don’t, you don’t, but you’re just this is who I am. And you’re gonna see it through my videos and, and that sort of thing. So that was eat that made things very, very easy, because I don’t have to worry about stuff. But as as we kept going, I also wanted to, okay, so how can I?

How can I set myself apart from some of the other guys, you know, there’s, there’s ATHLEAN X and Jeff Cavalier. And the way he does his things are different, right? He these five exercises should do and he does that sort of thing. And then there’s other people out there. So I said, Okay, for me, again, it’s the workouts but now I have to evolve my workouts. It used to be just, I’m shooting a demo. And then that’s it. That used to be I’m shooting a demo, and I’m going to talk over it and then then once once COVID hit, it was I’m doing follow along workouts, and not only am I going to do follow along workouts, but I’m gonna coach through it. And I’m gonna go through the the entire workout with them.

So they can see me struggle, and they can see me and I that was a that was a that was a no one on no one on YouTube was doing that before COVID Nobody was so it was a very big thing because I’m like. Okay, well listen, I’m gonna be struggling and they’re gonna see me struggle, they’re gonna see me have to put the weight down. But that’s reality. And that’s how my my program is all of my workouts in the over 40 offer program are all follow along workouts. So I just thought, Okay, I’m just gonna do this. And again, people who want who like it, they like it. They don’t they don’t. Well, during COVID My YouTube channel blew up. Because I was putting follow along workouts all Bodyweight Workouts. So people who,

Chris Badgett: Obviously without a gym, yeah, without a gym, which was everybody in the

Funk Roberts: World. So and people loved it. People were just Oh, my God isn’t the first time first guy can see that. That is actually coaching because that’s a big thing for me coaching through the exercises, because that’s how I do them anyway. And then oh, and he’s also struggling. So it’s really real. And I just saw net. So then I thought, Okay, this is what I’m gonna do follow along workouts follow along workouts, but then I started to see more people doing follow along workouts.

So they started so they started doing the follow up, but they don’t coach because it is very difficult to do a full 20 3040 minute workout coach and do the workout. It’s difficult. Some people started and tried and they realized very quickly, it’s like, okay, you know, we’re gonna do we’re just gonna put the music in the back, and we’re just going to work out which is what you see more now.

Like the big the big ones out there. That’s what they do. They just put the music behind and they and they and they do which is great. I mean, that’s, that’s a niche that people like, and then there’s others who are starting to come out and just okay, I’m just gonna do the workout with you. And I think people love that more because you get to, you get to experience who I am. And you know, there’s a connection that was that’s a big thing for me is connection. I want to connect with my audience.

I can’t connect with an audience if I’m just putting music and I’m just doing an exercise. There’s no connection. Here. There is a hear me farting. They hear me burping they hear they hear everything because it’s real. We all do it in the gym. So why would I’m not gonna I’m not gonna do anything else.

But then we have to then we have to go Okay, listen, we’re doing these workouts but now we got to take it up a notch guys. Like, we got to we got to keep evolving. We can’t just do the same thing. Like you know, we changed cameras. We had two cameras now we now what I wanted you to keep engagement because you also have to think about what YouTube likes will thumbnails they want watch time. So short video isn’t going to work. They want watch time they want. They want to sell ads. So 20 minutes plus, that’s your that’s your video. So think about that. Think about your thumbnails, think about the tags and think about one single message. Because my my single message is metabolic workouts.

If you do metabolic workouts, you’re gonna burn fat build muscle, I do mean metabolic workout. Sure. So metabolic workouts are like what most people think of hit. So you do one exercise for 30 seconds, you rest for 30 seconds, move on to the next exercise for 30 and rest for 30. And what metabolic workouts do is not only are you there short, but the because of the intensity is so high, you’re going to burn calories during but then you’re going to continue to burn calories up to 24 hours after because your body’s still trying to get back to homeostasis, which is where you started. When you’re doing like long 45 minute cardio session.

As your you’re going at a medium pace for 45 minutes, and then 30 minutes, or an hour later, your body gets back to homeostasis because you did not increase the intensity plus anything higher, any workouts that are higher, were more than about 30 minutes, you start to increase cortisol. Cortisol is a stress hormone, which we do need specifically during our workouts. But too much cortisol is exactly what kills your muscle growth. It kills your testosterone, your hormones, and it also causes belly fat. So that’s why you see a lot of people at the gym who do the elliptical, and you have to lose weight for the first month. But then six months later, they still have the belly, they still have because and they don’t have a lot of muscle because it’s not that long cardio session, that’s not maximizing their calorie burn.

And so when you do, again, the shorter workouts, you’re you’re releasing testosterone and you’re releasing growth hormones, you’re not hitting that cortisol. And because workouts are so intense, depending on what level you’re at, you’re going to continue to burn. So a lot of times guys, will will, they’ll come in and go man, why funk? Why two hours later, do I still sweat? Like, I think I have a sweating problem. I’m like none, and it’s because your body’s still still still burning, like your metabolism is still going, it’s trying to get back, it’s a good thing actually, that you’re doing that because you’re still burning.

So that’s metabolic training. In a nutshell. So I say I say the same thing, whether it’s a four six year old person, obviously, it’s going to be the exercise gonna be a little bit more joint friendly, or whether it’s a fighter. But more more importantly, now it’s more for men over 40. So now we add that we add pop ups during the exercises now because again, I want to keep that engagement most of the pop ups do so they’re just like if I’m doing if I’m doing a lunch and I say okay, guys, keep that knee pointed out.

knee pointed out once to the knee. Why as I’m doing it, right, because I want to keep people engaged. I want to keep people watching and most people who watch my follow alongs they just watch it first before they do it. Like no one really just clicks on again, I’m gonna do this workout. Some do a very few, but most people want to see it first to see, okay, let me see this workout are cool, but I want to keep them engaged. I want to educate them, I want to give them as much as I can in regards to the right technique, because I’m not there to, you know, to Okay, pull your knees out or, you know, keep your shoulders back, you know, shoulders back.

And then my my editor’s will point shoulders back like, so it’s really it’s another lab trying to keep leveling up so that I can keep the engagement because that’s what YouTube likes. But also I can use it to educate as well and keep people entertained, it’s edutainment, right, just shikshan entertainment, and results driven, they can actually do it and get something done. One last tip, just one last tip about YouTube’s if anyone is going to start using YouTube. So the other thing is I only I focus on YouTube.

I don’t focus on YouTube and Instagram and like I only have 40,000 followers on Instagram, I barely post on Instagram, because he can’t do it all. You have to be one person. Yes, there’s a couple of people who got billions on each one. But that’s because they got millions of people on both platforms. I only have only focus on YouTube. And yes, I will post on on Instagram and maybe some on Facebook, but it’s not my number one I focus on YouTube. That’s where I can connect with people. And that’s where my my voice is.

So if you’re doing YouTube, just focus on YouTube, focus on your messaging, and focus on longer videos to keep people engaged don’t have to be Showtime videos, man. Like I said, some of my great greatest videos that my burpee video is done outside in a park. My wife, you know, we still can’t believe that video. But then when we watched it, we watch the other day like, Hey, man, that’s a good video. Like, that was really good. Like, okay, I don’t even have to reshoot that I know it’s in the park and grasses up to my up to my you know, my waist, but it’s a good video.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I was listening to your podcast this morning, the over over 40 Alpha podcast and I heard you were promoting or somebody was becoming a captain. And, and it basically a part of what you do is what I call it education entrepreneur. One of the skill sets is building community. And I was wondering if you could kind of touch on that community piece, particularly if you’re serving a market, maybe people will have challenges and they don’t necessarily want to go go talk about their belly fat or their low sex drive or whatever it is. So it’s like a challenging community but somehow you’re able to also build community how do you how do you connect these people to each other to help motivate and you know, drive your business forward?

Funk Roberts: Yeah, this is the number one thing that keeps my guidance my business this is the number one thing is the bar tribe, we call it a tribe element we teach this when you create a community, a tribe, a positive cult, okay, not like CrossFit is, is a positive cult, they have their own words and wants, and they have their own lingo. And you know, like, they know. And that’s a massive close community and they’ve created a tribe. So when we created over 40, alpha, that was the number one thing was Guy gotta cry, I want to create a tribe, I want to create, first of all, a community of men who can, who can be vulnerable with each other massive, massive test, men aren’t vulnerable.

Men don’t talk about things at all, except just shop talk with their buddies. So having men a from all over the world, all different colors, all different religions, all different languages, calling each other brother telling each other, they love each other. You know, that’s what happens. We’re inside our brotherhood.

So but there has to be like, there’s a formula. So first and foremost, you know, when I, when we created it, it was an identity, what’s the identity over 40? Alpha, that’s our identity. So everyone’s an over 40 Alpha, you know, when you come in? And how do you really become the over 40 alpha, where there’s a journey. So when I set up my membership site, most membership sites, no matter if they’re fitness or anything else, usually, you join, and then there’s a whole bunch of things that you can access, like resources, right? That’s kind of like the Netflix. But for someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing, and they’re coming to you for information, and then you just put them in this this place library, they still don’t know what to do that.

Okay, where do I go? What do I do? I still don’t know, I need hand holding. And I understand that with men, or with anybody, you know, the good thing about men is when you give them something, they’ll do it. Like, I’ve tried women on the women’s side, and it’s a whole different ballgame. No disrespect to women love you guys. But it’s just a different way of dealing with women. Men are just do this. This is why it’ll work. Okay? Like, it’s insane. It’s amazing. Amazing. You get a bit of pushback at the beginning, like Believe me, it works, just keep doing it. So we had to have this journey. So you start everyone starts in the same place. That’s the other thing.

Everybody starts in phase one. And so because they start in phase one, they go to phase two phase three phases are 28 day programs, they’re just 28 days, right? So everyone starts and then there’s the first year is called one year to alpha. So you go through 12 phases 12 likes, every every phase is different workouts are different. And they become an OG at the end. So they get this OG status. Now I know GE, right. So during that journey, though, how do you keep them interested? How do you keep them, you know, really focused on this journey? Well, we have milestones every three months, you hit a milestone and that gets you a t shirt. Right? So now what are we doing? We are creating uniformity.

Right? What what is what are communities have the same uniform, they look the same, they dress the same? Right? So that’s the uniformity because when you go through the mound, the milestones, a, you’re gonna get a t shirt that says something that that relates to exactly what you just did, you know, I got it done, you know, phase phase after phase six, it’s, it’s, I cannot stop, I will not be stopped because you’ve gone six months, there’s no turning back, you know, phase nine is stronger today better, like better tomorrow or something like that. And then at the end, it’s kind of like all of our pillars, and then they get their name on the back. So now they’re an OG efficient. Now, they’re also become moderators, because they lived. Not many people can do a program for 12 months.

Chris Badgett: Right? Serious business. That’s a commitment.

Funk Roberts: Yeah, it’s it’s a commitment. And so at the end, they become moderators because they can teach a lot of the new people coming in there. You see that moderator badge, okay, that person has been here, they’ve done this. And because everyone’s done phase one, most of the times people will come in and they’ll start an odd man phase one workout was so hard and everybody will say I know what you go into. I remember that workout instead of going suck it up, you know, like, get it done. It’s like Oh, dude, yeah, we remember that workout that was tough, don’t worry, it gets easier, it gets easier.

So now they’re just kind of like uplifting the guys who are coming in and then and so then we have another 12 phases, which is another 12 phases of workouts and then we have another 12 So there’s three years of programming in this program in this in my in my brotherhood and again every month going through so now we’ve got a uniformity we’ve got the the levels and now we have our our sign so this this is the brother like everyone if you look at the pictures, everyone posts, the post their picture and they have this sign right here and inside the Brotherhood, they all have this. So that’s part of our, you know, if I’m walking down the street, and I see someone Hey, that looks like somebody and I do this to them. Maybe Because back, you know, they’re part of the Brotherhood.

That’s what we want. That’s literally what we want. So the other so that’s, that’s it and then now we’re doing this because the end of my workouts, I always ask for you to hook me up with a bump at the end of the workouts dying. So now I’m seeing people do that all the time. Next up, so now we’ve got our signs, right, we have rituals, you have to have rituals, something that everyone does. So Sunday is our accountability ritual, people will write in their accountability, we have rituals, like posting your meal, so they’ll post their meals guys will come in, or I will all come in and say, oh, yeah, that’s good. Or you need a little bit more carbs or this and that because our nutrition is very simple.

They’re just, they put it’s just, uh, you know, balanced plate, carbs, fats, proteins, vegetables, fruits, fruits, etc. And they and they posted and people can can help them. They’re sweaty selfies, right? That’s, that’s a ritual of posting a sweaty selfie. Every Sunday 10am doesn’t fail. I have a coaching call a live coaching call, which is what you probably listen to one of the one of the live coaching calls. Because I want to coach these guys. It’s not just about because my goal is actually not the fitness part of it. It’s creating, recreating our men, because we’re losing our men. We’re losing our manhood.

They’re suppressing our manhood. So I need to develop alphas men who can lead their procreate provide protect their families, the people around them, but not do, she’s got not do specs, Alpha men, guys who let maybe left their kids when they were younger, where you know, like went off, you know, go ahead and pay child support, go back and get that stuff done, you know, and then teach your kids, your daughters, your, your sons, your grandchildren, you know, how to how to live, how to live that life and regain it. You know, testosterone is a good thing, and we need it to survive.

So I teach a lot of that sort of thing, mindset stuff. And that’s that stuff. And then we have Captain, because, again, there’s lots of people in the Brotherhood, and there’s guys who shine guys who are always posting some guys who are always doing their motivational stuff. Some people who are just just, they just that, you know, people can see. So Bruce Taylor from Australia was our first captain. And I didn’t, we didn’t even they just started calling him captain. So we said, You’re a captain. And so now Bruce is one of our captains. He’s one of our leaders. And then we Andrew. You know, he was always posting motivational stuff. So he’s another captain, and then Rob is another captain. And here’s the here’s a huge thing. Rob just created this internal challenge called the torture chamber.

He just said, Hey, fuck, I’m just gonna create this challenge. Is that okay? I’m like, Absolutely. Inside of our Facebook group. And now everyone’s loving it. It’s like, Oh, my God, I just did Ross torture chamber. So now everyone is jumping on that, because of that community. The other thing is the vulnerability. And that’s something I stress a lot. I always tell these guys listen. iron sharpens iron. We’re all here for the same thing. But what they realize is, as soon as they start to transform their body, they realize it’s it’s not about them now. It’s, it’s something bigger than them.

Right? It’s something bigger, it’s like, oh, man, no, I need to, we need to help men. Like, you know, there’s so many guys out there, they see it in their families, their friends who are struggling, they start to see you around them. Because they’re now changed their lifestyle. They’re no longer on prescription pills. They, you know, they’re they’re, they’re no longer pre diabetic, they’re there. Their relationship with their, with their wives, their kids are running around, some guys are having kids guys are going back to school guys are getting their masters guys are are swimming the Alcatraz frickin swim.

Like it’s insane. Like what these guys do. It’s unbelievable. And so they realize, oh, this is bigger than me, man. Like, this is like, there’s a big movement happening here. And so we don’t talk politics, we don’t talk religion, we don’t post pop culture. And when guys have problems they posted in there guys will help them and guys will guide them and it’s a place to be vulnerable. They post their pictures that you know, like the first first day guy posted pictures. 250 pounds. He’s He’s overweight, but he knows that he’s not he’s gonna get support.

Right? Not, you know, oh, come on, lose weight. No, it’s like, okay, great. We got you, man, we got you. You’re not going to be the same guy that you were there that you came in, you’re not gonna be that same person three months down the road. For a month down the road. You’re not gonna be the same persons. And that’s really what it’s all about. But when you create that, that environment, now I have to be in there like, oh, sorry, I’m on Fridays at 9am. We have our Hangouts where I just go on and for an hour we hang out. I talk whatever man last week we talked about the best, the best.

The best. Super nuts to me are the best adventure actor like, you know, like Tom Cruise or, you know, Ryan Gosling, because we’re so Ryan Gosling’s new movies. I gotta go He’s he I buy what he’s selling. And so now we go back and forth. So it’s, again, a way for us to kind of connect with each other. And remember, we have Muslims, we have Christians, we have atheists, we have everybody and everyone loves each other. First, I gotta tell him, I love you, man. I love you, man. And they meet up with each other.

When I’m meeting Philip Schmidt today from France. He’s coming in. He’s coming in at 8pm. We’re all going to meet him at his hotel. Last Last time we met venger bay from Ottawa with his family. Next week, we’re meeting Josie back coming to Toronto. It’s amazing. And then they meet each other. They have with each other. It’s incredible. I get goosebumps because I didn’t expect it to be this powerful, but it’s super powerful community. But it starts with that tribe. You gotta have that tribe element.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And that’s like a textbook masterclass. I love it. I love it. Let’s let’s talk about tech for a little bit. Tell us about your WordPress story. And what brought you to lifter? LMS.

Funk Roberts: Yeah, so so we use wishlist as a membership, just because I just started using WordPress from the beginning. So you kind of you know, my developer has been with me since the beginning. So you know, together, we’ve kind of been building out what we want, whether it was a blog, or whether we’re our programs. And so WordPress has been there. And then wishlist happened to come out and look, it’s a great plugin. It’s got everything I need. Let’s start building things on wishlist. And so as you know, as we continue to do this, we have an app now, so ever. So you know, our WordPress. wishlist is connected to our app. So whatever’s on our WordPress, we can put it on the app. That’s great through bid app, which is awesome and then now because So, again, I’m always trying to evolve.

And I do, even though I met over 40. Actually, what’s starting to happen now is a lot of these guys are asking for Oh, funk, you know what I think I want to become, I want to get into fitness. I think I want to help other men like Tao got started to come on. Oh, my God, guys. All right, here we go. So. And then also, kettlebells is a big thing in our family, like we, my wife, and I use kettlebells a lot. kettlebells were a big thing. When I actually transformed my body, I’m certified, my wife certified. And we realized that there’s not a lot of people in the world who know how to use kettlebells.

But they want to use kettlebells. Because it’s such a, it’s such a powerful piece of equipment, but you have to be taught that it’s not like a dumbbell. It’s not like a barbell. It’s not like bodyweight, like you can’t just pick it up and start using it, you’re gonna get injured, so you have to learn. But once you learn, man, it’s incredible. So we wanted to create a course, we shot the course, we shot the course we shot everything in there. Okay, now we got to put it into our course, software. So we looked at one that really didn’t have the features.

Then I found lifter LMS and started to look through everything. And I remember I spent like an hour and I’m just like, Man, this is great. Like, this has everything the plugins and like all this is because I always think about two years down the road, right? I’m always thinking. Okay, what will I need two years down the road. That’s why I bought the multiple platforms, because I couldn’t wait my developers, like just buy one. I’m like, no, no, because we’re gonna put three or four or five different courses here.

So it might as well get this now. And you know, the certifications and the exams because I want to this is even though this this kettle boss, which we’re launching tomorrow, by the way, even though this is for beginners, or people who’ve never used calabaza, for people who have never gone through certification, I know that trainers are going to want to do this and get their CE CE their their continuing education credits. So I need the exam portion. And I know that you guys have a plug in for that. So perfect. Now I can offer the CPUs and get all those accreditations from all other things. So the scalability of lifters great, the ease of implementation.

I mean, I’m not doing the implementation. But the ease of let me what I’m looking at right now is exactly what I wanted. Like, it couldn’t be any better than what I envisioned it to be. Because I’ve done a lot of online courses. I’ve gone through many people’s online courses. So I know already what I want. And you know, you guys have everything. You guys have everything. And I just found out that you also have a WooCommerce implementation we have because I also have a WooCommerce store. And I want to sell some of these on WooCommerce. So another massive I was like, yes, WooCommerce lifter, what is happening here. We’re going we’re going but Let’s go baby. Let’s go. You guys are amazing. You’re amazing. I love it.

Chris Badgett: Nice. Well, it’s great to be with you on the journey. One more question to kind of inspire the other education entrepreneurs out out there. How do you think about like your sales funnel? Or how do you get sales? Obviously, you’re you’re great at getting all this content out there and attracting your tribe. Your vibe attracts your tribe kind of thing. Like but like I noticed you have some like a challenge that you do like how do people kind of get into your world?

Funk Roberts: Awesome. Yes. So very Very important. So for me, I do not want to be the guy having to do ads all the time. I’ve gone through that, and I hated it. So your

Chris Badgett: Organic marketing guy like content marketing? No, no,

Funk Roberts: We do we have we have we so I have my YouTube team. So we use YouTube and we have ads. Now, I’ve created a couple of ads, but I don’t want I just said, I didn’t want to do the ads every day, like the ads every day. But we have ads running on YouTube that push people to use to push people to our our own the $1 trial. And that did well for a while. But things change. So we had to change up.

And and the team that I have said no, you know what we need a standalone product. So that’s why the challenge is a standalone product. But it’s a challenge. And we know from before when we used to run challenges, because that is a very great way to get people in your membership. And in fact, that’s a excuse me, that’s an incredible way to get people into your memberships running challenges. Because you run the challenge, you have that product.

And the challenge mimics exactly what’s inside my membership. So from the daily emails to the type of workouts to the app, so that after they’re done the challenge, obviously they want more get done this challenge, I got results. What’s next, oh, you’re gonna come into our membership, the over 40 Alpha. But the great thing is the people who buy the challenge are all ready in my Facebook group. So they already see all these alphas talking about phase 20. And phase A phase this excitement, excitement, excitement, a lot of the guys in the Brotherhood have also already been through the challenge.

So you have this challenge, you put everyone in the same bucket, right. And then after you migrate them into or trance, you know, you convert them into your membership, which looks exactly the same, really, there’s nothing different, they have to go through the same steps to do to unlock or not unlock. But to get to those phases. So we have YouTube ads that worked very well. And for for us to scale those YouTube ads, we’d have to know our lifetime value. So we have software that that figures on our LTVs, our ltrs, which are lifetime revenue. Very, very important, because now we know that our ads are getting, you know, $31 CPAs.

But we know that our day one lifetime, is $38. So now we’re saying hey, let’s jack up because we were covering it like we’re not we’re we’re still making money. So let’s, let’s say like spend more, spend more, spend more. Now I have no YouTube, but I don’t have to worry about posting every day on Instagram and Facebook, because that’s what drives people in, I want to be inside my membership. That’s what I want to do, I enjoy being more internal content for the membership.

I don’t want to spend all my time outside. So that’s why we have that ad. And then we’re going to be connecting with somebody else who’s going to help us focus on Facebook and Instagram. Again, I told him I don’t want to be doing ads every day. So let’s get one or two good solid ads that will go out and drive people into that funnel. So very important to now that’s just me like some people love doing the Palais Comm, you know, they love doing that I just don’t like doing that.

I’d rather be in I want to get results. So that’s the most important thing for me. So a lot of times people focus on, I gotta drive people in, but they leave their customers alone. And that’s where they lose their customers. You can’t leave your customer, your customers are the most important people in your business because and they refer their

Chris Badgett: Friends I was listening to a podcast where your your it was like a brother saw the other brother had died had been.

Funk Roberts: Robbing Anthony. The other thing is, as you can see, I have supplements, right? My supplements I don’t, I’m not a big supplement company. But these supplements I sell to my members. Why? Because my members trust me. They know that I’m there. They know I’m not there to sell them crap. And my name is on those supplements. So that’s a huge that’s a massive revenue driver for us. Like literally every day we’re selling supplements and subs I have resistance bands. Why? Because man over 40 lovers, isn’t it. So I made my own resistance bands, created a couple of phases and programs resistance bands related. And now I can sell those. So once you if I did not have that connection, there’s no way I can sell those.

I mean, I could sell it but I would just lose that I would lose my integrity. I feel that that’s just me and I want to have integrity. And I want to know that when I create a supplement because I create myself from scratch. It’s going to be powerful, it’s going to work and they’re going to need it. Right they’re going to say I’m creating something so you guys are going to need during your journey. So being having that membership and getting them results and having a connection allows you to scale. You can do courses you can do other products and not other people’s products, your own products.

Right I don’t sell other people’s products because once again, it just it there’s a deal Kinect it’s like well why are you selling that product? I know if I if I don’t have I don’t have it and yeah, I made like sending them over. But most most most of the times I want to create my own my own brand my own stuff because I get 100% of that as opposed to 50 or 10% or 12% or whatever it is, depending on

Chris Badgett: What it is that’s awesome and just the the bottom of the funnel the sales conversion point for the membership what what is it? Is it like primarily a sales page that does the heavy lifting like what if you were advising another education entrepreneur like what do you think makes your sales page convert are work well for you? I know you have a lot of before and after pictures, which for fitness makes a lot of sense. But what else?

Funk Roberts: It’s a copy. It’s 100% the copy

Chris Badgett: That was actually on my list to talk to you about I wrote down copywriting Where did you learn how to write like that? Or do you hire it out? Or what do you do?

Funk Roberts: James little Galbo he is my copywriter. And here’s here’s the thing, because James and Joel Galbo are my copywriters. Joe Lowe Galbo is a direct, and I don’t like to say competitors because we don’t compete. He has the anabolic life. So he also does men over 40 Like massively does men over 40 So we both do men over 40 But he and his brother write my copy. They write my emails because Joe Joe and James are the best copywriters as far as I’m concerned. They they’re they they’re they hit it bang on. So we don’t I again, like my mindset is and oh, well, he does the same thing as me. So I’m gonna go against them. No, it’s like, Hey, here’s the

Chris Badgett: Mindset. There’s a billion

Funk Roberts: Men out there we that we have to So let’s all do this together fit father does the same thing. And him and I have gone back, you know, like talked about what are you doing? You know, you’re all young kids. So what we’re doing great sharing, because we all have different personalities. And we are going to, we’re gonna attract different types of men who are in their 40s 50s 60s 70s. So there’s nothing really to worry about. There’s a lot of men out there. So it’s all out there. But the copywriting I cannot tell you spend the money.

Because it makes a difference. The difference between our old 30 Day Challenge pays and I tried to do and I’ve been in this industry for many years, I have books on copywriting I’ve written sales pages before, but the when we had our old page and we had the ads going to compare to as soon as we put James’s like as soon as James wrote the copy, and then we put everything to that copy. It’s we get 2030 new people every single day and that’s just on a very low spend we’re going to be increasing the spend but imagine 2030 new sales every single day adds up to 300 or 900 sales a month and then those guys we convert them into the membership usually about 60% 50% Convert.

Because not everyone starts to the 30 day challenge the same time right they just buy it because they own it right but it is it is the copy like spend the money on the copy yes it may cost you six grand yes it may cost you seven grand but I guarantee you you will make that up in no time law and it’s long paid sales pages. It’s the story airs Listen, there is a formula and sometimes there’s times where I will I’ll look at a long sales page I’m like how the hell wrecking thing or I watched those those sales videos sales page videos vs vs sales.

I get 30 minutes 45 minutes, but when I used to do affiliate stuff every single time I would send to those pages they would crush it’s it’s it’s the formula man I don’t know what it is and I don’t I don’t care. It works so get get a copywriter get someone who can create your sales page and those those testimonials are so important make sure you you highlight as many testimonials as you can whether they’re pics whether they’re fake the Facebook ones are really good.

Because people It looks real like it’s oh that’s someone just or wherever you can grab those from don’t write them out and say Jim said this actually post it because there’s more of a connection when someone sees that it’s like okay, okay, this is this is a post done by whatever and whatever well they’re supposed to about whatever whatever. That’s so important. Those are those are the elements the testimonials and this is copy from a sales right

Chris Badgett: Bonk it’s been awesome. You’re such a shining example of education entrepreneur driven by mission and vision and impact and really making a dent in the universe. So I thank you for spending some time with me. For the people out there listening what’s the best ways to connect with you and all the different places?

Funk Roberts: Sure. So if you want workout follow along workouts go to my YouTube channel, you know start just go there first see who I am. You may like me, you may not but you’re probably like me. Anyway. I wrote I’m real, this is who I am. But you can go to my Instagram funk Roberts Fitness on Instagram and then if you are ready to transform your body for $1 Go to over 40 alpha.com. It’s a $1 trial 30 days you’re going to lose 2720 pounds.

And we’ll be there through the entire journey with you so yes and again thank you so much and I want to help create the lifter community I want to be a lifter Lord or I don’t know I want to be part of that community man there’s a lot there’s a lot there we can we can really create that tribe, the lifters unless you guys already have one. I’m just joining it now.

Chris Badgett: You’re in man you’re in we have a pretty big Facebook group and stuff too. But it’s uh, it’s great to be connected. And it’s great to be on the journey together. And yeah, man, I appreciate it. Thanks for shining your light and yeah, we’ll see along the path.

Funk Roberts: Thank you guys and take care everybody.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifter lms.com For slash gift go to lifter lms.com forward slash gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post How to Build an Online Fitness Empire with Over 40 Alpha Funk Roberts appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

In this episode, Lisa Bloom shared the power of storytelling in communication, specifically how it can help in creating and launching a successful online training program. She emphasized the importance of authenticity in storytelling and how it can create a deeper connection and trust with the audience. She also mentioned how a lack of storytelling can make communication feel transactional or inauthentic.

Lisa Bloom is a story coach and author of the book “The Story Advantage: How to Leverage the Power of Story to Succeed in Business and in Life“. She teaches how to use storytelling as a powerful tool for communication and building trust and connection with clients, and achieving success in business and personal life.

Lisa also mentioned how a lack of storytelling can make communication feel transactional or inauthentic. She also shared her knowledge on how to use stories to articulate. What you do in a way that attracts clients. And how to get clear and confident about how your business helps other people. And to achieve what you’re really here to do in the world.

Episode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch and scale, a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest today, her name is Lisa Bloom. She’s from story dash coach.com. We’re gonna get into the incredible power of story today, just to help you in your life. But also to help you and your courses to understand what you’re doing, how to communicate better. Welcome to the show, Lisa,

Lisa Bloom: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Chris Badgett: I’m excited to get into it with you. I was on your website. And I noticed the first part about using story to succeed is to articulate what you do in a way that attracts your clients to get clear and confident about how your business helps other people. And then to achieve what you’re really here to do in the world. So those are all like, awesome. But just to frame it in. What is the story advantage? And you also have a book by that title that people should check out like what? What does that mean? Like when we really harness the story? What does that unlock?

Lisa Bloom: I think you know, the most powerful thing about story is its ability to connect you with others. And to build trust without even trying. So when you tell a story that’s compelling that the person listening feels, you know, they want to listen, they just want to they want to hear you get this engagement level that’s like no other. And people begin to identify with the story and therefore identify with you as the storyteller. That builds an incredible connection between you and the, you know, you and your audience. And, you know, they instinctively trust you because you’re telling a story that feels real. And of course, I have to have this caveat in place that this is not the story that tries to manipulate people to do the things you want them to do.

Right, this is the real story. It’s an authentic story of your experience, or a story that moves you. A story that you feel connected to, even if it’s not your own story, but it’s somebody else’s with permission that you’re telling that level of authenticity, you can’t fake it. And when it’s there, it builds this incredibly memorable experience for the listener. So we we come away from an experience like that.

We we really mull over the story, we think about it, we’re connected to we remember it. And maybe we don’t remember the details of the story, but we don’t remember how it made us feel. And so there’s something very deep happening. I’ve had situations where people have literally years later, come back to me and reminded me of a story that I told that I’ve even forgotten. I told her I’d forgotten I met the person but they had remembered the story.

Chris Badgett: For like a course creator or coach type person, what does it look like when we’re communicating without story? Like, what’s what’s missing? Or what is it? You know, what does that look like?

Lisa Bloom: Well, there’s a few ways it can look, I mean, one way it can look fairly transactional. So it doesn’t feel like there’s a connection between you and you know, that, that it’s really about just kind of pure business. But the other way it can look is it can feel to kind of practiced and perfect and not authentic. So you hear people who have this perfect sentence that they built around what they do, you know, I, you know, I offer this to this type of type person or, you know, whatever that transformational sentences, and it feels kind of like the sentence you’d hear from lots of other people who do the same thing.

So I used to go to these coaching conferences, because as a coach, and I would say to people, what do you do, and they say, Oh, I’m a coach, and I work with people who want to transform their lives, or whatever it is. And I would hear blabbity blabbity, blah, you know, really nice, smart people who had a lot to offer. I love coaches, and they’re doing great things in the world. And yet the language just would leave me feeling completely cold.

But when I would dig in and say, oh, so tell me more about that. Tell me about your How did you get into it? How’d you get started? What’s your story? Suddenly, I would hear these incredible things. And I would think to myself, Why didn’t you say in the first place, and I would have been engaged from the first moment. I wouldn’t have had to dig deep to find out who you are. And so I started to help people do that to discover what is the story that can connect them to the prospect to the potential client. And when they started telling those stories, suddenly, the magic happened in their business.

Chris Badgett: I have a nuanced question for you. If you’re an expert or a coach, or you’re you’re trying to help somebody, how does the story of the expert interact with the story of the client or the customer? Because there’s like two stories there. We’re on our own story paths. How does how does the resonance happen there between those two stories?

Lisa Bloom: Well, there’s a few things here. Firstly, what you know, in order to become an expert, you’ve experienced certain things, oftentimes the pain that has, you know, transformed you into the expert. If people who have, you know, for example, let’s say. I don’t know, weight loss coach, oftentimes there are people who have struggled in their life with their health and wellness. And so when they talk about their struggle that connects with the prospective client, but they also talk about how they’ve transformed their struggle, that’s the next part of their story. And that becomes inspiring for the client for the prospect. So our stories connect on the basis of us being willing to open up to the places that we’ve experienced pain and struggle, but also to continue to talk about what we’ve done about it and have, we’ve managed to somehow get beyond that.

And we only have to be a little bit of head of our clients to be able to inspire them to take those next steps. So I think that’s the first part. But the other part as well is that, you know, we need to tell the stories that resonate with our audience. Because if it doesn’t resonate, if it’s not relevant to them, it’s just not interesting. So if we become the hero of our own story, then we’re, we’re telling stories for the mirror, you know, we’re telling stories for our ego, what we have to do is tell a story that helps the audience identify themselves as the hero, the potential for what they can become, that becomes the hero, and then suddenly, it’s like, it’s about them.

So if you’re telling a story, because you need to tell it, because you need it for your own well being or for your own ego, or whatever it may be, or for your own healing. And that’s a story you need to tell but it’s not in business, you need to tell it to your, your therapist, or your partner or your your friends, the story you need to tell in your business is the story that serves the audience that you want to serve that you want to connect with, you want to be there for. And that becomes a very transformational experience for them.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. What do you say to people that have self worth around, or self worth or impostor syndrome around the value of the story of their lives? Or they feel like they don’t have enough for it to make a good story? What would you say to people like that?

Lisa Bloom: What can I tell a little story? Yeah, please do. I’ve done a lot of work in corporate over the years. And I remember going into a corporate client. And the minute I walked in the door, she said to me, oh, Lisa, we had an amazing Inspirational Speaker yesterday, it was this guy who he was a fighter jet pilot, and he had to eject from his plane, and he crash landed, and he ended up, you know, in a coma for six months. Then he woke up. And then he did this, and then did that and became an Olympic athlete, and, you know, this incredible story. And I said to him, you know, I’m thinking. Wow, that’s awesome and I knew of the speaker and I said to her, you know, that’s, he’s, I know that this guy’s incredible.

I’ve heard he’s a brilliant speaker. And I suffer. But to be honest, I’m much more interested in the small stories and the little stories of our day to day lives, because they’re the things that our audience can relate to. And they’re the things that actually matter in our lives, and that people feel connected to people who feel like well, I don’t have a story, you don’t have to have a, you know, jump out of an airplane near death experience, in order to have an interesting story.

You have to have insight into the these incredibly magical moments that happen every day in our lives. That a lot of times, we’re just, we just don’t notice. And I remember years and years ago, one of my first coaches I ever hired to help me with my business. She said to me, Lisa, if you want to build an audience, you got to tell a story every week, and you got to send it out in a newsletter. And my first response was, you know, my host is not that interesting. You know, I’m a mother, I’ve got a bunch of kids, I, you know, I live an ordinary life.

I’m trying to build a business, I’m trying to be a coach, like, There’s nothing interesting there. And she said, always, I trust you. And from that day on, I wrote a blog of a story. I told a story every week for 10 years, religiously, I did not miss a week. And I discovered in the tiny moments, the amazing potential for story for compelling story. I built an audience of 1000s of people over the years, because people were waiting to hear the story every week.

And again, it’s not that my life got any more interesting. My life was still an ordinary life, like most people live, it’s still his. But I honed into those, what I call these pivotal moments, there’s moments in life, where something happens, that slightly changes us where something happens, it’s unexpected. And the world feels a little bit different after than it was before. And that’s the seed. That’s the potential for great story. And when you can hone into those moments and tell them as a story. You capture people because they’re moments that they recognize in their life, that they’re probably missing too.

So you don’t need to have had this crazy exciting, you know, amazing experiences in your life to tell and sometimes when you do, they’re less compelling than the little moments. Yeah, so and it’s very, very common. People say that to me all the time. But I assure them that it’s the most compelling stories or the interesting little moments that we almost missed that are so proud. shows that we should be able to capture them.

Chris Badgett: How do you? What are what’s your story around getting so into story? Like, how did you end up here helping people in this way?

Lisa Bloom: Yeah, I mean, I so so there’s a kind of a I think the reality is I was always interested in story. I was an avid reader from a very early age, I used to steal my mother’s book club books. And she was in a book club and I would secretly read all her books. I always love story. And I had a vivid story based imagination as a child. I grew up in Ireland, I grew up in a Jewish family. So I sound genetically predisposition to be connected to story being Irish Jewish.

But aside from that, I think that I just, I was always interested in you know, I studied literature, I studied film, and I was I was always interested in story, I was always moved by story. And I was the kid of boys went to my, the older members of my family, my grandparents and my aunts and uncles, and would say to them, so what was it like when, you know, what was it like when you when you were living here, or when you grew up there, or when you got married, I was always interested in that.

As I got older, I kind of let it go. For many years, I went into business, I went into, you know, to university, Business, School, whatever. But I was always fascinated by stories. And I began to see the potential for story, as I went into my own business, and realized that people were just not very good at talking about what they do in a compelling way. And at the same time, I trained as a professional storyteller. So I went through, you know, I kind of fell in love with it. And I remember the day. I went to my first professional storytelling event, and I walked into the room, and I had this amazing feeling like the walls were shaking like, this is this is who I am, this is what I do.

And I didn’t know it was called this. And I think that’s an experience that many people have, and in lots of things that they do, you know, they become a coach, and like, oh, that’s what I’ve been doing in my life. I didn’t realize or they build a course and like education, that’s what I’ve always wanted to do. And I think being able to identify that moment where you’re passionate about something, and then share it with somebody. Firstly, that’s a gift to you. It’s a gift to them, but it’s also a great story. Yeah, that answers the question. But that’s, that’s where I’ve got to Yeah,

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. What about story structure? Like, how does somebody kind of put some framing around what to say? Or what? What to tell? I mean, we have lots of stories. So there’s kind of like these big meta stories and these small stories, like you mentioned in your newsletter, from the day to day, how do we structure a story if we feel like we don’t know how to tell one?

Lisa Bloom: So I think that, you know, there’s lots of different theories of story structure. And, you know, stories have to have a middle and, you know, beginning, middle and end. And they have to have, you know, there’s all these different structures, you can look up story structure, you know, get all the models in the world, you know, look it up and do it or whatever. What, to me what’s interesting as you have a person who’s experiencing a challenge, and something happens, that shifts their experience, they may be experiencing a challenge, or they may be, they may not be, they may be in some kind of status quo, but something happens.

And that’s the pivotal moment concept, something happens, that changes them emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, whatever. And as a result of that, there’s an outcome. That outcome sets them on a different trajectory, what’s important about the characters, we need to care about them, they need to be somebody that, for some reason matters. I remember years ago, I was creating a story for an event. I would often test my stories out on my kids. And I remember saying, telling the story to my son, and I, and he said to me, he said to me, I don’t really care about her. I said, Oh, really why? and he said, I don’t know.

I don’t care. Like maybe she needs to be an orphan or something. This is my my kid. And he was like, 12, at the time of 14 at the time. And I said, Really, she was been always it was something bad has to happen. So I can relate to her. Because if she’s just some Princess, like, what do I care? Who am I related to? You know? So I realized in that moment, it’s years and years ago, I remember realizing, we have to feel some connection to the protagonist to care about what happens to them. And then what happens to them, we’re invested, and we want to know, and we want to learn something. So that’s kind of the way the story will flow.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. How do we think about story in marketing? I mean, I know we can do like a video video seems kind of like a natural medium for storytelling. But there’s also like, if we have a sales page, and we’re using words, like how do we integrate features and benefits with story?

Lisa Bloom: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s opportunities to use stories in lots of different ways in marketing, as you said, in a sales page, for sure. I mean, they’re in the flow of the sales page, whether it’s a long page or a short page, you’ve always got an opportunity to to to tell a story of a past client or somebody who you’ve worked with, or your own story to show the transformational potential of the work you’re going to do with them. And ideally, on any given sales page, you would have several of those stories embedded in the page. Stories are also articulated through testimonials.

So they’re in the words of your client to talk about what you know, what was the before, what was the after, and what happened to make that happen, which was obviously the work they did with you. So we have opportunities to use stories. And people are often mistaken, where they think that well, if I give a one line of here’s the results, you know, such and such a person made $10,000 from doing this, this particular, you know, process that I taught them, that’s not a story.

But if you talk about the person, and you give them some character, and you talk about what they were struggling with, and who they were, where they lived, and what they look like, and what their problem was, and you kind of really give some life to the individual, and then you talk about, people get invested, they, you know, they can see the person, then they feel like, okay, I care about what happens to them.

And then when you understand what they’ve struggled with, and then you see their outcome, they celebrate with them, and they’re really impacted by the story. So you can’t just give a one liner of the results, people make that mistake and think that’s the story that you have to actually have to build it out a little bit and get people invested in get people to care. Like, why did I care about that person? Like my son didn’t care about the Princess, you know, why should I care? And then once you’ve embedded that, then people are impacted by it.

Chris Badgett: Do you have like an example or to have like a coach or course creator whose story or their ability to deliver it is so good and powerful that the success of their business was pretty inevitable, or it just worked really well. Like somebody that just just so we could look kind of look at a great story example, of transformation that just magnetizes and attracts people and that whatever that niche or pain is,

Lisa Bloom: Yeah, I mean, the first one that comes to mind is the person who, you know, the coach, excuse me, a health and wellness coach, who I always come back to this example. Because I could really relate to it, it was a person who was involved in a corporate career for many. Many years, I started out in corporate and, and she was climbing the corporate ladder, and was doing really well and was kind of piling on the pounds every year without really noticing. But as a person who as a young person, she was a swimmer, and she would run and so on she, over the years, became less and less active, because she was in this huge corporate career and being extremely successful.

But she got to the point, midlife where she began to feel like I become this different person, I’m successful. And yet I feel horrible, you know, and my body feels horrible. My energy levels are horrible, and, you know, eating junk food or not moving, I’m feeling awful. And then she started that incredible journey that most people go through where, you know, they try the diets, and they try the routines, they, you know, they try all these different things. And it just helped her add on more and more pounds. But ultimately, she did find a way as a particular system.

And that system, got her through, she lost, you know, 30 pounds, she became active. She became, she just really did phenomenally well. And most importantly, managed to maintain it for a few years. That coincided with her realizing that’s that journey she went through was so much more meaningful than anything she could have achieved in her corporate career. And so she made the choice to leave corporate and to become a health and wellness coach and now works with women in that field to do a similar thing to go on a similar journey that she went on. And that story, which is like, you know, she she lived and she understands that she gets it so perfect for the niche that she chose that it was just incredibly compelling and she became very, very successful with the story.

When she started out. She was like, Oh, I’m so new to coaching How am I ever going to, you know, be credible, like what he told me your life is credible, you know, or another one, a woman who she she had a excuse me, she had like this blended family. Her partner had a couple of kids and she had a couple of kids and got together had a few kids and it was kind of like a Brady Bunch scenario. And years later got really, really interested in parenting advice and studied coaching and parenting, whatever, and went into sort of putting together parenting groups. And she was somebody also Kenton said, you know, I have to build my credibility and I have to figure out like how I’m going to convince people that I know what I’m doing. It’s just like, you’ve got so many stories.

You’ve got a lifetime the last 15 years of bringing up these kids from all these in this way and building up a successful family and reaching out to your friends and your family and helping them with their have issues and families. And it was only when she leaned into her own stories and the stories of the people that she’d actually interacted with throughout the years, that she built up the confidence and the kind of repertoire that she could share it with people, that just the credibility and the trust was there, it was embedded.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Do you have any advice for people that may have stage fright around telling their story, particularly, especially if it involves some like, vulnerability or, you know, talking publicly about something they’re not used to talking about?

Lisa Bloom: Yeah. So I suffer from stage fright pretty seriously, which is crazy. Seeing as I’m, I’ve been a speaker for the last 15 years. And I’ve spoken on stages across the world. But I still suffer from stage fright. And I have a process that really helps me and I’m, you know, it’s it’s solid, and it works. So I still get scared, but I still managed to do it. And that’s fine. But I think one of the things that is a mistake that’s out there is people think you have to be vulnerable, in order to, in order to, to appeal to people. vulnerability has its place.

And vulnerability is super important, but not for the sake of vulnerability. I think that’s an important distinction, you shouldn’t be vulnerable, because you have to be vulnerable. And you should never tell a story that you’re not ready to share. So I’m, I’m pretty much an open book, and I, you know, tell stories about pretty much everything. But I still they’re sitting there that don’t talk about because I’m not ready to share them because they’re too personal. Or it would make me feel unsafe in some ways or another. And I think everybody is in that situation, there’s nothing worse than listening to somebody tell a story that is pushing them beyond the place that they’re comfortable, because it’s really uncomfortable for the audience. It’s inappropriate, and it feels almost abusive, it’s really not a good thing.

So I think the first thing you have to do is think about what am I ready to share this story? And more importantly than that, than Am I ready to share the stories is the story of service to others? Does this story serve people to a certain end and to an end that serves the reason I’m here in the first place? And if the answer to that is yes, great. Like, let’s figure out how to get yourself to a comfortable place. And part of it is to be able to create a distance between the experience and, and how you feel about it and to understand the transformation in the experience. So for many, many years, my father died very, very suddenly, and I couldn’t talk about it for three years I couldn’t talk about it was just too painful.

And there was a certain point in time when I realized. Actually, the story that I was telling about his death was holding me back about, you know, how unfair it was how awful it was a sudden that was, you know, traumatic it was. When I flipped that story and started talking about him as a person. I was able to talk about him and tell stories about him in a way that felt wonderful. And people would say to me, gosh, if I didn’t know he passed away. I think he lived down the street. And it never held me back anymore. And it felt vulnerable.

Because yes, this is a part of who I am and what I care about. And part of my my personal life. But if it’s relevant to the audience, that I share something about him or about my experience of, of telling his story. Then I’m going to do it because it serves the audience. And I have enough distance and enough ability to tell my own, like that inner story to myself. Because you have to remember the average story, the story we tell others is always dependent on the inner story, the story we tell ourselves.

And if they’re not integrated, well, then we kind of get lost, we tell stories that feel inauthentic, or we tell stories that are oversharing and are over vulnerable. And we have to get them back that balance, right and that balance is created by really doing the work on our inner story. What’s the story? We’re telling yourself about the situation? Are we ready to tell it to others in a way that will feel safe, and feel powerful, and most importantly, inform them and inspire them and be relevant for them?

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. If somebody’s kind of separating out story to like, okay, maybe I’ll write a biography or memoir one day, and they just kind of keep work in personal and separate buckets. Can you speak to that and like why maybe an integrated approach might be beneficial?

Lisa Bloom: I think we can’t help it to be honest. Like I think our own life experience will show that it’s very difficult to separate and compartmentalize our life into all these places. And I think that people do it but I think what they do is. They create much more transactional relationships and their work than the people who are a little bit more fluid in the way they move in and out of their stories. I feel that being authentic and sharing a part of yourself Alf, is as much of a gift to you as it is to your client. But it creates relationships.

And I think in a world where trust is a commodity that’s hard to come by. I mean, you know, I always say once upon a time, you could trust everything you can trust the banks and the government and the church. And however, you know, it was, it was easy. We can’t trust very much anymore, we can’t even trust our own health or public health. We’ve gone through and, you know, the level of communication and information is so broad. That it’s really hard to know what we can and can’t trust nowadays. But we can trust authentic story. And we can trust the connection of the personal and the business, if it feels real, because as I said before, you can’t fake authenticity. And that builds trust, and that is really good for business.

So I would like to think that anybody who I’ve ever done business with has trusted me that I’m going to take care of them. When I work with them. And if they, if ever the trust gets broken, then that relationship can’t grow. And that means, you know, pretty soon it’s going to separate and there’s not going to be any more business interaction. I think that if you’re not willing to bring yourself your true self. Your true authentic self into the business situation. You’re losing out.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. If we put our instructional design hat on, like, as a course creator, let’s say we’re making some content. And it’s known in like schools and universities the value of like a case study to, which is a story to teach a point or further elaborate it. If you’re if we’re teaching, like a process or something. How, as an instructional designer, should we think about the mix of theory and story like, within content? Am I? It makes sense?

Lisa Bloom: Yeah, totally. And I spent a lot of time working in. You know, I do a lot of work with organizations around story. And I’ve worked a lot with the big kind of corporate. You know, the computer scientists and the coders and everything and the engineers, for whom story is ridiculous. It’s just not something that I used to feel comfortable with. But what I always say to them is, at the end of the day, every process is impacting a user. And every user is a human being. And the human being has a human experience, the story speaks to the human experience. So every process that we design is going to, you know, it’s going to ultimately impact behavior.

So we need to tell the stories about that behavior. And we need to tell the stories about the people who are using and building and designing and ultimately being impacted by the process or by the system. And that’s what happens, people rely upon information, they they feel safe and information. If I give them lots and lots of information, though, they’ll know what to do. And they’ll know how to make a decision.

But in reality, we make decisions based on our emotions. All the time based on how we feel in this situation. So if we can speak to that in our instructional design, then that’s it’s not instead of the process or the or the tech piece. But it adds on to it and it brings it alive and apart from anything else that makes it more interesting. Courses that are completely devoid of story are really hard to get through. Because they’re just not that interesting.

Chris Badgett: All that? Is there a place for made up stories like parables?

Lisa Bloom: Well, you know, you’ve touched on an important point for me. Because as a traditional storyteller, and professional, traditional storyteller, I love everything to do with fairy tales and folk tales. And in fact, I have a podcast called Once upon a business. And what I do is I take fairytales and folktales, and then I get interpret the lesson for business. Oh, that’s so yeah. So that’s a place if you want to, you know, if anybody listening wants to get a taste for, like, how, how would a fairy tale impact business, that’s the place to go. And there’s a bunch I don’t know, there’s like 2025. We just started it last year 2025 episodes where each episode has a story. And then we talk about the lesson for entrepreneurs and for coaches, and for course, builders.

I think there’s a lot of space. Because these stories are, these are age old stories that have come through all the different types of communities and cultures, to bring us lessons. And stories that one are incredibly compelling that we remember all our life. But also they teach lessons that are just as relevant today as they were hundreds of years ago when they were first created. So yes, I love using them. It’s not for everybody, that people that I’ve taught storytelling to over the years. Some people are like, I never want to use a fairy tale and that’s fine. I personally think they’re so rich and there’s so layered. And there’s so much meaning embedded in them that it’s a fantastic source of inspiration.

Chris Badgett: How about as a business person, social media and stories like whether it’s Tik Tok or Facebook or YouTube or whatever, there’s kind of like the business stories we can tell. But there’s also like just sharing personal life to resonate with behind the scenes content. But how I mean, it’s any tips on social media because it can be somewhat overwhelming and what you’ve kind of already mentioned. Like things to share things did not share, but any just tips around social?

Lisa Bloom: Well, I think with social at the end of the day, oftentimes we’re interested in social. Because we’re interested in seeing the behind the scenes version, right. So social is a lot of behind the suppose it behind the scenes, actually. And that’s what the authenticity comes along, because it’s supposed to be behind the scenes. But it’s so practiced, you know. I think that when we tell personal stories, or we share these snippets of our personal life, or our personal experience. It’s what draws attention. At the end of the day is social media, there’s so much out there, it can be overwhelming.

But if we can tune in on something that’s memorable. Then we’re going to have impact and stories are what we remember. So yes, the challenge is always like. How do I tell a story and however many minutes or however many words that were limited by in social media. But I always think with story, less is more anyway. We want to be very careful about telling a story in a very specific and exact way. And stories can be as simple as one sentence, there can be whole story embedded in a sentence.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. What’s in the book, The Story advantage?

Lisa Bloom: What’s the book? Well, there’s lots in the book. You know, firstly, there’s lots of stories in there. Every chapter starts with a story. So that’s fun.

Chris Badgett: Quick question on that, like for, like, let’s say a lesson about learning, like a lesson in a course, do you think it’s better to put the story at the beginning? Or after the theory? You just said in your book? Or maybe there’s a place for both, but just any tips there?

Lisa Bloom: Yeah, it kind of depends, like, I think stories at the beginning, like, for example, for speaking engagements. So for live training, I always put a story at the beginning. Because it grabs people’s attention, and then you have their engagement. And they’re much more willing to be open to learn something if they’re fully engaged. So I’ll often start with a story. But when I’m teaching something, oftentimes I’ll use a story as a way to, to, to give an example. So that so that you teach something, and people kind of get it theoretically. And then when you put the example of this, like, oh, okay, that’s how it works. And then they really embed the learning.

So it can work both ways. It just depends in every situation like what’s, and this is part of the process. And it’s in the book, by the way of understanding like, what is the intention that I’m putting into telling the story? What what intention do I have? What do I want to create as an outcome for the person listening or reading or, or learning from the story. And what’s my core message? And what you have to go through this process? It’s a five step process. It’s in the book all about understanding. Like, what is the way that we design the story that’s going to have the most impact in the moment?

And part of that five step process is what is the resistance people have to this story in this moment? And can I embed that resistance so that they know that I see them? I hear them? I feel them as I tell the story. So yeah, I mean, that’s part of what’s in the book. And we also look at like, how do you find your stories? How do you craft them? What are the ways to build out a story? What are all the elements of story? And ultimately, like, how do you tell a story in an effective way?

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s Lisa Bloom, she’s from story dash coach.com. Go check out her book, The Story advantage, you can find that on the website. And then once upon a business is the podcast anywhere else? The good people can connect with you, Lisa.

Lisa Bloom: They’re really the core places, the website, the podcast. And the book. Yeah, that’s it. I mean, I’m everywhere in social media. I’m not big into social media myself, it just kind of happens in the background. But the all the core content you can get from the site and the book and so on. So yeah, that’s where to find me.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, Lisa, thanks for coming on the show and sharing your story with us. We really appreciate it.

Lisa Bloom: It’s a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifter lms.com For slash gift go to lifter lms.com forward slash gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post How to Attract and Convert More Clients through Story with Lisa Bloom appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

In this episode, Tammy Lane shares her expertise and experience in creating and scaling high-value online businesses through her knowledge in funnel building and Facebook advertising. She provides insights on how to create and market an online course, as well as her personal journey of overcoming challenges in setting up a sales funnel. She also offers a software tool and a sales funnel toolkit to help people build sales funnels and achieve their business growth goals.

Tammy Lane is a CPA and the founder of Funnel Cures. A website that offers a software tool for building sales funnels. She also has a background as a course creator. And has created a business training course for small business owners on how to manage their finances.

She started her journey as an online course creator with a business training course for small business owners on how to manage their finances. However, she found that marketing was a whole different ball game and it took her close to a year to set up her first funnel. She then got interested in Facebook ads, when they first came out, and things took off with her business. She then created Funnelcures.com, a website that offers a software tool for building sales funnels.

Tammy mentions that she loves teaching and that’s how she got started down the road. She was a CPA, and she always knew she wanted to have her own business. But she wasn’t really sure what that looked like. She quit her job with no business plan, no course created, no nothing. And then she took about the first four months or so to create her first course. Which was a business training course for small business owners on how to manage their finances.

She mentions that the hard part was over when she finished creating her course. But she quickly realized that marketing is a whole different ballgame. And so it took her close to a year to get her first funnel set up with all the tech connections. Tammy didn’t even understand what a funnel was. She thought it was just the pages that you see. She didn’t understand that you needed other different types of software to connect it so you can send emails, get an opt-in, and make sales.

Tammy Lane is giving away a sales funnel toolkit. The audience can grab it at funnelcures.com/funnel-gift.

Episode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch and scale, a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest, her name is Tammy Lane. She’s from funnel cures.com. She comes from a background as a course creator, she has a software for helping people build funnels. She’s also a Facebook ads expert. Welcome to the show, Tammy.

Tammy Lane: Thanks so much, Chris.

Chris Badgett: Tell us before we get into funnel cures, which is at funnel cures.com. And I know you have a gift for the audience, do you want to mention that now? And we’ll mention that at the end. Before we get started.

Tammy Lane: I got a kit that I’ve sold more than 1200 of so far this year. And I’m going to gift it to your audience. So it’s a sales funnel toolkit. And they can grab that at funnel curious.com forward slash funnel gift.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, thanks for that. Before going to the funnels, you had a background as a course creator. So that’s kind of like the building block for this whole show. What was your course creator’s story?

Tammy Lane: Yeah, I didn’t really know what I was getting into. So I’m a CPA. That’s my background. And I kind of always knew I wanted to have my own business. But I wasn’t really sure what that looked like. But I love teaching. And so that’s how I kind of got started down the road. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a course creator back then.

But I kind of, you know, started researching online. And I knew I wanted to teach people some of my skills that I had and so yeah, I could quit my job with no business plan, no course created, no nothing. And then I took about the first four months or so to create my my first course. Which was a so background in CPA it was like a business training course for small business owners on how to manage their finances.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And just just as like an Instructional Designer for that, like how do you I understand doing CPA work for like a client, but how did you think about structuring that for a DIY business owner? Like.

Tammy Lane: Yeah, so really bringing down some of the concepts in simple language. So I talked about what type even though I’m not a lawyer, what type of business you’re gonna have, it’s a little different in the States than in Canada, but like an LLC, or you’re going to be a sole proprietor, and what types of reporting you need to do based on what type of business you have. And then, you know, there’s a difference between revenue and profitability.

And so talking with business owners about how to make sure that what they were selling was going to be selling profitably. So kind of breaking it down and allowing them to understand what a financial statement meant. And why it was important, not just because the government says you need to provide when for your business. But actually because it can help you make decisions in your business.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So what tell us about the story, how did it go from course creator to funnel cures.com?

Tammy Lane: So that, so I created my course, I thought the hard part was over when I finished creating my course and then I realized that marketing, it is a whole different ballgame. And so it took me close to a year to get my first funnel set up and the tech connections and I didn’t even understand like I thought a funnel was just the pages that you see. I didn’t understand that you needed other different types of software to connect it. So you can send emails so you can get an opt-in so you can make sales.

And so that journey was a bit of a process. When we did get it going, I ended up getting in on Facebook ads. When they very first came out, they actually gave me a free credit for doing Facebook ads because they were brand new, and things really took off with the combination of the funnel and the Facebook ads. And so yeah, I hit 3 million that year in sales, both with the course and I had a higher-end program that I developed in conjunction with that so it was a bit of a whirlwind journey, and then subsequent to that, I coached clients on getting their funnel set up so we could help them run ads. And it was just such a process like connecting multiple platforms together.

Even with me coaching them, it often would take them you know several months to get their funnel up and running. And so when when we decided to build the funnel cure software because the cool thing is We develop this quick build technology that allows us to build the funnel and do all the tech connections for our clients in a couple of days, so that was a game changer for my clients. So it really was about making their life easier when I was trying to coach them.

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s amazing. And congratulations on that those sales. What was the you mentioned, there was a high high ticket thing that was there too. What was that? That was in your in your programs.

Tammy Lane: So I got into some marketing. So once I was successful with my front-end course, then I started teaching how they could do marketing in conjunction and profitable marketing. So that you could not just make revenue, but make profits.

Chris Badgett: Nice. And let’s go to some basics, like what is a funnel and like what kind of funnels do coaches and course creators need, but that you’ve seen in your all your experience.

Tammy Lane: Yeah. You know, Chris, but when I was first trying to learn how to do a funnel, like the understanding part of what it was, was challenging. Because you can’t see all the mechanics behind it when you’re going through someone’s funnel. So they’ve probably all been through a funnel, but it’s the pages, it allows you to collect email addresses, it allows you to email your list after so you can invite them to buy your course. It allows you to collect payments.

And then oftentimes, there’s other features like being able to text somebody to remind them to show up for either a training or a paid training or a webinar, things like that those can all become combined into a funnel. The goal of bringing in paying clients right, in a very direct method, it takes them from stranger to paying client in typically a very short period of time.

Chris Badgett: What lo so in that short period of time, like what’s at the top of the funnel, and then what happens in between that and the sale? I know it can vary, but what do you recommend kind of as a template or like a standard way of doing it?

Tammy Lane: Yeah, really depends on price point. So do you teach certain price points when you’re when you’re talking about courses?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, yeah, I mean, go for it. Yeah, I mean, people, people in this audience are gonna be all over the place from lower end to high end coaching stuff. So it can be everything.

Tammy Lane: Yeah, so the timeline really varies. Like if you’re selling something inexpensive, like under $100 for a course, oftentimes, it’s within a minute of meeting you that they’ll be buying that we have a lot of clients doing that. And then in that mid tier price range between 300 and 1000. Generally, we wouldn’t recommend some sort of video training or webinar where it can happen the same day. But usually they wouldn’t need to at least spend 20 minutes or 40 minutes with you for you to talk about. What you do and to understand what your course is. And then the higher ticket stuff we almost always recommend a sales call

Chris Badgett: that’s awesome. What do you recommend for filling the funnel?

Tammy Lane: Well I love Facebook ads I’m not really a selfie-posting kind of girl I just the thought of having to post content like that every day. I’m just like, no I’m out. And so that’s why ads were such a great fit for me and said I cuz we get to create one piece of content and get it in front of new people every day, instead of getting creating a ton of content and then getting in front of a few new people every day. And so that’s worked really well for me.

Chris Badgett: Where does funnel cure sit in this in the space I mean, many people would have perhaps heard of Click Funnels and you know there’s a lot of people in here in this audience who use WordPress and just kind of build landing pages and semi funnel like but what is the sweet spot for funnel cares

Tammy Lane: So I was a Click Funnels user and besides there they don’t have the best support in terms of if you’re new it’s difficult because there’s not anybody to talk to I click funnels but other than that I love the software I we built our client funnels on On Click Funnels. The problem is you need multiple software’s if you’re using Click Funnels like you need an autoresponder software and then you need to be able to connect all those things together.

And so the real sweet spot for us is we’re all in when there’s no connect tech connections to do plus we set up everything for you. And a lot of the funnel builders are really focused on E-commerce. So you’ll see a lot of their templates and all those things are really designed for someone selling a product and we’re much more course creator coach based and you’ll see that in Some of the funnels that we build for clients and get set up for clients is they’re very focused on selling courses and services.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And you mentioned like there’s a setup service included, like what is the course creator really need to have ready to? Like, what were what are they it was a perfect client for you, where are they at in terms of their course or their project, and then what can they expect to walk away with after working with funnel cures?

Tammy Lane: So I’m always a big fan of building your audience. As you’re getting your course ready because you want to launch to your to an audience when your course is done. Otherwise, it’s going to you know, the sales are going to be slow. So once you know what topic your course is going to be on, or your offer is going to be on, you have a pretty good idea of the audience that you want to deliver that to, my first suggestion is to get your lead funnel up and running. So you can start building the audience so that when your course is finished, you can go ahead and sell it to the audience that you’ve already built up.

Chris Badgett: Let’s go back to the ads a little bit what what is the what is a good ad like for a course creator? Like they get so into making the product like the course like how do you how do you get a good ad at the top? Like what are we promoting in the ad?

Tammy Lane: Well, depending again, on the price point. So, if you’re selling something under $100, like if your course is under $100. We would do an ad lots of times directly to the course. And that can work well you have to have a really good sales mechanism. And whether that’s a video or, or a sales page. So if you’re brand new, that that can be difficult. So lots of times, we recommend a lead generation ad. Where you send them to some sort of free gift, they’d opt in for the free gift. And now that you’ve captured their attention a bit more, they get to know you maybe in a video, that sale can come a lot easier, regardless of the price point. But so the lead gen ads can work very well top of funnel for a brand new audience, cold audience.

Chris Badgett: So it’s not about like going for the sale from the ad per se, like get them in the top of the funnel onto some resource that they don’t necessarily have to pay for.

Tammy Lane: Right? Yes. Or easy your ads to do.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, yeah. And you may you mentioned you had a Facebook ads resource. We’ll put a link to that in the chat. Can you or in the in the show notes below this podcast episode? Can you tell us what that is?

Tammy Lane: Yeah, I’ve got a Facebook ad template. So it’s going to help you write your copy. It’s going to explain what elements go into your ad copy that are going to get you attention in the newsfeed and then get people clicking through to come and see what you have to offer them a free gift or a paid-to-get offer.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Well, entrepreneurs always impressed me and tell us about like what it is about you in this journey from CPA to course creator, to Facebook ads expert, marketing expert to software entrepreneur with funnels, like, what motivates you like, what powers this journey?

Tammy Lane: Sometimes I wonder why. Honestly, it’s just watching my clients have, like they have this gift, they’re really good at something, and they’ve decided that it’s their calling or passion to share it with the world. And I know how hard that journey is like I’ve been on that journey. And so every product that we’ve ever made or offered has been designed to somehow make that journey simpler quicker, less painful.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. What are what are some of the in your your work around course creators and coaches? What are what’s what are people making that’s working out there these days? Like what type of niches are you seeing people operate in and love in life and building these great products, programs, and communities?

Tammy Lane: So I guess the one difference I really have seen in the last year or so is that the more specific you are about what you’re offering. The more specific the audience is, the better it’s going to do. So I know you’ve heard a million times niched down but in the last year, it’s about solving a real problem for a real person and having it be so specific that they can’t help. But want it so instead of 10 steps to Facebook ads that work. I would sell a course instead on Write your ad in in write your ad in an hour for coaches, something like that. So I just be a lot more specific in how I’m wording it and what I the result that I would offer in the course.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. If we go back into the price points a little bit you mentioned For a higher ticket program, you might need to the funnel might need to end up at a call, like, can you give some advice around what happens on that call or what that might look like. And remind us again, the price point where this is likely becoming a good fit for conversions.

Tammy Lane: So long term over $1,000 is probably where we want to be for a sales conversation. And I hesitated I never wanted to do sales calls. When I started, I was like, Yeah, I don’t want to do sales calls. And so I really look at it more like a consulting call, like I’m helping somebody see what they need. And if my solution is a fit, then I just make an invitation. So that might help some of your listeners with that. But over $1,000, long term, but if you’re new, honestly, the best thing you can do is have some conversations with potential clients. So you can see what questions do they have, oh, maybe I didn’t explain that very well. They’re concerned about if they can do it.

And so you can bring those pieces then into your marketing later on. But if you’re new, the more client potential clients you can talk to the better understanding you’re going to have. And so the sales call is what you asked to give up on the sales call. Really, it’s about first uncovering what they’re struggling with, or what the pain point is, and having you recognize that. And having the client who you’re on the phone with record or zoom with, recognize what that is, so you’re both on the same page. Then you’re you would ask them about what they want to accomplish. They want to get at a pain that they want to learn to play hockey, they want to learn Facebook ads, whatever that is and what they want to accomplish. So might people want to maybe learn Facebook ads or funnels?

What do they want to accomplish with their funnel, because I want to have an end goal, like, I want to pay for my daughter’s university education, with my sales of my course, whatever that is, and then simply creating a plan for them to get where they are from where they are to where they want to be. And if that plan coincides with your solution, inviting them to come in, get your help with your course, for the solution, really any sales call any good sales call comes down to just those three things.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. For the lower-cost courses, what is the conversion thing at the end of the funnel? Like, what do you recommend? And again, like proximate price point, range or whatever.

Tammy Lane: Yeah, so we do a really simple sales funnel. When people are just starting out, that is two pages, it includes an opt-in, and instead of having them go create a free gift, which we found is a bit time-consuming effort, people usually take several weeks. Instead, what we do is we have them, we create an opt-in page for them. When people opt-in, they go to a thank you page on the thank you page, you just we have them record a five-minute video, we have a script where you deliver a juicy piece of free content, and then you invite them if it’s a low ticket you to make a sale and so it’s just really a five-minute video.

So it’s a lot easier than copywriting a whole sales page and then inviting them into a sale. And that way they’re already on your list. So even if they don’t buy right on that page, you have the opportunity to to email them over the next week, month year to get invite them back into the sale.

Chris Badgett: It’s always obvious to me when somebody is really Xin with their market and you’re like you know that for beginning beginners, perhaps creating this elaborate lead magnet might be a little overwhelming. So you guide them into like, just make this one video. Here’s the outline. I love that idea. You mentioned copywriting. How does funnel cures help people with copywriting? Or? I mean, I guess I’ll start with that because it creating a landing page for marketing can be overwhelming to a non-marketer. Right?

Tammy Lane: I’m so excited that you asked me that because we have a brand new offer you. Anybody who signs up for the toolkit will end up seeing that that we have a brand new offer that we will not only build all the tech connections do the design work. We’re actually writing their copy for the opt in page and the thank you page. So literally the only thing they have to do to have their entire funnel working is record that five minute video. We just launched it a couple of days ago.

Chris Badgett: That’s amazing. Again, there you are like just removing the friction. That’s what entrepreneurs do is they remove friction and just create value. That’s awesome. Any it for somebody who’s writing their own copy if we’re writing a piece of content for the funnel? What are some just general copywriting tips? Do you have for people around whether we’re kind of pitching a lead magnet or pitching a sales call? Like, how do we learn to talk and like a copywriter? In our words,

Tammy Lane: I would say don’t talk like a copywriter. We did we have seen a huge shift in the marketplace in the last two years. Where prior, you definitely probably a good copywriter was helpful in a lot of situations. What we’re finding in the last two years is that our Non copyrighted stuff converts way better, meaning, we don’t want it to sound smooth. And we don’t want it to sound slick. So for anybody who’s not a copywriter. It’s a huge advantage for you, people now, just want to hear real people talking about how they can help them. It’s great news, there’s a couple of structure things that I’ll just talk about quick. So it the more you can sound like you’re just having a conversation with a friend, the better your copy is going to convert.

So lots of times, I recommend opening up your audio app on your phone and just like talking, pretend your sister’s there with you or whoever, and just talk. Because you’re gonna get the language sounds a bit different. And then a couple of structure things, you want to have a good page layout in your funnel pages. And it depends what page for what structure. But the the hardest part is to keep people reading your stuff long enough to want to buy it from you. And so headlines are important, and not having huge blocks of text on your page. I guess is one of the quick tips that I can give you like if you break up the text, people will read more of it and they’re more likely to buy from you automatically.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You mentioned layout and design earlier. Like it’s kind of included in funnel cures, you don’t have to worry about that. Can you just speak to that more like for somebody who’s like, Well, I’m not a web designer? Like how does something like funnel cures help them? Just don’t worry about design, we got that handled.

Tammy Lane: Yeah, and one of the big problems, when I was coaching clients to build their own funnels, was that most, if you most tools don’t have very good templates included in them. And so it’s very difficult to get a good page layout if you’re not a designer. Because I didn’t really think about this before I got into actually designing. And we hired designers to do funnels for our clients anyways.

But there’s so much so many things that go into design, like how big are the spaces, the whitespace, the font combinations, how the image. Where the person in the image is looking to get you to read the copy like there’s just so many things that go into design. I don’t know, I certainly couldn’t do justice to your listeners when there to help them actually design but we just, we knew it was a huge problem. Because when I coach my clients, they’d end up with these funnels. And I’d look at it and I’d be like, like, like, it looks kind of homemade. Let me see if I can do some tweaks on it to help you with it. And that’s your first impression with clients like the very first thing they’ve never met you before.

That’s what they’re going to see. And if you look, if you have a homemade-looking funnel, clients aren’t going to trust you. Right? They’re going to have that Oh, like, maybe she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. And so the design, that’s why we have done in packaged up the design work inside of our funnels. But for anybody who already has a funnel, I just invite you to take a look at your funnel and get get that first impression. Does it make you seem like a leader in your niche? Who knows what you’re talking about?

Chris Badgett: Imagine templates like what are the different types of templates? What do you mean by that?

Tammy Lane: So when you go to buy when you go buy something like click funnels. For example, they would include an opt-in page template or they’d include a sales page template. And the problem is they just have one or two looks that are usually e-commerce for an opt-in page and one or two looks for a sales page. And they’re just the layout isn’t usually appropriate for a course creator or and they typically in a sales page don’t have enough fields on it. Like you’ll get a sales page that’s this long, and we probably need one like this long. And so it’s hard to work from those kinds of templates.

Chris Badgett: That makes sense. How many funnels does somebody need?

Tammy Lane: We always get started with one. With one funnel. You can get podcast interviews, you can share it on your social media profiles. You can be participating in Facebook groups, and then down the road. Most people end up with more than one funnel down the road.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. what are what are some other types of funnels? Like, I know there’s like, I mean, there’s like the funnel to get to a sale. There’s like book funnels. But what are some different types, like if somebody’s has like a portfolio of funnels over time, what might be feeding their business?

Tammy Lane: So the secret is, most of those funnels are all based on the same funnel format. People just call them different things. And so that simple two-page funnel that I was talking about, it can be an opt-in funnel, it can be a webinar funnel. It can be a sales page funnel, like you, it’s just a matter of tweaking. But I’ll give you an example of some of the ones that I have. So I have a lead magnet funnel that I share. When I’m like doing podcast interviews, you will see it on my Instagram or Facebook. So that people can get that introduction.

I have a live webinar funnel, I’m doing a training actually, tomorrow, I have a live webinar running. And so I invite people to show up at a particular time with me to do a training and I’ll invite them into coming to buy something from me. I have an evergreen webinar funnel. Where somebody can sign up and watch the webinar today or tomorrow whenever they want. So it’s pre-recorded. And then I have a sales page funnel, and the sales page funnel will take them directly to buy something, typically under $100. In that kind of funnel.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Where do you position the live webinar? Versus the call versus the sales pages? Are these kind of on the sales or the price continuum? Or like so where are you on what I’m trying to ascertain is when should we use a webinar

Tammy Lane: Webinar. I do love webinars because they allow you to reach a lot of people. But they are more time-consuming just totally upfront. Like creating a webinar is actually probably a several weeks project to create the content for the webinar. But the webinar works well because you can get in front of multiple people that when then you get a train and invite them into a purchase. And that price point typically would be somewhere between 300 and $1,000.

Chris Badgett: What advice you have Tammy for somebody who’s earlier like they’re they’re kind of like an earlier version of you? And you know they’re they’re thinking about making a course or getting into this online business thing from whatever it is they’ve done to maybe their for their original career or their job or whatever. And they’re looking over here at this online course industry and online marketing and funnels and all this what what gave you courage and what what would you say to encourage other people who feel called to go help others at scale through the internet like this.

Tammy Lane: I so just totally upfront, it took me a lot of years to make the leap. I think I knew I wanted to have a business in elementary school, definitely high school. And then I did four years of university to get my accounting degree. I did another three years of Arctic clean to get my CPA. And then I worked for 14 years as a CPA before I actually ended up taking the leap. And how to get the courage.

Chris Badgett: You said it was inside of you like as a child, you felt called you felt something inside? I think authors feel this way. I mean, I think everybody kind of has something. But yeah, what what allowed you to really move forward and pursue pursue it. As a CPA, you were like, Alright, I’m gonna do this.

Tammy Lane: I got a lot of strange looks and questions from my colleagues when I said, you’re going to do what you’re going to create a course. And I was like, Yep, I’m gonna create a course. So for me, some circumstances came together. At work, I ended up in a situation that I didn’t want to be in anymore. Which was that was the first time that it happened. And I had savings enough that I felt like I had a cushion.

So me quitting without a business plan without a course created. If I’m, I think it takes you having enough resources behind you. That you feel like you can take the leap. So maybe a little bit of money is helpful to have saved up a couple of months as a cushion to maybe have started on your course or have an idea for what your courses and it’s about baby steps. Once you take the first few baby steps. It gives you courage for the rest I think

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Well, Tammy, thanks for being a shining light as a course creator. But also as somebody who’s coming to help other course creators with their funnels. Emmys a funnel cures.com And what was the where can they go to get that resource you mentioned?

Tammy Lane: So funnel cures.com forward slash funnel gift is going to be that funnel toolkit. And we talked about Facebook ads that will be at funnel cures.com Facebook gift.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, Tammy, thank you so much for coming on the show. And I appreciate you sharing your journey. And dropping so many knowledge bombs today around funnels and marketing and course creation. We really appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Chris. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifter lms.com. For slash gift go to https://lifterlms.com/gift/. keep learning keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post Marketing Funnels for Course Creators with Tammy Lane appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

In this episode, Paul Charlton shares how he helps people by creating courses and content related to web design and WordPress, with a focus on dynamic content using tools such as advanced custom fields and jet engine.

Paul Charlton is an entrepreneur and web designer with a background in education. Paul is the founder of the WPTuts YouTube channel and his website. He has over 138K subscribers on his YouTube channel. He has a passion for creating a web design, graphic design, and multimedia content.

Paul started building websites and using multimedia tools like Dreamweaver and Flash animation in his work as an adult educator. From there, he started a design business focused on web and graphic design, branding, and more.

He has a passion for helping others learn and expand their skills and has combined that with his interests in web design and WordPress to create courses and content for others. His niche is focused on dynamic content using tools such as advanced custom fields and jet engine, which allow him to build custom post types and connect custom meta fields to create a wide range of websites.

He has an honest approach to choosing the best tools for the job and believes WordPress is moving towards a more block-based system with the introduction of Guttenberg and the upcoming WordPress 5.8 release. He prefers self-hosted solutions rather than relying on third-party platforms.

Episode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch and scale, a high value online training program. I’m your guide Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of lifter LMS the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. stay to the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest, Paul Charlton. He’s from WP Tuts. Check them out on YouTube. The website is WP tuts.co.uk. Welcome to the show, Paul.

Paul Charlton: How you doing, Chris? How you doing?

Chris Badgett: I’m doing good, man, I’m doing good. You are like the epitome of what I call an education entrepreneur. So you’re a course creator, a YouTuber, a WordPress power user, and really a giver, I see you give a lot to the community and you you put your heart and soul into all your content and everything like that. It’s really impressive. Let me just take us back to the beginning, how did you fall in love with building websites,

Paul Charlton: That’s gonna be going back quite some time. And if basically, if we go back to sort of dinosaur time, I cut my teeth sort of building things for myself. But I was a an on a sort of like an educator working with adult education for the best part of 10 years. And what I started that kind of journey was with your typical at things like your databases, your work process, and those kinds of skills, it quickly evolved into me being able to bring my passion into the sort of adult education arena where I was based, which meant that I could bring in web design using tools like Dreamweaver, you know, multimedia flash animation, those types of things.

So I’ve always had a passion for creating web design for creating graphical content for dealing with digital images and things. So it just meant that I could sort of take that into my educational background, and build that into something that wasn’t really being served that much at the time. Like I said, we’re talking back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth kind of thing. So you know, it was pretty slow going.

But then kind of from that point, it meant that I could sort of move on when I kind of moved out of education, I set myself up as a business partner in a design business, that we focused on web design, graphic design, company, branding, and so on. So those kinds of I kind of like had the ability to work on both sides of the coin, as it were where I could teach people how to do something in one part of my career. And then actually the doing part.

I mean, I think they say most of the time when it comes to teachers they teach they don’t do. So I’ve kind of tried to embrace both aspects of that. And that just kind of led me on then to be unable to expand my skill set, learn more about web design, learn the different tools, and eventually end up, you know, moving over into WordPress and things like that. So I’ve kind of my background has kind of had a natural progression from education to doing to now combine the two sides of things where I can actually build things for myself, build things for clients, but also hopefully help people create better websites themselves and learn, you know, expand their skill sets.

Chris Badgett: At what point did you realize that you were kind of an entrepreneur? Because it sounds like it started with you working inside of a company or an organization? Is that right? When did that entrepreneurial thing kind of bite you?

Paul Charlton: I think I’ve always kind of had that spark. I mean, even going back to when I left school, I did an apprenticeship kind of thing. I’ve always looked at ways of integrating my passions into ways of making money. And it’s just I’ve had a a fortunate kind of time where I can actually combine passions with things that do ultimately make money. So I think pretty much from a very early age, I’ve had that entrepreneurial passion to look at ways in which I can monetize the things that I actually enjoy, as opposed to just go into work for someone else, which I think if anything these days, there’s one thing I’ve highlighted in my life is that I’m not a good employee, I’m much better doing my own thing my own way and turning that into something that ultimately helps people.

I mean, that’s the one of my biggest passions is to share the knowledge as opposed to the way he used to be going back years ago, where if you had skills and knowledge, you kind of just kept those close to your chest, you didn’t share them, because you were afraid of people knowing the skills that you’d honed over, you know, however many years, but I’ve always had that sort of thing where I would rather bowl people know about it. So the industry at large kind of benefits from it, as opposed to just a very small minority of small minded individuals as it were.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. One of the wonderful things about you is you’re a little bit of a unicorn in my book and that there’s this framework, the hipster, the hacker and the hustler. So the hipster is great at design. The hacker is great at like code and functionality and figuring out like more technical stuff. And then the hustler builds businesses you seemed to be really well balanced, it’s rare to see somebody who’s kind of firing on all three cylinders. Do that just kind of happen, or did you? Do you have any thoughts on on that balance in your life?

Paul Charlton: Thank you very much for that it’s very much appreciated, I’ve been called a lot of things, the uniform is not one of them very often. I can’t say that I made a conscious effort. But one of the things that I’ve always enjoyed is, if there’s a problem, my brain just goes into, let’s go to logical mode. And let’s look at how we solve it. And I’m kind of very OCD, when it comes to that, it’s like, if there’s a problem, I have to solve it for my own peace of mind.

So in going back to, when I set up the business, originally, myself and a partner, there was no sort of content management systems around that I particularly liked. I mean, I didn’t like WordPress, at the time, who said like version two, maybe three at a push. So it meant that I had to find ways of creating a content management system myself, that managed, my expectations was modular. And I could actually use that with with clients, excuse me.

So it meant that I had to learn skills with Dreamweaver, with coding with PHP, and, you know, looking at ASP, and those kinds of technologies, look at rapid application development tools, you know, there was quite a few different tools that were available at the time for quickly modularizing various different parts of building a website and a content management system and those kinds of connections between the tools.

So it meant that I had a need and a passion to kind of develop something that I thought fit the niche that I wanted, which meant that that kind of gives me a good understanding of how you would combine various different tools and technologies to create something that was developed in a modular fashion. The design side of things, I mean, I’ve always come from I come from an artistic background anyway, right back to my grandfather. So design has always been something that I’ve had a bit of a passion for, I can’t say I’m brilliant at it. But I think I’ve got enough to be dangerous. And I can probably cover most things, maybe a little bit longer than some people will design to get the end result.

But ultimately, I think I kind of get there and it just, it just allowed me to take those different aspects and sort of put those together. And then with the teaching side of things, you have to have an understanding in such a way that you can impart the knowledge and the reasoning behind why you’ve done something and the tools you’ve chosen to use.

And I think that’s kind of stood me in good stead, when it comes to the different kinds of parts of a business as opposed to me just being on the cold side or me just on the design side. So it’s kind of, I think necessity has probably been the reasoning behind why I maybe approach things in the way that I haven’t picked up the skill sets that I have, I’ve got enough knowledge in those areas to be dangerous, but not enough to be considered, you know, sort of anything special, I don’t think,

Chris Badgett: Well, that’s the brilliance of it. Like I mean, even if it’s just two things, you don’t have to be the best in the world. But if you’re pretty good at both those that makes you unique. And if you’ve got three things were that’s, that’s really cool. Um, let’s talk about YouTube, it’s halfway through 2022. As we’re recording this, when did you start the channel, and right now you’re at somewhere around 120,000 subscribers.

Paul Charlton: I started it back in 2015, I think it is, I think is around 2015. But I didn’t really take that channel particularly seriously, I had three channels. One was a music production channel, which is still available. And other one was a Lightroom and Photoshop channel. And the third one was the WordPress side of things. Because they’re kind of like things that I have a passion for. And I’ve always kind of been the same saying if I’ve got a passion for it, and I learned things, I just want to tell other people about those things so they can avoid some of the stumbling blocks and the longer roads that I’ve had to sort of work my way through to get to those results.

But I kind of found probably around 2017, somewhere like that, that the WordPress one was definitely the one that was the right one to focus on for various different reasons. So it means that the other two have kind of fallen by the wayside. There’s still content and lots of evergreen content on them. But I don’t do anything with them these days. So I would say probably seriously from about 2017. And that’s where I really dug deep into bringing various different kinds of content onto the channel and looking for my niche. I mean, when anyone that does anything to do with podcasts and YouTube or anything like that, you kind of have to find your niche and find your road and what makes you you and if that resonates with a potential audience, and if it does then embrace that side of things,

Chris Badgett: What is what is your niche, would you say and YouTube and WordPress and like what is the how would you describe your niche?

Paul Charlton: Definitely dynamic content. I mean, without a shadow of a doubt, I do other things. But once I kind of focused on doing dynamic content using various different tools, that was something that really wasn’t being served at all or if it was in very, very small minority’s, so using tools like advanced custom fields and crackerbox, jet engine and those kinds of things, to take WordPress beyond what it is it really intended to do, you know, people use page builders, and they use Guttenberg and things like that. And they’ll build blogs and build websites. And that’s great. I mean, that’s kind of where it came from. But there’s so much more you can do with it.

But when you rely upon third party tools, like you know, a listing theme plugin that goes with it, you’re always confined to what they want to allow you to do was I always kind of like, I prefer to look at how can I actually build my own. So I have the flexibility, which kind of goes back to that rapid application side of things with Dreamweaver back when I was doing that kind of thing. So I kind of approached WordPress from that side. And that’s really where my channel kind of started to take off in a more niche orientated way is dynamic content and the related services and tools that kind of go with it.

Chris Badgett: Could you describe dynamic content? And some use cases for somebody that doesn’t know what that is?

Paul Charlton: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you take a sort of simple example that most of us are probably used to, which is something like a real estate website, or you know, a sort of like a property sales website. WordPress is not really geared towards building something like that. However, WordPress is used for it. And to do that, you’ve either got to use a tool that allows you to create listings, but you kind of you’re limited in what you can do there with with a tool like advanced custom fields, which is allows you to create meta fields, which are basically your title, your content, basically, every field inside WordPress is a meta field, you can create custom post types. And if you look at WordPress, your posts, your pages, WooCommerce products, all of those are custom post types.

So you just you can create your own custom post types, you can connect your own custom meta fields, so you can basically build a combination of anything. So a real estate website, you’re going to have a property, you’re going to have your agent inside your property, you’re going to have the square footage, you’re going to have an image gallery, you’re going to have the price, you know, inside your agent, you’re going to have various other things inside their contact details, and so on. And then one of the beautiful things about using tools like this is you can then connect the agent or agents to the property or properties.

So all those kinds of things are dynamically generated content links, that connect up to the WordPress database. It sounds kind of complex, but the reality is once you start to step into that world and and see how these things actually combined, you can take it from being really simple to just, you know, adding a couple of extra fields into your normal WordPress posts, right, the way up to creating business listings, creating, you know, car sales websites, job listing boards, pretty much anything you can imagine, you can do that using the combination of tools that allow you to tap into custom post types and dynamic meta information and things like that. So I hope that kind of explains it in a little bit. Anyway,

Chris Badgett: Those core, I think people really look up to you too, because you have a, like an honest take of best tool for the job kind of thing. What I mean, maybe we could look at page builders, or maybe we could look more broadly at WordPress as a whole, like, how do you choose your tools? And how do you? Where’s WordPress going? Like, what do you see right now? And how is your what’s your journey been like in terms of selecting Tools and figuring out what to use? Because there’s so many options out there.

Paul Charlton: There are absolutely millions of combinations, I think, to me, it’s a case of there’s a couple of different aspects, I tend to look at tools that meet a need that I might have at a particular time. And then I’ll test out a range of tools, if it’s a viable thing to do, you know, obviously, there’s lots of costs involved in various different things. But I’ll try various different tools that kind of get a feel for where they are. And then I’ll kind of work with those and see how I can combine those with other tools.

So I mean, started off with Elementor Pro, for example, when they brought out version two that brought in dynamic information, you can do the dynamic tags, that allowed you to connect it up to advanced custom fields and some other tools like that. So that was a nice combination that opened the door and still opens the door to a lot of people that want to kind of get into that side of things, and probably would be my still be my tool of choice for a lot of different projects. But I think where we’re going with working with dynamic content and WordPress in general, as much as I may not have liked it originally, I think Guttenberg is the way that we’re having to move forward. And not specifically for Guttenberg itself but now I’m finding there’s a lot of tools are starting to embrace.

That kind of link between WordPress is database and the features you can you can use inside the database and WordPress itself. They’re now being integrated into block level tools. So for example, you’ve got things like stackable you’ve got cadence blocks, generate blocks, or if you want something that’s probably closer to a tool like elemental is quickly And the reason I kind of think that that’s the direction to go in is that they’re giving you the benefit of removal from the excessive code base that you have when it comes to working with page builders.

But they’re now getting to the point where they do have a more a more visual way of working up until now Gutenberg itself is still very limited when it comes to the connection between what you design on the one side in the in the back end of your website to what you see on the front end. And these are kind of starting to bridge that gap a little bit better, and getting closer to what a lot of people are used to, with page builders and so on.

And they’re also expanding into a lot more dynamic data, you know, relations between, like I say, you between your sort of agent and between your property, that relationship between those, and some of the more advanced features. So I think moving forward, that’s something that I think is definitely going to grow. Because there’s a lot bigger market, I think, now for Gutenberg than it probably was a couple of years ago.

But choosing tools, it really comes down to testing and finding what works well. You know, I’m in an enviable position where I can do that, you know, whether I purchased them myself, I can’t take the company to ask them, Can I test things out? Most of the time, it is a case I’ll just buy them and try them unless they’re stupid money. And find out what tools work well in combination look for a scenario and think, How can I approach that on what tools would do that job.

And then look into how viable it is to create something around that idea that concept as it were, so nothing really any different, I wouldn’t have thought to what most people are doing your your test the tools out, you’ll try a free version, if it’s available. If you like the way it works, you’ll then look at is the paid upgrade worth investing in and then kind of move on from there?

Chris Badgett: I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that what you’re saying it’s like best tool for the job, which starts for the job with the job instead of the tool because I don’t know I see and tool sometimes people get kind of tribal but the people that build the best sites are really just vetting requirements and then doing the best they can with whatever they find.

Paul Charlton: Yeah, tribalism, tribalism is something that is I think, rife in the WordPress space when it comes, especially when it comes to page builders, there seems to be a real tribalism, that once someone’s bought into that product, that all other products outside it should never be looked at. And then we discussed them talk and you kind of think, but surely, you know, that might be good for job a but Job B that might not be a good fit. And I kind of always champion, don’t limit yourself to one tech stack, you know, one set of tools. You look at the job and you think right, what’s the best solution for that job. And then you use those tools, and not try to shoehorn what you are used to working with, you know, should you hold the job into it as it were?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s, that’s really wise. Tell us about the the transition to course creation, when did that start or the idea to make some courses.

Paul Charlton: I’ve toyed with the idea of making courses for for quite some time. But talking to different content creators and course creators. One of the key things that I think when it comes to something like the tech space, which is moving very, very fast, you know, WordPress, where it is now to where it is tomorrow to where it is in a year’s time. It’s a very volatile market and a lot of ways. So the one thing that’s kind of always put me off is I don’t want to start creating a course.

Because if you’re gonna do a course properly, it’s not something that takes you a couple of weeks. It’s something that the planning, the execution, the recording, the editing, all those things will generally take me at least a couple of months. So it’s looking for for content that becomes viable, longer term evergreen content, or creating something that maybe isn’t low level, as you’re like, This is the specific thing or things that you do, it’s more going from a higher level to give people the ability to absorb a technique, and then doesn’t matter what tools they decide to use.

So I’ve been toying with it for probably probably the last four or five years, but not really knowing what direction to go in. And not really having a way of being able to validate the idea or ideas that I might not come up with until probably the last two, two and a half years when I created the Facebook group and started taking the WP dash channel on what I do and making it less about WP tats and more about me, if that makes sense not to sound egotistical.

But prior to that it was faceless. You look at my earlier videos from probably about three years ago, and they’re all just screen capture. And that makes it difficult to go and create a connection with your audience, your potential students as it were your potential customers whenever you kind of want to call them but changing that aspect of things given me the ability to be able to do the research with the potential buyers of any course or courses that I put out there has been invaluable in this helped me take an idea and see how viable it is. So probably about the last three to four years with any real sort of conviction

Chris Badgett: that What, um, it’s a challenge. I know just in teaching WordPress, if you get into tools, and all of a sudden there’s an update some changes, or you decide to use a different tool or whatever. So what how do you think about evergreen? Like, I know you have a course called the client lifecycle that’s more about building a web design business, right?

Paul Charlton: Less about building a web design business, but more about how you would approach working with clients in the real world. I spent probably the last 1415 years working with clients. And obviously during that time, I’ve stumbled across different things, I’ve sort of like come across situations that I’ve handled in one way and have a better ways to handle it and how you highlight Red Red Flag clients, you know, people that are not going to be a good fit for you and various different aspects. So to me that made a sort of logical potential course idea. I can’t say that I haven’t suffered from impostor syndrome with regards to that.

But I kind of wanted to look at it, how would you go from the point of someone contacting you as a potential client to the end of a point of delivery, but not focusing at any point on how you physically build the website? I’ve already covered that in multiple videos in this, there’s 1000s of videos up on YouTube, that’ll show you how to technically build a WordPress website and probably any niche you want.

So this was more about how do you actually handle that contact? The various different ways they’ll contact you? How do you check to see if a potential client is going to be a good fit for you? How do you handle contracts, the importance of contracts, right the way through to, we’ve now finished the website, you’ve signed the website off, what now. And that’s kind of why the client lifecycle whether it’s the name will stay, but the client lifecycle course, is more overview and showing you how and why you want to put processes into place as opposed to just be in. This is when a client comes in do X, Y, and Zed? I don’t really think for a lot of users. That’s any real use.

Chris Badgett: What about the design system? For designers? It first start with what is the design system design is one of your super skills, I think, from the outside looking in. So what was what is the design system? And how do you help them with that?

Paul Charlton: Design System. Again, this is one of those ones that is more about the principles and the processes than it is about the nitty gritty. But a design system can be something as simple as just having a sheet in front of you or digital sheet or suddenly want a website that has the colors, the typography, the font sizes, you use an any specific CSS that you might use for styling, things like drop shadows, interactions and things like that, something really, really simple.

And that’s probably what most people are, you’re used to, which isn’t technically a design system, it’s more of a style guide. But a style guide kind of is a part of a design system, which is a bigger kind of overarching sort of system, where you kind of look at things. And once you’ve kind of got those simple technical things out of the way, then design systems are going to be things like the language and terminology that may be used.

It can be the tone of voice, it can be the feeling that you try to encompass in a user when they visit the site. And if you look at things like the material Guide, which you think is this Google’s material Guide, which is freely available, and there’s ones for Shopify, and if you do just do a search for design system, Shopify design systems, you know, Google and things like that Microsoft, there are design systems out there that are hundreds and hundreds of pages and is all the iconography they use and all the different inside that and the terminologies, the language, the feelings, the emotions, and all these infants decimal amounts of different things.

And that’s what a design system can be. You can go for something as simple as just having your styles and colors and CSS and any code snippets, right the way up to having something really complex. So if you’re working on a project for yourself, you may just do something really simple, then when you come back in a year or two years time, and you think I want to make some changes, but I can’t remember what specific hex colors are used or typography and those kinds of things.

You’ve got that available to you. But it’s more useful when you’re working then with clients where you may not go back to the website for a couple of years. And then by the time you go back there, it’s a bit of a faff to go around and find out all the different things that you set up, when you could have one simple document there.

So the design system for designers course was more about if you are building websites, this is the reason why you may want to look at design systems. And you can go from something really simple, all the way up to something really more complex. Or you can just combine whatever elements you take away from it yourself to just speed up your design process to speed up your updating process. And, you know, if you’re working with teams, you’re outsourcing these things can be invaluable, but a lot of people don’t know about them or don’t use them.

Chris Badgett: Just to get some contrast, what if somebody’s like a newer website builder and they get they get into page builders and stuff and they have no concept of design system? What can go wrong?

Paul Charlton: I mean, one of the biggest things where you kind of get into problems is where you started dealing with things that are Like, when it comes to building sites, we got a range of different units that you can use, for example, you’ve got your pixels, you’ve got M’s, you’ve got rams, and a multitude of different things.

If you don’t know to start off with what’s being used, so let’s say you inherited design from someone else, you may not know what any of that means. And then when you suddenly look at it, you go, I just really have no idea what’s going on here, because I’m changing something here and it should be changing, but it’s not making a difference. And that could be down to something as simple as you’re trying to work in one value, whereas the actual site has been set up in using a different set of values. So it’s a really simple example.

But once you if you have a style guide, if you inherited that from someone else, and you can see that style guide you so your base font is this size, and then everything else is based from that using percentages, or AMS and rams, which are just values for how they work with that base value of 16 pixels, for example, using design systems can make that whole process much, much easier.

Because it means you can just say quickly look at it, you can just go Ah, right, that’s what they’re doing, I can see now that I need to change that to have the impact what I want, whereas I’d been trying to change something else, and it’s not doing what I want, really simple example. But also things like changing global colors, you know, once you kind of understand what the color system has been used, and how they interact with each other, and maybe naming conventions they’ve used for different color values, because you can use different naming conventions that are sort of globalized.

There’s a lot of benefits for using things like that. And if you don’t, and you inherit something or you know, you were looking to start working with these, because you know that you’re going to be offloading this to someone else. Just having that understanding of what these different terms and how they impact upon the design and the aesthetic, and all those kinds of things moving forward. Those are all things that using a design system, even its most simple form can just alleviate a lot of stress and frustrations moving forward.

Chris Badgett: Just one more thing on that where did where do people kind of capture a design system, I mean, it could be a webpage on a website, it’s a figma file, it’s a PDF, or like where to where did these live?

Paul Charlton: They can live anywhere. I mean, if you were sort of you’re working as part of a collaborative team, that it makes sense to have some kind of centralized location. And that could be a private page on a WordPress website, it could be somewhere that you’ve got set up as part of your, your design agency, you might have a section that you can say this is login with these details, it’ll give you access to client a and inside there, there’s all the design system review. So you can quickly see what the assets that they’ve got. So there are their branding and logos, the colors, typography, units of measurement, and so on.

It’s really up to you. And it could be something as simple as just a Google Doc that you share with other people, the method that you use to combine that information is less important than actually go into the time and effort of combining that information and creating that document to start off with. So the method you use whatever works for you, as an individual, a freelancer or an agency, whatever you you kind of brand yourself as use whatever works and scale up if need be, but make it somewhere that you can share it should you need to so starting off with something like Google Docs might be a good starting point. Because it’s free, and everybody can set up a Gmail account and access a file that you might put on it.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Well, shifting gears, if there’s like another creator out there, like you’re really inspiring as a creator. And let’s say they’re even in the WordPress niche, I know you’re you kind of had the wisdom of a niche within a niche, like dynamic content is kind of your thing. If somebody has some other unrelated niche or and they’re there just to just inspire creators in general, how do you think about monetization and all this? Because you can get really busy like being a YouTuber, a course creator, working with clients, just having fun researching and like exploring your passion? How do you come up with a monetization plan around all this without exploding?

Paul Charlton: I think in the same way, you probably would, when it comes down to setting up any kind of business, when I moved away from being a partner in a company to set up become a freelancer. And ultimately, I mean, I really don’t work with clients that often I work with existing clients, but I don’t take new clients on. But obviously most of my work is now YouTube and things like that. So I think you should approach this in exactly the same way you would any other business is if you look at putting all of your eggs in that one basket you don’t look at how do I monetize various different streams, then you need to go back and look at that.

Because even using something as simple as a web design freelancer, there are lots of different revenue streams that you can attach to that kind of role and exactly the same whether you’re doing YouTube, and a lot of creators will will do just that there’ll be creators in the fact that they’ve got a web design agency or a freelancer but they’ll also be content creators.

You look at a lot of people that are not necessarily have the same level of viewership as a lot of the sort of the high end WordPress youtubers do you know up into sort of 250 300 1000s but I don’t think you need that. You know, if you look at some of the classy smaller creators cuz I think that’s disrespectful. But you look at some of the creators that don’t necessarily have such a broad audience as some of the higher level ones do. They are getting contacted with job requests. And that’s because they put in content sharing their knowledge, and they have a web design agency.

So I think you look at it in such a way that whatever you kind of look to do you look at what are the avenues that can potentially bring in revenue. So if you’re a web design, freelancer, we’ll stick with that analogy. You’ve got your hosting, you’ve got your domain registrations, you’ve got maintenance plans, care plans, updates, but then you can look at what content creation can you do, you know, blog entries, can create YouTube videos, even if you don’t want to go on screen and do it, you know, you can do screen capture.

Most computers these days will be able to get some software, if it’s not already part of your OS, that cost you a couple of pounds, couple of dollars. And you can start screen recording, pick up yourself a cheap, cheap USB mic, and develop that. Because there’s lots of ways in which you can combine these different avenues to all bring it into the one thing.

And the same goes with, you know, if you are an agency, and you are finding that you’re building up an audience, you don’t need a massive audience to make a life changing amount of money, you know, you can easily start to create courses, you’ve got things like Udemy, you’ve got Skillshare, you can create your own, you know, there’s plenty of different WordPress plugins, as you well know, to do with learning management systems, you know, all those kinds of things, the tools are there, and you can get started for such a little amount of money. But always look at what actually all leads back to the same thing, which is the information, the knowledge or the skills that you currently have that you can monetize, and then just go for the different avenues.

You know, for me, for example, there’s, you know, there’s YouTube, but that was monetized to start off with when you’re making five, five pounds about like $7, that’s not going to go to change the world. So you kind of have to look at what else can you do. But there are people out there with audiences as small as a couple of 1000. Or they’re making six figure sums, because they’re sharing knowledge that people want to know about. And once they have trust in them, they’ll contact them for paid work, they’ll contact and sort of want to pay for courses or ebooks or PDFs or one to one training sessions consultations. There’s 1,000,001 different ways that once you show any expertise that you can turn that skill and passion into a monetizable avenue for generating revenue. I think that answers the question. Yeah, that’s awesome.

Chris Badgett: Let’s look at marketing in particular. And, and but also, like you mentioned, you had a Facebook group, what was the decision to start that? And then how do you think about marketing?

Paul Charlton: The Facebook group was something that I looked into probably a couple of years ago and and thought I’m really missing a trick here. You know, a lot of people ask the same questions. There’s a lot of the same faces that are popping up in the comments and stuff like that on on YouTube, and different places on on Twitter and stuff. So you can make it well, it would make so much more sense. Instead of having to answer the same question in maybe three or four different platforms to put something together where to start off with, I can be involved in and help out. But then if it grows, then everybody starts to help everybody else out, you know, in the same way the forums used to do it before and you different methods of doing it.

So I set that that up. And that is organically grown, we’re just about to hit 10,000 sort of members on the it’s a very active group. But it has a lot of really good things. It has the fact that there’s a great community inside there that help each other out, which means that I don’t have to be the person that tries to answer everything. Because there’s only so much that I know that needs so much time I’ve got to be able to invest in learning and answering questions.

There’s so many great people on there that are giving their time to answer questions help and have fun. And that’s been amazing. So that was one of the most important things I think I did. But it also gave me a really great place for me to do marketing, by market. And I don’t mean, you know, buy this product or buy that product marketing, to me is more a case of it’s a two way thing.

It’s where I ask people, What do they want? What are they looking for what’s not being served right now, is the value in you creating either a tutorial for free, or a paid course or something like that, I can get feedback in the space of 24 hours from my demographic target market. And I can find out the proof of whether that’s something to pursue, or Sunday to think okay, we’ll just leave that where it is. And that’s pretty much the only marketing I do, obviously, email marketing, but that’s I think that’s still tied to the Facebook group tied to the YouTube channel, and giving things away for free on the website, like like checklists and things that help people and bringing value to that side of things.

When it comes to like paid advertising and so on. I’ve never really been that interested in doing it because you can spend an awful lot of money and I know you can sort of you can really hone and fine tune exactly where you go with this. But I would much rather keep a smaller audience of people that I know are exactly the people that I want to work with, then go down that shedding money out for Facebook ads for YouTube advertising. So with that in the future, maybe. But I don’t really have aspirations at this point in time to becoming a global power when it comes to online education. You know,

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Just for a data point there, how long did it take you to get to 10,000 members in your group?

Paul Charlton: Probably about three years, which seems like a long time. But again, I would much rather have a group of people that are passionate about what we talk about. And it’s biggest, it’s more of a community. That’s the nice thing about there’s a lot of people in there that are commenting in the Facebook, they’re commenting on the YouTube videos, they’re involved in the live streams, you see them on Twitter, they message me and email me and things like that.

And it’s nice to kind of feel that there’s a lot of people that come back and forth there because they enjoy the atmosphere and the vibe, as it were, of the group and the people that are there. And you can see this different people have made genuine friendships, when you go into the live stream, and you see the same names and faces that are in that group, welcome each other and it’s little conversations going on, but the sight of what you’re actually talking about and for me, that’s that’s something that I think is massively important.

I kind of work on that 1000 true fans sort of analogy where I would much rather have 1000 people that really enjoy what I do what I produced, and those kinds of things, then have a million people of most of which couldn’t care less. It’s just because of vanity figures that and I think that’s kind of a bit of a fool’s errand. Yeah, it

Chris Badgett: sounds like, I mean, that’s a healthy indicator of a strong niche community, people talk to each other, and it’s not about the size. What about your approach to team? If Am I correct in assuming you’re, you’re you like to run a tight ship? That’s not like this big company? Or do you have tons of team members supporting?

Paul Charlton: You? Know, there’s me, it’s just me.

Chris Badgett: And is that me? Is that a conscious choice? Like, I just want to do my thing? And like, Are you like a strong solopreneur? Like, it’s, I just want to do it that style? Or do you have intention to, to like grow a big team or something like that.

Paul Charlton: I don’t have intention to grow a big team. At this point in time, I don’t think managing people is a strength that I have. So at this point, I can manage what I’m doing, however, set. That being said, My ideal scenario is not just me, but my partner as well, I wanted to be a family thing. She’s great in design and she’s great in sort of marketing and promotion, and things like that. And that’s where I see the business in the next two years is that my partner comes on board that she’s an integral part of the business. And if at that point, then it makes sense to look for outsourcing for video editing, or you know, things like that.

There are so many sort of like software service applications and things out there that you can literally automate a big chunk of what I need to do like translations, and so on. I don’t feel the need at this point in time. But that’s not to say that in the future, I wouldn’t. I just, I think maybe my OCD aspect is a little bit sort of finding people that have the same passion for what you do as you do is a very difficult thing to do. So relinquishing that kind of control to somewhere that maybe I wouldn’t have that same kind of passion. I’m a little hesitant at this point in time. But that’s never to say that it won’t happen in the future, just immediate plans. That’s not something I’m looking to do right now.

Chris Badgett: Any hard lessons like on your journey here as a creator, as an education entrepreneur, that if you could go back in time, I mean, it You sound really positive, and everything’s a learning experience. But is there any like lesson you learned that, that your if you could go back, you’d care not to repeat.

Paul Charlton: I can’t say this isn’t a not to repeat side of things. But I think there’s one thing that I kind of, I have to take away from, from the YouTube side of things, because that’s kind of that that to me is the sort of the the seed that allows these other things to kind of grow is that I would have niched down earlier, because to start off with you look at what other channels are doing, and it’s very easy to go out, just emulate what they do, because they’re having success. And the reality is, people don’t necessarily buy into their channels because of the content they buy into them because of the people that are involved.

Which kind of leads me to the second point, which is for the first probably four to five years of the WP dash channel. It was faceless. You know, it was literally, I wasn’t on the thumbnails. I wasn’t in the videos or anything at all. So I made a conscious effort to change that. And that is where I started to see more growth. And the sort of third thing that I wish I’d done earlier, is actually have an opinion.

Because even though I had an opinion on various different things I’ve talked about, I’ve tended to keep those things out of the videos. Whereas the one thing I find out is people want to know what your opinion is, they might disagree with it, they might think you’re talking rubbish. But they still like to know that you have an opinion and have a talking point in the comment section in the live streams, wherever you’re doing, that can kind of come across and say what their point of view is.

Those are kinds of things that I wish I had done earlier. So if anybody is thinking of getting into this side of things, seriously, consider how you position your brand, whether your brand is you, or whether you want your brand to be faceless. And if it’s faceless, there’s a set of challenges that kind of come with that. And if I’d known that earlier, and I’d had the confidence to not care so much about going on the camera, I would have done that much earlier. Yeah, those are probably the key things that I take away from where I am right now. And what I wish I’d done earlier in my career with it.

Chris Badgett: All right, that’s awesome. And last kind of series of questions, just rapid fire about as a YouTuber and as a creator. And I’m sure some of the answers are, it depends. But how many videos per week do you do? Or would you recommend, in general, if somebody’s gonna get serious about YouTube?

Paul Charlton: It depends on sorry, hit straightaway. I think I think it really comes down to the content that you create. If longer form content makes sense, then spend the time to create one good quality longer form content video per week, if you can, if it takes longer, that’s fine if you’re already on your journey, but traction is only going to come when you have a consistency. If you’re creating shorter form content, that I would say bare minimum of two, ideally, three, if you can go above that. But try to set yourself realistic goals that you can maintain longer term, don’t do something you think I start with five videos a week. And I’m going to do that for the next year.

Because the reality is once you get to week three, and four and five, and your ideas are running a little bit low, and your motivation is very low, because you get three views on your video, you will very quickly wish you hadn’t gone down that route. So think seriously longer term, what it is you’re trying to achieve.

And then plan your video shedule. Around that longer form content can be less because potential for longer watch time, shorter form content quicker to sort of process and batch it if you can get as many as you can nd even if it’s just the record inside, you can edit editing is something you can do when you’re sat there watching TV. But the record inside of it is something that takes your full concentration to do so try to batch that if you can, and then edit at your leisure.

Chris Badgett: It looks like you do both long form like hour plus and more short form like 10 to 20 minutes kind of stuff. What is the ideal length? Or how do you think about those two different formats like what makes the big epic video versus the 15 minute one,

Paul Charlton: It really comes down to whether I want to do something as simple as demonstrate a tool or feature or some aspect of something that I like, they’ll tend to be shorter form, whereas the ones that I generally call more masterclass ones, which are the more in depth, multi tool kinds of tutorials, they just naturally lend themselves to be in longer format. I will be honest, I don’t generally tend to worry too much about the length or the duration of the videos these days. It’s not something I plan to make a long video a short video, sometimes I sit down with an idea, I start recording the idea after sort of a just outlining what I want to do. And they run for an hour, an hour and a half.

It’s rare, but they can do. I think it just you got to look at the topic, can you do justice to whatever it is you’re trying to create in 10 minutes. And if you can try to do it in 10 minutes. But if all you’re gonna do is make assumptions of knowledge skirt over really key things, because one of the things you’ll find, when it comes to creating more complex tutorials, is you can not to emphasize one key point that has a massive knock on effect. And someone misses that and then they get three quarters worth of the tutorial.

And something doesn’t work because they didn’t catch something that was really vital back at the beginning of it because you didn’t emphasize that point enough. So do justice to what it is you’re trying to do. But don’t necessarily worry so much about the duration. If you like the short form content and your content fits into that into manageable bite sized pieces go with it if longer form is what you need to do that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And how how do you approach video editing? Do you try to like are you like one of these guys? It’s like 10x the amount of video time to edit it or do you try to do it like as fast as possible and you’re okay with a margin of mistakes and hums and ahhs and all that. Yeah, just tell us about your editing standards or process.

Paul Charlton: Let’s go back to my OCD is it I changed over from Windows and PCs to Apple about two years ago, primarily when the new sort of M one Max came out, because they were getting, you know, sort of really solid reviews when it comes to working with Final Cut Pro. And I always found that when I was working with the Adobe suite with premiere on a PC, it was really painful to work with when you want to put any graphics and zooms, and just little things that I think make educational content so much easier to understand.

Moved over to the MAC, which means that I’m now totally 100% Apple Final Cut Pro is just just flies through the editing side of things. So I tend to find now that I probably spend less time editing that I did three to four years ago. But my editing is much better than it was that time ago. Because I could just sort of focus on creating something I do cut out pretty much all the the arms and the arms. Although if I’m honest, there’s not that many in there.

Because I’m kind of used to doing this. Now I’ve been doing it for so long and teaching, you kind of move away from that same thing. So, you know, pause is the when you click on something on screen, you have to wait for door, but I cut all those bits and pieces out. And I record multicam. So in other words, I record the screen recording, and I record the camera that you can kind of see right now. And then I can use that together, combine it link the time lines up together. And then I can just switch back and forth, which allows me to hide cuts, without any real problem.

You know, so there’s this little tricks that you can use, if you are editing and you don’t like those jump cuts, where you go from being like looking at it to look it over there and saying something weird. You know, there’s lots of little tricks that you find. So I would probably say, if I looked at the video I did this morning, which is a 15 minute video, I probably spent an hour editing it. So if you kind of use that it’s about four times the runtime versus the editing time in general. But I can kind of fly through this pretty quickly. You know, with that side of things, I’ve got a pretty streamlined way of approaching it.

Chris Badgett: And what’s your approach to comments? Like? Is that some you get YouTube comments you get into that daily? Or how do you think about comments?

Paul Charlton: I’ve got only 750 videos on the channel. And one of the things that YouTube doesn’t really do is he doesn’t keep you up to date with all the comments you can, as you can imagine, with videos like that, if you say there’s one comment per video, there’s 750 comments coming in every single day. But the reality is YouTube probably pulls up 25 or 30. And generally they’re on your, your top videos or your new videos. So I look at them. And if I think there’s something that needs to be answered, I’ll try my best to answer them.

But the fact of the matter is, there’s only so much that you can kind of do while still trying to create content, research, edit videos, you know, all those kinds of things. So I do try to get involved with most of the time, if people are asking questions, like, you know, how do I build a website using so and so it’s like, you’re better off going to the Facebook group? Because chances are, you’re gonna get a better answer in there. If I can answer it, I will. But I think as your channel grows, you invariably have less time to be able to answer questions and comments, but I try to answer some as often as possible if I can.

Chris Badgett: All right, last YouTuber question for you, Paul. You have an awesome looking studio. How do you not necessarily all the specifics of the tech and the gear? But obviously you kind of have like your Creator sanctuary of productivity? How do you think about your production space where you make your content and your videos?

Paul Charlton: Well, up until probably the end of last year, I was sort of shooting things inside the room in the house, you know, much the same as probably most anybody that’s sort of creating YouTube content, especially at the beginning, where you don’t have a dedicated space as it were. So that was great. But the problem was a lot of that was to do with natural light, you’re in the house, just like you got a dog there and you baby, it’s like all these things kind of lead to how the hell can I get a quiet environment to be able to record something, so it wasn’t conducive in the slightest, but it had served well for 600 Odd videos, so I can’t complain about it.

So it just means that when I had the opportunity, when we found out that we were going to have a baby, my first thing after the sort of celebrations and stuff was like, right, I need to find some other way now. And it’s a choice of either going out and renting space, which I again have no control over and I’m limited to what I could do or how can I actually get space in in our house in you know what we own kind of thing.

So as it was this is basically my garage three quarters converted into a studio had totally sound proofed inside here, you know, so it means that I can now literally just walk in, switch the camera, everything on to the computer in bits and pieces, and I could be recording a video in the space of five minutes and I’m ready to go straight away. But that’s an enviable position to be in, you know, and it was it was sort of necessity meant that I had to find a solution. But, you know, sometimes you don’t have that that luxury veil to do something like that.But what I would always say to anybody that’s either looking to get into doing this or they’re already doing and kind of morons, make the best of what you’ve got.

There are tools that they like, for example, this room, even though it’s not particularly big, there is an echo, which you can probably hear on the live stream on what we’re doing right now. But if you listen to the videos, you don’t get any of that, because there are tools out there that allow you to get rid of any of that kind of reverb and echo and things. And it’s like, you want to make yourself look and sound better, you don’t need to spend huge amounts of money, there are tools out there to do just that.

So my audio sounds better on the camera wise, you can pick yourself up, you can use your phone, you know, use it use an iPhone, for example, or an Android phone, they’ve got amazing cameras on this set that up, you can get noise reduction, you don’t need expensive gear, you can be up and running. For literally buy yourself a little lavalier mic that plugs into the bottom of your phone, use natural light and use your photo to it you can be up and running, you know, without any real problem, that they have to be the best videos in the world.

Now, if you’re giving good information and good knowledge, and your audio is clear, nobody cares. Really, they don’t use some of the best performing videos, I’ve had other ones that I’ve literally set things up quickly, and just run the video off and not given any thought to it. And they’ve performed brilliantly. So as long as your audio is clear, and you’re explaining or you’re giving information as valuable to someone or people, the rest of it doesn’t matter. You know, it doesn’t just I’m lucky that I’m in a position that I could build something like this and now I have a dedicated space to do it. But this has become my job. So I need somewhere that I can, you know, hopefully look good, sounds good and allows me to operate as effective as I possibly can be. So I think that as the question

Chris Badgett: does love it. That’s Paul Charlton. Go find him at WP tuts on YouTube and the website is WP tuts.co.uk anywhere else for the people to connect with you or final words for the people out there.

Paul Charlton: I mean, if you want to connect with me, I mean the easiest thing to do with this there’s Twitter, which is WP tetes literally just go on to you on to Google and just type in WP tats and other than the theme, which I didn’t design, pretty much everything else you’ll find on there is going to be me. But if you are interested in finding out more, join the Facebook group. Just do a search on there for WP tetes and get involved that fantastic community and you can find out more about what I do. You can get involved in answering any kind of questions about future content courses, training material, anything like that. There’s lots of places to get in touch.

Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming on the show. Paul would really appreciate it.

Paul Charlton: Absolutely. My pleasure. Thanks for asking me.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifter lms.com For slash gift go to lifter lms.com forward slash gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post Education Entrepreneur Paul Charlton Helps People Build Powerful Dynamic Websites appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

In the podcast interview, Sherry Walling from Zen Founder podcast shares her personal experiences with grief and how it has affected her as a business owner. After losing both her father to cancer and her brother. Sherry found herself immersed in a world of sickness, mental illness.

Sherry Walling is a clinical psychologist. She’s the author of Touching Two Worlds her new book. Sherry Walling also has a great book called The Entrepreneurs guide to keeping your shit together. And sherry is the host of the Zen founder podcast.

This prompted her to start writing about her experiences with grief, leading to the publication of a book on the topic. Sherry also discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a significant increase in the number of people experiencing grief.

This grief can stem from the loss of plans, security, or even health and safety. Sherry refers to this as the “strange world of grief,” as it can feel like an alternative reality that exists alongside our everyday lives.

Sherry believes that it is important to talk about grief and to recognize its impact on entrepreneurs and business owners. By acknowledging and addressing grief, we can better support ourselves and each other as we navigate difficult times. By doing so, we can work to create a more understanding and supportive business community.

Episode TranscriptChris Badgett
You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch and scale, a high value online training program, I’m your guide Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. stay to the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast, I’m joined by a special repeat guest. Her name is Sherry Walling, she’s a clinical psychologist. She’s the author of touching to Worlds her new book, she also has a great book called The Entrepreneurs guide to keeping your shit together, which is amazing. And she’s the host of the Zen founder podcast. Welcome back on the show, Sherry.

Sherry Walling
Good to be with you, Chris. Thanks for having me.

Chris Badgett
I’m really excited to kind of go into taboo land today with the education entrepreneurs, as I call them out there, who are pretty busy people, they pour a lot into their courses, or maybe they’re running an agency building sites. And sometimes I get so busy, they kind of fly over grief or it becomes inevitable. everybody deals with it. And it’s kind of one of those things that people don’t talk about a lot. So I’m really excited to get into it with you today. Can you give us the setup? How did you ended up focusing on this topic?

Sherry Walling
Yeah, I, I wrote this book, I started writing this book, a few weeks after my dad was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. So he had the kind of stage four sort of nightmare cancer where your life changes in a day. And he lived 18 months from his initial diagnosis to his eventual death. And right alongside my Dad’s experience, his illness. My brother, who was, you know, in his very early 30s, really took a deep dive into his own experience with alcohol addiction and depression. And we ended up losing him to suicide six months to the day after we lost my dad. So I went from being a person with a pretty sort of intact family, to someone who was really spent several years just immersed in sickness and mental illness and hospitals, it’s in all this stuff. And then eventually, you know, these two deaths.

So I was really aware of how it was shaping me as a business owner as a, you know, a writer, a podcaster, somebody who does a lot in public was suddenly confronted with this big personal story that I felt like I needed to, to wade into. And so writing has always helped me, I started writing really for myself, but wrote so much. And, you know, to be honest, I wrote so thoughtfully, and was able to bring in my clinical experience that, you know, this book is sort of my my gift to others, is there, inevitably, at some point in similar kinds of situations.

Chris Badgett
In addition to losing a loved one, you wrote an article about the great resignation and grief, can you tell us just a little bit of the setup around that?

Sherry Walling
Yeah, so I think we, we think about grief, I certainly initially thought about grief as like the emotional response to death. And of course, it’s much bigger than that. It’s the emotional response to any kind of loss. And, you know, as an entrepreneur, who, you know, is hiring a team or interacting with other people, a lot of us have experienced these big shifts in work life that have correlated with COVID.

Right, of course, everybody had to work remotely, whether they wanted to or not, some people like to, some people didn’t, but it kind of created this, like existential crisis for many, many people around how they wanted to spend their time and how they wanted work to fit into their life. And so the grief of COVID, right, the loss of plans, the loss of security, the loss of all of our rhythms, and for many people, the loss of health or safety or actual life, really shifted a lot of our assumptions about how work happens. And so, you know, lots of people are not returning to work. We saw the greatest number of resignations last year, and I think that that response is really grief driven, more than anything else.

Chris Badgett
You call it I read somewhere the strange world of grief. What is what makes it strange.

Sherry Walling
I think for me, I felt like I’ve been catapulted to this other world like Stranger Things. Fans may be familiar with the upside down, right? There’s this world that we all operate in. That’s like a You know, interacting with kids building my business do in my deal like living the life that appears on my Google Calendar.

But then there’s this other world, my book is called touching two worlds because of this other world of like, life and death and strain and deep pain, like just, it feels like an alternative reality, that, for me, as a young mother, with young children, someone building a business like I was living in these two realities at one time. And so when I’m sitting in the hospital with people who are actively dying, I was just like, like, how did I get here? Like, it doesn’t feel like a place I should be. But it is a really important and really common place for humans to find themselves.

Chris Badgett
You mentioned relearning how to grieve to kids and babies, or just young people do a better job? And if that’s the case, has, have we gone awry with culture in some way? Or? Or how, like our, the modern world has, like taken a misstep in terms of the grieving process.

Sherry Walling
I feel like one of the gifts of children is that they feel their emotions, all in MeV interact with a toddler, they are 100% committed to whatever they’re feeling. They don’t have a story around, should I be feeling this? Am I feeling this for too long? Is this the right expression for my feeling, you know, they don’t have that sort of metacognitive mess that we grownups find ourselves in. And I think specifically around grief, we do have these weird cultural expectations around how people show up when they’re grieving, especially professionals, like people will go to their mother’s funeral on a Saturday and then be back in their office by Wednesday. And that’s not that unusual, people don’t get bereavement leave, there’s not a lot of flexibility.
There’s sort of this expectation, in western review us based culture that will sort of stoically shed a tear, and then get back to business. We don’t have, we don’t have like, a framework for how to cry, like scream to whale, and that’s, you know, as toddlers to say no. But we don’t have these big bodied, full emotional expressions of big emotions that I think we in some ways need a more comprehensive capacity to emote.

Chris Badgett
You mentioned, you know, going back to work if for ourselves, or if we employ people, what do you think is the healthy thing to offer to let’s say, as an employer, when somebody loses a loved one, what should we say? Like, what should we how much time take as much time as you need as kind of what I’ve always said, but is, how do we help our team when they’re involved in that?

Sherry Walling
I think flexibility is really helpful, like acknowledging that some days, it may feel really good to come to work, and just dive in to a solvable problem and put your head down and get shit done. And other days, it may feel absolutely impossible to do that. So I think, at least like this sort of six week period of flexibility of saying, hey, here are the projects that I really need you to get done work in your time.

You know, if it’s a Saturday, where you have the energy to do it, great, do it if there are other days where you don’t have it, like, okay, just be in dialogue with me. So I feel like flexibility is the most honoring thing. Because you know, as grief also can carry some like, big fuel, like big creativity, big drive, to be really alive to get things done to focus. I mean, it’s not just, I want to go in my dark room and cry all day. There’s some real gifts in grief in terms of our creativity and productivity. And so that’s where I feel like giving people the freedom and encouraging them to do the self evaluation of what do I have to offer today is the most compassionate course.

Chris Badgett
When does it start? Is it does it start in anticipation? So for example, if somebody’s ill, or you know, you have a limited amount of time, like when does it begin?

Sherry Walling
I think that there’s that is a long grief, right? There’s some grief that begins with the sickness, because right away, there’s a loss of health, right. My dad lost his eyelashes, as you know, as a side effect of chemotherapy, and that was like, this big, right? Oh my god, the eyelashes. So there’s all of these little griefs that you’re grieving along the way.

So knowing that someone is going to die, I think changes the timeline. grief for a lot of people, it doesn’t make the grief less, it just maybe distributes it differently. And and then when I lost my brother, we had some inkling that he could die, right. He was ill he was struggling, it was not unlike cancer and the kind of ups and downs of and then this happened and then that happened and and then he’s in the hospital for this, you know it is its own tumultuous illness. But because I wasn’t present with him when he died, like we didn’t really have it date, so to speak. That grief felt very different because it was, it was more traumatic, it was more shocking.

Chris Badgett
Or their flavors or different types of, for example, a pet or a family member, or let’s say a business ends or it stops growing, or the world is no longer feel safe. Like is it all the same thing? Or? Or is it are these kind of different?

Sherry Walling
I mean, I think grief is the emotional response to loss. And there are lots of emotions that go in the bucket of grief. Right? It can be rage, it can be a new joy, or a new connection to what’s important. So grief isn’t kind of one thing, it’s sort of like a bucket of feelings that are our reaction or response when we lose something. And so I kind of think of the mix differently. It’s a little cocktail, they get mixed differently for different kinds of losses for different people.

Chris Badgett
That makes sense. You mentioned it reshaped you. So how are you different now? When with this big kind of grief session? And how long ago was that six month period from this this time?

Sherry Walling
Yeah, my dad died in November of 2018. And my brother died in May of 2019. So that’s both long and short at the same time, like I don’t know, is that long ago or not long ago. There are several things that are that are pretty different about me. One is a real deepening of my own commitment to my own body, if that makes sense. Like feeling really, yeah, my health but also the enjoyment of my health. So I have this sort of side life as an aerialist as a circus artists, or it’s anybody who follows me on social media as well.

But um, that’s become really, really important to me in a way that it was like just sort of like an exercise thing that I did before grief. But now it feels like this embodied part of me is a deep part of who I am, and what I need in order to march forward in the world in the best way. So that sort of deep sense of gratitude for a healthy body and commitment to keeping it healthy, that that’s it’s different. That’s a shift for me.

I think I’m a lot more tolerant of living in the back and forth between those two worlds, like, I generally would consider myself a pretty positive sort of personality based positive person. And now I’m not uncomfortable with deep sadness, like, I go there all the time. And I live there, and I’m okay there. And that feels like a deepening of my emotional capacity. That didn’t exist before grief in the same way.

Chris Badgett
In broad brushstrokes. Do you see any trends? Where men and women just in general deal with grief differently? Do you notice anything there? Or is it not really I think

Sherry Walling
a lot of our social expectations get applied in any type of high stress situation. So I think men are really pulled into problem solving and fix it mode. And maybe women are more pulled into like the emotional caretaking. So there’s some kind of like social pressures. I don’t know how many of those are like, endemic or come from truly who we are or if that’s these are just roles that we play.

I think the the vulnerability of grief can feel less comfortable for men. I see a lot of men masking grief with alcohol with other substances where they’re sort of turning down the intensity. Or, again, kind of going into distract and avoid mode. I think women generally speaking again, this is sort of stereotypical, but women generally have a little bit more permission to be overly emotional. I wish that men had a little more space for that. Frankly, I think it’d be healthier for them.

Chris Badgett
You’ve done a lot of work with entrepreneurs, specifically that the entrepreneurs tend to have some issues with grief that are kind of ways they deal with it patterns you see,

Sherry Walling
I think entrepreneurs are like in the moment go kind of folks. And so I think they’re also really driven for the well being and care of their companies, right? They’re committed. And what can happen, I think easily with entrepreneurs is they just sort of skim over the top of grief. And it gets kind of pushed down. And it can be dormant later and cause problems later. So I think like all really, on the go, highly ambitious, folks.

Grief is a lot of work. It takes a lot of time. And it’s very complicated. And most entrepreneurs, I don’t think see the value in going through that process as much as they see the value in like, skipping over and getting back to work. In the short term, that might work just fine. In the long term, I think that does create some problems. I’ve worked with a lot of entrepreneurs who are having an event happen that triggers this grief reaction for the dad that they lost 10 years earlier, and they never really waded into all that they felt about that event.

Chris Badgett
What about cross culturally? I know, I know, some people that have gone to like Native American, like grief wailing ceremony things, is there any cultural examples, you know, of around the world where a certain group of people may have a healthier relationship with grief? And what does that look like?

Sherry Walling
Yeah, I mean, there are several examples that come to mind. But even in even among my Jewish friends, the practice of sitting Shiva and the fact that it’s there’s a week long, at least seven day period where the family sort of just sits in Wait, and people come and visit. But it’s, it’s a very community oriented expression. And it’s much longer than the like, to our memorial service that, you know, my my Catholic brothers and sisters have. So I think that in itself is it is a really helpful and beautiful practice. And there’s a lot of like community practice around how to support a grieving family in that tradition. And then, another example that comes to I spent my junior year of college living in West Africa.

And when you go to a funeral in Ghana, there’s clothes like special clothing that you wear. It also is like a week long process. There’s parties, there’s all kinds of different events, and they all have sort of a different emotional tenor. So there is like a wailing ceremony, there’s a time where people cry, and they yell, and they express with their bodies. And then that same night, there’s like dancing around a fire. So there’s, there’s this full range of grief, and then celebration of life, and wailing and sadness, and then deep community. But even I was so impacted by the idea of dressing together, because it identifies we are all in mourning. We are all impacted by this. And we as a community of family share this visual external identity that says, Don’t mess with me, I’m in grief.

Chris Badgett
Alright, let’s say you have a like, somebody has a magic red phone to you. And they’ve just, they’ve just lost a loved one, let’s say a parent. What do you advise? What would you advise that person? They’re like, I don’t want to I don’t know what to do. I’m broken. Like, can you help? What would you what would you advise them?

Sherry Walling
I would advise them to go slow, to cancel as many things as they can possibly cancel. And to really listen to what their longing is like, is your longing to go lay on a beach for a couple of weeks go and do that is your longing to take a driving tour of all your childhood homes so you can remember all of these moments with your parent. Go and do that is you’re longing to call up your aunts and uncles and interview them about who your parent was when they were a child go and do that.

But but like really listen to those internal longings, those internal voices that are like buried so deep, they’re kind of hard for us to hear in our modern lives. So I would advise lots of space time to do what you’re longing to do. And then that deep listening, I would also advise people to really talk with others, like, build sort of a grief community of support. Let your friends know. Talk to your friends about what’s happening, even if they haven’t lost family members. I also think it’s really helpful to find a couple of people who have had a similar kind of grief experience. ends because there’s a lot of like, is this normal that this happened to you? That kind of grief community is really, really helpful.

Chris Badgett
You mentioned being touched by suicide. Is that an example of like, other people touched by that? For finding support?

Sherry Walling
Yeah, I think that’s, there are some intricacies with that kind of loss, that our culture in particular isn’t sure how to digest. There’s a lot of like, shame, or you people, other people remember that dead person with more complexity. So when my dad died of cancer, people would say things like, it always happens to the good ones, or, you know, just these like trade little things that people say, when somebody dies. What was suicide? People don’t say this.

You know, under their breath, they might be thinking, like, How selfish How could he leave his grieving mother and leave his sister and leave his you know, like, there’s a lot of like, judgment around suicide, because people believe, people believe that there’s choice involved, and it gets really mucky and existential with what we believe about how much freedom we have. And then what it means that someone would take action to end their life and what that means for everybody else. So all that say, because suicide is pretty complicated. I think talking with other people who’ve lost somebody to suicide is really helpful, because I, I think that’s a safe place. To remember the person that you lost without any without the same, like shame, complexity conversation.

Chris Badgett
How do you support somebody who’s grieving or like, what do you say, as an example, like you mentioned, people will often say this or that, like, if you can help people, like, what should they say when they’re like, Hey, I lost my father, my mother, my sister, my brother.

Sherry Walling
My favorite thing that people said, my friend Jamie said this a lot, which I really enjoyed. But she just said, you want to tell me a story about him?

Chris Badgett
So honor, the honor the life kind of thing.

Sherry Walling
I think sometimes people feel like, oh, I don’t want to say anything. Like they seem they seem happy right now, I don’t want to remind them that this person died. And then like upset them. And bottom line, like they have not forgotten is they’re at the playground with their kid. And they’re smiling and laughing like they have not forgotten that their dad died like they know. So I think it feels really good to have the option to have a conversation about either the grief that someone is experiencing, or the person that they lost, because that’s the tragedy of death is that like, you’re never going to have dinner with my brother, like, you’ll never get to meet it, like the story is ended in terms of his interaction with others in the world.

So when someone is invited to tell a story, tell me about your dad, tell me about your mom who passed away. Like that keeps them alive and present. And also, you’re sharing them with another person in a way that I think for most people who are grieving feels really, really beautiful and important. The caveat is, it’s always a really lovely to have the choice. Because grief happens as a result of choice being taken away. Something happened that I didn’t want to happen. And that’s why it hurts. And so helping people feel like they have choices, would you like to if you ever want to I’m available that that kind of language is so helpful, because it it gives people a sense of choice and autonomy at a time when they’re just reeling from the lack of choices that they’ve had

Chris Badgett
this grief ever end like is it a process that completes? If it’s handled, let’s say in a more healthy way, or does it never really end?

Sherry Walling
I don’t think it ends because I think it’s the shadow side of love. So it ebbs and flows, it changes. It doesn’t always feel with the same intensity of like rage and desperation that it might feel at the beginning. But I think it does sort of settle into you as a different kind of loving someone. So I will always miss my brother and there won’t, you know, he was supposed to grow up with me.

He’s my peer. He’s the one who was supposed to be around when my mom got sick or when my kids graduated from high school like he was supposed to be there like that’s the timeline of things. So every timeline every big event in my life when my brother is not there like I wouldn’t He said his absence will be felt. It’s not the same as the moment that I fell on the ground and like laying in the dirt for two hours after I found out that he died. That’s a different acuity of grief. But no, I don’t think grief ends, I think it just sort of changes shape.

Chris Badgett
What’s your advice? You mentioned falling on the ground? I think I saw on your site, something about crying on airplanes. What about grief and kind of having heavy emotions in public? It’s hard for people but what how should? How can you reframe that? Or what should people do if it happens in public?

Sherry Walling
I wish we could have like a cultural shift around this because we laugh in public, we, you know, why can’t we cry a little bit like it’s just the other end of the spectrum. Um, yeah, I was on airplanes a lot. While this was happening, my dad lived in California, I live in Minnesota, my brother was in Montana for a while.

So I was just like, basically flying all around. Also, I was also promoting a book and giving talks and still working during much of this season. So I was on airplanes all the time. And I had like a whole situation where I had this like hoodie that I always wore in planes, I always got the window seat, so that I could like sort of curl into the wall and have like a little bit more privacy. And for whatever reason, anytime I sat on an airplane, it was almost the sense of being still enough to not be able to super like, distract myself.

So I would cry on like, for like, two years. And I just kind of got used to it. And honestly, people weren’t very bothered like most, as long as it wasn’t like sob. It was just this sort of dignified, like, oh, this person is clearly going through something. The, the, you know, the airline staff, the stewards and stewardesses would often like give me extra bag of Cheetos, like there were just a little little expressions of compassion.

But it was, it was okay. It was okay, to be a little bit more emotional. I wish we did still wear, you know, like a black armband. As in past times, there’s some external signifier of grief so people know how to interpret your behavior, I think that probably would have been really helpful to these people on the airplanes to know what was going on with me. But in the absence of that, I think it is surprisingly, more okay than we might think, to have some emotional expression.

Chris Badgett
You mentioned grief is the shadow side of love, which I love that kind of concept. If somebody loses a partner, how do they know when they’re ready to like, date or love again, or get married again? Or something like that? Like, how do they? How do they know it’s okay, or maybe not feel guilty or something like that? Like, how do people navigate that?

Sherry Walling
Yeah, it’s a tricky one. And again, people have lots of opinions about it, right? I think, generally speaking, some time, and space is required to move out of that really acute stage of grief. Because in that really acute stage of grief, the emotion is so big, that it’s really difficult to make big decisions. You know, how people say, like, don’t make decisions when you’re tired or hungry or angry.

It’s sort of like that, but it’s like that for a while, like months. Um, some space is helpful. But also, I think, when you’re longing turns toward being in a romantic relationship, again, like that’s also something to listen to. I think grief is a really, really good time to have a therapist, because it’s so much bigger motion, it can be really difficult to sort through what’s what. So somebody who’s been bereaved and lost their partner and is thinking about, you know, partnering again, it’s a nice time to have like a thoughtful objective third party at least ask the questions around what might be at play in this longing?

Chris Badgett
What are some unhealthy behaviors that people just to be aware of that like, when you’re grieving, you may be inclined to drink a lot or go right back to work and just kind of power through it? What are the things to just throw some caution against?

Sherry Walling
Yeah, anything that functions as avoidance is can be problematic here and that’s that’s where the drinking can be problematic. It’s numbing, right? I don’t want to feel so alcohol becomes an option. I mean, all of the all of the distraction techniques like online shopping spending money pornography, having a fares like all of the things that lead us into another overwhelming state, and allow us to avoid our feelings. So there are healthy ways to have a break from the power of grief.

I think for me, that’s what the what my circus world has become like when I’m on the Flying Trapeze, I’m completely focused, for safety reasons on what I’m doing. And I’m not in my grief moment. But I can do that for a couple hours a couple of times a week and sort of have this full body break from grief. So some break from it, I think is totally helpful. But if we’re numbing regularly, or we’re regularly sort of seeking out these other kinds of experiences, or feelings that that discount the grief or put it away, and that’s where we run into some danger of not, not fully feeling it, not walking toward it.

Chris Badgett
If we zoom out, and we look at like the great arc of the human experience, or our generations and of our lineage, or whatever, and we kind of get to it, have had a healthy process with grief. How can we harness the creativity that comes out of that, like you mentioned for you writing was really helpful, but and also created something of value that’s going to ripple out into the world, tell us more about that creative energy that can come out of it

Sherry Walling
has actually an old Freudian idea, okay, for I’d argue that these two internal drives that are most powerful within us that we’re sort of always contending with. And I’m not a Freudian, by the way, but I think this his thinking about this is really interesting. He talked about the drive that we call libido, which has come to be thought of as sex drive, but it’s like a distortion of what Freud intended. It’s the drive towards generativity, or generation making things creation.

So sex can be like a component of that. But it’s this big force within us that’s says, like, I want to be alive. And I want to leave an imprint, I want to make something. And that sort of counterbalance against in Freudian thinking, Thanatos, which is the drive towards destruction, I want to burn, I want to mess it, you know, like, I was sort of terrorized, and I am ultimately heading towards my own doom. So we’re always kind of, again, Freudian idea, like contending with these forces. And I think grief, rips those forces open. So lots of people in grief, who’ve never had suicidal ideation experienced suicidal ideation, lots of people make pretty destructive decisions, right after grief, lots of people.

I mean, after my dad died, my brother, within 24 hours of his death, was in county jail, like, just lost his mind, you know, obviously, like in this very grief, distorted, destructive state. So the other side of that, though, is this creative drive, it’s the drive that says, I want to matter and I want my I want to be alive, like, I want to feel my life. I don’t know if that makes sense at all. But it’s really this powerful feeling.

And I think it can drive people towards all of this unlocking creativity, because they’ve already had this terrible thing happened, there’s no need to be afraid of it anymore. you’ve encountered death. It’s not a mystery, you know that it hurts terrible. But also, you really want to stay alive. And so I think people can feel a lot of clarity about what is important to them. And if again, if you have the time and space to listen to what’s happening inside of you, that creative drive, I think, can be pretty amazing. Like, like great poetry, great art, all kinds of music is written in reaction to grief and loss. And even even, frankly, the getting done of business. You know, there’s a focus thing that can happen when people give it the time and space.

Chris Badgett
Incredible, touching two worlds.com. What can people expect inside of the book?

Sherry Walling
Yeah, the book was, to be quite honest, originally written sort of as my journal. There’s a lot of stories in it. But in partnership with my publisher, they really invited me to think like a psychologist. So most of the book is a compilation of essays and essays involved, like a story about what I experienced, and then my reflections on what I learned and how to make that helpful to other people. So it’s not just about me, it’s a lot of breathing practices, yoga practices, journal recommendations.

You know, there’s a whole chapter about how to talk to grieving people. So really thinking about how to live out grief in a better way in our society. The book is sad. There’s a lot of sad parts, and there’s some really funny parts. There’s a lot of like, bizarreness about death that with the consent of my family, I felt quite free to talk about and make fun of a little bit. So I think we’ll hopefully leave people with a sense of nuance and depth. It’s also pretty hopeful and very loving. So I’m really proud of it. It’s, it’s, there’s a lot of meat in the book. And it’s quite a vulnerable book to put out there into the world. But I’m very hopeful that it will serve people well.

Chris Badgett
Well, good on you for doing it. That’s it touching two worlds.com It’s also on Amazon and wherever books are sold anywhere else. The good people of the internet can connect with you. Sure.

Sherry Walling
Yeah. So I’m on Instagram at Sherry walling and Twitter at at Sherry walling and Sherry. walling.com. So funny, I almost didn’t get a book deal because my Instagram following is not very impressive. Apparently you need like 20,000 Instagram followers. So now I’m telling people please follow me on Instagram just in case I want to write quite a quite a weird gauntlet to walk through. Have somebody look at all of your internet numbers.

Chris Badgett
That’s awesome. Well, Sherry, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having this conversation. And I’m really glad we could get into this topic that doesn’t get discussed enough.

Sherry Walling
Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks for your thoughtful questions, Chris.

Chris Badgett
And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifter lms.com For slash gift go to lifter lms.com forward slash gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post Coping with Grief and Loss with Sherry Walling Author of Touching Two Worlds appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Frank Kane is a LifterLMS user and founder of Sundog Education. is a highly successful education entrepreneur who has found great success on the online learning platform Udemy. He has over 600,000 students and 15 courses available on the platform, which have generated over 2.7 million in revenue.

Frank’s journey to becoming a course creator began when he was a senior manager at Amazon.com in Seattle. When he and his family decided to move to Florida, he left Amazon and started doing freelance work.

One of those gigs was in curriculum development for a company in New York City, where he created a data science course. Udemy reached out to Frank to create courses on big data topics, and he ended up creating his own course on data processing. Since then, his business has grown significantly, and he now teaches a variety of topics including data science, machine learning, and Python programming.

Frank’s success on Udemy shows the potential for growth and income that can be achieved through creating and selling online courses. His experience serves as inspiration for other entrepreneurs looking to enter the world of online education and create their own successful courses.

Episode TranscriptChris Badgett:
You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch and scale a high-value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you, enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Frank Kane, he’s a prolific course creator. You can find him on Udemy. You can also find him on his website, which is Sundog-education. Just do a google search for Sundog Education.

Welcome to the show, Frank.

Frank Kane:
Hey, thanks for having me.

Chris Badgett:
I love interviewing um education entrepreneurs like yourself. Uh, and I’m grateful to, you know, found out that you use our tool LifterLMS.
I wanna ask you first before we get into your story. Um Just to kind of set well, actually, kind of where you are today, I was looking at this, the stats on Udemy you had something like 500,000 students or something like that?

Frank:
That’s over 600,000. Now, last I checked just…

Chris Badgett: Okay…

Frank Kane: Juston that one platform.

Chris Badgett:
Give us some, give us some numbers, just like for Udemy like Or or just your empire, like 600,000 students. How many courses? How many years doing it? Just give us some data.

Frank Kane:
Yeah, I mean, uh I started doing this in like 2013, so it’s been a while, you know, it’s been a long a long road, as they say. Um but today I’ve got depends on how you count it, I would say like 15 courses because there’s a bunch of like, localizations of different courses and stuff that are technically their own course. But yeah, it’s really grown over time. I mean, when I started off, my first course was making like 100 bucks a month. But today it’s more like 40,000 a month in revenue. So all told, like we said, 600,000 students around the world just on Udemy and uh About 2.7 million total revenue from that platform alone.

Chris Badgett: Wow! that’s mind-blowing! Um, what’s the, what’s the genesis of you? The course creator?

Frank Kane:
Yeah, I just kind of was in the right place at the right time, you know, that’s uh kind of a common theme I think with people who end up, you know, getting lucky with something. Um so yeah, if you want to go, there’s no, like short attention span version of this story, I’m afraid. So, give me a couple of minutes.

Chris Badgett:
This is a this is a longer form podcast, go for it.

Frank Kane:
Awesome! Yeah, So where do I start? I mean, I was actually a senior manager at amazon.com in Seattle about 10 years ago actually, and, you know, I clawed my way up the corporate ladder there and did that whole corporate thing and uh, you know, it was rough, you know, it’s, it’s a challenging environment. Still is. But what really got over time with the weather. So eventually we decide you can’t take the Seattle weather anymore. Um, and I think you you came from Alaska. I think you said so. You know what I’m talking about?

Chris Badgett:
Yeah!

Frank Kane:
You know, that’s, like, two months where it’s nice there. Um, so we packed up, my family decided to move to Florida, and at the time, Amazon have these tax issues where they could not have employees outside of Seattle. Basically, so that meant that I had to leave Amazon. So I’m like, well, what do I do? Do I get a real job again? Or do I try to strike out on my own and be an entrepreneur and, well, this time as good as I need to give it a shot? Right. Uh, so I started doing some freelance work and, you know, doing some programming and stuff on the side of things like that wasn’t a lot of fun because, you know, you’re still basically trading your time for money and trading one set of bosses for a different set of bosses at the end of the day. But one of those gigs was actually doing curriculum development for a company in New York City. General Assembly was what they were called. And one thing led to another. So we put out a data science course in General Assembly where I was like making the content for that behind the scenes. And somehow, Udemy found that and they were trying to find people to come onto their platform to teach big data topics and data processing. So they reached out to me like literally just cold calling me one day and said, Hey, we’re Udemy. I’ve never heard of them at that point. It’s a long time ago. You know, we’re looking for people to create courses on big data stuff. Would you give it a try? So I’m like, Why not? How hard can it be? Alright. Turns out it’s pretty hard to make a course, especially on technical topics like that. So, like I said, I give it a shot, in that first course did not do well. It was it was making 120 bucks a month at first, but I didn’t give up, so I said, okay, we’ll put that much time into creating this course, and if I push a little bit more, it’ll get some legs. So I created the second course and I went back to Udemy and said give me some advice on creating the right topic and creating those sorts. Of course, is that resonate with your audience and I did all that.

So I was able to promote that second course to the students in my first course and it’s much, much, much better. And I made a third course and promoted that to the students of my 1st and 2nd course and you just kind of building on that like compound interest over time until you get to where I’m at right now.

Chris Badgett:
That’s awesome. And what…what do you think? I remember I’m an old school, I might have even been on Udemy before you, but I had like a little cooking class..

Frank Kane: Yeah!

Chris Badgett:
..that I did about making the perfect omelet. Uh, it was a while ago, I think that was 2012 or 13. I’m not sure when you said you started?

Frank Kane:
I think it was 2013,

Chris Badgett:
Okay. You might have beat me. I definitely didn’t get recruited, but I put it on there and uh, I just wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. And you know, I didn’t really try really hard to market. It wasn’t that serious.

But I was fascinated with Udemy like at the time and probably still one of the top-performing courses was the course about how to use Excel, right?

Frank Kane:
Yeah!

Chris Badgett:
So there’s like product I saw like the millions of students or whatever it was and there was obviously like product market fit. What is it about the big data niche that other people could learn from? Is this like helping people get high-paying jobs or like why does this niche really work, for online courses on Udemy and beyond?

Frank Kane:
Yeah. I mean I think it’s specific to Udemy you know different platforms have kind of what they specialize in. So skill share for example they’re more on lifestyle things. You know a cooking class would do well there for example Udemy tends to focus more on business-related topics and technical topics. So they have a big audience in places like India where people are really trying to learn technical skills so they can get an awesome job and make more money. So that’s kind of the demographic that I’m reaching there. So, topic selection is just hugely important and understanding the audience of the platform that you’re on. It’s the real key to success.

Chris Badgett:
You know, now that you say that I did put a free course on um Udemy about LifterLMS like in WordPress, and it was, it got a ton of users, like it was like, it was in the tens of thousands. I don’t know, it got up pretty high, especially because it was free.
Frank Kane: Yeah…..!

Chris Badgett:
I even hired a I hired a developer later who was like, who met me through that course, and I’m not even a real developer, I’m more of a power user and uh just did the exposure of Udemy was really cool.

What else do you like about Udemy?

Frank Kane:
Uh, they’re good people you know I mean you know being one of their top instructors I get to talk to a lot of people behind the scenes at every level..

Chris Badgett: Yeah!

Frank Kane:
… And something that impresses me with Udemy is just the quality of the employees they are. They’re all nice people. They really have the best interests of the students at heart and of the instructors. So they’re always looking for these win-win situations where everybody ends up benefiting from what they’re doing. And you know these days it’s kind of hard to find in cause it’s a stark contrast to some of the other platforms out there. So they’re just good to work with.

Chris Badgett:
One of the things I appreciated about them too was uh they actually they took one of my courses down because I wasn’t keeping it updated or something and they’re actually kind of protecting the quality or the current the current relevancy and you know they wanted to standardize all the graphics at one point. I remember that like they like how do you how do you make a learning platform that doesn’t become like a free for all. They seem to strike that balance.

Frank Kane:
Yeah, it’s It’s delicate, right? I mean, they have a huge job in front of them for, like, policy enforcement. So they have this open platform. Or basically, anybody can submit a course on anything, and there’s no standards on how you teach or what your graphic design style needs to be. There are other platforms that are like that, and as a result, they’re not very responsive to changing trends in the world. But that’s another thing. Uh, but yeah, I mean, the thing with Udemy though, is that they have their like, this two-headed beast. You know, they have the open marketplace where everybody can submit their own courses. And then they have Udemy for business, which is their curated selection of the best of the best courses that are aimed at business users. Um, and that is where they are much more picky, right? So they actually have human beings looking at individual courses saying, Hey, this is a good one. This one has good production quality. This is a topic that our customers need. Let’s promote that, and that’s close to half of their business these days, so that’s really growing for them.

Chris Badgett:
Remember ways back. They they enforce some like pricing controls in terms of how much you could charge and stuff like that. Um And some people took issue with that. Um some people completely fine with it and then there’s all the bundling and stuff like that, but um particularly around the pricing issue, what are your thoughts on courses and pricing and obviously you’ve moved a lot and I think Udemy’s cap is $50 a course? I could be wrong there. But is there, what’s your pricing on that platform?

Frank Kane:
Generally, I priced the least prices around between 25 and 50 dollars…

Chris Badgett:
Yeah.

Frank Kane:
…depending on the length of the course and you know how much competition there is. Um

Chris Badgett:
You ever feel like, do you ever feel like that, that you know, a lot of talk about like high, high ticket courses and all that

Frank Kane:
hmm..!

Chris Badgett:
..and I’m sure you’re delivering incredible value, helping people get great jobs and everything. But what are your thoughts around that lower end of the price market for courses?

Frank Kane:
Yeah. I mean, it’s not great, right? I mean, I would much rather sell, you know, 100.. 200 dollar courses than you know, $2005 courses or whatever works out to..
Chris Badgett: Alright!

Frank Kane:
.. um But that’s the whole way Udemy works. It’s all about volume there, right? So they’re constantly running sales people in India, for example, are getting these courses for the equivalent of, like, $4.99. So if you have, you know, hundreds of thousands of customers the math works out. But you still have to support those customers, right? So, you know, if you get someone where you only made 80 cents from the transaction after everyone takes their cut I mean, India, taxes get taken out, platform fees come out, Udemy takes their cut. So at the end of the day, you might have a student who is asking you a whole lot of questions in exchange for 80 cents. And, uh, you know, that’s that’s not cool. And that’s part of the reason why I built my own site using LifterLMS. Because they’re I have complete control over pricing or what coupons I can issue or can issue. So if the day comes where Udemy is not paying the bills for whatever reason, maybe they decide they don’t like me anymore and kick me off the platform. I’ve got that sitting there ready to go where I can offer higher ticket items and you know, maybe offer more add-ons like, you know, office hours and things like that. Or more direct communication with me as an instructor, which I just can’t do at the price points of Udemy.

Chris Badgett:
Tell us more about just the decision to, to build a WordPress LMS site yourself and uh, you know, what, what spurred it on and then why, you know, what’s your long term goal for it?

Frank Kane:
Yeah, I mean, you know, when I was looking to launch my own site and you know, I looked at all the, you know, plug and play options out there, teachable and what not. I’m like, well you don’t really have a lot of control over it there. Right. And hey, I used to make websites at amazon.com. I think I know what I’m doing. (Chris Badgett is laughing)

Frank Kane:
How hard can it be. Right. Uh, so I figured, you know, I was using WordPress for my blog already anyway, I was familiar with the whole technology stack started doing some research on different plug-ins for LMS solutions on WordPress and found you guys. And yeah, like within, I think two days I had my first course up and running on the platform, so it worked out well. But like I said, the long-term goal is mostly a hedge. I want to be able to have something ready to go in the event that disaster strikes. So, for example, we mentioned skillshare earlier. They came that close to kicking me off the platform at one point

Chris Badgett: Why?

Frank Kane:
.. due to some minor policy violation. It was because… Oh, yeah, I remember what it was. At one point, they they were giving me some advice to promote something. My own website, I think at some point at the end of the course, and I did that. But the way I did it was that I copied and pasted the same video across all of my courses saying, Hey, come visit me at sundown-education.com. And apparently reusing videos on different courses is against the rules there. So that close to getting booted because of that, but you know, fortunately, they gave me a chance to correct that and and keep me on the platform for most of my courses, but that sort of thing can happen with Udemy or any other platform to where you don’t control it, you know? So I want to make sure that I have a platform of my own where I have complete control over what’s going on just in case some outside thing happens that I need to react to.

Chris Badgett:
That’s cool. You’ve.. you’ve been a course creator for like a decade, it’s your job, as you say. Um, how do you approach your job? Like in terms of uh content creation time, instructional design time, do you do a bunch of marketing or not worry about that since you’re more kind of in Udemy’s flow? Like what’s what is the job like for a pro 10 years in?

Frank Kane:
I mean it’s it’s all about trying to figure out what the best use of your time is and trying to focus on that as much as possible, which means outsourcing all the other stuff. I mean it’s a very
a common refrain with any business owner, right? You’ve got to focus on what you’re best at and what you’re most irreplaceable at. So for me, you know, being in front of the camera, you know, being in front of a microphone, delivering this content, that’s what’s important. That’s my students are paying for. So that’s why I try to spend most of my time doing it was creating new content. Right now, I’m just, like, go into town, trying to update one of my technical courses to the latest version of that technology. And that’s what I’m doing 40 hours a week right now. The other thing that’s important to you, though. So developing the actual like coding exercise and things like that. I might farm that out to somebody on Upwork, you know, just to save me some time because that’s not something that I’m uniquely qualified to do. Marketing. I hire assistants to help with that as well. So you know, keeping regular updates on social media, sending out our newsletter, sending out promotional announcements, things like that. Someone else handles all that and also have a couple of people who are kind of the first line of defence for answering questions from students. So, you know when I get 10,000 questions and I’ll say where do I download the course materials from? Someone else deals with that instead of me. So yeah it’s all about you know focusing on what you have to do and outsourcing the rest.

Chris Badgett:
On technical topics for courses, do you have to spend a lot of time updating? Like is it like what words of wisdom do you have for somebody who teaches on like a technical topic or something that’s going to go out of date and..

Chris Badgett: ..it has a shelf life?

Frank Kane: Yeah, I’m trying to get away from that quite honestly. Um..

Chris Badgett: Yeah!

Frank Kane:
The worst ones are the IT Certification courses. So you have these worlds where they have a new certification exam every six months a new version of the exam and you’ve got to scramble to make sure that you’ve taken the exam yourself and know what’s on it and turn around and create all the content. You need to get that out before the next iteration comes out right? So Um with the number of courses I have drunk that many you know like I said 10 or 15. That’s almost a full-time job in and of itself just keeping those courses up to date. So you want to pick your battles there, right? I mean, IT certification courses can be very lucrative, but they do require a lot of ongoing maintenance. So there’s a trade-off there. These days I’m trying to focus more on evergreen topics. So my most successful course right now, which is kind of a surprise to me, is one about interview tips. You know, how can I get through a system design interview at a big technical employer? And that’s just gone gangbusters. And it’s beautiful because I’ll never have to upgrade it, you know, updated for years and years and years from now. Um, so I’m trying to do more stuff like that, You know, the next one I’m gonna do is like, how do you manage the transition from becoming an engineer to a technical manager? I’ve done that so I can talk about that. Turns out there’s a demand for that course out there so I can do that and I’ll never have to update it. So I’m really trying to focus on things that are technical but aren’t going to go out of date in a month, right, because it is a lot of work to keep up on that.

Chris Badgett:
That’s very cool! What about support? You mentioned like, you know, if somebody’s not paying that much and you you have to have a million questions or whatever. Like how do you think about the support that’s that you offer at the price point that you do? Like what how do you just how do you how do you frame it in from a customer success standpoint for your students?

Frank Kane:
I mean obviously, if someone’s having trouble, you gotta help them, right? So Um it’s just kind of the cost of doing business. Unfortunately, the vast majority of students do not ask questions. A lot of them are just hoarding courses. You nknow, that’s the reality of the matter. They’re like, I want to learn this someday. I’m gonna buy this $5 and tuck it away somewhere and they never actually look at it. So it still works out economically because there’s such a small percentage of students that actually do want some of your time that when they do, even though they only individually paid you, you know, a dollar or so there’s 100 other students who didn’t ask a question at all. So, you know, it still works out financially, but I’m not going to do things like offer, you know, one on one, you know, consulting or you know,
personal office hours or anything like that or you know, working on your project with you or things like that, it just doesn’t make sense at that price point.

Chris Badgett:
How did you learn like the skill of teaching itself, like do you have a teaching background or did you have to develop that or is it from being a manager? Or where does your instructional design ability come from to take a topic, chunk it down and make it usable by a learner?

Frank Kane:
Yeah, a lot of it does come from being in management, you know! I mean as a manager you need to teach people how to do new things. Um And for a while I was actually conducting a new employee training at Amazon for technical stuff or just introducing people to my organisation. Um But you know, I do not have a formal education background where I’ve taken courses on instructional design, but I’ve read about it, I’ve talked to people who do know what they’re talking about and learn from them, so I try to, you know, when I do have the opportunity to talk to an actual instructional designer or someone who actually does have an education degree, I soak up whatever I can from their knowledge and try to apply that we really just comes down into breaking down these topics into subsections and just trying to chunk it up into easily digestible bits, right? I mean, some of it’s just common sense. People have short attention spans, so you don’t want videos that are too long. Um, you know, people want to get a lot of value for their money, so comprehensive courses do well, but they need to be organised in such a manner where somebody is looking for a specific task or to learn a specific thing, they can find it quickly, digested quickly and go off and apply what they learned.

Chris Badgett:
What about like the content itself? Do you use things like worksheets and or you mentioned code challenges or coding exercises like what is there in there besides videos that you found effective?

Frank Kane:
Yeah! I mean, it depends on the course, right? So for the certification prep courses, obviously practise exams are hugely important. You know, they want to take what they’ve learned. They want to take a practise exam that’s as close as possible to the real thing and gain some confidence that they’re going to get through this exam successfully. Uh, for the coding exercises, though, the problem there is that there’s not really a standardised platform for doing that, right? So there’s a lot of platforms out there that are offering these sort of sandbox environments for executing python code or, you know, insert your favourite language here. But for things like big data processing or machine learning or deep learning, you need a big, expensive cluster in the cloud to really do this stuff. And no one wants to pay for that at $5 per student, right? So the economics again, at that price point, don’t work out, which is another good thing about having your own platform. You know, at some point I could build that out myself, give people access to a sandbox in the cloud and just charge more for it. But I can’t do that on a platform like Udemy.

So instead, I try to give them an environment that they can run on their home PC on their own desktop. You know, I teach them how to set up a virtual environment for running these activities in. I have a video that says, Hey, here’s your challenge. Go build this thing, give it a shot, and then the next video will be okay. Uh, compared to how I did it, here’s my solution. I’m going to walk you through it. How does that compare to what you did? You want to take this further. Here’s something else you can do with it. So you know, it is still video-based, But, you know, I give them a lecture on how to set up a development environment on their own to go and experiment and apply what they’ve learned.

Chris Badgett:
Let’s shift gears and look at, like, kind of the business side of it is there? How much of your time do you spend on like, kind of managing the business of it all in terms of, I don’t know, taxes and accounting and all that stuff you try to outsource as much as you can, Or how does that work for you?

Frank Kane:
Fortunately, the the accounting arm of Sundog Education is my wife carries. Once a month, she handles all the tax funds and you know all the accounting funds. So you know I don’t worry about that too much for the annual taxes. Obviously, that’s a little bit more work. So I get some involvement in that. And we have we have a team, right? So I actually have a C.P. A. In addition to that for actually filing everything and double-checking everything. I’ve got a lawyer for the legal stuff that we need to go through and contract reviews. But yeah I try to like I said focus as much as possible and just creating content myself. So yeah I mean the business side of its maybe 10% of my time but I try to outsource the rest of it. So it’s no more than that.

Chris Badgett:
What about work-life balance and burnout? Have you had any struggles? They’re not really because, yeah.

Frank Kane:
Absolutely! Yeah, I mean so I’m probably flirting with burnout right now quite honestly because I mean one of these situations where a new version of technology came out and I have to scramble to get a huge course updated to that new version of the technology and every day that I don’t have that out, people are complaining your courses out of date. You know I want my money back. Right?

Chris Badgett: (laughing)

Frank Kane:
..So, a lot of pressure there to get a lot of work done really quickly and you know, that’s, that’s hard. But I do try to take care of myself and you know, when this is done, I’m gonna give myself a break, you know, take a couple of weeks off, go on a cruise or something and just try to recharge a little bit because after being an amazon as a manager, you learn really quickly what your limits are and uh, and what the warning signs are when you’re gonna burn out. So I don’t want to go back there, you know, you gotta watch out.

Chris Badgett:
You mentioned, um, you know, having to update the course. I know there’s not a right answer to this about like how long, of course, should be or whatever, but just over your career for like a technical course, do they end up being about a certain length of if you were to add all the videos together to make it, or does it really vary based on the topic?

Frank Kane:
The ferry is based on the topic. So, whenever you’re gonna start doing a new course, the first thing is to look at the competing courses on the market in the marketplace that you’re on. Right? So, in a place like Udemy, where people are paying a fixed amount pretty much everything is on sale for 10 bucks or 15 bucks. If they have a choice between spending $15 on a 20-hour course versus $15 on a 2-hour course, they’re going to take a 20-hour course because they’re just more perceived value their right and even for subscription-based offerings, you know you’re getting paid by the minute consumed. At the end of the day, you know, you’re you’re being paid based on how many minutes of video people watch of your content. So again, it’s to your benefit to have long courses, because if people are watching a 20 hour course, you’re going to get a bigger piece of the pie than if it was a 2-hour course. So there’s a lot of incentives in place right now for courses to be as long as you can reasonably make them, and ultimately you’re limited by what you can do personally or what your team can do. So typically, my courses end up between 10 and 20 hours, I’d say, on average, um, some are shorter, you know, sometimes I’ll do these sponsorship deals. Um, this is kind of like a thing that started happening in the past year or so where some company will say, hey, you know, we want to get in front of your audience uh, of students, can we like pay you to create a course on our technology? And if it’s something I would have paid anyway, then sure. You know, usually, the economics of that works out to more like a 2-hour course because you know, they only have so much money they want to spend on something like that. Um, but you know, everyone wins in that case too. You know, it’s more content for me that I can, that I can sell, they get their name out there. So, um, yeah, the short answer is it depends on the course, on the audience, on the platform, on the topic anywhere from 2 to 20 hours.

Chris Badgett:
How edited is it your workflow? Is it, do you try to get it like one shot, one take or it’s heavily edited? Like where do you sit on the spectrum?

Frank Kane:
Oh, I, it’s terrible. I’m anything all over the place. But I have a shortcut, Here’s my, here’s my secret, my dog clicker here.

Chris Badgett:
Okay!

Frank Kane:
If I’m blathering about some complex technical thing and I slip up and say the wrong thing, I just hit my clicker there. So then when I go back into edit it, there’s a nice little spike in the waveform there for the audio and say I screwed up there, can zip right to it, and edit out whenever I messed up and and get right back to it. So that helps to accelerate the editing of it. Anyway, I still do my own editing because, you know, it’s tough to find someone who can do it right for you and it’s not that much work really. So as long as I can make it efficient.

Chris Badgett:
That’s cool! That is a pro tip. Um since we’re on the gear, could you just, and you’re, you’ve had a lot of experience, You know, what’s the, what are the key pieces of hardware and software that uses, of course, creator, mikes, cameras, video editing, um, key apps you use or whatever, like what, what can you not live without?

Frank Kane:
Well, the most important thing is my microphone, uh front and centre here. So especially with technical courses, a lot of what you’re doing or screencasts where you’re just, you know, showing people on your screen how to do something and you’re just this disembodied voice. So
for a typical course, I’m not on camera much at all really just for the introductory segments, you know, say, hey, I’m a real person, you should like me and you know, you know, like me, so you give me a good review. I’m not a robot. Um so it starts with the mike, this is a Shure SM7B um and it’s piped through a cloud lifter pre amp device. The thing with these dynamic mix is that they’re really, really low signal and you need something to boost them before they actually go into anything else. So from the cloud lifter, it goes to a blue icicle, which is basically the USB adapter that goes into my computer, so that’s the, that’s the chain there. Um I started off with a blue Yeti, like a lot of people do, but you know, those condensers are super sensitive so this sounds better and it doesn’t pick up as much noise, which is nice. So that’s the audio piece. Um for software I use Camtasia mostly, mostly because they had a big promotion going on back when I started for Udemy instructors. So I got it for cheap back then and I’ve been using it ever since. Um, it does the job, you know, I mean, I would like something that had maybe more modern design elements available, but hey, um, that’s not what people are paying for with my courses, They’re paying to learn technical stuff and for video depends what I’m doing. You know, it’s just like be sitting at the screen doing something, then my webcam is good enough, you know, with a green screen behind me. It’s just a Logitech Brio, which is a good, high-definition webcam, but if I’m actually like, you know, standing in front of a bookshelf or something, trying to look professional, that’s when I’ll get out my old DSLR camera and take video with that instead with all the, you know, proper lights, what not to make it look good. Um, so yeah, I think that’s pretty much everything. We got the mike, got the camera, got the software that’s pretty much all that’s required Camtasia also has a screen recording software that I use as well built-in.

Chris Badgett:
Very cool. Um, you mentioned, uh, like if there’s a long course, you know, on Udemy people, the same price, same price higher perceived value. Is something there? How else do you look at differentiation? Um, I’d imagine you have some competitors in big data, and, uh, there’s probably new people coming all the time. Like, how do you compete and stand out?
Frank Kane: ….

Chris Badgett:
..I know you have it. You have an early advantage of being there. But you still have to compete. So.

Frank Kane:
Absolutely, you know, you still have to create content that’s up to date. And, uh, you know, has hands-on activities. So if people feel like they’re actually getting a chance to apply what they’re learning, that alone can be a competitive advantage. Because so many people just get in front of a camera, you know, blather about, you know, the theory of everything, but they don’t give you a chance to practise what you’ve learned. So it takes a lot more work to develop a course that has those hands-on activities. But that’s one way that you can differentiate yourself. But the truth is, a lot of it really is a first-mover advantage on these platforms. So, uh, the trick really is finding emerging topics that have not been covered by others yet, uh, for example…

Chris Badgett:
What’s an example of that? Like if you had to pick one out of the air for today like maybe something with autonomous driving tech or something that’s newer?

Frank Kane:
Oh, no, that’s been beaten to death already. Uh, you know, an example would be..

Frank Kane:
..Amazon Web services coming out with a new exam. Right? So they actually do have a new one coming out. I forget what it’s called staying with camp too. They have a couple of new exams coming out as well, So that’s kind of the easiest ones to find. You know, big technology platform is coming out with a new certification exam. You can be the first to create a really good course about it, right? So those are probably the best opportunities. But again, those are the topics that require the most ongoing work to keep up to date. Beyond that, you know, think about you know what business users need to learn in the workplace and our people filling that need. So I mentioned earlier that the next thing on my plate is, of course, about transitioning from engineer to technical manager surprisingly, there aren’t a lot of courses out there on that. You would think there would be. But if you go and research it, there aren’t, um and that’s something that business customers of, um er explicitly asking for. So that’s another example of maybe an unexpected opportunity that people can take advantage of.

Chris Badgett:
Since you brought that up and you’re talking about working with the team and stuff too, what, uh, what are some of the management lessons that you’ve learned in terms of? I think it’s a It’s a wake-up call for a lot of people to, you know, go from technical excellence to managing teams.

Frank Kane: Yeah!

Chris Badgett: So what are some words of wisdom that you could share from your career?

Frank Kane:
In the context of, you know, making a small business around creating course is probably the most important thing is coming up with really crisp concrete definitions and expectations of the work that you’re outsourcing to freelancers, right? So, um if you go and say Okay, I want to hire someone on UpWork to help develop my curriculum or to, you know, create this graphic content for my course or whatever were to edit my videos. If you’re not super super, super specific about what you want, when you want to buy and at what price, it’s not going to go well, right? So take the time to really think that through and write it up as thoroughly as possible. You know, you might think to yourself I’m outsourcing. Think about it. I want to spend a lot of time, you know, specifying it. But you’re going to be wasting your time at the end of the day if you do not specify that out as much as possible and get really clear expectations upfront, Right? So that’s number one just having clear expectations of people. And that applies to any management situation, right? You know, people need to know what you expect of them, and, you know you need to be giving them constant feedback as to whether or not they’re meeting those expectations. So you don’t want to surprise anybody at the end of the contract and said, this isn’t what I wanted at all, you know? Well, why don’t you tell me that? You know, three weeks ago, So, um, at the end of the day, it comes down to communication, right? So, you know, communicating what you want, whether you’re getting what you want and what corrective action might need to be taken.

Chris Badgett:
Your other, uh, evergreen topic that seems to be taken off as interviewing.

Frank Kane:
Yeah!

Chris Badgett:
Which I find interesting. And it seems like a lot of your product-market fit has to do with people advancing in their careers and getting great jobs. What’s the key to a great interview?

Frank Kane:
Mhm. Oh, uh, there’s not one answer to that.

Chris Badgett:
Yeah!

Frank Kane:
Obviously, but a lot of it’s just understanding the corporate culture of the company that you’re interviewing with, you know? So, for example, if you’re interviewing at Amazon, they have a list of leadership principles that are very important to them. For example, being very customer focus, that’s like number one. So if you know that Amazon really values customer centricity, you can use out in your interview answers, right? Like if you’re giving a technical question, answer from the perspective of the customer experience that you’re trying to deliver, you know, work backwards from the customer instead of forward from the technology that you want to use. So that’s an example of how you can use that knowledge to your advantage. And you know it’s all the usual stuff like you know to make sure you’re rested, you know fully caffeinated or whatever and you know be happy smile you know don’t don’t come across as a jerk but really you know it comes down to understanding what this company is looking for and you know really appreciating that a lot of the times these company values, they’re not just talk, you know, these people who work for these companies are evaluated on how well they embody those values so they take them very very, very seriously and they’re going to be looking as to whether you embody those values as well as much as your technical excellence or your qualifications on paper. Right?

Сhris Badgett:
I love that. I was just interviewing somebody for a role and every time I, I could hear like one of our company values come through in the conversation I’m like check, check yeah yeah.

Frank Kane:
Um right!

Chris Badgett:
Brand new. You do me, instructor, you mentioned, um you know, look for emerging opportunities that haven’t really been covered yet. What other like Udemy tips do you have for somebody who’s gonna put some courses up on Udemy and they and they haven’t done it before?

Frank Kane:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean really topic selection is like number 1234 and 5 on the list. Um, but beyond that, you know, I’d say the audio quality is more important than most people realize. So you and I see a lot of people who just like stick a phone in front of their face and like, you know, hit record and hope for the best um video might come out. All right. You know, if you got good lighting, but the audio probably not. So the reality is people are gonna be listening to you more than they’re looking at you, especially because they’re gonna be watching this on the phone most of the time anyway. Right? Or even while they’re driving or like during their commute. So think about your audio quality. Think about your presentation skills, you know, like practice those if you need to you don’t wanna be worth using a lot of filler words all the time. You don’t want to be, you know, going back, I just did it. I said…

Chris Badgett: (laughing) I saw it, I didn’t know if you caught it, but you caught it. You caught yourself doing it.

Frank Kane:
Yeah, but you know, you did it again. Um yeah,

Chris Badgett: (Laughing)

Frank Kane:
It needs to just have like a good dry run of what you’re going to present ahead of time, especially if it’s something technical and complex. So don’t just turn on the camera and hope for the best practice it yourself first, make sure that you’re comfortable with the material, make sure you are, you know what you’re going to be presenting and talking about before you hit that record button.

Chris Badgett:
Last question for you Frank, many people, you know, really aspire as a course creator to end up in a, with as much many students, as much revenue, as much like freedom, like you mentioned to move and stuff like that, um that’s that’s great and you’re a shining example, but how do you know that you’re here and you, you know, you’ve got some success. How do you think about your future as a course creator? like what? What’s next or what’s the end goal from here?

Frank Kane:
Gosh, I wish I had long-term goals. You know, honestly, I find that you just don’t see the best opportunities coming ahead of time. You just have to put yourself out there and, you know, talk to new people and see what comes your way and be willing to try new things. So as far as planning ahead, I don’t really do a lot of that. Um, I do plan ahead for you know what courses I want to be creating. And as long as there’s new opportunities to create new courses, that might do well, I’ll keep on making them. But, you know, I like where I’m at. I like doing what I’m doing. I like my lifestyle, and I’m not out there to create a multi-million dollar company and sell it to some other company and go sit on a beach for the rest of my life. Beaches are kind of boring, quite honestly. So, um, I like what I’m doing. I like being productive. I like helping people. I like knowing that I’m helping people find new careers around the world. Uh, and I can do it all at home on my own schedule. I’m my own boss. What’s not to love, right? Why would I want to stop doing that? So, my long-term plan is to keep doing this as long as I can.

Chris Badgett:
One more follow-up on that is as an expert transition to well, I guess, practitioner to the manager to an educator. How do you stay current in the field?

Frank Kane:
Yeah, it’s not as hard as you might think. Technology changes quickly, but not so quickly that you can’t really keep up with it. So the reality is that just teaching this stuff forces you to stay up with it. So when I see a new emerging topic that nobody’s done before, if it’s something that I, I’m pretty sure I could pick up, then I’ll go off and learn about it. And nine times out of 10. That’s how I stay up to date. If I’m teaching a topic and something new comes up in that topic in that technology that I’m teaching, students are going to complain about it pretty quickly if I’m not covering it and it’s out of date, so I’ll go off and learn it right? So just that pressure from the customers to keep your content up to date and accurate all the time and they’ll tell you what topics they want to learn, you know, so just listening to your customers and reacting to that and learning what you need to learn to fill those customer needs. Honestly, I feel like I’m more up-to-date on technology than I was as a manager at Amazon because, at Amazon, I was just laser-focused on the technologies we were using at Amazon. But out here in the real world, you know I’m seeing all the technologies that all these students across the world are being faced with. So it’s actually a much broader and more current snapshot into the world of technology being out here on the outside.

Chris Badgett:
I love that, I love that. Another is that saying that to teach something is like true mastery or whatever. So that that makes a lot of sense. Well, that’s Frank Kane, he’s a Sundog software and Sundog education. Thanks for coming on the show, appreciate you sharing your Udemy journey, your WordPress journey and your expert journey. It’s awesome what you’ve done andyeah, I wish you all the best on the next next decade.

Frank Kane: Thanks and thanks for making LifterLMS. It’s been a joy to work with.

(Background sound)
Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post Udemy Course Creator Frank Kane Shares How He Got Over 600,000 Students and 2 Million Dollars appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

No matter how engaging courses you build, there always remains room for improvement to help you grow your business. Today’s LMScast episode will feature how to improve online courses that convert with Holly Chantal.

She is a speaker, author, and business integrator at hollychantal.com who loves to help course creators make their courses more polished. In this blog, she will share suggestions to improve online learning or courses for students.

How to Create a Signature Course that Converts?To build an excellent signature course, you must figure out the target audience’s needs. For example, what solutions they are looking for, their difficulties, etc. After finding out everything, design a course according to their needs.

You must ensure that, with each course, your students develop skills and overcome their problems. So, prepare an ideal system for your business by following these. Now, how to brand your courses and reach more audiences? Keep reading to get your answer.

How do You Brand Courses Online?Playing branding games is not necessary to sell courses online, as these can also sell through referrals. However, this can indeed offer additional benefits to selling courses online.

Excellent ideas can only discover through experiments. So, you need to experiment again and again to establish a brand.

First, test different prices and check if students are buying courses. Then find out your audience’s problem and offer solutions to those problems on your website. This means to start creating a brand and website thinking about the difficulties your target audiences face.

How to Create a Brand Persona?A brand persona means giving the brand a face, setting voice and core values for your business. Your brand persona needs to build by focusing on the needs of your targeted audiences. Then, you should do a competitor analysis and list all your power features that your competitors don’t have.

While building a brand persona, course creators predominantly suffer from imposter syndrome due to a lack of confidence. Imposter syndrome means not being confident about products and thinking their products are not good enough to stay in the competitive market.

Therefore, while creating a brand persona, you should try to get rid of this imposter syndrome. This helps you to create a perfect brand persona for your online courses.

Tips to Recover from Burnout for Course CreatorsIt’s absolutely normal to go through burnout. But, facing continuous burnout is not normal. Besides, it reduces the productivity of course creators, which leads to less valuable courses. Therefore, you should try to recover from burnout to create improved courses that offer high value.

But how? What helps you to recover from burnout? Follow the following tips of Holly Chantal to get over burnout:

Stop doing lots of things at a time. Minimizing the workload is effective in avoiding burnout or get rid of it.
Focus on your time management. Must keep room for refreshment.
Learn to take failure lightly. Build a motto that either you will win or learn.

By building your mindset like this, you can further overcome burnout and improve online education.

Start Improving Online CoursesPeople are always worried about creating and converting online courses. But, very few consider improving courses to increase sales and profits. However, sometimes course creators want to do it but don’t know how.
If you read till the end, you already get the guide on how to improve online courses. If you need more guidance, you can do a six-figure plateau masterclass of Holly Chantal to learn how to optimize your courses more.

Episode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch and scale a high-value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast, I’m joined by a special guest, her name is Holly Chantal, that’s at hollychantal.com. We’re gonna get into a bunch of ways to improve your online course or online learning business. Welcome to the show, Holly.

Holly Chantal: Hey, thank you for having me.

Chris Badgett: You see yourself as a business integration Coach? Tell us what that means.

Holly Chantal: So integration is a little it goes a little bit deeper than implementation. So implementation is kind of just the doing of things. And integration is really deeply layering new ideas, new strategies into your business so that you can create the result you want. So the way I work with clients is looking at what their goal is, what their vision is, and then we reverse engineer it. And then move forward with integrating piece by piece. Rather than having a to do list or checklist like it’s, it’s just a little bit deeper, it develops habits and lasting results versus kind of like a flash in the pan, they get one result once and then have to do it again. The way we work is because we put the weave deeply layered and built as we went, whatever result we created can then be repeated and repeated and repeated, because all the systems are there. And they’ve built the habits, the language, everything.

Chris Badgett: So who do you help who’s like your ideal person that you’d love to work with and get great results with?

Holly Chantal: I really love working with coaches, I have always been called Focus coaches when I first started back in 2009. Because they typically have one really interesting story and a really interesting point of view that I like to learn about. And they’re also very mission driven. So I figure if I impact them and help them serve more people, then it’s kind of also increasing my impact. Because I don’t have that wake, huge message or inspiration piece. So I work behind the scene so that they can do what they do best.

Chris Badgett: You’ve got a on your website, the buyers arc Marketing Guide. Tell us about that.

Holly Chantal: Yeah, so the buyers arc is this would be really useful for your course graders, it because it’s really the decision making process that people go through when they’re making a decision to buy a course the coaching program, take out on Friday house anything. And once you understand what that arc looks like, it’s very, we can again, then reverse engineer your marketing campaigns, and your website and any anything that you’re using to sell to satisfy those different points along the arc. So what you’re doing essentially, is just empowering people with the right information at the right times. So they can decide if your course is going to be the best next step for them. And it’s interesting, because the questions people ask themselves aren’t always what you expect or can’t be like they don’t ask the questions. Sometimes they really show up as their fear, anxiety, their own, like emotions, and they don’t realize that they’re actually questions. So, for example, toward the end of the buyers arc when someone’s actually deciding to commit, they’re the things that are holding them back are not typically price. It’s typically is there something I should be doing before this? Is this the best next step for me? Could I do this in a different way? Do I like the approach this person is taking? So they’re asking themselves all of those questions kind of unconsciously. But what they’ll say to you is, I can’t afford it. I need to think about it, those kinds of things. And so that’s why we feel like everything’s revolving around price. But the reality is, if they were completely confident that this is the best next step, this is gonna get them what they want. The price becomes a small, small piece of the puzzle.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So that’s Hollychantal.com. Go look for the buyers arc there. What else? Like what else I know you do a lot with messaging. Like, where does the messaging work begin? Like for a coach or an expert. That’s alright, I’m moving in this direction. I keep hearing online I need to have my million dollar message or what whatever, like, where does that work begin?

Holly Chantal: So it begins at the beginning. And the, that’s the good news is that like, starting with messaging is going to set you up for success is that like, forever ends

Chris Badgett: Is that like the first step? Like, if we’re gonna do it, I’m called to be a coach, course creator, expert, whatever, I should start with messaging,

Holly Chantal: Right, you can’t just come out and say, I’m a coach, or I’m selling this widget, because no one will listen to you, no one will hear you. Because there’s so many other people in the space that are marketing to them, they sometimes don’t even know what they’re looking for a coach or a course or anything like that. So so it starts in the beginning, really understanding who it is that you’re looking for who those ideal clients are, and then creating messaging around your offer and how it’s how it’s going to take them from the point A of where they are now to the point B of exactly where they want to be. And you’d be surprised. Coaches think that you have to like cram so much into that to create value. If you move them one step closer to their goal, or eliminate one obstacle is highly valuable. And the more specialized and and detailed you can get in that step, it’s going to be easier for them to see that’s the solution. So it’s saying that, you know, it starts in the beginning, but your messaging is a iterative process. So you’re never going to feel satisfied that your message is done, buttoned up, I can move on now. And that’s, that’s something that I think a lot of business owners don’t realize. And they feel like a failure, because they’re like, Well, what I’m doing, I describe it differently every single time or I just feel like I’m constantly figuring things out. And, and the reality is, that’s, that’s the reality of business, because you are consistently, continually growing, evolving, adding skills, adding points of view, getting experience with clients, seeing what challenges they’re having, and your messaging and how you talk about your work evolves at the same time. And the key here is you need to keep your message and your audience match, like they have to stay aligned. Because over time, what will sometimes happen is your offers and what what you’re doing will start outpacing the audience. So the examples you’re giving, the stories that you’re sharing, the topics that you’re talking about, when you started worked out really well, and we’re attracting the right people. But as these of us, you have evolved, if you’re still talking about those same topics, you’re going to attract the audience that’s back here, not the ones that are ready for your services now.

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s really cool! Is that is that kind of like, if you’re gonna market it to beginners? Let’s say, like, you might actually kind of like your people, and then you move forward with them. And now you’re doing intermediate stuff. Now you’re doing advanced stuff, and you’ve abandoned the beginners? But maybe that’s where all the opportunity is? Or should you track with them? Or tell us more about that? disconnect between audience and message?

Holly Chantal: Yeah, so it’s kind of like what you just said. And, and, and, yeah, so you start, like most people, when they’re starting out, they don’t feel confident enough to work with people that are further along in their journey, even if they themselves have a lot of experience. They haven’t coached before or taking some of your process. So they they’re a little bit hesitant to jump right in. So they’ll start working with people that are more at the beginning stages. And I feel like a good rule of thumb is to target folks that are about two years behind you in your journey. Because that gives you enough experience and lead time essentially solving these problems, that you’re still your message stays relevant. So what happens is, let’s say we’re targeting people that are at the beginning stages of their business. And then you know, a few years later, those people, you the people that you’ve worked with, have evolved, you have evolved, you’ve taken courses, you’ve worked with coaches, you’ve grown your own business, you have a lot more to offer now. But if you’re, you’re and you probably as raised, raise your prices along the way. Now you have more sophisticated services, you’re doing more detailed work, et cetera, et cetera. But if you’re still using the campaigns, the topics, the stories, etc, that you’re using, when you started that speak to the beginners, you’re going to continue to attract people that can’t afford you now. And that’s what I find happens. actually haven’t talked to someone that it hasn’t happened to so I’m gonna say 100% of the time. With a totally made-up statistic, they’re there every coach reaches a point where their business stops growing. And they’re not really sure why they think it’s that they need to market more, they need to bring new strategies in etc etc. So what will happen is they’ll hit this upper limit in their business, and then they’ll hit that element and they’ll actually start, their revenue will start to decline. And then they’ll do a big push, it’ll go back up to that upper limit, and then it’ll start to decline. And you’ll find that I’ve talked to a few people that have gone through this, the find that over the like, two, three years, their, their top line has actually started to decline. And they start to feel like, maybe this was that was it, they got really lucky. And now, you know, maybe I’m not, maybe I’m not supposed to do this anymore, maybe I need to get a job, etc. The problem, most likely, what happened is there’s a message to market match between what you want to be doing even, and the people that you’re currently attracting, so you start to outgrow your business. And if we can bring those things back into alignment, you’ll be back off to the races. Because what you have is still valuable. It’s just there’s a mismatch in how you’re talking about it.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I know, another way you help people is with like mapping their method of how they solve the problem. And it for course creators and coaches, sometimes it’s called instructional design or teaching methodology or framework, how does? How does an expert, let’s say, who does not have any background in teaching or coaching? I see this as a big blocker for people. How do people like create that method, that signature program method that actually works?

Holly Chantal: Right, so I like that you’re framing this as like coming from like instructional design, because that’s a really smart way to do it. I don’t think a lot of I don’t think everyone thinks of it that way. When most what I have found is that, when most coaches are planning on writing a course, they start thinking about what topics they can write about, and less about the progression of the student. And it’s, it’s really just, they just don’t have experience looking at it that way. So this is where integrated like that layers and integration analogy kind of makes sense. So what you need to keep in mind is, as you are building out your course, is understanding where your student is in their level of knowledge, their experience, et cetera, and then adding one, one layer at a time. So not jumping from topic to topic, so that you have a lot of different topics in your course. But like I said, maybe focusing in on one aspect, and going really deep into that aspect and making sure that they’re developing the skills along with the just the ability to implement. And so when I’m helping my people map out what their method looks like, what we’re looking at is okay, what is the starting point that someone’s at? Like, what? Where are they starting from skills experience? How long have they been? How long? Have they been trying to solve this problem? What if they tried before? What hasn’t worked? Why hasn’t it worked? So we really dig deep into, like, who this program is the best fit for? And then we look at what, where do they want to go. And since you have all that like rich detail in who it is you’re looking for, you know, what they’ve tried before, probably where their their sense of skepticism might be coming from their hesitations. And you also know what they have going for them at that point. So that you can design the course to really satisfy their specific needs. So that so once you have point A and point B, then it’s just a matter of reverse engineering, or like taking that point B and kind of taking steps back and how do we get there? And that becomes the trajectory of your course.

Chris Badgett: All right. When do we integrate in branding, I know you have the branding game. And I see a lot of people start with branding as they understand it with logos and colors and maybe throw up a website but when does branding come into the mix if you could have it your way and had to were able to shape somebody?

Holly Chantal: So it really depends. So I have there’s kind of like two different paths you can go the brand new game is geared towards people that are starting out and they need to get their ducks in a row and build that foundation so that they can have an effective website be able to market and be able to sell. So if you’re starting out so I find that a lot of coaches course graders, they feel like they need a brand, like a website logo and their offer all those things before they feel official enough that they actually have a business and start marketing. So the branding game is really about experimenting with those different pieces and finding where you fit so that you can create a solid foundation to grow from. In ideal world. If I’m working with someone that has an established business. They don’t they might not necessarily have a brand because a lot of coaches work by referral. And it’s when they need to move online and start it expanding their reach that that’s when branding and messaging really become important. Because when you’re working on referral, you have an opportunity to have a two way conversation with whoever’s coming to you. And you can really tailor what you’re saying to that. When you’re marketing online. It’s a one way conversation, you have to make sure that what you’re saying is very intentional about who you want to attract. And so in an ideal world, what I would have a client do is test their course idea with a few hand raiser emails or Facebook posts, just to see test interesting see, you know, is this something is this a viable ideas is what people want, and even start selling it before you read your website, write a sales page, like invest in launching the program, because you get a lot of information when you’re doing that testing about what promises land, what are what hesitations are people coming to you with? You know, does the method is make sense to people? Are they having a lot of questions about it, you get a lot of information that would go into creating the website, the brand, the even naming the program, that kind of thing. And so if you can test and sell before you actually, you know, make it all pretty and packaged, that’s really the ideal.

Chris Badgett: So the branding game on your website is a course is that right?

Holly Chantal: Yes. It has some coaching with me. So I do like bi-weekly q&a calls. But it is a course.

Chris Badgett: I’m just looking at the content is so good. I’m like, well, which one of these are we going to talk about right here? Let’s talk about brand persona a little bit. That’s something that people don’t always think about. Tell us your take on brand persona, what it is and how we should how we can create one?

Holly Chantal: Right. So as generally, we’re starting off as solopreneurs, you are the business. And so your persona really matters in how you’re marketing yourself. And some people are more introverted, some people are just naturally, here I am, I’m going to tell you all about me that kind of thing. So there’s kind of different levels of personality in a business. And the persona, is, we approach it from a couple of different ways. One, we actually approach it in three different ways. I’m gonna give you the second to sorry, caught me off guard of this question I can get I can really nerd out about this stuff. So configurable. The persona is, first, what aspects of your personality come out with different people in your lives, because you’ll notice that you behave differently if you’re with your children, than if you’re with your parents, if you’re with a client versus a CIO, a supervisor, a friend versus a relative, like there’s different aspects of your personality that come out with those different people. And it starts creating this self awareness for how you show up. And then you can make really intentional decisions about how do you want to show up in your business. Because, you know, do I share my political views? Well, it kind of depends on what type of persona you want to create, how do you want people to view your brand? Is your political views important to your clients? If not, then, you know, you don’t have to share those things. And so we look at it from that aspect. And then the other aspect is Archetypes. So there’s 12 different Archetypes. These are based on Jung’s psychology. And I find that the archetype kind of gives you a character to play in your business. And what this does is it drives the graphics and the style of your website, in your logos. If you’re having photos done, it drives the voice that you’re using in your writing, how like, even how you’re dressing and what your headshots look like, like when you know how you want to show up, all of those decisions become very easily and you know what to ask for, which I used to, I stopped my start. When I started my business, I was doing website design. And that was like the number one thing was that people would come and they would have no idea what to ask for. It was just kind of like, I’ll know it when I see it. And we just kind of had to pull rabbits out of a hat. So that’s why I started developing these modules. Actually, that’s what the Beretta game came from, is getting you to a point where it’s like you know exactly what you want, how you want to show up, what to say all of those things so that you can build your website.

Chris Badgett: I just want to list them out. I’ll just pulling up the union archetypes. We’ve got the innocent the sage, the Explorer, the Outlaw, the magician, the hero, the lover, the jester, the everyman, the caregiver, the ruler and the artist. So using one of those as an example, perhaps with you are with one of your clients, like what’s an example of embodying one of these archetypes to really focus our brand persona?

Holly Chantal: So what’s interesting about each archetype is that there is the Attract apart and then there’s the shadow. So innocent as you’re talking, you just kind of like lit up for me. Because innocent is, I find that a lot of a lot of coaches tend to fall into that one naturally. And then we need to massage it a little bit so that they don’t seem to innocent. And the reason is the innocent is the one that is viewing the world through rose colored lens. And they’re so a lot of coaches like they’re so far ahead of their clients, that they’re just talking about this world that where they are, you know, living their best life, they’re energized, they’re so healthy, and vital and vibrant and vigorous, and all these things. And they are very inspirational themselves, but their clients are. They’re not there, it’s like they the coach is the butterfly, and the clients are the caterpillars, and they’re not speaking the same language. So what happens is, is that their clients don’t don’t resonate, because they can’t see what the coach is saying it’s possible. So that’s the shadow is like, you can be inspirational and talk about all the amazing things because you’ve gone through that journey, and you may have helped other people go through that journey. But unless you can put it into Caterpillar speak, they’re gonna think you’re just blowing smoke and making promises when you don’t know their specific situation. And how could you like, how am I supposed to do all those things when I have all these obstacles in front of me. So that’s like, that’s where we have to balance the archetypes. But they can be, they can be really cool. And it’s a neat tool to kind of play with. And I usually find that when people come in, go through the brand new game, a natural archetype just emerges for each of them. And then we get to play it and massage it and just make sure that they’re balancing out that shadow so that they are not, not shooting themselves in the foot and making sure that they’re speaking language that their clients are going to use. So it gives them a guide about how they want to show up. But also, you know, the pieces that they need to use in their messaging to balance it out.

Chris Badgett: Love that. But one more thing before we move off brand persona is a lot of course creators and coaches struggle with impostor syndrome. How can brand persona help us show up better or get through that barrier?

Holly Chantal: So imposter syndrome? Yeah, it’s a it’s a beast. And I feel like it’s something that we we all go through. And so when you are trying to think like, it’s, you don’t want to fake who you are, because then that brings up the imposter syndrome.

Chris Badgett: One quick point, I found it interesting what you said I hadn’t even really thought about it. But even if you’re very authentic, you kind of show up differently to the family, to the friend to the at work. So in some ways, I think that’s part of that story that

Holly Chantal: Right.

Chris Badgett: But it’s not that you’re being an imposter by being more reserved when you’re with family versus your ideal customer or something like that.

Holly Chantal: Right? So tell me how do you define impostor syndrome? I’m turning this around, asking you questions.

Chris Badgett: Mostly, it’s driven by the lack of progress is like the outward expression. And the inward expression is driven by the internal questions that people ask around. Who am I to do this? Will anybody buy my product? Is my programs not good enough, yet? I just doubt that people will respect me or, you know, my, my people, my friends or family will think I’m crazy or something like that. It’s just a it’s a dream of negative self talk.

Holly Chantal: Right. So the way that I combat that myself, and and works with clients is to build a body of evidence that those things aren’t true. So going through the persona exercise, for example, and like you said, how do you show up with different people will start to build a body of evidence that I’m not a complete failure. And people do find what I say is valuable. And, oh, yeah, I’ve helped this person and this is how this is how I did that. This is the role that I played in that journey that they were on. So you, you, it helps you again, self awareness. I’m just, that’s part of my personality. I’m very naturally self aware, to like kind of annoying, annoying degree. But I’m also helping people develop that self awareness because it’s really important as a business owner to be able to look at yourself objectively, without all that negative self talk, and just observe how you work. How you show up. That’s one of the things I’m really good at when we’re We’re looking at people’s methods is oftentimes, because you’re so creative. And because you’ve been working with referrals and kind of working as things come to you, people don’t think that they have a method or a system. They feel like it’s just creative. It’s inspired, it’s in the moment. A very intuitive like they say, that’s the kind of things that they say. And if they if we actually zoom out and look at, okay, the last five clients you’ve worked with, there’s usually a pattern that develops in the way you’re asking questions, what questions you’re asking, what were they, you know, what aspects they struggled with, and those are all things that you can build into your course. And you can start creating a system to like I call it you the method, your magic, you can start putting that system around it, that still allows you to be creative and intuitive and in the moment, but it gives a kind of tangible framework that makes it easier for your client to understand. And again, that’s like that caterpillar and butterfly language. So like second nature to you that when you explain what you’re going to do, makes total sence, but to the caterpillar. They’re not so sure yet. So this kind of that like that, finding the patterns and putting a framework around, it really helps with that. That’s awesome.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about brandable names, naming courses, naming coaching programs, choosing our URL, I guess. I see, let’s say How should I phrase this? I see a lot of bad names out there, I see. Where I can’t even I can’t tell or it’s too long, or it doesn’t sound fun or appealing. I don’t know how do we create a brandable? A name that’s going to work? I know there’s a lot that goes into it seems simple, but it’s not. And it’s hard. And I, I’ve created a lot of bad names of things too.

Holly Chantal: When you said let’s talk about brandable names, because naming is like, that’s my like, I hate naming my least favorite thing. But I have like entire modules around naming because, like I said a lot of in order to put something forward, you need to feel confident in things like your name and your logo and your your website. So yeah,

Chris Badgett: I just want to add, once you have your message, like you’re talking about, like it’s kind of the next step, because if you’re going to test the market, you need to invent the product, before it’s created. And you got to kind of have this vision and it needs a name like a person has a name.

Holly Chantal: Right. Now, because that’s exactly what I what I that’s one of the methods that we use. So what the process you just laid out is actually really important to point out that the message becomes before the name, because a lot of folks just try to figure out the name first. Or they’ll come to me like is this a good name? Oh, like depends on what’s in the actual program, or what you’re trying to do. Like, I can’t tell you if it’s a good name or not. So your name needs to be fun, it needs to have some kind of outcome attached to it needs to be clear, like what it is, to a point because you have to keep in mind that a name on its own is very rarely used. There’s usually a lot of context around it. So that’s why you find people using they use the acronym for the program. And because there’s been so marketing, so much marketing around it. People would like are indoctrinated into using that acronym. So the name matters less like Product Launch Formula. No one says Product Launch Formula. Everyone says PLF. Because there’s been so much marketing around it. And so much context built around it that the name is actually less important. It’s more content that people are focused on.

Chris Badgett: There’s a funny thing there too. I even hear people talking about the modules within the course by like the like PLC one or whatever. Like it’s crazy, but it makes sense. Sorry, go ahead.

Holly Chantal: Yeah, it’s like a whole other it’s like you learn a language. So one of the things like I can’t tell you how to name your course, because that would be like a whole, like, hour long thing on its own. But what I can tell you is you were saying kind of like a person like he needs a name. There’s a there’s a little test that I use with clients with their names. We call it the backdoor test. So I read I saw a video or read something once that, that when they were trying to name their child, they went outside and they yelled the name 100 times because they wanted to envision themselves yelling to this child this name, and they wanted to know if it would annoy them ever. I thought that was perfect. I was like that’s amazing. So your course say it on its own. Say it in a sentence like does it make sense? If you’re writing an email and like As the name of the course, do stumble over it when you’re reading, does it work in a sentence? Or does it like, sometimes people use? I don’t have a good. A good example. I don’t want to like bash someone’s name on. They use a word like tenses of words that don’t really go together. Oh, yeah. Or like, they’ll use the same tense word again and again, like continuing communicating program. And it’s like, oh, like, am I continuing communicating program? Like, that doesn’t make sense. But, so you need to make sure that the words make sense in a sentence. The other thing is, sometimes acronyms work. Sometimes they don’t. So I try to keep the names as short as possible. So like my programs are map your message Trailblazers collective, a brand new game, like they’re short.

Chris Badgett: Those are all the names, by the way, what makes them good, like maybe tell us a story of of one of those examples? Because I think they’re all just great.

Holly Chantal: So yeah, they all came from very different places. The branding game has a really funny story. Because it’s based on Candyland. Which is like my favorite game when I was a kid. And I have this just really, I was having a conversation with my mentor, who was Michael Porter, who I mentor I could afford at the time. He’s still Michael Porter. He was my mentor at the time. And he was talking about, I should have lollipops in my brand, like it was just this complete random conversation we were having. And I was like, it’s really stupid at the time. But afterwards, I was thinking it was like, You know what, what if I did this theme around Candyland. So I went to my business partner at the time was like, I have this crazy idea. I think we should create this program based on Candyland. And he was like I’m in so we called it brandy land. What else? Yeah, no, not good. So brandy land is a website for people who really like brandy, and actually have a problem with brand. Like, okay, maybe not. So that’s where we came up with the branding game. And so it, it just kind of came out organically. And what’s really funny is that I’ve wanted to change the name of that program for so long, because it’s from my old brand. And it doesn’t really fit what I’m doing now. haven’t been able to come up with another name for it. It’s just kind of stuck.

Chris Badgett: One of the things I like about it, I heard this concept like a decade ago, this term called wallet closing words. So in your your messaging, your copywriting. And so calling a course like a game is like, that sounds fun. That’s like the opposite of a wallet closing word. Like some people say the word school may have a negative connotation, or it might feel like a lot of work, or it might bring up past memories or whatever. Yep. And I like what you have another one, though. It’s the collective right. Trailblazers collective Yep. And I love Trailblazer. And I like being with like, a collective of cool people. It just works, you know. So

Holly Chantal: It was called the trailblazers collaborative. This is where naming does make does matter. It’s called the trailblazers collaborative. And the biggest objection I was getting was, what if I don’t want to work with other people? There you go there and I was like, but that’s not what we’re doing. So I changed it to the collective. And now I don’t get that objection anymore.

Chris Badgett: You have a gorgeous like website, and just your own branding, and everything is just so good. Like, how does one get to this point? I know some people are good artists. So I’m gonna we’re gonna hire it out. So you didn’t do all this by yourself?

Holly Chantal: No, I did the layout and I built the site myself, just because I’m a kind of a control freak with my own stuff. But I had an artist that did the art and he’s he’s amazing. He actually does work for Starbucks and a couple other brands. But

Chris Badgett: When you say Did did the art you have like photographs you have like these cool drawings like what was the art?

Holly Chantal: So I hired him because my old brand DeLanda friend I was going to that was all cartoon, it was all drawn are all illustrations. And my the partner that did that we parted ways. He retired for design, he’s doing something else now. So I needed an artist to upgrade that branch. When I was working with this guy though, we decided alright, you know what, let’s get let go of the later brand and brand me is probably shouldn’t help. But I hired him because I was looking for an illustrator. So I went on what’s the website Upwork. I found them on Upwork I just went found illustrators found someone that I liked the style of and that’s how I started the conversation. And so he developed the plan for that photo shoot. So all of this behind me He he put together a concept for all of this and had like he like photoshopped a picture together. This is what your office needs to look like he picked out my paint.

Chris Badgett: Well, I actually I noticed that I actually noticed that I don’t, you can’t see my office right now. But it’s literally the colors of my brand, like each wall is different colors stuff. I was like, I bet she’s living inside her brand too.

Holly Chantal: I am. So yeah, he designed my office he, I have a peach wall over there, that some of my photos are against a peach wall, which apparently is really hard to photos. But my photographer did amazing. So he planned all of that out and sent me basically a brand sheet that said, you know, this is the style, these are the types of photos, etc. And then he thought chose the fonts. And then I basically gave him a wireframe of, okay, here’s what I need. And he just created certain images. So he did that banner, he did most of the banners at the top, and then that geographic graph, that geometric pattern. That’s my geomet. Like he made that custom for me. And I have a couple of different versions of that. And that’s really, that’s really all that went into the branding is the photos, the geometric pattern, the fonts and the colors. And everything else is just colors, like, you’ll notice like the boxes on the homepage are just solid, solid colors. So there’s actually no graphics there. The illustrations are there. Because he did like logos for each of my programs. But there’s very few graphics that had to be done.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. Can you give us a sense of how much working with the illustrator like that costs are like your price range or something? If somebody’s like, hey, I want that, like what should they be thinking of?

Holly Chantal: It really It depends. So he was $75 an hour. And I think I think the logo ended up being around 2500. And I, so I did like three different logos with him. Because we did the we did three different brands, who did me the brand new game and the trailblazers collective. And so I think it was around $10,000 For three brands, including the website, graphics, etc. So if you’re doing just one brand, it would be less than that. I also have a designer that I work with that did the page for the branding game, and trailblazers collective. So if you look at those, they have kind of a different look and feel. It’s because it’s a different designer. But she laid out, I think it was like 20 pages of copy, like in a Word document, it was insane. She laid it out beautifully. I’ve cut it down since then. But that, you know, you can find good designers for I think she’s like she does VIP days in there about $3,000 for a VIP day, what’s a VIP day. So it’s like eight hours of design work. So she can do probably like half a website. So if you’re gonna do a whole website, I’d plan like two VIP days like $6,000. But she’s really, really good. And I’m happy to share her information. She’s Mesa

Chris Badgett: Is that something a VIP day that you’re present with a designer or they’re just doing they’re just giving you dedicated focus?

Holly Chantal: I’m finding that a lot of designers are doing, like their design work, like they have you batch everything. And then they just devote a whole day to your project. And basically what they’re doing is just checking in on certain things like the top of the page, she’s like, does this look good? Am I on the right track, because she just want to finish the rest of the page if like, there’s something wrong with the colors or fonts, etc. So I think she just was checking in, like a couple times throughout the day just to see like how things were going and making sure that it was on track. So that’s fine. A lot of designers do it that way. And I really like it because it’s not like this long drawn out process. It’s like just done

Chris Badgett: That was cool. I find that interesting. The like gets setting up the office like was part of the project was they suggest that or you suggest that you suggested that?

Holly Chantal: He suggested that. Because apparently I have terrible taste.

Chris Badgett: Hey, everybody, at some point realizes like everybody thinks you’re a good designer, whatever. I’m sure I’m sure you’re above average and most but I had that realization myself. And I know what that feels like.

Holly Chantal: Yeah, I’m not I’m not I will not I will say I am not an interior designer. My office is the most put together room in the house if that, if that helps.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Well, I want to dig back into your, your, your program, what’s the message to market audit? So I guess that’s where for somebody that’s already moving and struggling or or hit a wall?

Holly Chantal: Yeah. So audits can be used in a couple different ways. Sometimes it’s things aren’t working. Tell me what Tell me tell me what’s going on. Like I’m doing all the things I’m marketing, I’m sending emails, but I’m still not getting the number of leads. I know I could be. So in that case, we audit for that message to market match. And I’ll point out these are all the points that you’re losing people or you know, if we just change these words, you’ll change your results. And then sometimes it’s just someone wants to know how they can improve. So I do a lot of webinar. Like funnel audits where someone’s running a webinar, but there might not be getting, like the numbers that they know they could be. So just audit that one funnel. And I’m finding that people get about a 300% conversion, like upping their conversion by 300% After the audit. So there’s really kind of like you can’t see your own stuff because you’re so close to it. Just having an objective I come in and just look at the messaging and how everything’s structured and fresh eyes. Like as I kind of look at, like, the buyers aren’t like, we’re kind of looking through that, that mindset and that point of view, I can kind of see what people are thinking at different points and what questions they’re asking that aren’t being answered. That could make a big difference in conversion.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. What um, I’m on your six figure plateau. masterclass what, what is the what does the six figure plateau? Like? What what causes people to get stuck there? And first of all, it’s great to celebrate that. I mean, hey, what an achievement. But sometimes people want to go a lot further. why don’t why don’t people stall out at six figures?

Holly Chantal: Yeah, so the six figure plateau is conceptually it’s about you, when you start your business, six figures is the goal, right? But then you find you get there, and it’s like, okay, should it be smooth sailing that right? And it’s not. Because like I said, your business is going to continue to be an iterative process, you’re going to outgrow things, things are going to change, the markets gonna change, you have to continually adapt. So the six year plateau is where someone has hit that stagnation point, that upper limit that I was talking about earlier, I find a six figure plateau is kind of like a fun name, like it rolls off the tongue and people get it, but I find that it sometimes it happens around $50,000, not even six figures. So it can happen at any point, that you just hit this plateau where you can’t take on any more clients, you try to raise your prices, but people then are saying they can’t afford it and your leads dry up, you might try to go from one on one to groups to start creating more leverage for yourself. But you’re finding you’re putting so much work into filling that group that has actually dollars for hours less than if you were to book someone one on one. So there’s just all these different levels of complexity that come up when you start when you reach your upper limit, and you start trying to figure out how do I break through that next level. So that’s why I traded, I created the trailblazers collective, because that’s a longer term program where we find your message to Market Match upfront and create your messaging, and your website, copy and like all those pieces. And then we end like that’s the integration part, we integrate over 612 months, so that you can dial the messaging and further, make sure that everything’s getting implemented, you’re developing new habits, we deal with all the mindset stuff that comes up as you’re breaking into that next level. So it’s a really holistic, completely integrated program.

Chris Badgett: Where do people kind of get stuck? The most Do you think with in terms of not, you know, kind of being having a fully integrated, you know, expert coach type business, like what what is the most common missing pieces or lack of connection, that’s that shouldn’t be there that’s holding them back.

Holly Chantal: There, I would say there’s there’s two, but then they really go down to one. So mindset is probably one of the biggest things like you are your own worst enemy. And why I say like, there’s two and it kind of goes down to one. Because because the second one is when you’re trying when you want to do something different, and kind of take that next level, or you’ll continually get in your own way. So you’ll have other ideas that take you off track. And you will unconsciously procrastinate, because you’re not really sure where to start. So you’ll start working on what feels urgent, and what is going to give you a win right now because this other piece is so like that new thing you don’t know if it’s going to work. It’s a lot of work to put together. I might as well just stay where I am. So that’s where the upper limit stays. But it comes down to one because that’s all mindset, like and that’s why privilege was selected. Like that’s my favorite program. Like if I could just do that all day. I love it. So it’s me and I have a partner who is a communications and human behavior expert. So she is really good at finding those blocks for like, we observe you basically as you’re implementing, you’re coming out of the calls and we’re finding that we’re identifying different patterns and then she helps people. Once we identify the patterns, she helps offer alternatives and ways to overcome it. And then I’m working on the like strategic piece just making sure that it’s not just their mindset that’s holding them back that actually you know the strategy sound this messaging sound there’s filling up the way they want to be those kinds of things.

Chris Badgett: How about avoiding burnout or overcoming it?

Holly Chantal: Yeah, I’ve been there. Three kids.

Chris Badgett: I just find like coaches and people that want to serve and help people and create impact in the world, and also build business, they’re prone to burnout. So like, how do we..

Holly Chantal: Yeah, I mean, there’s so many different things that lead to burnout. And it definitely impacts you, because a lot of times, it really comes down to one thing, and in the big scheme of things, it’s reacting versus responding, versus being in command. So there’s like three different levels. And my point is, I want to give credit where credit’s due Michelle, my partner, she’s one that teaches this piece. So I’m going to speak her words for a moment. So Michelle Quinn, she’s the one that teaches us concepts. So when you, when you’re in business, and you have emails coming in, and you have family to take care of, and you have just always all these demands on your time. You feel like when you start, it’s like you’re reacting to things. You’re constantly putting out fires, you’re responding, you’re reacting to what’s in the what’s in your email, how your numbers were this month, how do I get more clients because I need to pay the bills, and it’s all reactive. And it’s all like, happening to you. The next step is, we get you to a place where you can respond to those things. So giving yourself enough breathing room, to be able to make thought out decisions that aren’t just in the moment and going to create more problems later. But because you have an outside perspective, or because you have made certain choices in your business, you have that that space to really start making intentional choices. And sometimes that has to do with how you’re structuring your time. What you’re saying yes to with clients, so setting expectations and boundaries with it during the sales process, not just with your clients, but during the sales process makes a huge difference. Because that’s where the burnout happens. It’s like you can’t keep up with all the demands. But if the demands weren’t there, you can keep up with them. And some of those demands are not always, not always necessary. So for example, one of our trailblazers, he just week after week was not getting the pieces done that he wanted to for his business. And he kept saying, it’s so important to me that I get this piece done. Like, this is my goal. This is my dream I want it was a webinar, I need this webinar done so that I can start marketing it. And so I asked him, Okay, what is getting in the way? Like, why? What’s going on? How are you scheduling your time, because he kept saying, I’m scheduling time to do, et cetera. So he was doing the most productive time of his day he was giving to his clients, because he wanted to be on for them and give them the best service, etc, which makes complete sense. Until I asked him when you’re working with clients, does it matter if you’re tired? Do you like most coaches, they turn it on when they’re on the phone with a client no matter where they are during the day. And he’s like, Yeah, you’re right. Like, I could do them in the afternoon and be completely energized and fine, because it’s completely different doing client work than it is doing your work. So we just had him flip flop his schedule. So now his most productive time was spent on his projects, which are harder to execute. And then his afternoon time, when he’s feeling a little bit more lagged, he devoted to clients gave them the exact same experience they would have had already. But now he was getting his stuff done. So just those kinds of things. In that case, he was reacting to, like, the perception that his clients needed a certain aspect of him and they in it and he didn’t like once he took a step back, he can make a more intentional choice. So the third level is being in complete command. So that’s where you have orchestrated your life, your business, your clients everything so that you aren’t, oh, my audio go out?

Chris Badgett: No, you’re fine.

Holly Chantal: Okay, went out of my ear. So now you’ve orchestrated your business, your life, everything so that you’re more in a director role. Rather than being in the weeds all the time, it doesn’t mean you don’t sometimes end up in the weeds, like if a lot of calamity happens at once. But in general, you’re able to handle the day to day and you’ve designed thanks so that you don’t feel burned out. You’re giving everyone the attention they need and you find yourself in a place of balance.

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s really cool. Any just kind of tactical tip on how to transcend up to the command level. Like what was the big driver for you to feel more in command as opposed to reactive?

Holly Chantal: Yeah, So for me, this was back in 2017, that I hit my low, where I was completely burned out. Because I had a… So my son, my second son was just under a year. And I had and then my older son was three. So I had like a toddler and a baby. And a business. Yeah. And I was, I was putting way too much pressure on myself because I, I, you know, foolishly went to the expectation of when I had kids, my business wouldn’t change, like it still have my goals, I’d still do everything I was doing, I found very quickly when I had my first son that that was not the case. And basically fought that for the first few years. And that’s why I’m burning myself out. So the this is where it’s hard to recognize for yourself. But like when you’re feeling that burned out, something’s got to give. And so that was when I actually started working with with Michelle myself, to work on those aspects and helping me kind of manage all of the demands on my time and expectations of myself expectations from others, those kinds of things, and really just restructured not just my business, because that part I was actually pretty good at I’m good at restructuring and redoing offers and like changing my business model. And that’s like, that’s why I help other people do that. Because integration like that’s, that’s what it is, like you’re making those changes. But the mindset aspect was really, really important to understand how I was communicating to myself. So all that self talk, the expectations that I was setting with clients, and how that could be creating some of that reactivity. And if I just shifted some of the onboarding, or how the sales cycle was working, to set those expectations up front that I wouldn’t, I would have less problems. So there’s like all these like subtle nuances that when they all add up, really creates a lot of space for yourself. So now, I work 20 hours a week, four hour days. And back then I was doing that too, but it was painful. Now it’s very easy. It’s like I have plenty of time, because I’m not biting off more than I can chew. And I know what my limitations are. And now I have three kids. And you know, one of them just turned two yesterday. So it’s it’s something that once you have it into place, it can grow with you, and really changes how your business looks like in a lot of different ways.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. That’s Holly Chantel. That’s Hollychantal.com. Go check out the buyers arc over there. Any final words for the people or other ways they can connect with you?

Holly Chantal: Yeah, so I’m so glad everyone was listening. I hope you got something out of it today. And yeah, the buyers arc is a really cool place to start if you’re looking at wanting to sell higher ticket offers, if you find yourself reaching that upper limit. If you’re having a hard time selling your courses. In that PDF that you can download, there’s exercises, questions, we ask yourself at each stage examples of what type of content belong at each stage. So that’s basically all the things you would need to kind of get started with implementing.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. You’ve dropped so many words of wisdom and sharing your experience and everything really appreciate it.

Holly Chantal: Thank you. This is a lot of fun. We should do it again sometime.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifter lms.com forward slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com forward slash gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post How to Build the Coaching Business that Lights You Up with Holly Chantal appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

LMScast has a special guest today with our host Chris Badgett; meet Christine Kloser from getyourbookdone.com. Christine has taught and mentored young aspiring writers to complete their books, publishing, marketing, and sales since 2007. If you are interested in writing tips, you can also visit her other website freebookwritinghelp.com. 2007 is very early in the course selling industry. So, how did this happen?

Christine started by publishing her husband’s first book in 2004 without any of them having any prior knowledge of writing or publishing. But taking her learnings from it, she published her book on 40 women’s life stories shortly after. That book got featured in a high-circulation entrepreneur magazine and was the best-recommended book of the season. Requests poured in to release follow-up editions, for which she was unprepared. But she eventually did it. When this kicked off, many people who wanted to tell their stories started to ask for her help to teach and guide them to write their books. At a point, she created her course so that everyone who needed help with writing and publishing could benefit from it.

Christine has been running this course for almost 15 years, and over the years, the course improved in many ways, including offering video course materials and exercises. The courses have made her more money than the books. But it is publishing the books that really gave her the authority in this area as an influencer. Getting your book published has a social value unlike anything else.

Christine is what she calls a “transformational author”, and she helps people change as a person by writing their books. She takes them each through a quadrant of transformational questions, and with each step completed – the author gains more confidence and clarity about what they need to say through their book, what transformation they want to see in themselves as they are writing and what impact it should leave on the readers.

Some people often believe that their book needs to be perfect, which is a setback. Being done is better than perfect; sometimes good is good enough. Publishing your book doesn’t have to be super hard. And a humble request to authors from Christine is not to edit while you write. Edit it only after you have finished the book, or take help from an editor. Let your story flow as you write, and let the professionals improve it for you. If they follow the process, usually in 6 months, their manuscript is complete, and it takes 6 more months to get it ready to be published. So, in a year’s turnover, you can expect to be unveiling your own book!

With Christine and her team, someone who wants to publish their books does not have to go anywhere else for any solution. From helping with writing the chapters, passing several layers of proofing and editing, designing the covers, choosing the right publishing platforms, marketing the book, getting into book fairs, distribution, and even things you did not even consider asking yet are already thoughtfully prepared for you. The author only pays for the service, and they get to keep all the rights and royalties.

To explore Christine’s free content, visit freebookwritinghelp.com; all her services are well-listed at getyourbookdone.com if you want to get in touch with her publishing team, head out to capuciapublishing.com.

Episode TranscriptChris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you are looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I am your guide, Chris Badgett. I am the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay till the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Chris Badgett: Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I am joined by a special guest, her name is Christine Kloser. You can find more about her, at getyourbookdone.com. She also has a podcast by that name “get your book done”. And then if you are picking up or laying down here go ahead and head over to freebookwritinghelp.com. Welcome to the show Christine.

Christine Kloser: Thank you so much, Chris. I am excited to be here.

Chris Badgett: I am really excited to kind of nerd out here with you here today around course creation, about being an expert, about commitment and consistency. Just to give us a snapshot of present moment you have certain program on your website. You have got a course coaching. What is like kind of your program stack as an expert?

Christine Kloser: Well, the core program is Get Your Book Done. It’s a course I developed in 2007 and 15 years later we are basically still teaching the same course. You know, we will update some additions over the years but we offer that program in a number of different tiers. We have an online version which is, you know, just for the do-it-yourselvers out there. We also have an online version with group coaching for the people who are like well I go wanna do it but I also have questions. So, they get group coaching every week for six months to help them write their books. And then we have what’s called the accelerator level program which is for the people who really want someone sort of holding their hands through the entire writing, publishing, and like into the marketing and launching the book process. That’s the accelerator. And then we did, although I am not offering right now is like a high-level select version of that program, which is where people get one on one access to me as their mentor and coach throughout their year. I am on that journey. So..

Christine Kloser: That’s just one course, 15 years old.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So, what happened?

Christine Kloser: Still keeping it strong.

Chris Badgett: What happened in 2007 or particularly before led to this idea. And this is early days in the course creation space that you wanted to make a course to help people write and publish a book.

Christine Kloser: Well it happened very organically. I actually didn’t want to create a course to help people write their books. It is my husband’s fault, right. 2002. We got married in 2001 so are kind of you know newlyweds in that stage of our relationship and we are at in and event and are hearing like Mark Victor Hansen and Robert Allen and all these people speak within like all over the New York Times bestseller list and there was someone who spoke about how we interviewed all these different people and you know publish a book and sold a lot of copies and all of the sudden I feel the temperature of my husband’s body like rise a couple of degrees. I am like what’s going on and he just looks at me is like “I’m gonna write a book” and I’m like that’s awesome. What’s it gonna be about? Right. “Well, I am gonna interview major league baseball players” like this guy didn’t took all the wisdom and put it in one book. Am I am like that’s great honey and I said I think you know well you do that I’ll figure out how to publish it. Truth be told I didn’t think he’d do it. He didn’t know any major league baseball players, he wasn’t a major league player. In college, he kept his barry bonds to his second while they pitched against him. when he was playing for Berkeley but he didn’t know anyone. He didn’t know anyone who knew any Major League ball players and I’m like what are thee the chances that happening. Maybe not the most supportive wife but 300 plus interviews later he had his book and I had to figure out how to get it published cause he literally interviews ball players from all 30 major league teams. So I figured it out. Published his book in 2004. That was the first time I published it, 18 years ago and I was like well now that I figured it out like why don’t I go to my network of amazing women that I know and funny enough I didn’t pull this out on purpose but I just pulled out this is the is like the very first copy of the book that I had. My book published a week after his and it was an anthology of 41 different women sharing their stories and inspiration to realization and I was like check you know becoming an author off the list and we’re having this conversation in 2022 so that wasn’t the end of the game for me and I am amazed at how did I go from my husband book and from my first book to…

Chris Badgett: Yeah, what happened there? Yeah.

Christine Kloser: What happened there was the first book that the first book we ever published had a good publicist. She got the book featured in the print edition of an entrepreneur magazine in the summer of 2005. And it was one of the top books which the entrepreneur magazine was recommending for women entrepreneurs to read that summer. I was like oh that’s kind of cool but like all of a sudden you know all these other women from the networking group that I was found in a running in Los Angeles so like when’s the next one. What? What do you mean next one? So, I did a volume two, I did a volume three and people were having such profound experiences in writing their own chapters. Like it was a really good way to get started and to feel themselves as an author and a build the courage and like the clarity and message to to write something that was actually published that was featured in the magazine right? So over the course of those couple of years between 2004 and like mid 2007 not only were they asking me what I was doing for my next anthology but the people who had done the anthology started to ask me you know can you help me write my own book. I was like no. I don’t do that. You know. 2 years later! I think finally in mid-2007 I was cornered by a couple of our authors from her anthologies. Like please please please Christine will you help me write my book and I couldn’t stop the yes that came out of my mouth. Right? It was like my mouth spoke before my brain had time to process. I was like how am I gonna figure this out. So, I went to my favorite Spa here in Pennsylvania at the Hotel Hershey and I spent the day doing just what would I do if I were going to write a whole book and I created a process. I secured the URL that day in 2007 getyourbookdone.com which you will never get that today and I was like okay I guess I’m doing this now. So, we got our first group of I think 7 authors into the program and I taught people how to write a book and wrote my own book and here we are 15 years later still doing it.

Chris Badgett: So cool! So cool! I’m going to kind of drilling in around this the expert out there somebody that has the interest or passion or whatever their niche is. Do you have? I know on your website … I’m a frameworks guy. So I see I see a lot of structure and I saw that you know in your course you help people overcome brain clutter, self-doubt and lack of time and for like your husband and yourself and your clients or for you and your husband it sounds like it started out with like kind of like an anthology slash interview series. If you could if somebody if you know like somebody who wants to write a book and maybe they’re struggling with some of these things should they maybe start with like an interview phase like anthology type or really just go all in on their own cause I mean you get good research about all that anthology stuff and maybe that is easier or maybe that’s harder. I don’t know. Where do you recommend people to start?

Christine Kloser: It all depends on ‘Why”. Right? Why are you actually gonna do this book in the first place? And knowing why you’re doing the book in the first place is going to determine what might be the right strategy. You know my husband it was like straight divine intervention with him you know like I’m going to do this book and I could see it on him I am like something just happened to my husband over there and like last week he was out of the high school talking about us book write the book came out in 2004 so obvious who’s the right topic and the right thing. You know.

Chris Badgett: You just have a calling. Some people call it calling.

Christine Kloser: Yes. For me, I was like why the heck not. I don’t even know how to write a whole thing I don’t think I have enough to say to fill the whole thing but I’ve got this amazing organization like 250 women entrepreneurs who have a little bit to say. So that was kind of like my approach but when you look at the world of like expertise and really become an expert in your field nothing says expert. Right? Nothing can even say like being an authority in your topic without the word author in it. Because authorship is it doesn’t matter how many courses you create I think sometimes it’s like authoring a book is like the be-all-end-all. Even on the courses are gonna make you a whole lot more money and help people in a much deeper way. There’s just credibility when you like you know step onto Oprah’s couch or whatever you know Good Morning America, the local news know that they’re the author of the blank. There is a credibility and the clap that comes along with that and nothing else. And it is much more so for the book that you have written all on your own versus you know getting other people to contribute chapters to a book that’s a whole other thing. So if someone has something and you are an expert or you really kind of leaning into that expert status and being in the sorority in your field, I would highly recommend that you write your own book on whatever your topic of expertise is. You can use those interviews as sort of what I call supporting characters. Right, you’re going to teach what you’re going to teach in your book but you can interview people. Actually, I was interviewed by one of our own clients about a book she was writing in leadership and it’s like you know it is her book but she pulled in interviews to help drive home the point that she was already teaching her book. And that’s one way to use interviews but still maintain the expertise to the thing all you rather than you know collection of multiple chapters from multiple people.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome! Let’s talk about brain clutter. You just mentioned you were in a spa hotel, on Hershey in Pennsylvania. And you kind of got your downloaded the process. How does one overcome the writer’s block? The structure thing. Like how do you kind of organize the chaos in your head when you are kind of an expert and you are kind of super passionate about something.

Christine Kloser: Most important thing is to not try writing the book before you’ve laid your foundation in place and you know more of the things that we help our clients inside the get your book program and like sort of like lay the foundation and set the banks of the river. because brain clutter happens when there’s just all stress whirling around and there’s no former structure to have all of this stuff go so it ends up everywhere. Right? It’s on your phone. It’s on your notepad and on your desk. It’s in a document in your computer, it’s in your journal; It’s like it’s everywhere and it’s messy and it’s kind of like the river that doesn’t have any banks. It’s uncontained. It is just stuff everywhere and it;s a mess. So, the most important thing you gotta do first to eradicate brain clutter is to start to lay a foundation and there is a series of core questions you can start with at the URL that Chris gave you earlier freebookwritinghelp.com. That will give you like the some of the first foundational questions in our program. It’s actually is the actual get your book done program. You just get the first module which is some of these core foundation building pieces. Cause the more that you can get clear on the foundation and set that foundation in place then you have a better feel of like okay here is who my ideal reader is, and here is what this book is going to do, here’s the problem they’re facing, here’s the solution that I’ve got for them. You know here’s why I’m writing this book and here’s the ways that I really see this book being able to transform not only myself, right? but also my reader’s lives, my business you know the world! So once you get all of that clarity in place that’s like the rigorous work and then you know, then it’s easy to be kind of like okay yeah this thing that I wrote it is perfect in here in this section of the book. But the color happens when you don’t have the foundation structure. It’s really hard to write a book without foundation and structure.

Chris Badgett: If you could wave a magic wand with an expert would you recommend they write the book or make a course first? Let’s say if they had the choice or they did like…

Christine Kloser: It really depends upon the stage at they are at in their business.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Christine Kloser: Right, if someone is starting out early and then like you know I am in the place where maybe got to be making the money to bring in the sale to get this business going. In that case, you’re going to make a lot more money of course then you’re going to make off of a book. But if you’re like advanced enough in your career or you yeah you got private clients that you’re working with and you’d like you you’re not in that like okay like generate generate generate mode but you know you’re ready to take it to whatever your next level is. If that’s the case then the book will bring an authority that the course just can’t. You know someone introduces you at a party and ouh yeah they created a course on whatever it’s a very different situation than if you get introduced as someone like they’re the author of blah blah blah book. Expertise, credibility all of that make sense you just have to look at where are you at in your in your life. You know we have clients who come to us like they retired from their career you know, maybe they’re in their sixties and they just have to do this because it’s a legacy piece.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Christine Kloser: Right, like in that case like write the book because it’s all about book. There there’s no one-size-fits-all. Some people will tell you it’s one size fits all; you have to do the course first, you have to do the book first. With our company very much like well what’s going to be best for you, where you’re at, who you are, what you want your business to look like, what you want your life to look like, and what’s going to be the best vehicle to help you get there. In many cases it is the book but not in every case. Sometimes of course makes sense first.

Chris Badgett: Well, let’s look at the like kind of the organizational brain here and I guess a nuanced question for you is how is creating a book outline different from creating a course outline? I’m sure they’re similar and they can there are similar qualities of both processes but how do you see those being different?

Christine Kloser: They are very similar. The thing with the course that you really need to keep in mind is ideally you know someone’s gonna be watching videos and it’s going to be supported by action guides or whatever your other tools are that they’re going to be using inside of that course. Access to coaching and things like that. So, when you’re developing the course you’re really looking for the deeper dive the interaction, the doing the work of what you’re teaching them. So you need to make sure that when you’re developing the course you develop it with that in mind. How are they gonna really do this and execute it in their life get whatever the transformation is it they’re looking for. Where is it with the book sometimes with a book it’s more teaching like philosophy approach and maybe you’re getting some of the here’s what to do for the first, second, third, fourth to five modules of your program of your course. But it’s not it doesn’t go quite as deep. So it’s a different type of experience that the author the reader is having with the book than they’re having with the course. And in a perfect world right like they read through the book and they kind of get a taste of what this is. And then they find out that there is a course on this where they get to deep dive and have access to you know, more training and information processings and all of that structure you know than right into the books or right into the course from the book. Right, in a perfect world that would happen.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about, I mean, there is that famous quote, right? Writing is rewriting or whatever. And looking at books but also course you have done the same course and have proved it over 15 years. What is? How do we know or how do you approach while at the same time handling imposter syndrome then need to edit and refine and distill and do that both the written book and also an online course.

Christine Kloser: Yeah. Well, one of the things that I would say is done is better than perfect. Because if you are waiting for perfection it’s never going to happen. There will always be something that you can improve in your book in your course and sometimes good isn’t good enough. Right. And having something available in the form of the book or the form of a course to sell and impact people’s lives is way better than delaying it by years or we’ve seen people writing a book for decades. Right, because they have this idea that it has to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It can always adjust. We live in a world now really you don’t have to order 50,000 copies of a book. Right. And fill your garage, floor to ceiling just to get the price low enough like that’s that’s what it was like when I started, you know, out in this industry. But now it’s like good is good enough like do the best that you can do with it. Understanding that it is not going to be perfect and it might be that you know I did a 10-year edition, a 10-year anniversary edition of the book- the freedom formula. because like so much had happened in the ten years since it was out of like I need to update this book. So you know, you can always update it and load a new file up into you know Amazon or Ingram or however you are publishing and like you know the update is done. So, it doesn’t have to be super hard and one of the things that I always tell people is really please please please please please try to not edit while you write. Let your writing process happen in the flow. Don’t stop yourself by trying to perfect every sentence before you move on. Because you’re going if you’re going to publish a book you’re going to work with an editor. Or I hope you’re going to work please just make sure you work with an editor. Don’t take what you wrote and just publish it. It has to go through an editing process first to make it the best book that it can be to represent you and your expertise. That editingprocess will flush out so much that you’ll be amazed at how much your book can improve from when you think that you’re done with it and you send it in. Which is another reason why it’s important to like not try to get into perfect cause editing is going to shift and change. What about this or that doesn’t make sense. Or this is awesome. Like can we do more of this over here. And a good editor is going to help you with that. And it is not worth your time to try and achieve perfection seeing that someone whose job it is to bring your book close to perfection as possible. It is going to be reviewing it so you write and let the but the editors edit. I always say you don’t have to be a writer to be an author. You have to have something to say. You have to be a messenger to be an author. Cause the editor will take your words and make them you know sell off the page.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome! That’s a good quote by the way. What about timeline and I know it varies and it depends and all that but if let’s say somebody was working with you or your process, your system and I think I saw somewhere months not years to get progress or get the book done; let’s say somebody has full-time focus or somebody has and also somebody has they’re doing it on the side around there their main things so they have nights and weekends for both of those avatars what’s the realistic timeline?

Christine Kloser: Well I’ll tell you what are our records are fist.

Chris Badgett: Okay

Christine Kloser: Like we had someone come into the online to get your book done online program and had her manuscript on the seventh day of their membership. I was like what! And she was like wow.

Chris Badgett: That is something I must say.

Christine Kloser: Yeah, that is something to say and they set up a date just dedicate the entire week. It wasn’t a huge book cause maybe you know 30-40 thousand worth of substantial but not ginormous. Our second place is 33 days. But we really find the person who is especially his kind of doing it sort of on the sides. They have something else going on. They don’t have full-time focus. Typically it’s more like six months to write the book. And like when we publish the book we always tell people it’s another 6 months to publish. Because of the quality control that we have on every book, and the customization, and the multiple rounds of you editing asssessment, and then you know couple rounds of editing and then just one round or proofing but a couple of rounds are proofing. Youknow costume cover all of that stuff takes time. So for us you know someone can come to us with an idea and as long as they kind of stick to the plan that we’ve laid out you know a year later they’re going to be you know talking about their book launch date. So and then you know there’s a lot in between.

Chris Badgett: Talk to use about the self doubt and the Imposter syndrome. Cause I see it in the course creating community and the writing community.

Christine Kloser: Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Badgett: What is that and how do people get past it?

Christine Kloser: Well, imposter syndrome I find often happens when people like are really good at something but they haven’t yet owned like they don’t yet take ownership of how good they are. They feel like it’s impossible. Like they’re doing it and they’re doing well at it but they don’t see themselves as everyone else sees them. And to move through that like I always feel like the only way out of that imposter syndrome is through. It’s like just going through their head on. And what we find with people that we’ve worked with as they get into their book, and they start seeing it come to life, and seeing their back cover like amazing and the chapters are in, and you know they’re feeling really good about it. And imposter syndrome like it doesn’t become something that it is not plaguing them anymore. Like, every step they take forward with their book is clarity and confidence and focus and courage like put themselves out there. It’s like imposter syndrome is just the thing that’s left in a wink. But it is not, it is not something that they’re beating down directly. They’re just stepping into and owning their own brilliance and their own expertise. And the more they do that for the process it naturally becomes a thing of the past.

Christ Badgett: Wow!

Christine Kloser: We’ve seen it over and over as it is like that’s the best part of helping people write books. It’s seeing who they are at the end versus who they are at the beginning. At least the way we, not me, not everyone walks people through a book you know, writing during like going to change your life. But we do, and then we see it do that. And you know by the end it is so funny. Like I was in a call recently with some clients and you know one of them is like- you know it’s so weird what my book’s about to come out but like I used to think the book was everything and it kind of is but like who I became in this process, like the book is it smaller than a cherry on top of that. And that’s how we really help people just like kind of eradicate imposter syndrome and self-doubt is by pushing through the process. It isn’t always fun and easy. Sometimes it’s hard but it’s so worth it and it just changes lives.

Chris Badgett: You’re obviously a transformational like course creator and author yourself and you help other people you’re like an engine of transformation through others. What makes a transformational work, whether it’s a book or a course versus something that’s okay like how do you get to that kind of transformational level magnanimous or whatever?

Christine Kloser: Yeah, absolutely and this will actually be the process that anyone goes through who goes over to freebookwritinghelp.com.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Christine Kloser: Because when I was going through my own dark night of soul, having written book that wasn’t really it just wasn’t the right book. And then I built a business you know of a decent size on top of this book that wasn’t quite right for me. I wasn’t it was it was the right book but not the right time. It was a book that I should have been reading not a book I should have been writing kind of thing. And when all of that imploded at my own hand I just pulled the plug. Like this is so out of line. Like this is not what I’m here to do. I really had to go on with my own personal question. Like you know, I’ve got all the expertise and authorship and even long before the been doing authorship I’ve been facilitating transformational women’s retreats. Right, for years before I ever published a book. So, I can’t say how it happened other than just like sheer desperation and like begging you know for the universe like show me, show me what I’m supposed to do you know don’t get out of this. And what it showed me is like you know your spot in this world is to combine what you know is a transformational leader and facilitator, with what you know about authorship, and trim the book into a transformational experience and help peoplebecome transformational authors. And I’m like great what does that mean! So I go to Gooogle and I put it in quotes. ‘Cause I was like what transformational author like put it in quotes like what does that mean. And I mean Google had nothing! I mean I think it’s probably the only time I’ve ever seen Google be like we’re sorry but we don’t have any results like this. Like oh my God that doesn’t help! You know, like this what it is supposed to do! What is it? And I had to just find it. And the way that I defined it was actually not really by definition but by lenses or what has come to be known as something called the transformation quadrant. And the transformation quadrant 4 questions and they’re the essential four questions that every author really needs to be able to answer in order to move through this journey through that lens of transformation. And the first question is what is the transformation that you want for yourself as a result of writing this book? And that’s a question that often shocked. You know, it was supposed to be about the reader or about myself? Yes, but first you’re the author. Right? It’s about you what do you want to ship? Do you want to release imposter syndrome? Do you want to finally want to feel like you come into an alignment with your soul’s purpose? You know. Is it. You know, maybe it’s for you it was like to show people that you could do it. You know like have that feeling of confidence. Like you know all those naysayers out there could just you know go somewhere else because like I did this and you want to feel yourself as the person who did it. Whatever the transformation is. First and foremost you’re going to look at what you want for yourself as a result of this book coming out. Second thing that you’re going to look at is then what is the transformation that you want for your reader. And this kind of takes the whole problem solution being just a little bit deeper. Like what truly do you want to be transformed in the heart and soul and mind of your ideal reader. And when you really get connected with that, like it comes out the pages of the book. It comes out through your words. The third question to ask yourself is what transformation do you want for your business as a result of writing this book? Because as I experienced with my first book, certainly, it can be the key that turns over the engine of a business. And it did mine and made out of half a million dollar business within six months of my book coming out. But it wasn’t the right business cause I didn’t have this quadrant yet. And I didn’t ask most especially the first question. But your book can really transform your business and you want to know how exactly do I want my book to do that. And then the fourth, fourth question to ask is what transformation do I want to see in the world as a result of my book being out. And you know that’s where you’re really get to look at, man! like maybe the divorce rate you know comes down or people figure out how to have happier marriages or maybe there is no you know fewer kids who are you know every day contemplating suicide. Because they figured out a way to you know work through the mental challenges of the number of health challenges that they’ve been having. Or you know maybe it’s helping that more people figure out how to do their businesses. So that they’re actually you know, enjoying lives they love instead of going to the grind everyday and coming home you know being a stinky wife, husband, parent, child, friend. I’m like what’s the bigger impact? So when you look through those four lenses of the transformations that you want for yourself, for your reader, for your business, for the world, and you’re willing to take on this writing process through those lenses like that is the transformational author. And the topic is almost irrelevant if you’re clear on those four transformations.

Chris Badgett: Thank you for sharing that. I have a visual image of like making that, and then framing it and putting it into your writing desk and if you ever get lost or needed a little pick-me-up, just look at the transformation quadrant!

Christine Kloser: Yeah and the amazing thing is like I always love sort of the end of the journey with a client and you know they’ll say something like oh my gosh like I’m like I’m not the same person I was when I started this process. I’m like come back and take a look at your quadrant. Especially the you know first question with the transmission they want for yourself. And just go take a look and then they’ll come back and they will be like what when I wrote that I had no idea that it was even possible or how that would happen! And now not only I have had that transformation but then there’s been others on top of it that I didn’t even know we’re in my consciousness to right at the beginning of the process and we just see that over and over and over and over again with a clients. You know, some of whose books you see behind me on the shelves and it is it really is amazing.

Chris Badgett: Nothing more rewarding than that.

Christine Kloser: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: I want to ask you just some tactical technical questions just for the people that are kind of thinking about you know starting this kind of book business or doing the the work so kind of rapid fire style. When you write a book do you get a special software like Scribner, use word, or pages or what do you write a book in?

Christine Kloser: I personally write in Word.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Christine Kloser: We do have clients who work in Scribner as well or we have pages for people who are on Macs but I write in Word.

Chris Badgett: What about the publishing process? Where does one get a book cover done?

Christine Kloser: A number of different places if you’re working with any sort of publisher whether it be traditional or hybrid or an indie kind of like what we do they will be handling the book cover for you. If you are completely self-publishing your book. A lot of people find book cover design will find in some places like Fiverr or 99designs or things like that.

Chris Badgett: What do you recommend for the self-publisher like in terms of the platform or the where do they do that?

Christine Kloser: Yeah if you’re if you’re doing everything on your own and even with a lot of you know hybrid indie publishers they’re using the Amazon platform. They’re using in Kindle. You know KDP- Kindle Direct publishing because Amazon love it or lump it, it is you know THE place that you want to make sure your booked is at. A lot of people are just publishing directly on KDP and then getting distribution you know and other places through ingramspark and things like that. But Amazon’s kind of like them behemoth in the industry.

Chris Badgett: If we don’t have an editor where do we get one?

Christine Kloser: Well, again if you’re working with a traditional hybrid or indie publisher like us that has got teams of editors say you’re covered in that area. If you’re doing it on your own, you can actually like I actually found one of our editors she is one of our senior editors now. She’s been with me for oh my gosh I think since my third, third book. So since 2006 she’s been with me and I found her on the earlier iteration I forget even the name of it of like Upwork. So you can actually go find decent people there if you know what to look for. Don’t work with a rookie. Don’t be willing to be the one that someone like gains their first you know five star rating on. But you can actually find fairly decent people and places like Upwork. Like, ask around. Like ask your author friends. Cause they have good referrals too.

Chris Badgett: So, you have a publishing company yourself as well?

Christine Kloser: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And what’s that called?

Christine Kloser: Capucia publishing. It’s Capuciapublishing.com.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And what is that like? What does that do for someone in the sense that like okay I don’t know what to do this? I thought about self-publishing but I really want some help with what benefits they get working with Capucia?

Christine Kloser: Pretty much everything.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Christine Kloser: One thing that you really have to do is deliver us a manuscript that is in good enough shape that we can move forward with the editorial assessment process. But all the editing. All the proofing, all the design, all the interior layout, all the loading to the proper size,figuring out the right genre, figuring out the right price of the book, making sure that the files are formatted correctly. I’m offering you you know six months of marketing support along side of the publishing process. So, that you’re moving into our proprietary marketing math and learning about book marketing and have a one-on-one consultations with our team. You know, to really help you just like decide and determine and focus in on what are you gonna be doing to help you market your book. You know, while we’re making everything happen and getting things optimized. You’re running your first 30 days of ads and you know sending out a media release from when the book comes out. So, you come to us and it’s like you don’t have to go anywhere else. We handle every detail. Dot every I. Crossed every T. And most importantly for a lot of authors like we know your name. We always know it’s happening with your manuscript. There’s people to call or text or email and be personally responded to and just you know have an incredible team walking you through in guiding you through every single process answering every question especially the ones that you don’t even know that you’re supposed to be asking. We will answer those for you too.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

Christine Kloser: And at the end. With our model at the end of it you keep all of your rights and all of your royalties cause with like typical hybrid publishers your pain and wants to do all the services that I started just describe but not even all of them some of them don’t do a whole lot around marketing but then you’re also paying them a second time every time you sell a book cause when it comes to books, marketing is always the responsibility of the author even if your random author like you have to be involved and engaged in the marketing process. But with the typical hybrid you’re paying them you know to publish the book but then there are also usually keeping 50% on every book sold so you’re only getting 50% of what you sell. And with us authors keep all their rights, they keep all the royalties and it’s just a straight fee for service type of arrangement.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome! A few more questions before we go about your course.

Christine Kloser: Sure.

Chris Badgett: You’ve had the same course for so long which is really fascinating and you know you found the transformation, the people you want to help that’s what your course is there for. What. What have you done? What it. What are the main things you do like over the years to make it better or updated or whatever like how how do you improve it over so many years?

Christine Kloser: Absolutely. Well, we did go from audio. Which is how it originally came out.

Chris Badgett: So, it is audio only.

Christine Kloser: It was audio-only. You betcha.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Christine Kloser: It was audio only before the days of everything being videos. Of course we updated everything to video. When we did that update of the video we really looked into the content. Well, and of course in 2011 when the transformation quadrant was developed and you know this whole journey started we went in and we added. You know, a whole preliminary module that made sure that we covered that. First and foremost before anything else. So, we, you know, made that update on the end. Things have changed in the industry. The publishing industry today if you know 15 years later or when I published my first book 18 years later is radically different. I mean my first books were published before the Kindle existed. Like, it was only print. There was no such thing as digital there wasn’t a digital reader. Nothing along those lines. So, the industry has really transformed. So, we went in and we updated everything. We really helped people understand the different types of publishing models out there and you know pros and cons of each. I don’t know which one is right for you. So, we just keep kind of layering on pieces and if it’s outside of the core content but we know that it’s important for them. Then we’ll bring it in as you know a bonus for like a secondary you know offering. So, that’s just some of the things that we’ve done.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned inside your course you have action guides I think.

Christine Kloser: Mhmm.

Chris Badgett: What are those. How do you make those? Cause I mean a course is more than just the content. They are candy. So, what are you doing in your action guides?

Christine Kloser: Yeah, with the action guide like way that we designed the lessons inside of each module is it’s a relatively short video. On like one specific step that is like this is the time to be taking the step in the book before you go on do this

Chris Badgett: Cause you just can’t write a book by just watching videos.

Christine Kloser: Right. So, there is very specific instructions on what to do and every instruction that I give in every one of the lessons of 44 lessons that we’ve got, there is an action guide that is like okay here’s here’s what I just talked about like print it out and put it in the three hole punches. Stick it in your binder, and do the exercises, answer the questions. Don’t just have this be a video that I watched. Do the work. You know, I like I tell people how to go out and do certain researches at like their local book stores, even a library and you know they take the action guide along. And it’s like okay. You know. I’ll do this first. And find these kinds of books and put them in these kinds of stacks and then I’ll analyze this. You know, so it just takes the teaching and gives them a way to you know make it concrete.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome! Tell us about your podcast as we start to land the plane here.

Christine Kloser: Yeah. Well, my podcast is called get your book done. We post two new episodes every month where I talk with you know everyday authors, best selling authors, or recently had a conversation with Eckhart Tolle publisher of The Power of Now, my colleague Mark Allen and we talked books, we talked writing, we talked marketing, we talked mindset, we talked you know everything that is going to help an author succeed on the get your book done podcast.

Chris Badgett: Alright. Well, tell us about what people can find on your website one more time. From the freebookwritinghelp.com and then also on your main site.

Christine Kloser: Yeah. Well, freebookwritinghelp.com gives you free access to the entire first module of our award-winning get your book done program. So, you’re going to go in, watch the videos, get access to the action guides, download those and do the work beginning to lay the solid foundation for your books. So, that’s what you’re going to get there at fre bookwritinghelp.com. And then at getyourbookdone.com you’re just gonna see you know who we are, our philosophy, what we do, how to you know get connected with us learn more about our programs and podcast of courses posted there as well. And then capuciapublishing.com is where you’ll see everything publishing-related. You know the types of book we publish, how to get connected and have a conversation with our publishing team just to see if we might be a good fit for you. Our services are listed out there and you know great detail and all the different phases of the publishing process. So that’s at capuciapublishing.com

Chris Badgett: Christine, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for sharing so many gems like you’ve had you’ve been in the industry for decades and you’ve really delivered a ton of value here. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for helping so many people out there who have a book or course inside of them. An expert with a message or calling is trying to get out. That’s a real transformation engine in the world so I’m I’m grateful that you’re doing that work and are helping so many people. Thanks so much. And we’ll have to do this again sometime.

Christine Kloser: It was my pleasure. Thank you. Anytime.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode and I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post How To Get Your Book Done With Christine Kloser appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

The global eLearning industry is growing rapidly, and so is the competition. Therefore, course creators are struggling hard to sell their digital resources. If you are also facing hard times selling courses online, get a handful of tips from John Ainsworth, who has profound knowledge in this industry.

John Ainsworth is from datadrivenmarketing.co, which guides course creators to build funnels, increase social media presence, and help in marketing activities. Besides, he has a podcast “The art of selling courses online” where you will find case studies, interviews, and traffic-driven videos.

In today’s episode, John Ainsworth will share guides and tips on how to sell more courses online.

What Do Course Creators Skip While Marketing?John Ainsworth shared in this podcast that course creators mainly miss three things while marketing and they are:

Course creators don’t focus much on selling products to customers who have brought premium goods before.
They don’t focus on building converting email list.
Course creators don’t force social media audiences to subscribe to the newsletter to grow their email list.

Now that you know what course creators miss, time to discover how to sell more courses online.

How to Make Audiences Buy Courses from You?There are two strategies to sell more courses online one is Order Bumps and another one is upselling. Now, do you know what these are? Let’s learn about them one by one:

Order bump: If a customer goes to the checkout page before placing an order, if they see you are also providing free stuff, such as templates with the plan, they will surely buy it.
Upsells: Suppose a customer brought a product plan from you. You can offer more attractive plans to your remaining customers by using upsells.

How to Sell Through Email Marketing?Email marketing is an effective marketing activity through which you can connect directly with your audiences. It’s better to send 2-4 emails per month to your customers if your business is suffering.

Moreover, moving subscriptions to your email list is a good practice. Therefore, you can nurture it further for another campaign and increase selling online resources.

Pricing Advice for Course CreatorsAt first, you have to create free and low-cost courses that will let your audience convert more. After implementing all the strategies to enhance your sales, increase the price of your products.

Common Failure of Course CreatorsOne of the main reasons behind failing to sell courses online is only worrying about creating a perfect product to make money. This causes failure most of the time, as it’s hard to start with a perfect product. Course creators should start earning profit through valuable products, not necessarily to be the best product.

Apart from this, they also use complicated strategies to sell their courses online. They should also stop doing this if they want to be successful in this business.

Is Selling Online Courses Profitable?Now, the most crucial part is whether selling courses online is profitable. Of course, selling courses online is a very profitable business nowadays. Besides, after the pandemic, the demand for making money by selling courses online increased immensely.

Summing upHopefully, now you know effective strategies and tips on how to make money selling courses online. This might feel haunting and tough at the start. But the whole process will be more straightforward when you implement these tips and techniques discussed in this blog.

Christine Kloser: Thank you so much, Chris. I am excited to be here.

Christine Kloser: That’s just one course, 15 years old.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So, what happened?

Christine Kloser: Still keeping it strong.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, what happened there? Yeah.

Chris Badgett: You just have a calling. Some people call it calling.

Chris Badgett: If you could wave a magic wand with an expert would you recommend they write the book or make a course first? Let’s say if they had the choice or they did like…

Christine Kloser: It really depends upon the stage at they are at in their business.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Christine Kloser: Well I’ll tell you what are our records are fist.

Chris Badgett: Okay

Christine Kloser: Like we had someone come into the online to get your book done online program and had her manuscript on the seventh day of their membership. I was like what! And she was like wow.

Chris Badgett: That is something I must say.

Chris Badgett: Talk to use about the self doubt and the Imposter syndrome. Cause I see it in the course creating community and the writing community.

Christine Kloser: Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Badgett: What is that and how do people get past it?

Christ Badgett: Wow!

Christine Kloser: Yeah, absolutely and this will actually be the process that anyone goes through who goes over to freebookwritinghelp.com.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Chris Badgett: Nothing more rewarding than that.

Christine Kloser: Yeah.

Christine Kloser: I personally write in Word.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Christine Kloser: We do have clients who work in Scribner as well or we have pages for people who are on Macs but I write in Word.

Chris Badgett: What about the publishing process? Where does one get a book cover done?

Chris Badgett: What do you recommend for the self-publisher like in terms of the platform or the where do they do that?

Chris Badgett: If we don’t have an editor where do we get one?

Chris Badgett: So, you have a publishing company yourself as well?

Christine Kloser: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And what’s that called?

Christine Kloser: Capucia publishing. It’s Capuciapublishing.com.

Christine Kloser: Pretty much everything.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome! A few more questions before we go about your course.

Christine Kloser: Sure.

Christine Kloser: Absolutely. Well, we did go from audio. Which is how it originally came out.

Chris Badgett: So, it is audio only.

Christine Kloser: It was audio-only. You betcha.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: You mentioned inside your course you have action guides I think.

Christine Kloser: Mhmm.

Chris Badgett: What are those. How do you make those? Cause I mean a course is more than just the content. They are candy. So, what are you doing in your action guides?

Chris Badgett: Cause you just can’t write a book by just watching videos.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome! Tell us about your podcast as we start to land the plane here.

Chris Badgett: Alright. Well, tell us about what people can find on your website one more time. From the freebookwritinghelp.com and then also on your main site.

Christine Kloser: It was my pleasure. Thank you. Anytime.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest, his name is John Ainsworth. He’s from datadrivenmarketing.co. He also has a podcast called The Art of selling online courses. Welcome to the show, John.

John Ainsworth: Thanks so much, man. Great to be here.

Chris Badgett: I’m stoked to chat with you today. You seem like a guy who’s just as obsessed with courses and Online Marketing and Entrepreneurship as I am. So I know we’re gonna have a great conversation today. First, real quick, what’s your elevator pitch for what you offer over datadrivenmarketing.co.

John Ainsworth: We help online course creators who’ve already got courses and they’ve already got an audience. And they’ve already got some kind of an email list to between about two and five times their revenue through email marketing funnels. And we do it purely on an increase in profit basis. So we only get paid when people make more money.

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s awesome. That’s a very finely dialed irresistible offer there. Before we go more into that tell us about the niche like how did you end up here and coarse land with this lack of focus? Because I mean, yeah, I mean, you can help a lot of different companies grow and market better and all that stuff. But why courses for you?

John Ainsworth: Yeah, I used to work in fitness marketing, okay. And so I’d worked in that for a number of years. And I’d worked with hospitals and gyms and councils, and health charities, all kinds of organizations. And at some point, I read the book from Russell Brunson about funnels, and I was like, ah, that’s it. That’s what I need to be doing. That’s the system. That’s what I need. So I started building these funnels for fitness marketing, and what happened after once I got really good at it, and then started filling stuff up. So if you had a service for getting cancer patients active, I could fill it up. If you had a gym, I could fill it up, we got to kickboxing club, and I could fill it up, that’s great. But what happens is, when you fill up a gym, they no longer need the marketing consultant.

Chris Badgett: You’re too good. You were too.

John Ainsworth: So I had two options. I was like, I can drag this out and just make it kind of last what have you, which totally doesn’t fit for me, like, not just ethics, but just the way that I like to work. I’m like, How can I do it better? How can I do it better just for the fun of it, you know? And so where else could I work that has more capacity? So I was like, What about e-commerce? What about sass? What about online courses, and I knew loads of people in those kinds of spaces. So I started interviewing people who were running SAS businesses, who were running eCommerce businesses, that kind of thing. And I started working with a few of them. And we started getting really good at the funnels for each of those. But the ones that then worked the best were the online courses. And by lucky coincidence, the people who I got on with the best were the online course creators as well. And it’s a specific subsection of online course creators, it’s not the ones who really got in it for making a lot of money necessarily. It’s the ones who got into it because they loved their fields. They were an expert in dog training or woodwork, or they were really good as a language teacher, or whatever it was. And they wanted the freedom of working online. And they started making great content and great courses, but they never learned marketing and the funnels and the email. And they know they should have that stuff. Right? They know they should. But that’s not their bag, and it’s not their thing. And so that’s the group who I find tend to be really ethical, really good people really good at what they’re doing, and really, really need our help.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. We were talking briefly in our pre chat I was I was talking about how I didn’t have a background in marketing and business and tech yet here I am. But you don’t know this. I do have background in anthropology and I kind of see myself as like the an anthropologist within this niche that you’re describing. So I studied culture. I mean, I have a keen eye for it.

One of the things I noticed on your website as I think you worked with Teal Swan. Is that right? Yeah, we still do. Yeah. So teal has always fascinated me, you know, just with my anthropology goggles on just looking into this niche, you know, huge YouTube channel like very authentically her own style. Her content goes super deep. Clearly, I’m sure she’s very successful, but clearly, she’s that expert you describe that is like really passionate about her niche and helping people. Tell us how you help someone like Teal Swan kind of do better in terms of marketing and scaling.

John Ainsworth: So there’s three there’s the three main areas that teal and everybody else misses all these course creators tend not to have these three things in place. So one is how do you convert more of the people who buy something interest into buying more from you? And to get more of the premium content getting more stuff? The second one is how do you get your email list to actually buy from you in a way that doesn’t feel too salesy or aggressive or spammy or anything like that, but it’s just like, how do you combine useful content with promotion? So people buy from your email list? And the third one is, how do you turn that audience your YouTube channel or your social media or whatever, into people on the email list? So those are the three areas right. And so teal, Swan had the same problem as everybody else. They had built up the audience, they built the Great Courses, but they hadn’t done those three steps. I’m gonna talk you through kind of how that all like.

Chris Badgett: I’m a framework guy. So I love it. We got our we got our three lanes, take us down. Expansion, revenue, email marketing and audience to conversion.

John Ainsworth: Yeah. Okay, cool. So the first one to start with, when we always start with this, how do you convert more of your sales into higher revenue sales?

Chris Badgett: Is this is this on the first sale or on after they’ve been already been a customer to sell more later?

John Ainsworth: Every single time! Okay, every single time. So when you let’s say you’re doing an email promotion and you make an offer? How do you get those people to buy some more, if you’ve got the front end funnel that your traffic gets to from, you know, the first time that we hear about you? How do you get those guys to buy more. Now, the order in which you do those is there’s subtlety to it. But it’s basically the goal is to set up four of them. So there are two ways that you can do it. And they’re called order bumps and upsells. So you have explained to me the difference, you probably know all of this, but like, explain to me what the difference between those two are. So an order bump is somebody is on the checkout page, they’ve decided they’re probably going to buy, they are filling in the credit card details, and there is a tick box on the checkout page. So before they’ve hit submit, before they’ve paid, where they can get something else that goes with that product. So let’s say, for example, somebody’s buying an ebook, The Order bump could be an audiobook, if they’re buying a course, it could be a workbook that goes with it, if they’re buying a workbook, it could be the course that goes with it. It’s something else that goes alongside what they’re already buying. And what most people don’t realize is about 30 to 60% of people, if you offer them a good option there will buy that.

And it’s it adds like 10 to 20% to people’s revenue. And it’s the fastest thing that you could possibly do as a course creator to increase revenue. If you’ve already got sales, you add this in your revenue goes up by 10 to 20%. And that is like I’ve had people have that kind of an increase in like a day, like two days work. Like, honestly, this is when I’m trying to convince people that Funnels is the thing to do. I’m always like, start with this, like do not pass go, do not collect nothing else, right until you have done your order bumps. I had a guy runs a really successful training about building up your online business, but building up a site online where you’re going to be an expert in an area.

And he asked me like, what’s the I went on his podcast? And he asked me like, what’s the what’s the perfect launch look like? And I was like, okay, cool. So I explained it to him into like, five or 10 minutes. I said, but don’t do it. Because like what? I said, Don’t do that because you’ve got an order bump. Yeah. And he’s like, Yeah, but come on. I want the advanced stuff. I’m like, but you haven’t got an order bump. Why would you do the advanced stuff, and you’d have an order bump. So it’s like, Alright, fine to set one up.

He made an extra $100,000 a year.

Just like GC? Do you see what I mean? Here? This is the good stuff. What are some other? What are some other order bump ideas besides a workbook for a course creator? Yeah. So if you’ve got a course, let’s get the crucial thing here right is do not create anything new. To start with, right you have to implement before you optimize, don’t try and make the perfect one. So what you do is you make a list of all of the products that you’ve got, and you put them in order what’s from the Most Popular The Most sales to the least popular. So let’s say you’ve got a beginners course in dog training, that is your most popular course, right now make a list of everything else that you’ve got that could potentially go with it and just look at it, well could that fit, could that fit, could that fit, you’re looking for something that’s about a third of the price of the main product, it doesn’t have to be it could be half the price could be the same price. But as a rule of thumb, about a third is a really good level. And so then what you’re looking for is what is there in there, that could be a good fit. And that’s more important than trying to have like the ideal, the ideal thing because if you have something that converts at 20% and beats it up today, that’s way better than in two months, maybe setting up the perfect one. So that’s the kind of the starting thing, but I will actually answer your question properly in terms of like, okay, what actually should it be?

So we’ve got a client where they had a training about how to set up your marketing agency and like how did I think it was how to market your marketing agency. And the order bump was interview with 10 different marketing agency owners about the biggest mistake that they made with marketing their marketing agency. We’ve got a client in the home recording studio space and what he doesn’t have anything else apart from courses. So his order bumps are other courses. So if you’re buying the beginner one, he’ll sell you the intermediate one, if he’s if you’re buying the one about let me think what it was, I think it’s about how to actually record something. And then the second one is about like, how do you then make a master out, I don’t know anything about recording music, but like, it was something kind of like that way. So it’s another course that was kind of connected. So they’re the price tended to be about the same of the main thing and the order bump. But it’s, it’s the fundamental idea is anything that goes with what you’re already selling. That’s cool. Awesome. Well, what comes after the order bump for expansion revenue. So the next one is upsells. So an upsell is technically very different to an order bump. But the concept is the same. The upsell is on the confirmation page, someone’s gone to the checkout page, they fill in the details, maybe they ordered the order bump, maybe they didn’t, they’ve hit submit, the order is gone through that doesn’t change whatever happens after this. The next page is the confirmation page, and you put an upsell there. And so this is whatever is next logically after what they’ve just bought. So if they’ve bought the beginner course, this is intermediate, if you’re selling a membership, and they’ve bought one month, this would be three months worth, if you were doing this an E-commerce and they’d bought one t-shirt, you’d offer three T-shirts or one bottle supplements you offered really, it’s the next kind of thing that comes afterwards.

And the way this work, because it’s called a one click upsell or a one time offer. And so there’s a pay a button on the page, someone can click and it will just they don’t have to fill in their credit card details. Again, it will just add it on to what they’ve already bought. If they close the page, and they don’t buy it doesn’t matter your original order goes through. And so that’s conceptually the difference. Now the way that this is technically different in terms of what you need to set up, is you’ve got a whole sales page for it, you’ve got the full, you know, headline, sub-headline call to action, you’ve got calling out your audience, you’ve got bonuses guarantees all this kind of stuff, the order bump is two lines of text on the order page, very, very, very short. So this takes a bit more work. But about 10 to 20% of people will buy the upsell if you set this page up correctly, and you have the right offer at the right kind of price. In terms of pricing, it should be about the same kind of price as what they’ve already bought. It could be twice as much. It could be three quarters as much, but somewhere around the same kind of price.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. All right, email marketing, what do we got to do here?

John Ainsworth: All right, cool. So there’s a few things with email marketing, but the biggest one is that most people just don’t send out enough promotions and they don’t write them very well. So most people who are selling courses, will send out a promotion two to three times a year, they’ll do Black Friday, maybe new year, maybe their birthday, something like that. And when you look at the revenue for the year, there’s always always always a spike with those promotions, they work and they make money. But everybody then feels uncomfortable about it. Because they don’t want to send these out all the time and annoy people and spam people and everyone unsubscribes. And the reason people think that is because they’re currently writing bad promotions and their current promotions or things like it’s on discount this week, get it quickly, that’s like, well, if I got that all the time, I would unsubscribe as well, it’s like you have to have some value in there at the same time.

So ideally, people should be doing two email promotions a month, and I start people on one, but then we build up to doing two. And you can do two promotions a month for years. And it does not lead to a big increase in unsubscribe rate, as long as you have good content in the emails. And so what we’re looking for is we use a framework called game logic fear going going on, as the six emails you send that over the course of a week. And then you send out just useful content for a week. And then you send out another one of these promotions. And so let’s say you’re selling a course on language learning, right? And you’re teaching people about English grammar. So the game logic fear is going to be about the gain is how is their life going to be better if they solve this problem, you’re not selling the course you’re selling, solving the problem? So you’re talking about what should they do in their life in order to solve this, how their life will be better in a week, a month, three months, six months help people to visualize a better future for themselves.

Chris Badgett: Quick question. And just to clarify, are these six separate emails or parts of one email?

John Ainsworth: Yeah, six separate emails Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and then another one on Friday.

Chris Badgett: Cool. All right. I love that love the framework game game logic, fear.

John Ainsworth: Gotta love a framework. It’s so good to understand

Chris Badgett: What happens in your logic email. Okay, so the logic one is for people who think things through in terms of statistics, and details and understanding, like how something works more practically, so it’s not visualizing the future. It’s thinking, what is it logically that’s going to be helpful about solving this problem? How is it gonna fit? How is it going to work? What’s the steps you need to work through?

And then the fear one fears makes it sound like a little bit exaggerated, but it’s about what will happen if they don’t solve the problem I put in there for why is this important? What’s that opportunity cost? Like? Yeah, well, if you don’t take action on this, yeah, and it’s trying to convince people, you really should sort this thing out, you know, and it’s not making them feel bad. If they don’t, it’s just saying, This is important for your life. And I know, because I’m somebody who’s helped 2000 people to solve this problem before. And maybe you don’t believe that you can solve this problem, and you can’t get there. But I know that you can. And I know when you do, it’s going to be better. And you know, this is how your life is gonna look. And then logically, this is the steps you need to take. And then if you don’t do it, this is some of the stuff that you’re going to be frustrated with. And I want to solve save you that frustration. So sort this thing out.

Chris Badgett: So in the game logic, fear stages, have we even mentioned or linked to our offer or not at all?

John Ainsworth: Yeah, so we do but more softly. So it’s at the bottom saying, and by the way, if you want our course to help with this, it’s on promotion, 30% off this week, and there’s always a discount on it to kind of give people some urgency on it.

Chris Badgett: So the call to action is persistent throughout these emails, but more subtle in the beginning. I gotcha. Yeah. All right. Going, going. Gone. Thursday, Friday, Friday, what’s happening?

John Ainsworth: Yeah, so these ones are more what people would think of a standard promotion. But we still want to make sure the emails are useful, even if people don’t buy because 99.5 to 99.7 of people aren’t going to buy in every single one of these promotions we do. So we want to make sure those people like the emails stay on the list, because they might buy in the future. And we want to make sure to help the people who are going to buy to be able to take that step. So what we’re doing in here is things like case studies, testimonials, frequently asked questions, storytelling about like, actually, the benefit somebody got from going through and buying this and how it changed their life, trying to bring it to life, answer any of their questions and show why they should do it. We can have features and benefits emails in here, that kind of thing. I’ve only got three emails. So you’re not going to do all of those things I mentioned, but some of those in each series you do, and then the last one, so that’s two emails are like that, let’s say one is a case study. And one is frequently asked questions, then the very last email is about two or three lines. And it just says, Don’t forget this course as discount, it’s going to finish in three hours. The last chance to get it at a discounted price now links through to the sales page. Very, very straightforward. And then the cart closes, and then the price goes back up.

Chris Badgett: Love the let’s zoom out and just look at the whole month if we’re doing two of these a month, what’s happening on the other two weeks nothing or in terms of emails, or what? Yeah, so ideally, you want useful content about the topic that you’re going to be selling a course about. So let’s say your course is going to be on, you know, dog training for older dogs. Well, then you send out maybe three YouTube videos, links to your three best articles on dog training for older dogs, it’s getting the audience who are interested in that topic being like, Oh, this is cool, useful, free stuff. This person obviously knows their stuff. They’re thinking about that topic more. And then you send out the promotion around that. That’s the idea of linking the content and the promotion together.

Chris Badgett: So pure content, kind of the the week before the promotion. Wait. Yeah. Wow, that’s solid. And the cool thing about course creators is they don’t really have a problem creating content or getting on camera or doing whatever they need to do they just need to know what to make.

Tell us about the last lane the the audience to conversion, or what did you call it?

John Ainsworth: Yeah. How do you actually grow the email list from your from your audience, convert your audience to the email list? Yeah, so most people don’t realize that, because they’re not doing this email promotions very often, the money is in the list, right? So that’s but it’s true, you’re much much, much more likely to make a sale to somebody from email than from social media. So what you want to do is get them from social media or website visitor or YouTube or whatever, onto your email list. Now, the way to do this is relatively straightforward. But there’s just a number of steps that people missing here, what you’re trying to do is give people something valuable, useful and free, that gets them to want to sign up to your newsletter. It’s called a lead magnet. Normally, most people have heard of that. Some people call it a freebie.

And the idea is that if they sign up, they’re going to get this free, useful resource. So what kind of resource might it be it’s something that’s going to get them a result as quickly as possible with as little effort from them as possible. So an ebook is fine. But a template or a swipe file or some other kind of useful resources better so we’ve got to use like to actually implement on Yes, yeah, without having to think without to do anything. They want them like 15 minutes they want the result kind of thing. They don’t know you very well yet. They want to you to prove that you can help them.

Chris Badgett: Like even just talking to you. I’m like man, I wish I had that template for game logic fear going going gone? Like a swipe file of like, I’d like to see that in action so I could model it or something like that. Yeah, that’s what you’re talking about something that template of sorts.

John Ainsworth: Exactly that kind of thing is perfect. So it could be you’re teaching people about some financial model, maybe there’s a template that they can a spreadsheet template they can download, they plug the numbers in, it gives them the answer, the best converting one we’ve ever had was a client called paintable. And it’s paintable.cc. And what they do is they teach people digital painting techniques. And if you go to their site, you can sign up for the newsletter and you get, I think it’s something like 12 free brushes that you might use in Adobe Photoshop, or whatever it is where you do this kind of thing, right? And so it’s no work, right? What do you do, you download them, you upload them into Adobe, now you’ve got them. And next time, you’re going to do your painting, you’ve got all these different kinds of brushes, that’s brilliant, you know, super, super useful. So that kind of thing is the perfect kind of lead magnet. But if you don’t, if you’re not got something quite like that, just go through everything you’ve got listed all out and go, What could we give away for free that people would love and will be quick and useful and and would support them in what they’re doing?

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I love this. This all sounds like doable and not overwhelming. Like how, how long does it take to like, implement these three strategies? And you’re like, I know people are different and situations are different, but like to really upgrade somebody’s marketing, how long does that take?

John Ainsworth: Yeah, so the first go through if people are doing a decent amount of work on this is about three months. And the way that you do it. And I’ve said this before, and I hammer this home is you’ve got to implement before you optimize. So you put in place an order bump for everything you’re selling, and upsell for everything you’re selling. There’s like other steps I’ve missed out. But you know, those are kind of the main ones that and then you start sending some email promotions, maybe you do it once a month to start with. And it’s not very good. And you haven’t written it as well as you’d like. And you’re not delighted with it, but you’re sending them. And then you start getting more people onto your email list. And you set up the lead magnet, and you put the lead magnet in more places on your website, and you put it on your social media, and you put it in your YouTube videos. And all of that takes time to make process. So after you’ve done all of that, now, you’ve probably doubled your revenue, like that’s the normal that we’re seeing after a few months, then you go back to the start and you go, okay, how am I order bumps converting which of them are doing well, which of them are not doing well, the benchmark is 30 to 60%, this one’s only converting at 10%. Let’s try something else as a product in there, let’s rewrite the text on that you do the same thing for the upsells, you do the same thing for them, and you go back through it again. So with Teal Swan, we’ve been working with them for a year and a bit. And we’ve gone all the way through, we’ve gone all the way back through we’ve implemented the whole thing multiple times. And I don’t, I don’t think I’m allowed to say how much more money they’re making. But it’s, it’s a lot more, you know, every time it goes up and it goes up and it goes up. So that’s the kind of way that it’s best to think about it. And like I said at the beginning, what we do is we work with people who’ve already got that audience on like a, you know, we only make money when they make more money. But it’s worth it for us to keep working with them long term because we can keep helping to increase that. And then there’s other stuff that you start to put in, there’s a thing called a tripwire funnel. And then there’s stuff you can do with ads, and it gets more complex, but like, you need at least three months, and then at least another three months to optimize probably like, you know, it’s just you do it forever, to an extent, you know, and it keeps making more money. It’s cool. It’s fun, you know.

Chris Badgett: If I want, I kind of want to help people who get like, overwhelmed with marketing and all these strategies and tactics. It sounds to me like you’re starting at the conversion point and working backwards up the funnel is that. So like, if somebody gets really excited about lead magnet, you’d be like, stop, slow down, you need to focus on the order bumps and upsells first, yeah, and it’s out of those specifically, its order bumps first. Because what happens is, if you try and do increasing your email list size, well, you’re not making any more money from that, because you’re not sending in promotions through email list. So it’s gonna take it takes a long while to build your email list. Even if you four times the number of leads you get per month. If you’ve got 10,000 email subscribers at the moment, and you’re getting 300 a month. Well, now you’re getting an extra 1200 a month. But it’s going to take another 10 ish months to get that up another 10,000 with people unsubscribing and you weren’t making money from them or promotion. So you get frustrated and you stop. But if you’ve already making let’s say, an AI $4,000 a month, right? And you do order bumps on top, and now you’re making an extra $400 to $800 a month with no extra work. You’re like Cool, cool, man. That’s three and that took like let’s say you set it up for all of your products version one in three days. Like I did three days and now I make an extra $500 $600 a month. This John guy knows what he’s talking about, Cool. Now let me go to step two and do the upsells. And then as you work your way through, it’s like each one takes a little bit longer out of those the order I put them in. But the so you do the short, what are the quick ones that get you a quick result. And then you move on to the next one. The next one, the next one.

Chris Badgett: Is there any thing you’ve noticed, just with working with so many course creators around pricing, I see a lot of people get lost in pricing. And I know it depends on what the market is and what the product is and what the offer is. But any just general pricing advice to help people, you know, have less friction when for their customer?

John Ainsworth: Yes, and nearly all course creators who fit into the profile, I’ve been describing a price in their courses too low. And the reason that you can tell, the way that you can tell is if you are making sales, most of your sales directly through the website of traffic goes to your website, and then they just buy, then your price is too low. It’s very, very straightforward. It’s like a hard and fast rule. That one’s really, really easy. So what you do is, after you’ve started, you’ve done your order bumps, your upsells, you started sending email promotions, and you’re making sales to your email list, and then you’re building your email list, then one of the things you do is you increase the prices. And you say in one of your email promotions, let’s say you’re you because you sell each course one at a time, you never do a bulk sale of all of them.

You say Right, we’re putting up the price of this course. And it’s going to go up and it’s never going to go back down. Again, this is the lowest price it’s ever going to be at the current thing and we’re going to put the price up for that is the biggest sale you’re ever going to have of that course. And then you do that, again, as you go through each of the courses, you put the price up for each of them.

And then you will see that there are less sales directly on your website. But if you’re still getting quite a few sales directly, it’s still too low. So then you go back through and you can put it up a little bit more people will pay more when it’s through an email promotion than they will when it’s directly on your website. There’s more context, they trust you more, you’ve had more content that’s going out about that topic. So pretty much all course creators, that’s the that’s the main problem with pricing.

Chris Badgett: I know there’s a couple of different ways to do it in terms of like you’re mentioning ala carte core sales versus like bundles, like in a membership or whatever. Do you if you had your way? Would you like steer somebody one way or the other to in terms of ala carte memberships or both?

John Ainsworth: Yes. So it’s, if you’ve, if you really want to do a membership, then it’s both. But don’t do a membership unless you’re really sure about what the membership is for? Like, why is it that someone buy a membership? Now, most people who do a membership they do it because it’s feels easier to them? Or why not just charge someone a monthly fee? Yeah, recurring revenue? I’d like that. Wouldn’t that be great? For me? It’s like, Right, but why is it better for the customer. So people want that people don’t trust you yet. So they’re not going to buy a membership. A lot of the time, if you sell individual courses, it’s much easier for them. If you’re in the hobby niche, it’s normally between 79 and maybe 199. You know, relationships or languages, that kind of thing. If you’re in b2b, then we might be talking more expensive courses.

And people are happy to pay that a lot of the time don’t want to sign up for long term membership. The membership sits behind that people have bought courses from you. And then you have a good reason why there would be in your membership. Maybe there’s q&a calls with you every so often. Maybe you’ve got a forum that goes with it, maybe there’s some other benefit. There’s some reason that fits, that makes more sense to be a long term thing, rather than just a one off sale. And then you have that set behind the individual sales.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. Let me ask you a product question based on your experience. Deals always fascinated me. I’m looking at her site. She has like these meditations, books, quotes, gift cards, other types of cars, she has events, workshops, other kinds of training, then she’s got her online courses, there’s so many different things in the product mix. What’s your advice to course creators? And I know some people are like, I’m primarily online courses and programs. And some people are like, I’m primarily physical products, and I’m just getting into courses. But what makes a healthy product mix? Or how should somebody think about that?

John Ainsworth: Yeah, so tills actually got too many. Okay. Don’t model that. That’s just something that’s happened kind of organically over time.

So I would say that the huge I mean, I could be biased, but I don’t think this is fair. The huge benefit of courses over physical products is the margin from a business point of view. Right now, if you’re not someone who’s been making courses, and you’ve selling physical products, and you’re doing really well with it, great. Keep it up. Awesome. But the margin on each course you sell is 100%. And the margin you make on each physical product is like I don’t know. So let’s say 60%, something like that depends on what you’re selling, right. And so that gives you a lot more room to play with. So I think as a business overall, they tend to be a better model for most people to be in. But like I said, if you’re already good at ecommerce, you’re already good at selling physical things and then then crack on.

I don’t know about a mix. I think if you’re selling courses, I would not suggest to start selling physical things as well. Like, if you look at just been studying my old, I’ve been checking my old marketing professor. So I’ve been getting back into some some stuff, right? There’s something called ANSOFF matrix, and it’s about market expansion versus product expansion. And the general rule of thumb is, the least risky thing to do is market penetration. So sell more of what you’ve currently got to the current market, that’s probably easy. And don’t stop really, until you’re swamped. And most course creators want to make more things rather than sell more of what they’ve got. And it’s like, for the amount of return you get, that’s the worst one to do. So start making new courses, if you’ve already got a bunch, or making physical products, when you’ve already got courses, it’s like it’s almost certainly a waste of time. Like really, in terms of actually making more money. So my advice is sell more of what you’ve got, as a general rule.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I was on your website, and I was clicking on free training, and you have a pimp your funnel training. You mentioned in the copy that one of the things you teach is you show some success examples. We also show three failure examples, tell us some of this failure, like where do people try and fail, besides just not doing the marketing, per se, but some of the things we talked about? But where does the what are the most common failures you see out there that we can learn from today?

John Ainsworth: And remember, what I’ve got in the training is the three failures. And I also realized, as you ask him that I was like, I should have shared more successes in the in the podcast today, I kind of talk about the concepts are not always about the successes, but let’s think failures that people have with this. Okay, so one of the biggest ones and I have kind of mentioned this before, but I see it all the time is people trying to do the perfect version to start with, and what was your quote there, you said implementation, then optimize, implement, then optimized, like you cannot go to the really good version straightaway, you can’t do it, it just not how it works. Of course creators have that they have the perfectionism and the imposter syndrome and it compounds and then nothing happens. Yeah, it’s terrible, isn’t it, I don’t go through it as well, like I get it, I understand it. But it’s like, that’s why we have a coaching program. So the vast majority of our coaching program is not teaching people what to do. Because we’ve got a course as part of that, that teaches people what to do. It’s encouraging people not to do the all the other ideas that they’ve come up with about, you know, like, no, don’t do these seven other things. Don’t put four products on your sales page to follow the system. And like helping them to work through the emotions and like to stick with it. So that’s definitely one I’ve seen people do is spend a month on making the perfect order bump, instead of getting the perf instead of getting something they’ve already got up. Like that’s a really, really common one.

What else we had that’s go? Right, a giant one is trying to do more complicated tactics. And we used to do this right, we used to do these automated webinar funnels and all kinds of clever stuff, without having had the basics in place first, like this, this is the stuff that I like encouraging him to do is the real fundamental basics. But people underestimate how long it takes to get the basics in place and want to jump ahead and go and do too many things. And so doing a clever via video sales letter or doing an automated webinar funnel, when you don’t have an order bump is just madness. And I see that quite often.

Other mistakes with… it starting ads before you’ve done any of these things.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. All the time. At what point? Do you recommend ads, it’s like more of a scaling strategy after you’ve got all that other stuff figured out?

John Ainsworth: Exactly. So once you’ve got your converting your existing traffic into your email list, you convert your email, listen to sales, you convert your sales into higher revenue sales, you’ve got good sales pages, good checkout pages, all of that stuff. Then what you do is you build a front end funnel, and we recommend something called a tripwire funnel. I won’t go into the details because it would just be it’s too much detail for him but but it’s like the basic idea is you take one of those things we’ve talked about with a cheap product and upsell an order bump good sales page, good checkout page and you put it behind your lead magnet so someone signs up for your lead magnet and then they see an offer then if they buy that’s a more expensive offer this kind of thing. Quick question.

Chris Badgett: Quick question for a tripwire for a course creator. What’s most common is it like a mini course or like a what to make it low cost? Like what do you..

John Ainsworth: Yeah, I could huge discount on one of your cheaper courses, or so take just one for example. Yeah, the lead magnet is five free meditations.

Chris Badgett: Which, by the way goes back to what you said, that’s something I can just implement right away. It’s not something I have to read and work at. I just plug it in and go, right. Yeah, exactly. Right. So really, really simple. The tripwire product is 27 meditations. So you bought some meditations? Well, let’s get you some more of those. Yeah, the upsell is, I believe, the self love course, which doesn’t fit 100%. Exactly, but it’s her best selling course. And so it’s, it’s makes sense, because it’s the one that is the best thing that fits in, I forget what the order bump is. We could go look it up. But so that’s the basic kind of idea is like you have that kind of a funnel that sits behind the lead magnet, you see if you can get it to be converting? Well, you keep optimizing, optimizing it once it’s converting at least 3% of the people who get the lead magnet, then buy that tripwire product, then you can test out running ads to the lead magnet, but not before that point and not until everything else is in place. And then the stage were..

Chris Badgett: You went faster, but I just wanted to know..

John Ainsworth: Sorry.

Chris Badgett: Good, I just want to make sure that people captured it that the ad was to the lead magnet not to the course, like the paid course or whatever. So you’re when you’re doing ads, it makes a lot more sense to advertise free stuff and content than in most cases. But..

John Ainsworth: Yeah, it’s it’s an interesting one, because the actual technical states steps are that you do ads to the lead magnet. And that way, you’re definitely getting leads and you’re getting new people on your email list. And you’re testing that out and then you see does the that cold traffic convert to buying that tripwire product. Then once you’ve run that for a while, and you know that that does work, then you can test ads straight into the tripwire product. Because sometimes that converts better overall in terms of the amount of money you make from it. And you’ve run that test as well. But like we’re talking here, like, this is like a year and a half into the whole process before you get to this like this is way past where anybody is like start with order bumps, you know.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. That’s cool. Is there another success story? Like what you could share that you’re really proud of?

John Ainsworth: Yeah, they got loads. So let me find let me find one. I got some notes here. So we had somebody who was selling a course about Google Shopping ads, a guy called Dennis, and he had been running it for quite a while he built up an audience and his best month ever was $7,000. And he was still doing consultancy. And the core sales was like, you know, his side thing. And he done that one time. And normally it was like 3000ish. in month three of us working with him he hit $17,000. Wow. And then he just stuck at that level. So he’s now making 20,000 a month, like pretty much pretty much every month.

Chris Badgett: Give us another one. And then I got another question for you.

John Ainsworth: Okay. We’ve got a client in the language learning space. And she was averaging a few 1000 a month, she had a big YouTube audience. And she’s now just hit that magic 83 84,000 a month, which means she’s on track for a million a year. Oh, my goodness, like, yeah, she was at 7000 a month. So about three about 320.

Chris Badgett: Okay, what was the big unlock there?

John Ainsworth: I mean, it was still email list. She already was converting people onto the Melissa that she had a big email list to start with, which is great. But she wasn’t doing email promotions. So it’s, it’s all of these things compound, right? They all add on top of each other. But that was the big one for her was just she wasn’t doing email promotions. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And for you often think about this in terms of course creators, you mentioned it in the beginning, like your perfect ideal client. Some people some course creators get really focused on themselves and like, I need to make money and I’m trying to build this online business and give freedom for my life and all this stuff, which is not bad. But you got to serve and you got to help people. And what amazes me about you is that even your business model is like I don’t get paid unless you get paid. Right? Am I understand that? Right? Can you tell us the story of getting to that because that’s like so aligned as an offer. The it just seems easier to sell, like, I just want to learn from you. And for the audience, like how do we put skin in the game like that where we’re we get the upside, but we also get the downside. If it doesn’t work, we’re tied to the results. How did that happen for you?

John Ainsworth: So the way it happened was that we are obsessed with results. And lots of people say oh, yeah, we’re all about results. I’m like, I talked to them. I’m like, No, I don’t I think that you’d be right if it just does, okay. And I’m like we are obsessed with things working really, really well. And the problem we had with that was if we have somebody who we put extra effort in for and we make the more money we don’t get anything more back from it so it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t align. And also, our clients never believed that they’re going to make as much more money as we tell them they will they never believed us. And I get it because it’s like, it would be so wonderful if it happened. But come on, it can’t really because everybody says that you can make more money and whatever else, right? So I’m like if they don’t believe us, and that’s why they’re not signing up, we have to show them that we believe it more than they do. So let’s, let’s line it up, let’s make it so that if they make more money, we make more money. And if they make less, if they don’t succeed, then we don’t get paid. Like, basically, we would never take a client on if we weren’t sure that they could do this and couldn’t make money with it. So I’m like, well, then, if we’re already doing that, why don’t we go the next step and actually set it up. So that will you know, make make it aligned more, but still, I thought it’s like a year ago, and I still hadn’t done it. And then I got two friends who run YouTube ad agencies, and they do the same model, right, they only get paid as a percentage of the, the results that they bring in. And they were just telling me how they done it. Because they felt like it was the right thing to do. And it made them more money. And it made it easier for people to sign up. And I was like, oh, I should be doing this. It’s like, it’s such a win win for everybody. It makes people more comfortable, it makes them more money, it makes us more money. It just makes the whole thing fit. So it took a lot of like building up to it to be able to do it because it feels nerve-racking. Right? Like, okay, well, what if we have a client and they don’t do their part of the work, or we have somebody who, you know, we make them loads more money, and then they decide not to pay us? And I was like, okay, suck it up, just sit with it be alright, with the fear. It’s okay. Just do it. It’s the right thing to do.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool! In terms of working with you, and like, who does what I noticed on your site? It’s, you have done with you. So like, what is the course creator? Do? What do you do? How do you work together to achieve the outcome?

John Ainsworth: Yeah. So what we do is we provide them with all the insights and the understanding of what it is that needs setting up. And then we support them to do it. Now there’s a couple of reasons for this. Why don’t we just do it as a done for you?

Most course, creators will pretty much all course creators are an expert in their field. So they can write about that field, they can write about that topic. We can’t like, I can’t be an expert in Warhammer 40,000, meditation, language learning and dog training. It’s like it’s impossible, right? Like it took them years to gain that. But what we know is, how do you structure it? What’s the framework? What do you say? How does it fit. And then what we do therefore is we support them as much as they need with all of those different steps for anybody who kind of qualifies to work with us, because we obviously don’t take everybody on who wants to work with us, we only take on the ones who we think they’re going to implement, they have good courses, they’ve got enough traffic, there’s the potential there for that kind of thing. So what we do is we have a course that teaches them all on the steps. We have templates, we have swipe files, we have group coaching calls, we have individual coaching calls, we have a Slack group where we answer questions, we have an automation expert, a copy chief or strategy person who like work through with people on every single bit that they need help with. And we find that the model that works best in terms of getting the results and being efficient for them. And it just yeah, all kind of fitting together.

Chris Badgett: So somebody who’s like super excited right now and they’re really want to explore working with you, what should they do? Where should they go. So the first step for everybody is to get their course profit report. So most people can increase their average revenue by about 20%. In inside of a week. And so we want to, and it’ll be probably for most people, it’s going to be order bump, right, I’m gonna get spoiled, I’m gonna give you a spoiler on this one. But what we’ll do is we’ll make a plan for you totally for free. We’ll do this for every single one of your listeners who wants it. So people can go to courseprofitreport.com. And there’s a form there, people fill in a few quick questions. And my team will then make a personalized plan for their business, they’ll figure out how much extra revenue they could make, what steps to work on what step to work on, first, they’ll century training on how to do it for free. There’s lots of variables in this, it can’t be automated. So it normally takes them a two or three days to go through and set this up.

With some people, if they look like they have loads of potential, they’ll also get a loom video with this. That’s like breaking down their current funnel and where the steps in it are wrong and this kind of thing. And yeah, so that’s the first thing and then if somebody qualifies to work with us from that, then they’ll get invited to come on a call with someone from my team who can just double check, they’re going to be a good fit.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And if somebody is wanting to go deep into your podcast universe, the art of selling online courses, tell us about the show what types of content are on there and what really your mission and vision for your podcast is.

John Ainsworth: So we’ve got three different topics that we cover on there. One is we talk to successful online course creators who’ve done this in some way or another how are they managed to be successful? Loads of case studies. Generally that’s people are doing at least 500,000 a year. Some of them are doing millions multimillionaires, that kind of thing. Second one we have as I interviewed the guys on my team, because it used to be that I was the one who was doing all this work, right? And then I hired really smart people and I train them up, or I might hire people who’ve got experience and stuff already. And then they’ve got way better than me. Right? So I interview Josefa Monica, who use hips are head of delivery, he does all the strategy. And Monica is our copy chief. And so I interview them about what is it that you’re doing right now? Exactly. How did you do the email promotion last month, what order bump worked really well, this kind of thing. So getting into real detail. And then the third one is people who are focusing around driving traffic, because we don’t do traffic. So I’m like, Okay, well, let me go and interview the people who drive traffic people who are doing summits and YouTube ads and organic YouTube and all that kind of thing and finding out what is it that’s working. And so we have those three different themes on there.

Chris Badgett: That is awesome. That is John Ainsworth from datadrivenmarketing.co. Head on over to course, profit report.com Any final words for the people John or any any way else they can connect with you?

John Ainsworth: Can connect with me just drop me an email if you want to John Jo HN at datadrivenmarketing Dotco.

If people have got like a specific question about any of this, that’s cool. And in terms of final words, I’m just gonna say it again. Please set up an order bump. Please, you’ll if you do it, right. I had someone messaged me the other day. And he’s like, I listened to your podcast. I went and I set up the order bump. And now I’m making $5,000 more month. Like Thank you. And I was like, Oh, you’re welcome.

Chris Badgett: Thanks, John. I appreciate you coming on the show sharing your wisdom and enthusiasm with us. We really appreciate it.

John Ainsworth: Yeah, you’re welcome in let’s be here.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends, and be sure to subscribe, so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifter lms.com forward slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com forward slash gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post How to Sell a Lot More Courses with John Ainsworth appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

TL;DR – It’s Black Friday and everything is on sale! Most software companies like Adobe and even Apple is offering some discount on their products. WordPress plugin and theme companies are following this trend as a major event every year offering the highest amount of discounts on all of their products. We at LifterLMS have also prepared a roundup post to help you choose the best resources you can get this Black Friday. LifterLMS Recommended List of Resources can be found here. Our round-up of essential Black Friday Deals for Course Creators can be found here in our blog section. …

Why Now is the Best Time to Get Your eLearning Software and Other Tech Read More »

The post Why Now is the Best Time to Get Your eLearning Software and Other Tech appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Today we have Julian Juenemann from Measure School in this episode of LMScast with Chris Badgett. Their whole platform is built and maintained on WordPress by Julian himself. Julian creates and sells Google Analytics training courses through his website. But not all learners get their questions formed during their course time. So, for people with a longer learning curve, he also has memberships to his site where they can ask their questions to their experts and the community they have built as the learners encounter new problems or discover a new way to use Google Analytics on their websites. However, …

Fast-track Your Digital Marketing the Data-driven Way with Google Analytics Expert Julian Juenemann Read More »

The post Fast-track Your Digital Marketing the Data-driven Way with Google Analytics Expert Julian Juenemann appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Nowadays people prefer to make money with digital products by promoting them on websites, social channels, newsletters, and so on. But, most of the time, people fail to generate revenue through these digital products. No worries. Here we have Nancy from NancyBadillo.com who has been helping entrepreneurs to make money through digital products. Besides, she used to offer free YouTube training videos to help others to sell easy digital products. Furthermore, she will also share her incredible success story in this blog. How to Start Selling Digital Products? Generating revenue with digital products is the easiest way to do business …

Success Story of Nancy Badillo – Earned $52K from Her Courses! Read More »

The post Success Story of Nancy Badillo – Earned $52K from Her Courses! appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Need a complete guide on how to generate leads & traffic as a course creator? Here are some exclusive tips from Ken Marshall that would definitely suit your need.

The post SEO for Course Creators with Ken Marshall from RevenueZen appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

The goal of starting any educational training program is generating recurring predictable revenue. Learn how to generate it with Liam Austin.

The post How to Set Up a Predictable Revenue-Generating Education Empire with Liam Austin appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Podcasting is a powerful tool for marketing for learning industry professionals. Craig of Castos.com shares how he runs an entire business on podcasting on this episode of LMScast.

The post How to Create a Private Podcast For Your Course or Membership Site with Craig Hewitt from Castos appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

In this episode of LMScast, we have our chief guest Anil Gupta from multidots.com, the CEO and Co-Founder of this WordPress development agency. Here he will talk about one of his groundbreaking products Multicollab which is a Google docs style commenting and collaboration tool. Besides, he will also guide us on how to start and scale a WordPress development agency. What is Multicollab? A Multicollab is a WordPress tool that allows providing Google-style editorial comments and suggestions inside your WordPress site. It has brought all the features and interface of Google docs right inside your WordPress dashboard so that your …

Google Doc Style Collaboration for WordPress via Multicollab with Multidots CEO Anil Gupta Read More »

The post Google Doc Style Collaboration for WordPress via Multicollab with Multidots CEO Anil Gupta appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Need guides to create an effective training program? Learn how Bradley Morris has pulled off his online training program, Magic Kids.

The post State of the Creator Industry – Bradley Morris from Majik Media and Chris Badgett from LifterLMS appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

In this episode of LMScast, we have the exceptional Yoga master Cate Stillman from yogahealer.com, and our host is Chris Badgett. She started in 2007 as a curriculum creator and instructor by guiding people on a healing journey with Ayurveda & Yoga, an ancient Indian medical practice. Cate has emerged as an evolutionary thought leader, global tribe builder and author in the field of re-wilding humans, orienting towards meaning and purpose, and getting deeply invested in life. What is Ayurveda? It is about unlocking the full potential of the human body, the most complex and advanced system known to man. …

Transforming Lives Through Courses And Coaching With Yoga Healer Cate Stillman Read More »

The post Transforming Lives Through Courses And Coaching With Yoga Healer Cate Stillman appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

In this Episode of LMScast, we have our chief guest Chris Martinez from dudeagency.io. He is an education entrepreneur and a savior of digital agencies. Here, Chris Martinez will be teaching us how to scale a digital agency in a Dude way. How to Start a Digital Agency Starting a digital agency is not as hard as it seems. By doing proper research and utilizing knowledge, you can easily start a digital agency. First, you need to educate yourself through courses and training. After getting proper knowledge about digital marketing, find out your niche. Then you have to list down …

How to Scale Your Agency the Dude Way with Chris Martinez Read More »

The post How to Scale Your Agency the Dude Way with Chris Martinez appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Time is money, time is rest. Manage your time better with these pro tips from Les Watson in this episode of LMScast.

The post How to Get More Done in a Limited Time with Les Watson appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Natalie is a Facebook and Instagram ad specialist who has been assisting course creators and coaches to run ads in the right way.

The post How to Run Facebook Ads for Course Creators and Coaches with Natalie Anne Martin appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Pricing is crucial for any business. If you want to know the right way to price and how to increase prices on your existing services without making any investment, this insight session is for you.

The post How to Optimize Your Prices with Loren Fogelman appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

In this LMScast meet Derek Ashauer as he discusses client happiness and being a plugin creator besides serving clients through a web development agency.

The post How to Build WordPress Products and a Thriving Agency at the Same Time with Derek Ashauer appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Ever wondered about a nomad life? In this LMScast episode, meet David Cole. He travels the world and also makes money with ESL curriculums using LifterLMS. Join us to learn more about his exciting life and entrepreneurship.

The post Language Learning Curriculum Entrepreneur David Cole Has a Surprising Use Case for Lifter LMS! appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

If you run an agency you have to ensure the top quality of your client’s websites. Vic Drover from Watchful ensures you can do that with a click. Catch his interview on this LMScast episode with our host Chris Badgett.

The post How WordPress Professionals Can Provide Recurring Revenue Services at Scale with Victor Drover appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

In this episode of LMScast, we have Lesley Sim from NewsletterGlue.com with our host Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. Their plugin allows you to publish your newsletter directly in WordPress. For course creators, engaging your learners with newsletters can be a very useful way to add value. So, there is a lot to learn from this episode. Newsletter Glue is getting integrated with LifterLMS very soon, so you will be able to use the great features of this plugin with your course-selling website. Newsletter Glue does two things really well. It halves your publishing time by automatically sending out the newsletter …

How to Publish a Newsletter Directly in Your WordPress LMS Website with Newsletter Glue Read More »

The post How to Publish a Newsletter Directly in Your WordPress LMS Website with Newsletter Glue appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

LifterLMS and Presto player creates the best of both worlds for video-based course creators on WordPress. Listen to what Adam Preiser the founder of Presto has to say in this episode of LMScast.

The post How to make students fall in love with your video courses with Presto player appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Who doesn’t want fast websites? In this LMScast episode, we meet Jon Phillips from the LifterLMS community sharing his secrets to making any WordPress website load fast.

The post Website Speed Expert and Course Creator Jon Phillips Reveals How to Speed Up Your WordPress Site appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, meet Jason Gracia of Swyft Sites as he shares how he has helped hundreds of people and coaches through building websites that can drive a business actively.

The post How to Quickly Create a Coaching Website that Converts with Jason Gracia from Swyft Sites appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Join us in this episode to dig into how outsourcing for agencies works with our guest Michael Short of GoWP. Learning platform creators and entrepreneurs would get valuable insights into how they can leverage outsourcing to improve their business.

The post How to Outsource Copywriting, Development, and Design as a Learning Platform Creation Agency appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

We have trainers, course makers, and people establishing training-based membership sites at LifterLMS and in our community where everyone is asking and looking for ways to acquire more visitors. They want to buy traffic since they don't want to squander money on a rabbit hole that will not bring them any results. So, this episode has a lot to offer to all members of our audience and community.

The post From Zero to 300K Per Year in Course and Membership Sales in 3 Years as a Chill Entrepreneur with Josh Hall appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

We have Sam Michie from Social Bluebook with us today. We have discussed brand collaboration ideas and strategies for the course creators and coaches and help them generate more money.

The post How Course Creators and Coaches Can Make More Money From Brand Collaborations with Sam Michie from Social BlueBook appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

We are going to learn about what she has done so far, her decision-making process, some of the important bits, etc. We will also try to know about the training stack she uses, the product suite, and many more!

The post How to Create a Recurring Revenue Membership Site with Kay Peacey from ActiveCampaign Academy appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Today's podcast is about transforming your hobby into a money making business. We have also emphasized on how listening to people more, how empowering hobbyists can help you also find your purpose in life. And yes, there are very detailed discussions on how Ziv created the six figure business and kept growing aggressively even during the pandemic!

The post 6 Figure Membership Site Creator Ziv Raviv Reveals Golden Keys to 377K in Revenue in 5 Years appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Brian Casel of ZipMessage shares insights into how you can increase your ability to communicate effectively online...

The post How to Increase Your Ability to Communicate Effectively Online with Brian Casel of ZipMessage appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Learn how to create a sales funnel to sell online courses with Chris Benetti in this episode of the LMScast hosted by Chris Badgett of LifterLMS.

The post How to Create a Sales Funnel to Sell Online Courses with Chris Benetti appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Learn how to run a massive niche virtual summit with LifterLMS through the story of Fantastic Fungi Global Summit.

The post How to Run a Massive Niche Virtual Summit with LifterLMS Fantastic Fungi Global Summit Case Study appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

We dive into the release of LifterLMS 6.0 in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett of LifterLMS where Chris breaks down what’s new in LifterLMS 6.0 and how LifterLMS has evolved to democratize education online and serve LMS site creators on a global scale.

The post The Best LMS Plugin to Create and Sell Courses Online appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

We dive into managed WordPress hosting, open source software innovation and community with Robert Jacobi From Cloudways in this episode of the LMScast podcast.

The post Managed WordPress Hosting, Open Source Software Innovation and Community with Robert Jacobi From Cloudways appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Learn about the ultimate guide to Facebook Ads for course creators with Shelby Fowler from Fempire Media in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. At LifterLMS and in our community we have coaches, course creators, people building training based membership sites, and everybody is asking and looking for ways to get more traffic. They want to do paid traffic, they don’t want to waste money going down a rabbit hole that does not yield results for them. If you’re someone who offers marketing service to clients as well, understanding how to leverage Facebook ads …

Ultimate Guide to Facebook Ads For Course Creators with Shelby Fowler from Fempire Media Read More »

The post Ultimate Guide to Facebook Ads For Course Creators with Shelby Fowler from Fempire Media appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Learn about how WordPress pro Kurt Von Ahnen creates successful online learning platforms on Cloudways hosting with LifterLMS and WooCommerce in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Chris and Kurt chat about WordPress, online courses, working with clients, and tech infrastructure. Kurt recently completed a project for a client called Inner Treasure Hunt, which can be found at InnerTreasureHunt.com. The Innter Trasure Hunt or ITH project falls into the wellness category in online education, teaching about Eastern philosophies on cycles of the moon and they host events based on new moons and full moons. …

WordPress Pro Creates Successful Online Learning Platforms On Cloudways Hosting with LifterLMS and WooCommerce Read More »

The post WordPress Pro Creates Successful Online Learning Platforms On Cloudways Hosting with LifterLMS and WooCommerce appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett from LifterLMS and Linda Puig, creator of the program Your Audience, Your Way, discuss how to build your audience in alignment with your personality type. Linda explains how to build your audience through other people’s networks and social media. Linda Claire Puig is an internationally recognized marketing expert who helps solo-business owners develop profitable relationships and portable businesses that go with them wherever they want to go. Linda has taken her own business abroad for months at a time to locations that include a medieval-era Italian village, the grand cities of Paris and Rome, the …

How to Build Your Audience Your Way with Linda Puig Read More »

The post How to Build Your Audience Your Way with Linda Puig appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett and Micah Mitchell discuss how Infusionsoft, Keap, and ActiveCampaign users create powerful automated WordPress based membership sites with Memberium and LifterLMS. Memberium helps you build powerful, automated membership sites while being deeply integrated with your CRM. Memberium is a WordPress membership plugin, so it controls access to what pages and resources on a website are open to the public or only for certain members. And it does this at a very deep level between a website’s database and a CRM. And you can use that to trigger actions based on a customer’s actions on …

How Infusionsoft, Keap, and ActiveCampaign Users Create Powerful Automated WordPress Based Membership Sites with Memberium and LifterLMS Read More »

The post How Infusionsoft, Keap, and ActiveCampaign Users Create Powerful Automated WordPress Based Membership Sites with Memberium and LifterLMS appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Learn about mastering modern marketing with Todd Brown’s E5 Method in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. Todd shares marketing insights he’s gained throughout his years working in marketing for businesses, both brick and mortar and online. A marketing campaign’s big idea is the message that underlies all elements of a campaign to resonate with the audience you’re going after. It is something that resonates with your audience and is the source or reference for the methods and messaging of your marketing campaign. Behind every marketing campaign, every marketing promotion, every video, every long-form …

Mastering Modern Marketing with Todd Brown’s E5 Method Read More »

The post Mastering Modern Marketing with Todd Brown’s E5 Method appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

In this LMScast episode we’ll discuss 17 ideas for how to market your online course and scale with Facebook ads with Liana Ling, hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. Liana is from Power Up Strategy, where she helps empower business owners to get as many clients or customers as their hearts desire. Liana worked as a corporate litigation lawyer for about 10 years, and then her position was restructured. And after that happened, she realized that she was actually a frustrated entrepreneur, and she would do better to run her own show. She had been through university and law school …

17 Ideas for How to Market Your Online Course and Scale with Facebook Ads with Liana Ling Read More »

The post 17 Ideas for How to Market Your Online Course and Scale with Facebook Ads with Liana Ling appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Learn about exploring the WordPress LMS for nonprofits niche and community building with Carol Stambaugh in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. Carol shares insights into how she got started in the nonprofit space and building websites for nonprofit businesses, along with some industry insights you may want to consider when entering the space. Carol has a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in social work. She started as a social worker years ago, and was the executive director of two different nonprofit organizations. What made her fall in love with the web is when …

Exploring the WordPress LMS for Non Profits Niche and Community Building with Carol Stambaugh Read More »

The post Exploring the WordPress LMS for Non Profits Niche and Community Building with Carol Stambaugh appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Learn about teaching startup founders high growth strategies and tactics online at Craig Zingerline’s Growth University in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. Growth University is a place where startups and founders go to learn a lot of the holistic elements around growing their startups. Craig takes a very stage and industry agnostic approach, and has put together a series of training programs that help startups across the board learn customer acquisition, activation, how to measure and track retention, how to do product-led growth, and how to run experiments. That has really been Craig’s …

Teaching Startup Founders High Growth Strategies and Tactics Online at Craig Zingerline’s Growth University Read More »

The post Teaching Startup Founders High Growth Strategies and Tactics Online at Craig Zingerline’s Growth University appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Learn how to create a training based membership site on WordPress the easy way without limits with Jonathan Denwood from WP Tonic in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. Jonathan has a great podcast called the WP-Tonic Show where he interviews members of the WordPress community about various topics each week. Chris goes on Jonathan’s Friday round table show semi-regularly, which is a really great discussion on things that are happening in tech and WordPress, and even in the elearning space. But in this episode we really get into what Jonathan offers over at …

How to Create a Training Based Membership Site on WordPress the Easy Way Without Limits with Jonathan Denwood from WP Tonic Read More »

The post How to Create a Training Based Membership Site on WordPress the Easy Way Without Limits with Jonathan Denwood from WP Tonic appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Learn how this online course teaches how to make money from HNT cryptocurrency on the Helium Blockchain via hotspots with Nik & Lee in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. Nik Hawks and Lee Selman are from Gristle King, which is a place where you can learn about a blockchain technology cryptocurrency called Helium.

Helium is an idea that’s one of the first and the largest projects that tokenizes something in the real world. Up until pretty recently, blockchain projects were all in the digital world. It was Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other digital currencies. There wasn’t really a crossover into “the real world.” And Helium is one of the first projects that has done that. You can earn Helium coin by putting a radio on your roof and that radio provides coverage on a very specific frequency or protocol called LORA for LOng RAnge. LORA coverage typically services what’s called IoT or the internet of things.

The radios on your roof provide coverage for sensors that might be transmitting information about temperature, humidity, they might be tracking vehicles or packages or pallets or planes, they might be pet trackers tracking animals. There’s lots of different things that the IoT (Internet of Things) can do. In return for providing that coverage, you’re paid in a cryptocurrency called the HNT or Helium Network Token. And that’s the very big picture about it, is that it’s this interaction between physical and the digital.

Nik and Lee built the course because it is a big and complex environment and ecosystem, and as you get into Helium and you start to deploy hotspots, you’ve got to figure out where do you buy them, what do you do with them, how do you set them up, how do you know that you’re in the right location, how does the whole thing work, what’s good what’s bad, when they go down, how do you troubleshoot them, what’s next on the horizon. There are so many things going on, and Helium itself is a really dynamic company. So they started with LORA and now they’re pushing into 5G, which is a totally different spectrum of the radio or set of frequencies on the radio, and so there’s a whole new set of rules around that. That’s what Nik and Lee cover in their paid online course and coaching programs to students who are interested in being involved with the network.

Be sure to head to GristleKing.com, check it out, look around, and see what you think. You can always look at Explorer.Helium.com to look at the map and see what hotspots are out there. If you decide you want to get deeper, Nik and Lee have built the entire website for you, so check it out at GristleKing.com.

And at LifterLMS.com you can learn more about new developments and how you can use LifterLMS to build online courses and membership sites. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. If you like this episode of LMScast, you can browse more episodes here. Thank you for joining us!

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Chris Badgett:

You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay till the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by two special guests, Nik and Lee Hawks from Gristle King, which is a place where you can learn about a blockchain technology cryptocurrency called Helium. I’m really excited to get into it. Welcome to the show, you folks.

Lee Selman:

Thanks.

Nik Hawks:

Thanks. Psyched to be here, psyched to just share the knowledge and share our experience with LifterLMS. It’s been pretty cool so far, lots of learning.

Chris Badgett:

Awesome. Well, I’m super passionate into crypto and technology. And really how technology can make the world a better place is something I really believe in. For people who don’t know, where does Helium sit in the ecosystem? I know that’s a big question, but how do you tell somebody who’s never heard of it before, even if they’re not familiar with blockchain or crypto, what is it?

Nik Hawks:

Sure. So Helium is this idea, it’s really one of the first and the largest projects that tokenizes something in the real world. So up until pretty recently, blockchain projects were all in the digital world. It was Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever it was, it was a digital currency. And there wasn’t really a crossover into “the real world.” And Helium is one of the first projects that has done that. What it is, you put a radio basically on your roof and that radio provides coverage on a very specific frequency or protocol called LORA, L-O-R-A, for long range. And LORA coverage typically services what’s called IoT or the internet of things. I know there’s a lot of stuff coming at you, but it’s a pretty big space and there’s a lot of information.

Nik Hawks:

So the very short version is you put one of these radios on your roof, it provides coverage for sensors that might be transmitting stuff, information about temperature, humidity, they might be tracking vehicles or packages or pallets or planes, they might be tracking animals.

Lee Selman:

Pet trackers.

Nik Hawks:

Pet trackers. There’s lots of different things that the IoT, the internet of things can do. And in return for providing that coverage, you’re paid in a cryptocurrency called the HNT or Helium network token. And that’s the very big picture about it, is that it’s this interaction between physical and the digital.

Chris Badgett:

So why the course?

Nik Hawks:

So we built the course because it is a big and complex environment, it’s a big and complex ecosystem. And the three minute information or introduction I just gave is not even the surface of it. As you get into Helium and you start to deploy these hotspots, you’ve got to figure out where do you buy them, what do you do with them, how do you set them up, how do you know that you’re in the right location, how does the whole thing work, what what’s good what’s bad, when they go down, how do you troubleshoot them, what’s next on the horizon. There’s so many things going on and Helium itself is a really dynamic company. So they started with LORA and now they’re pushing into 5G, which is a totally different spectrum of the radio or set of frequencies on the radio, and so there’s a whole new set of rules around that.

Nik Hawks:

And because it’s such a complex system, and especially because right now it’s probably, as of even early 2022, where we are right now, January, it’s still one of the most profitable things you can mine in all of cryptocurrency. That was far more true in 2021, when a great miner cost about 500 bucks. And in a good location, it would be making something like $15,000 to $20,000 a month. So the demand for it was incredible, but the difference between a good and a bad location could be significant. You could be making 100 or 200 bucks a month. So there’s this really big demand for information. So for a long time I gave it away for free and then found out about you guys and we decided to say, okay, let’s build a course that is reasonably approachable for people and lay out the whole thing in about an hour so that then you can go and do a really good job of mining and contributing to the ecosystem.

Chris Badgett:

Wow, that’s awesome. What makes a good location?

Nik Hawks:

Sure. Good location, it’s a combination of things. So it is, I call this WUPU, so it’s W-U-P-U and that’s it provides this coverage that’s wide, unique, provable, and useful. So it’s wide coverage, your radio really your antenna can receive information from a lot of different places, it’s not boxed up. It’s unique coverage, so it’s not you putting two miners in your house and providing the same coverage twice. It’s provable coverage in that when your miner sends out a signal or transmits what’s called a beacon, another miner can receive that. And in Helium world, we call that witnessing that. And because this proof piece is so much of the earnings, this proof of coverage cycle is so much of the earnings, it’s really important to be in the right place where your miner can actually prove its location.

Nik Hawks:

And then the last thing is that it’s useful or usable. And that’s it’s processing sensor data, it’s actually doing something useful for the network. And that’s probably the most exciting thing in the long term about all of Helium, is that it’s an actually useful network. You’re not just trading stuff on the market, which, hey, that’s fun can make a lot of money doing that. And if you like making money, then crypto’s a good space to be for that. But if we’re looking for long term plays, it’s really about how do you have a useful application to the world we currently exist in.

Chris Badgett:

That is awesome. Is it biased towards being in a very populated area or can a rural area meet those criteria as well?

Nik Hawks:

It’s tough for a rural area to do it if you’re what’s called a lone Wolf. So if you’re the only miner around and you can’t provide that provable coverage, the P in WUPU, it’s really difficult if not impossible to earn any significant amount. So there’s a sweet spot, and this is one of the complexities that the course goes through, about how many miners you want around you and what the let’s say the quality of those miners looks like.

Chris Badgett:

That’s awesome. I did some research and I was looking at the map of the miners in my area, I’m still getting familiar with it. But I can see how the appeal and how interesting it is and really empowering that. How is it different from the current way? What makes it decentralized or more for the people or more democratized?

Nik Hawks:

Sure. So it’s decentralized in the sense that it’s replacing the current wireless system. So right up until Helium came along, the only way to get signal out there was to be a giant company, a Verizon, a T-Mobile, a Sprint and say, we’re going to put up our own towers and we’re going to provide radios and antennas on those towers, we’re going to spend a ton of money, millions of dollars, to put up one tower. And we’re going to provide coverage for people and those people will never be able to earn off of the coverage that we provide. In fact, they’re they’re going to spend to use that coverage. And there’s no chance for a small operator to come in at anything less than a few million and provide useful coverage.

Nik Hawks:

So what Helium did was make it so that any of us can put a pretty small radio on top of our house and provide coverage and get paid for that. So that’s the decentralizing part, it’s decentralizing this wireless buildup. And if we think of this in terms of what does this look like compared to another business or another wireless rollout, this is the fastest wireless roll out that has ever been seen in the world. And just over a year, Helium managed to incentivize the roll out of over 400,000 different radio stations. So it’s a demonstration of what can happen when you align the incentives and you combine the physical and the digital and make sure everybody who participates wins and see just how big and fast and amazing a thing can grow.

Chris Badgett:

That’s awesome. Well, let’s talk about the education piece. Cryptocurrency, blockchain technology, decentralization, the tokenization of everything is moving really fast. So education definitely plays a part. How did the need to educate come in and what are some challenges you wished to solve by creating a course?

Nik Hawks:

I’m going to put that over to Lee. She started to run… I just said, “Hey…” Lee’s my wife and I said, “Look, I’ve got so much going on I can’t handle this. Can you help me build this course?” I’ll let her talk about what we think we’re going to do with the course and where it’s going.

Lee Selman:

So Nik’s got on this road, I don’t know, probably, which is a really cool story, I don’t know, about a year and a half ago. And really became the expert in this technology and just started doing a lot of consulting for people who wanted to do large employment deployments or even it was actually people all over the world. And Nik started doing because of the demand, people wanted to know this new language. And most people really don’t have or didn’t have the bandwidth to piece this all together and learn all the language. Everybody had this thing in their head that they needed to use the technology of, oh a higher tower will give me better coverage. So it was really a lot of educating people on it’s very heavy in education. So that’s when we thought, well, if we could make it so that it was available to more people in a course format. So that’s when we found you guys. So we’re putting it into a basic beginner’s course that can walk everybody through really anything they want to know to get started.

Chris Badgett:

What’s-

Lee Selman:

And it’s been amazing. I’ve gone through all your videos, I’ve listened to all the the house cleaner lady one.

Chris Badgett:

Oh, yeah.

Lee Selman:

Which is amazing. Yeah, there’s so much. And it’s the same with you, it’s all new. You have to break all this stuff down to teach people. And I think you made it really easy for us to do that.

Chris Badgett:

Well, I appreciate that. You’re education entrepreneurs, they go together. And you mentioned Angela Brown, who’s a house cleaner, who’s teaching and helping others in that niche of house cleaning entrepreneurship. What’s the history like? I’m trying to get the timeline of how old is Helium, when did you start consulting, and how far back is your WordPress experience? Those are just some key data points there.

Nik Hawks:

So WordPress, I’ve been doing since geez, probably 2004.

Chris Badgett:

For what? That’s pretty old.

Nik Hawks:

Yeah. But more on a personal blog level. So for a long time, I’ve just enjoyed writing stuff. So I’d write travel blogs or what I was doing, and I was doing a bunch to different stuff. And it was always a way to make it so that family and friends could see what I was doing. So the WordPress stuff, at least at a surface level and just publishing blog posts and doing that thing, I’d had a long time or a lot of experience with. Helium technically started much longer ago than the current incarnation is. So let’s say 2019 is probably when Helium really started banging in its current form. I found it in August of 2020, so middle, beginning of the pandemic. I’m a paraglider and August of 2020, a fairly famous paraglider went missing over the Nevada Desert. So he was trying to set a personal record, he was flying with a bunch of other people. We all carry GPSs, we all carry cell phones when we’re flying out in the back country. And his last GPS ping was at something like 17,000 feet or 14,000 feet and disappeared.

Nik Hawks:

So he was really well known in funnily enough, both the paragliding and the psychedelic community. And through both of those communities, he had all of these wild connections. So he knew ambassadors, he knew owners of big companies, he knew the little people, the big people and everyone in between, and was really well liked. And so this giant search and rescue effort was stood up to find this guy. We had everybody from government satellites going over because he knew some folks in the intelligence community and saying, “Okay, can we use some of this older data?” All the way down to hunters, hikers, bikers, ATVs, private planes. I flew up there with a buddy in his private plane. We had helicopters there, we had drones all scouring this giant area to find this guy because the GPS and the cell phone hadn’t worked.

Lee Selman:

I think it was the summer too, which was you’ve got the clocks ticking on what if he was alive.

Nik Hawks:

So the short and tragic part is he was dead when he hit the ground, it took us 30 days to find him. And we just ended up finding him through getting lucky. So on the plane ride for me up there in this little small plane with my buddy, we went up and searched for a couple of days, I think three days of searching the air, all we were talking about was how do we make sure doesn’t happen to us. If we’re flying in the back country, we thought that GPS and cell phone was the gold standard and you couldn’t not be found, turns out that’s not true. What’s our third option? What’s our, to make fancy words, tertiary geolocation option, our third way to be found? And that’s when I found LORA. So I find LORA probably eight to 12 months into Helium’s real existence and probably like 10 months or eight months into it really starting to take off. Still considered super early in that space.

Nik Hawks:

And at that time, serendipitously, Helium had opened up this program for what are called DIY or do it yourself miners. They since closed that program because it ended up opening a bunch of loop holes for gamers and cheaters. But in the short time that it was open, I ended up building a couple of different Helium miners and learning a lot more than probably your typical person does just from having to build it from scratch myself and seeing how the system works. So now we circle back to the WordPress experience. I wrote my first blog about Helium on my personal blog just because friends and family were asking, what are you doing 25 hours a day? I was out in the mountains all the time, I was in the garage, I was building stuff, putting things up on the roof, I was doing these crazy hikes to put these radio, we call them towers, but sometimes they’re just a four foot station in all of these-

Lee Selman:

Mad scientists.

Nik Hawks:

Remote places. And the blog post got picked up because it was just me explaining what the system was and how it worked and how to optimize a hotspot and how to make that $15,000, $20,000 a month. And obviously that information is pretty in enticing and valuable to people. And more or less by accident, the blog post got picked up in the Reddit world and the Helium community took it and ran with it. Then I started getting phone calls and the most memorable one was a 9 o’clock on a Thursday night, this Ukrainian dude out of Buffalo, New York called. I picked up the phone and it’s like the classic movie line, “Hello. I have a bunch of miner. I have some questions for you.” So we had this really fun long term conversation.

Nik Hawks:

But at that point, I started to realize, okay, I can’t do what I’ve been doing, I can’t give away all this information for free, and I really can’t give all this time away without trying to figure out a business around it. So I began a charge for consulting, the consulting business took off, we did really well with that. Then we saw, okay, that’s not going to be enough either, we’ve got to build a course. And that’s really when Lee came in and said, “Okay, let’s systematize this a little bit and make it so that you can either do a one-on-one consult, which can be really valuable if you have a larger group or you got really specific questions.” Or you can take a course because a course solves 100% of 70% of the people’s problems or 80% of the people’s problems.

Chris Badgett:

Wow, that’s awesome. So what was the timeline from the idea, okay, I think we should turn this into a course to getting your first one up?

Nik Hawks:

That was super short. I think I found LifterLMS, I looked at it. I think within two or three days, I just bought whatever the ultimate mega package was. I was like, “I just want to buy this buy once cry once.” And what I did was I took the consulting session, it’s between 60 and 90 minutes, it’s right around an hour most of the time. And I just sat down, looked at the camera just like I’m doing now, and recorded a flat session with no customization. So here’s what I go through, I talk about strategy, tactics, tools, 60 minutes of just talking about Helium. I put that up as the course and I think it had paid everything off in a week. Selling the course paid off all the LifterLMS expenses in the first seven days. It might have been eight days. But it’s like, okay, well this is probably a good idea, let’s keep going with it.

Lee Selman:

And I think there’s also other things you can always add to what you’re giving because things change. And you think of, oh, we could add this. So we’re in the phase right now where we’re just making it better looking with all the offerings. And the ultimate is we just want to help people. We want to help people do this and help people understand it and expand people’s knowledge of Helium, that’s the goal.

Chris Badgett:

Let’s talk about-

Lee Selman:

Create a membership. We’re going to do a membership thing where Nik can do a Q&A and we can bring experts in and then…

Chris Badgett:

Is it that an upsell or just something you’re going to add on top or how are you thinking about that?

Lee Selman:

We haven’t really decided yet.

Nik Hawks:

Chris, we’re not sure. I think this is one of those things where it’s interesting because you’ve got domain expertise in one area. In the world of Helium, I totally know what I’m talking about, in the world of learning and teaching stuff I’m pretty good. I’ve had a bunch of experience in another curve life. But in the world of applied entrepreneur educator, educator entrepreneur that you talk about, we really don’t know what to do, we’re still newbies in that. So the LifterLMS course has been super helpful to think about that and frame that. And we’ve had people reach out to help us. But we’re still figuring out, what does it look like to be a member? What does it look like to take a course? What does it look like to take a couple of courses? What does it look like to have access to the blog? And how do we put all of that stuff together? And we’re still in the learning phase before we really the pilot stuff.

Lee Selman:

We’re probably structuring it to where the course is just the basics, it’s the foundation, it’s all the language that you need to know. Then the membership is going to be this ongoing thing where if things change, if you have questions, troubleshooting and that’s a real time where Nik can talk to people once a week and then we can bring an expert in once a week and perks and all that stuff. So we’re just basically going through all that right now and getting into the badges and all the options.

Chris Badgett:

That’s awesome. Well, just to throw some ideas your way, I think of a course as a fundamental building block. But then when you get into memberships, you put your target customer in the center and they need help, and then you surround them with whatever they need. They may need courses, they may need office hours, they may need templates or schematics, even potentially some physical items that come in the mail, access to experts, potentially office hours, like a time box amount of time that they can come to and ask anything. There’s group coaching, there’s private coaching. There’s so many different things that you can just surround them with help. And basically once you have that, like how you started your company, when people keep coming at you with the same problems over and over again, oh, there might be a course that can answer that, there might be a template PDF thing that could answer that. Could be connecting them to each other through community, which I know that’s big in crypto. So there’s lots of options there.

Lee Selman:

I have a question for you. I’m part of your Facebook group and I asked about memberships and you sent me, I think to Melissa, I forget.

Chris Badgett:

Melissa Love?

Lee Selman:

Yeah, Melissa Love and her membership. And so I joined her membership.

Chris Badgett:

Oh, you did cool. Yeah, she does a good job.

Lee Selman:

She’s over in the UK. so I’m learning a lot from what is been doing. One of the things that she does is she starts a Facebook community. Have you had anybody do like instead of doing the Facebook community to do the Discord, you send people to the community on Discord?

Chris Badgett:

We see people use all kinds of different things. There’s Discord, there’s Slack, there’s these different forum softwares. You can even host it on your website, Lifter has a tool for that. There’s something called Buddy Boss. But-

Lee Selman:

Because I know that’s how she reaches out, that’s how she reaches out to her community.

Chris Badgett:

It’s a popular debate in the sense that yes, you can create it on your own website, but if people are already… I know crypto people, I’m in a lot of Discord groups. So when in my Discord, I’m in that head space. So that might make sense for Helium. I’m in some more technical website WordPressy groups that are really Slack heavy. I’m in other things like more general entrepreneurship where I’m in Facebook groups. So I think it’s not a one size fits all, it’s what are your people… By getting in the flow where they already are, if they’re already spending a lot of time on Discord, I would definitely consider doing a private Discord. Actually I have seen some people, if you know what the Rally token is.

Nik Hawks:

Mm-mm (negative), no.

Chris Badgett:

It’s a social token for basically certain thought leaders. They get a coin, but on the rally platform, which makes it easy for them. And then you buy tokens and then you get access to private Discords or certain member perks and stuff like that. It’s fairly newish, but I’ve seen some people automating certain things where they have these bots in Discord that can tell that you have this much of this social token and it gets… There’s some interesting stuff going on there.

Nik Hawks:

It’s fascinating. I think the combination of Discord and NFTs and access and sorting things out and really automating it like a system of joining a group, that stuff is really interesting to me.

Chris Badgett:

Social learning or social communities, it’s a big part of it. Everybody starts with the content and I’m like, I’m productizing my knowledge. And then they realize, especially in a tight niche where everybody has shared problems or similar styles or ways of seeing the world, this community thing really takes on a life of its own. Sometimes it becomes the main event.

Lee Selman:

It’s pretty cool.

Chris Badgett:

All these wild Helium people that are doing what they’re doing and they like hanging out with each other I bet.

Lee Selman:

Yeah, it’s cool.

Chris Badgett:

I’ve I have a question for you folks. One of the trends we’ve noticed is that the companies make technology are never the ones that make the best training about it. With crypto, it’s a little different because it’s somewhat decentralized. So I’m just trying to get a sense, how big is the Helium niche or the Helium community? Or how many developers are there that actively work on the protocol or on the blockchain technology or whatever? how big is this niche?

Nik Hawks:

Sure. So we start with Helium, Helium’s got, I want to say 30 to 40 employees. So it’s still a pretty small company. The language that they’re using, URL Lang, is known by almost no one. So they’ve got a really small pool to draw from, but it does apparently things that you can’t do it other languages. So there’s that side of it. The economic side of it, I don’t pay as much attention to. I can tell you I think we just went over 500,000 miners on the network.

Chris Badgett:

Wow. Which means 500,000 devices.

Nik Hawks:

Yeah, half a million radio, expected to be three and a half million by the end of the year deployed all over the world. So when we think about how much HNT is going out, it’s 2.5 million HNT tokens are going out a month. And about a third of that, actually two thirds of that goes to the people who are actually doing the thing, whether they’re deploying miners or they’re processing data. So two third times 2.5 million is what is that? 800,000 HNT and HNT is 30 bucks right now. So there’s a lot of money in the space.

Chris Badgett:

And would you agree that the Helium company didn’t really have adequate training materials, that’s why people we’re calling you?

Nik Hawks:

Yeah.

Chris Badgett:

It’s a common trend, I see. It’s not a…

Nik Hawks:

No, I think the way I look at it is Helium doesn’t care if you understand it or not, they care if it works. And they’ve been pretty clear about that. They’ve said, “Look, we want to not purposefully leave a ton of money on the table or a ton of opportunity on the table, but we purposely want to build a community. And so we are going to focus on the core of making sure this thing works and everybody else can make sure that they figure out how to support that or how to grow an ecosystem around that.” So Helium talks a lot about, “Hey, we’re flying a plane with everyone on it and we’re fixing plane as we’re flying it. If you want to offer room service in the plane or you want to offer wine or champagne or whatever, you want to be like an extra fixer, you want to be a navigator, fine. All those positions are open, we’re just keeping the thing in the air.”

Chris Badgett:

That’s cool. So in this model, I think a lot of people are just trying to wrap their heads around blockchain and web three and all this stuff. What are we disrupting here? How is this better and more empowering to the people? I know you’ve touched on it a little bit, but what innovation or creativity or acceleration does this really unlock? What’s the game changing nature of this?

Nik Hawks:

We got two big things to think about there. One of them is just allowing people to earn off of providing coverage, like wireless coverage-

Chris Badgett:

Instead of just big companies doing that.

Nik Hawks:

Instead of just big companies.

Chris Badgett:

Monopolies.

Nik Hawks:

Yep. I don’t know if they’re totally monopolies because we got Verizon, we got AT&T, we got T-Mobile, we got Sprint, there’s a couple in there.

Chris Badgett:

Will this replace the cellular network one day?

Nik Hawks:

I don’t know about replace it, I think it’ll augment it. So we think of the cost to a Verizon or a T-Mobile or a Sprint of putting up a tower is a couple of million dollars. The cost to a normal person of putting up something that can provide local coverage or even hyper local coverage is more like, I don’t know, 5,000 bucks at the top end, if we’re talking about 5% and probably $1,000 if we’re talking about LORA. So on the side of how is it disrupting an industry, it’s disrupting the telco industry because it’s replacing in some parts the big towers, but it’s also just making it easier for all of those companies to provide coverage. Because what Helium is doing, their playbook that they’re just going to execute over and over again is to go into a wireless area and say, how do we build out something that supports better coverage? And then how do we sell that coverage to the T-Mobiles to the Verizons, to the Sprints?

Nik Hawks:

So let’s say on this block there’s not great cell phone coverage, where we live or near my building, whatever it is. We could put up a Helium hotspot, and I’m being a little bit loose with different frequencies here, but we could put up a Helium hotspot that a telco would never consider putting up because it’s just not worth their time. But for us, it might make enough to pay half the mortgage or pay a bunch of the bills or pay the whole mortgage depending on how good it is. So it’s not going to be a total disruption as much as it is an augmentation and also a distribution of funds. So instead of the big companies getting all the money, now that gets split up to smaller people, the smaller entities. So that’s the first side, is the wireless side.

Nik Hawks:

The second way that this is disrupting basically the world is it’s exposing people to the idea of IoT. And IoT is a giant space. If we think about IoT in very general terms in how we understand it as humans, we start with going back 10,000, 20,000 years. And we go back to a human who was living 10,000 years ago, 20,000 years ago, that person knew everything about their local environment. They knew where the deer was, they knew where the rabbit slept, they knew where the Fox was, they knew where good water was, they knew where bad water was, the dry air, they knew all of that stuff. But that information couldn’t be transmitted or distributed at any scale. It went to their tribe of 20 or 30 or 50 people and that’s where it stopped.

Nik Hawks:

What the IoT is allowing us to do is to be begin to distribute that information at scale. So you have not just one sensor, not 100, not 1,000, but millions of sensors all around the world, all collecting different data. And that data is now with Helium able to be tokenized and then sold. So whether you’re a college with a weather engineering program or weather degree program and you want to look at it ton more data than you used to be able to have just on professional weather stations. So now you’re looking at these extra pieces of data coming in from all the IoT sensors that are being deployed or you want to track pallets, planes, and packages, if you’re FedEx or DHL.

Lee Selman:

Farmers want to track moisture in the soil.

Nik Hawks:

So this whole idea-

Lee Selman:

Rather than just wasting water, you can actually measure to see if you actually need water.

Chris Badgett:

Sensors.

Nik Hawks:

Yep. So this whole IoT sensor thing is, I liken it to it’s as if we had an earthquake in the middle of the Pacific and there’s a tsunami coming to hit the Western Seaboard and it’s moving 600 miles an hour. Right now, it’s only a foot high. So people look at it, they’re like, “That’s not big.” But when it hits that Western Seaboard, it will be unlike anything we’ve ever seen before as far as understanding our world and the distributed amount of information that is going to be available to people at reasonable prices due to Helium. And that’s the giant thing backing all of this play. Is that sure, you’re making money off of this proof of coverage stuff right now, you’re making money by having your radio up. But in the long term, what we’re participating in is this decentralization and distribution of information at a scale that no one’s seen before.

Lee Selman:

Build in a network.

Chris Badgett:

Wow, this is really cool. Could you provide an example maybe of how this will collide with autonomous driving or the future of vehicles? Does it mess with that at all, GPS or traffic data or something?

Nik Hawks:

We’re seeing a ton of different projects, Helium’s not the only thing. So Helium is more of a wireless project. But there are other projects, Demo or Map Metrics or Hive Mapper or lots of these other things that are saying, look, we are all generating data as we move around. And we can begin to tokenize that data in very different ways. So for a project like Hive Mapper, you put a dash cam on your car. That dash cam feeds the images that as you drive around you collect. And now instead of Google having their own car and having proprietary access to their mapping information, you can start providing coverage to that map and you can get paid for the tiles, the small areas of the map that you actually map. And that information is way fresher, way more accurate, way more detailed than a Google vehicle driving around. So that’s just one example.

Nik Hawks:

Now, will Helium directly interact with that? It may, it may not, it depends on the sensors that are out there. It may make it so that it’s easier for vehicles to communicate over the IoT with where they’ve been or what they’re doing or the temperature or the humidity or how many are parked in a lot. A lot of those kinds of things on the sensor side, Helium will contribute to. But I really think of Helium more as an enabling technology and not really an application technology. I may be wrong in that and I’m so sure some engineer will go like, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” But that’s how I think of it, is it allows people to do things and now it’s up to the rest of us to build the things will do that stuff.

Chris Badgett:

That’s awesome. Going back to being an education entrepreneur, how do you think about your customer avatar or your ideal learner, who are these people?

Nik Hawks:

Lee’s been thinking about how we do this.

Lee Selman:

I think there’s so much new language with it. Even the word IoT, internet of things, and there’s so many acronyms. I think a lot of the people on this end are super smart. And I don’t want to say having to dumb things down, but really you have to start there.

Chris Badgett:

Make it accessible.

Lee Selman:

Yeah. And you have to bring people up through kindergarten through elementary through middle school because you want them to be successful and you want this thing to work. So I think that’s how we just start with the basics. I always wanted to do a YouTube interview and have me ask Nik questions because I’m pretty the normal user. It’s probably the same with you and your wife and how something works or your girlfriend asking you questions. But that’s probably the avatar that we’re building out.

Chris Badgett:

Are they mostly coming at first after they hear about the mining and the HNT like income opportunity? Is that the doorway, gateway into the world?

Lee Selman:

Yeah, pretty much. It’s very curious people. I think that’s curious people and they just don’t know the language behind it and just the mechanics behind it. They just want to be spoonfed. I’m the same way. You don’t want to piece all this together, you want to go to somebody who’s the expert in it and learn from them. And time is everything, right? So if you’re going to spend an hour or two learning something, and I…

Chris Badgett:

One of the things that people, I heard somebody say this, I think his name is Deb Basu, the things that people buy in courses is speed, certainty, and insight. So if you can help him save time, make sure they don’t make a bunch of mistakes, and learn along the way, that’s what people are actually buying, the speed and whatnot.

Lee Selman:

Yeah, exactly. It’s just cool.

Chris Badgett:

What are your plans for the future in terms of growth, getting people in there? I think one way ask that is actually, a lot of people struggle with getting students or clients or customers. It sounds like you already had this pipeline of people coming for consulting. But what are your thoughts on just growing? Or how do you think about marketing or getting new learners in the platform? Are you just trying keep up with the demand that just comes naturally?

Nik Hawks:

I’m trying to keep up with a demand that comes naturally. If we look at the site right now, it gets, I don’t know, 70,000 sessions, that’s a WordPress step per month, which is a lot of people. It’s probably-

Chris Badgett:

That is a lot.

Nik Hawks:

… 40,000, 50,000 people visiting the site a month, something like that. I think Google stats are the people. So right now we’re just trying to keep up with that demand and figure out how do we…

Lee Selman:

Help more people with it.

Nik Hawks:

How do we help those people who are coming to the site. Because we think of it in two ways, you can go to the site and you can get all of this information for free. But it’ll take you hours of going around to read every single blog post I’ve written and understand all of it and have it explained to you. So how do we have an offering for everybody? So one of the things is making sure we monetize all those offerings so that it’s fair for both sides.

Nik Hawks:

It’s fair for me to sit down and take away time from my former life, where Lee and I run a cookie company that sells desserts online, and it’s fair for me to say, “Okay, I’m not going to do that, I’m going to do this.” And we’re going to get paid for that. And it’s all so fair for the person coming in and says, “You don’t need to spend 500 bucks an hour on a consult session with me, you can spend 10 bucks a month and read the blog. Or you can spend whatever it’s going to be for the membership and have weekly or biweekly or whatever it is access. So we wanted to make it so that there was entry points for everyone and everyone could participate at any reasonable level.

Chris Badgett:

Well, congratulations on 70,000 people coming to check out your stuff, that’s awesome. It really blows my mind how just scaled out this new technology era is and just the demand for information and understanding. Just watching things like institutional adoption of various cryptocurrencies and just seeing this whole thing go mainstream is fascinating. It’s just moving so fast.

Nik Hawks:

No, it’s bananas and it’s going to move faster. And there’s so many cool projects coming out, some of which we’re doing and some of which are just unknown to us. But I think 2022 is going to be the fastest year that anyone has ever seen as far as change.

Chris Badgett:

That’s awesome. I’m looking forward to it. If somebody were to take your course, at least in today’s dollars, what’s the timeline and cost for them to get Helium? Did you call it a mine or a connector? What is it called

Nik Hawks:

Miner or a hotspot. Those are…

Chris Badgett:

A hotspot. If we get into your course, how much money and how much time till we could get one up at our house.

Nik Hawks:

Sure. I think the first thing to do before you do the course is just look at the map and see what is going on around you. If you’re in a rural area and there’s no hotspots around you, think of it this way, as you’ll probably earn the average of your closest 10 hotspots. Now, that’s a very rough number, and that can be be wildly wrong, but it’s usually pretty close.

Chris Badgett:

Is all that data open, you can see whatever hotspots?

Nik Hawks:

All that stuff is free. That’s all on explorer.helium.com. So you could start there and say, is it worth it for me to get in there? If you’re in downtown New York City or downtown San Francisco or downtown Boston, no, it’s not. Those are too overcrowded. And the way Helium works with overcrowding is the more overcrowded it is, the less you earn. But if you’re in that sweet spot, if you’re out on the edge of a city, you’re in the suburbs, and there’s not a lot of hotspots around you and you say, okay, I think this is worth it, the course is a 100 bucks and takes an hour. So if you’re cool with that, that’s the starting thing.

Nik Hawks:

And then from there you decide whether or not you’re going to buy a hotspot on eBay and get it basically right away. That will run you in today’s prices somewhere between $800 and $1,200. Or you say I’m going to wait for a hotspot to be delivered, and manufacture lead times right now are between, I don’t know, 18 and 24 weeks. So that’s really what the course helps you decide. Is you say, okay, I’ll put a 100 bucks into this and figure it out. By the end of that course, then you know where to look, what to look for, and how to much more accurately assess your location and make that decision, do I spend the $1200 or do I spend for a manufacturer provided hotspot, they’re $600 to $800 new out of the package new in the box. So that’s the progression and flow.

Chris Badgett:

And once you get the hotspot, how long does it take to actually get it online and get everything connected?

Nik Hawks:

To connect it, it takes, I don’t know, five minute. For it to be up and running and earning is anywhere from two hours to 96 hours, depending on the manufacturer. So right now, and this will change in three months, so by the end of Q1 2022 this will change, but right now every miner carries a large portion of the blockchain on itself. So it has to deal with a giant amount of data. And depending on when your hotspot comes online and what, this is getting super technical super fast but I’ll try and keep it easy, is every Helium will release a snapshot of the blockchain which says, hey, this is not everything that’s on there it’s just it gets you up to the present. If you put your miner online right after they’ve released a new snapshot, you’ll be up and running because you have this copy that is easily digestible by your miner.

Nik Hawks:

If you put your miner online a week or two weeks after the latest snapshot, it’s going to take it a couple of extra days for it to get all of the updated information on the blockchain onto it. So two hours to 96 hours is probably as long as it takes before you’re up and running. And then average earnings right now are 0.14 HNT a day, it might be 0.12 HNT per day, that’s global average. So it’s really dependent. The high earners are earning just over one HNT a day and the low earners are earning nothing because it’s not plugged in or they’re just in a basement and they don’t understand the system.

Chris Badgett:

Cool. One of the things, this is a little more technical for the folks out there that may not be familiar with blockchain and crypto, but in terms of coverage, if you think of something like Bitcoin and okay, we’re going to use the sun to mine Bitcoin. And all of a sudden the entire world is covered in solar panels, how do the tokenomics work in terms of a saturation point? Will it always be accessible to the little… For Helium, will the little person, the individual always be able to participate or is it just changing so fast we have an opportunity right now, let’s jump on it but eventually we won’t and it’ll be hard for individuals to contribute?

Nik Hawks:

I think it’s a little bit of both. It’s just like any business, is that early on there’s giant opportunities for a small amount of people. As the groups of people get larger and larger, the pie is the same size and we split smaller and smaller slices. At some point you decide whether you want to do it or not and whether it works for you in your location. One of the cool things about Helium is that it’s about the same amount of energy to run a light bulb as it is a Helium hotspot. So very different than what’s called proof of work mining, which is what Bitcoin has been. So on an environmental energy demand side, super, super low. So that’s how to think about that.

Chris Badgett:

That’s awesome. Do you have some of the people that have been through your course, what results have they had or how has it impacted their lives? What have you seen happen to people that have been touched by your program?

Nik Hawks:

Sure. A lot of the feedback I get because I ask for testimonials at the end of every consult is, “Hey, this really helped me understand the system.” And in some cases for some people, depending on where they are, they say, “Thank you for doing this. The 500 bucks I spent on the consult was awesome because I know that I don’t need to spend any more money on Helium because it’s not going to work for me.” And other people are like, “Hey, the $500 is just the beginning. We want to hire you to come out and we’re going to pay your day rate, we’re going to fly you out to XYZ site, and you’re going to help us deploy 30,000 of these things globally.” So the span of participation and the span of the level of participation is super wide right now. But some people are seeing…

Nik Hawks:

I just yesterday talked to, I don’t know if you can say this term anymore, a bar maid in Brighton. So it’s a lady who works at a bar in Brighton, England, which is down on the South Coast. She had bought a couple miners with her boyfriend and they split up. He was just like, “Hey, you figure this out, I’m out of here.” So she had to figure out what she does with the six Helium hotspots she has. That’s a really interesting thing for her. She was, I don’t want to give away too much personal information, but she has the opportunity to change her life and not wait tables, not wait at the bar if she doesn’t want to with Helium miners.

Nik Hawks:

It can not only replace her income, but substantially improve it. So that’s some of the cooler stuff I see, is that you take a risk, you get curious about an environment, you make sure that the risk is reasonable, and then you can see, especially in this crypto and web free land, an unreasonable payout. And that’s the thing that a lot of us are chasing, is saying, where is it an asymmetric risk reward ratio and how do you find that? And that’s one of the things that I really like helping people do.

Chris Badgett:

Any other thoughts around just education and web three, what the world needs to do to help with the transition. If 2022 is going to be the biggest most wild year we’ve seen, what can education do to help?

Nik Hawks:

It’s a great question. So there’s two sides of it, what can we do as educators and what can we do as people who want to be educated. As educators, we just have to get better at doing the thing we’re doing. Just like Lee and I are doing right now, we have to learn how to build an education system, we have to figure out how to systematize the whole thing.

Lee Selman:

How to communicate.

Nik Hawks:

How to communicate, how to run…

Lee Selman:

… to everybody.

Nik Hawks:

How to run it at scale, how to make a program out of it so that it’s not restricted, there’s not a bottleneck of just us. So on the educator side, I think we just have to learn about really the business of educating and how does that work. Just like Lee and I have learned about the businesses of cookies, of notaries, of welding, of any one of a number of things where the different businesses we’ve run or ATMs, you got to learn about the business, you have to educate yourself. On the other side, on the side of how do we educate ourselves? I think 2022 is going to be not only the fastest year we’ve ever seen as far as just how fast it goes by, because there’s so many changes. It will also be absolutely the most rewarding year for anyone who is curious and willing to do the work, far away. Because we are entering into this web three arena and this is early adoption days for everything out there.

Lee Selman:

What is web three?

Nik Hawks:

Web three is this idea that we start taking things on the blockchain and they start to become an interactive piece of our lives. It’s really the blending of physical and digital reality and using all of this new technology. So there’s many ways to describe it and probably a lot of better ways to describe it than that. But it’s this shift from one person having all the power to all of the people having a little bit of power and deciding where they’re going to apply that power. That’s probably the best overarching way to say it. Chris, is there anything to add to that, on the web three side?

Chris Badgett:

I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. I’ve heard it described as… When people ask me, I say web one is information, web two is social, and web three is the internet of value.

Nik Hawks:

That’s what I’d say.

Chris Badgett:

What that means, I think it’s a little easier to maybe see that with things like Bitcoin, digital gold versus physical gold. But even what you’re talking about with HNT participating in the IoT network and generating value from that, it makes sense to me as being a web three thing going on there.

Nik Hawks:

I don’t know if they’d consider or themselves web three or not, but I think the applications are going to be laid on top of it are clearly going to be web three stuff. As we start seeing people interact across really fluidly crossing physical and digital lines and using blockchain to track that and to decentralize how all that stuff gets rewarded, the tokenization of everything, that’s at the core of what’s happening right now.

Chris Badgett:

Part of the web three thing, going back to the conversation around community, is the digitization of community, some people call it cloud cities and things like this. Where let’s say the people who are really into Helium, there’s a whole community. You could have like pop conference somewhere, anywhere in the world, and bring Helium people together. That’s a very web three concept. And it’s happened online for a while, that cultures develop on the internet. But it’s now it’s…

Lee Selman:

Accelerated.

Chris Badgett:

Yeah, very much accelerated.

Lee Selman:

Yeah, it’s crazy. I think it’s cool. The people who are experts can now get their knowledge out and think how much that’s expanding people’s lives and people’s worlds and they can start businesses based on that knowledge. Like the lady who is the cleaner, is just a perfect example, it’s amazing. And she’s enabling other people to start a business and giving that information without them having to start from scratch.

Chris Badgett:

And I saw her go from zero to, I think last I checked, 200,000 YouTube subscribers.

Lee Selman:

Yeah, I saw that.

Chris Badgett:

It’s just amazing.

Lee Selman:

I just love what she’s doing.

Chris Badgett:

It’s empower empowering other people.

Lee Selman:

It’s empowering other people. And I think that’s what’s most important, is it’s incredible. I love it.

Chris Badgett:

Especially in technology, for me, software company, getting web developer talent, oftentimes they don’t come through the traditional education system. Because technology is changing so fast, traditional college or community college curriculum and stuff, it has a hard time keeping up. So these more agile, just in time learning entrepreneurs like yourselves are actually creating the best technology education of the future, which is… And you’re moving quick and you have a niche that’s… Helium mining, it’s specialized whereas university stuff tends to be more generalized. So it’s really cool to see you and folks like you just mastering these technology niches and just helping empower other people, it’s very cool.

Chris Badgett:

Awesome. Well, Nik and Lee, this has been a great conversation. I love getting into crypto and blockchain and learning about how it crosses into the physical world. Because a lot of people can’t see it. But when we start to think about, oh, internet of things, I can feel and touch those things, what’s happening in the background so these devices can talk to each other and communicate, it’s really amazing. Any final words for the people? Let’s say first about if somebody is thinking about creating a course and second about getting into Helium mining, if we’ve peaked somebody’s interest, what they should do.

Nik Hawks:

Sure. You want to take the course one?

Chris Badgett:

You guys pulled off a course quickly and what piece of advice do you have? Some people don’t launch or they get all wrapped up in these rabbit holes, but you made it happen. How’d that happen?

Lee Selman:

I think the biggest thing is just do it and don’t worry about being perfect and just do it and just start and put it out there. Because if you get into this perfectitis thing, you’re just never going to be able to put it out if you’re so worried about out how you look or how you sound. I think that’s the biggest stumbling block for people wanting to create something. Because somebody needs what you need to teach out there. And instead of thinking self-centered and just doing it for yourself or how I look, think about the other person and giving to the other person and creating expansion to the other person. So it’s all about the other person, is expanding their life and not self-centered, what I look like and all that.

Chris Badgett:

Love that, love that. Nik, if somebody has just now become insanely curious about Helium and HNT and creating a hotspot, what should they do?

Nik Hawks:

I would say go to gristleking.com, check it out, look around, see what you think. You can always look at explore.helium.com just to look at the map and see what hotspots are out there. And then if you decide you want to get deeper, we’ve built the entire website for you, so check it out.

Chris Badgett:

That’s awesome. So that’s gristleking.com. G-R-I-S-T-L-E K-I-N-G. Nik and Lee, thanks for coming on the show. Keep up the amazing work. We’ll have to do another one of these in a year or so and just see where you’re at and what you’re doing and how the world has changed in 2022. But thanks for being a shining example of education entrepreneurs who just get out there and just do it, make it happen, help people, and pursue their passion.

Lee Selman:

And thanks for doing what you do. I watch it every day, watch your videos. I watch one of your videos every day.

Chris Badgett:

Awesome.

Lee Selman:

You’re creating a lot of expansion also.

Chris Badgett:

Well, thank you. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post Online Course Teaches How to Make Money from HNT Cryptocurrency on the Helium Blockchain via Hotspots with Nik & Lee appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Learn about the WordPress education ecosystem challenges and opportunities with Courtney Robertson in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS.

A trend we see in online education is where the value is often not in information, but in the curation of information and the results people achieve. Courtney shares her experience with that in this LMScast where she breaks down how she and her team contribute to the WordPress core product and what evolutions she’s seen in the online space over time.

There are many different types of users in WordPress, including general site builders and users, those who build sites for others, users who work with code, and users who don’t. So the challenge of teaching all of them is what Courtney and her team are tasked with. And then added to that is different learning styles, languages, and various accessibility needs, too. It’s a whole lot of training content. Courtney has been teaching WordPress for a long time, and they often run through user experience and then move on into development.

WordPress is an open-source software itself, and Courtney would love to see the education training for it be just as available as reading a post or joining a Slack channel. Making sense out of all of the training, updates, and many learning styles is a challenge with such a diverse and ever-evolving ecosystem. With so many people in the community, there’s never really been a shortage of resources to learn about WordPress or anything online. But there is a need for how to sequence the learning, how to do it in an order that makes sense, and how to provide the resources for all stages of the learning journey from “I need to learn how to set WordPress up” or “Somebody built it for me, and I need to know how to make a post” all the way up through “I’m a full-stack senior dev training a team of people and need to continue my own learning journey.”

You can find out more about Courtney Robertson at CourtneyEngle.com. She also does a ton of great work over at Learn.WordPress.org. You can also find Courtney on Twitter at @CourtneyR_dev.

And at LifterLMS.com you can learn more about new developments and how you can use LifterLMS to build online courses and membership sites. If you like this episode of LMScast, you can browse more episodes here. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us!

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name is Chris Badgett. I’m joined by a special guest, her name is Courtney Robertson. You can find her at courtneyengle.com. She also does a ton of great work over at learn.wordpress.org. Welcome to the show, Courtney.

Courtney Robert…: Hello. It’s great to be here

Chris Badgett: Long-time listener, now a guest on the show. And you kept popping up in social media around topics related to WordPress and learning and instructional design. I knew eventually our worlds were going to collide and we were going to have a conversation, which I’m really excited to do today. Let’s talk about WordPress and the challenges of learning it.

There’s advanced users, there’s beginning users, there’s beginner developers, there’s advanced developers, there’s the agencies and the freelancers that make money serving clients in this niche. And there’s product companies like mine that need to be able to operate in this ecosystem. How do you frame in the learning curve challenge of WordPress with all these different user types?

Courtney Robert…: Oh, man. And then add to that different learning styles, languages, human languages that is, and various accessibility needs too. There’s a lot going on with that. It’s a whole lot. I have been teaching WordPress for a long time and we often will run through user things and then move on into development. That was the case when I taught in high school and boot camp and a few other places.

To meet such a vast array of needs, we have to think that, just like WordPress, the software keeps evolving. We need to keep evolving the type of training that we have available. We need to keep that training very current and to make it as accessible as possible. I’m really passionate about making sure that people from all walks of life don’t have any barriers to entry in this process.

If we open-source the software itself, then the education and the training for that, I really would like to see just as available as it is reading a P2 post or joining a Slack channel. Making sense out of all of that. There’s never really been a shortage or at least not since the very early years has there been a shortage on resources to learn about things.

But there’s also been maybe a need to be filled about how to sequence that, how to do it in an order that makes sense and how to provide the resources for all stages of the learning journey from “I need to learn how to set WordPress up” or “Somebody built it for me and I need to know how to make a post” all the way up through “I’m a full-stack senior dev training a team of people and need to continue my own learning journey” and what does that look like?

Because the software keeps changing and the tools that we use keep changing with it. So being able to account for that process I feel is just as valid and important in getting the community’s feedback and the community’s input around what needs to be there in a way that lifts all ships, right? A rising tide can lift all ships. So making that more accessible to the public at large I think is really valuable.

Chris Badgett: So what’s the mission of learn.wordpress.org? Why was that created? What is its purpose?

Courtney Robert…: Right. Behind the scenes, I’m quickly referring to how we word this one the training team. The training team is one of the official make.wordpress.org teams. And we have been around since 2013. We do similar work to Docs, but we are a little bit different in some of our process.

The mission for the training team I think helps set the context for Learn. The mission on the training team is that the WordPress training team helps people learn to use, extend, and contribute to WordPress through synchronous and asynchronous learning as well as downloadable lesson plans for instructors to use in live environments via learn.wordpress.org.

So the Learn platform can help folks from direct learners to meetup organizers to people that facilitate training for others. It’s kind of vast, and that’s why it’s such a big, long-time-coming platform for the team.

So Learn launched, learn.wordpress.org launched in the end of 2020. And the training team had been responsible for a lot of the lesson plans. We saw during COVID the need for some other types of formats to come along since we weren’t having as many word camps and word camps were not in person.

So also on Learn, you will find video-based workshops, and those workshops have an extension of discussion groups. They often happen in Zoom, but sometimes they’re happening on Slack-based chat messages as well. And the content that we see that’s there is in the video workshops, the intended audience is the direct learner.

We see people watching at any hour of the day, participating in chats and the discussion groups at all types of hours available as well. But also, I believe that some of the meetup groups have shown the video as part of their meetup time when they perhaps want to cover a specific topic.

Lesson plan area, we have seen programs like Girl Develop It over the years. And I myself have used it in a high school and a boot camp setting for training students through that program. There are a lot of ways that those lesson plans can be used and they are just the same as the licensing around what we see on wordpress.tv, as far as anyone could come and use it and make use of it.

It would be falling within the… I don’t know the technical terms. I’m not sure if it’s under Creative Commons or GPL type of things, but that spirit of people are free to come and make use of this.

Chris Badgett: That is awesome. How does video fit into this? I just go into my story and I also see it a lot in people in the LMS community that I’m around and membership site-building and all this stuff. I learned WordPress first by going to YouTube and watching a tutorial. And I see there’s a lot of action on YouTube, but people are often left like it’s incomplete or they don’t have the right foundation or it’s a video for a developer but they’re a regular user.

How does video fit into… Or let me just broaden it out to different learning styles too. I love video. My business partner, Thomas Levy hates video. He wants to read because he’s a developer and video is too slow for him. How does multimedia and all these different options come together in a cohesive way?

Courtney Robert…: Yeah. Great question. So at this time, at the time of this recording, we’re actually going through a UX audit. That means usability user experience audit of the learn.wordpress.org platform. We have the lesson plans. We have these video workshops. We have a lot of types of users of the platform or potential types of users spanning many different career roles, many different learning journeys, all of that.

What we know for sure that we need is more of a choose-your-own-adventure approach to how people navigate through the site and access all of these materials. We know the opportunity for these materials is really, really big, but what we need to do is improve the journey of, I’m new here and what can I get into? What can I learn? Let me pick and choose where I need to start. Identifying what I already know and what I would like to learn.

When you don’t know what you don’t know and you face maybe things that aren’t in the best flow for you, it makes it not the best experience. So we’re working on that part of the process and we invite people to come and help shape that and form that. But to address different learning styles that are there, we know that some people learn best by literally going to the docs and reading the docs.

And so our team has been working more closely with the WordPress Docs team that is responsible for what we see at wordpress.org/support or developer.wordpress.org. They’re responsible for the content there. So we’re working more collaboratively with them.

We often refer to their material as source material for what we’re doing, thus putting a high priority on having their material up to making sure everything that has come out in a recent release has been tracked. Likewise, some people learn best through video, some people learn in short bursts, and some people learn with just “Let me kick back and absorb this for a long period of time.” Some learn through discussion groups and the ability to interact with others.

We’re working towards having more user learning styles addressed. As a public educator, I had college coursework that helped me learn about how to learn. And people learn in so many different ways. I think there’s between four to eight different types of learning styles. Some people are tactile, “Let me do the thing.” So there I think about some of the places where folks learn how to code and they make you do the code, go write the code and it will auto-check you in that process.

I don’t think we’re going to see that real soon with something like Learn, but some people learn by doing, some learn by hearing, some learn by seeing it, some learn by talking about it, by reading. There are many ways to go about this approach. So it’s definitely in the vision of having that learning style.

And all the LMS people will completely relate and understand this, especially if your content is about technical things, being able to easily swap out that as a release changes some feature, down to the nuances of… In WordPress, we see that the latest release changed the block toolbar. We have screenshots of that everywhere. Now we need to go and change that everywhere.

And so that’s easy in a picture, sort of. We need volunteers to do that kind of thing to help. But for videos, that means rerecording. And so chunking it down so you can drop and swap little pieces would be really important there.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. One of the benefits of running a podcast is I get to get free consulting. So I’m going to ask you a question. So LifterLMS is almost seven years old. And many of our users and customers, we’re their first introduction to WordPress. So not only do we have to help them learn our tool, we have to help them learn WordPress. And some are already familiar, but many are brand new. One of the things we’ve done is we’ve licensed the WordPress 101 course from Shawn Hesketh over at WP101.

Courtney Robert…: Love that. Used that with my students, in fact.

Chris Badgett: It’s great. It’s great. Shawn’s a great guy. And the content is basically like a tour of the dashboard, so this is what everything does. And it kind of lays a foundation. And then we have our own quick-start course where we teach the 5% of the tool that is the most important to get people moving.

But then the challenge comes up that because WordPress is so infinitely customizable and all these tools are interoperable with each other and you can make all kinds of different use cases, the learning, it becomes more challenging. What advice do you have for a company like ours where we’re trying to help people onboard and then just help them grow? But the path ahead, there’s infinite options of what they’re going to do with the tool.

Courtney Robert…: Yeah, that’s a good one. So one of the things that I love about WP101, and I’ve also used the WP101 plugin that adds some additional extra and allows me to embed those videos inside of a LearnDash or LifterLMS type of approach. I had used LearnDash previously. So that is amazing in that not only is it about WordPress itself and what comes core in WordPress, but it extends if you install Jetpack, if you install Beaver Builder, if you install this with that, you get specific customized coursework that is about that as well.

And I enjoyed being able to make use of that when I was teaching students up through using a page-builder approach. Here’s all the extras and the most popular and common things, here’s ninja forms and how to make use of that. Focusing in on a few that are the large players or that you see people commonly interfacing with I think is really valuable.

Also, continuing, I listened to the interview with Vito right before we went to record actually, wrote WP feedback. And so I was really struck by how he said chunking down again and swapping out his content. So he has training for that particular service available for the clients and making sure it gets in front of people’s faces that they have added new features and to their new features to learn about.

So synchronous with the release ships, now you need to update your docs and your video coursework and any other type of knowledge-based material altogether in cadence with that release.

And I think when the release has happened and products and services change what is possible when we add new features, in those release announcements, it’s a really key place to let the developers that are using your stuff know and let the end clients that are entering the data or whatever they’re doing with it also know, “Here’s where you could go find the training related to this new feature.”

Making sure that it’s continuing to remind them we’ve added or included, we’ve updated, we’ve whatever has happened. And so getting in front of their faces with a kind way of saying, “Continue. We’ve answered this request and here it is.”

Chris Badgett: Very cool. Very cool. Want to say something among the development community in WordPress is… Well, I’ll just use Thomas’s, my example of my partner. He’s very into React and JavaScript, and he just charges ahead into the future. Even when the WordPress docs are not totally there, he’s able to manage and just be on that cutting edge. And I love that about him.

I see a lot of other developers struggle with change. What can we do to… I guess I’m just trying to get a sense of the health of the development community in a fast-evolving product, whether it’s the block editor, whether it’s React or whatever the technology of the day is where we just… We’re in a complex, adaptive system. And how do we move WordPress forward without leaving people behind and solving this learning in a rate of change that’s accelerating? How do we do that?

Courtney Robert…: Yeah. So my high school teaching experience was great in that I got to work with youth who… They were in some ways a blank slate, right? So they didn’t know one way or another, and it was a clean slate to be able to help train them. I’ve also worked in corporate training and providing training to my clients, and they’re used to one way, think about classic editor versus block editor. “And I was used to doing it this way, and I don’t want to learn a new thing.” Right?

And the same happens even if you’re on the programming side of things, “I was used to doing it this way and now there’s this other way. And how do we deal with all of that?” In that process, I think having material that has the input of what’s happening in the ecosystem, not just the team has a good idea and so the team does a thing.

I come from a vo-tech as a high school teacher, so my job was to create what the curriculum should be. But I did that with advisors in the context of a career technical school or a vo-tech. And so we had employers in the industry that said, “Here’s what we’re hiring for and what we need. Can you help get us the people ready?” And they’re thinking a few years down the line, as far as the job pipeline goes and how they’re going to train people and work with them.

They had a very vested interest in what we were doing in our classroom. They had hiring needs for that. Likewise, the ongoing professional development is something I’m still kind of kicking around. I spent some years working for The Events Calendar when it was owned by Modern Tribe. Loved my journey through that process. It really helped me understand both the products side of the company at that point, which was The Events Calendar and its sub-products, right? Its sub-plugins and SaaS offerings.

But also, I got a little peek into the agency life too and what that development journey looks like. I didn’t necessarily work in that side, but I know that there was ongoing training, ongoing evolving ways of doing things. And so learning the languages is a great step in that direction, and we certainly can work on that.

And I think within the context of Learn and the training team and things, we have ideas around teaching the actual programming languages themselves and doing justice to the creators as well, right? They’re open-source projects themselves. And so positioning things in a way that, “Do you want to get more involved?” Here’s how those projects, whether it’s the language, the build tools, all of the code sniffers and all of the geeky stuff, right? How to benefit. A rising tide lifts all ships again there.

But I really would value the feedback of employers and also those that are doing ongoing training and within the company, getting a picture of how are you continuing your own development. As a teacher, I know that I had to go back for more college classes pretty much non-stop. It’s part of the education profession. I know that the medical world faces this. And in technology, we know that things are constantly evolving, we’re the reason that it is. But also, we need to help each other through that process and make sure that we’re continuing to learn and that we account for that journey.

A lot of folks will think that creating something, oh, it’s just easy. You just do this and this and this. And as an educator, I say, “Wait, time out. That’s not easy for some people.” I had a huge obstacle myself, even though I had… It was a lone, single, simple C college programming course. I had a hard time figuring out what I was doing in PHP and it wasn’t simple, and there wasn’t materials. And even with an abundance of materials available now, there’s no logical flow to find it, especially if you’re turning to sources like YouTube for your training.

If you respond to video, there’s a lot of good stuff on YouTube, but there’s also things that are very opinionated or not timely anymore, or could just overlook… Think about if you’ve been in… Well, even in high schools, but specifically, I think about in colleges. The professors I had that were not part of the education program and were never taught how to be good teachers, you could tell.

And so we make it look easy to the end-user, that’s our goal. The person that’s learning should feel like it’s easy to learn. There’s details involved in making it feel easy for that person to learn.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I want to dig in a little more on an area you were talking about, which is vocational training. So learning in order to get a job, ideally, a well-paying job that you love. If we look at the WordPress ecosystem, it’s extreme… In my experience and also one of the ways I learn is I do masterminds with other WordPress product owners and things like that, so we’d learned together, we discuss our challenges and whatnot.

But for myself and many others that hire WordPress developers, it is extremely challenging to find people with the adequate skillset for what we’re looking for. It’s extremely challenging. And we’re happy to pay for it. To me, there’s a disconnect. There’s this demand, but then there’s this wall of getting people to a certain level across multi areas of skillsets that they’re going to need. How do we solve this in WordPress? Is that on us as a company to create the training? Is it on the community? Is it on Lynda.com, Udemy? How do we solve this?

Courtney Robert…: All of those programs are really great. I’ve taken the LinkedIn Learning stuff. I’ve taken Udemy. I have gone through Treehouse. There’s a lot of really good resources, right? What we don’t have is we’ll never get to a point where everybody has a universal “Here’s what we want for a tier-2 tech support: somebody that knows a little code.” Or “Here’s what we want for our entry-level devs.”

But we can’t get to a generally accepted spot, I feel like, that would be reasonable. The methods of training people have right now, they could go the traditional route of I’m going into a college computer science program. And there, you will find a solid foundation and understanding of programming concepts, but perhaps a lack in open-source awareness or specific languages and frameworks within those.

So I don’t know of a lot of places that would be yet teaching React at a college placement. JavaScript, sure, it’s been around for 26 years, but they may also be getting a lot of other languages too. And so at a college point, I think a computer science degree can be super valuable at understanding how to think about programming and just how to be a good learner.

Also, if we’re looking at boot camps, which I have instructed, I was a faculty member for Code Differently Bootcamp for about a year and pioneered their WordPress Development boot camp program. I am hard to find any other boot camps offering WordPress that is developer-oriented.

I find a lot that are more towards content marketing and creating your own business out of that program. So I find a lot of how to use WordPress, the software, not planning for people to start dabbling with plugins, themes, etc., other than to pick one out and use it.

So if the goal is to hire for companies that are creating a plugin or a theme or a SaaS that interfaces with WordPress, the resources aren’t… There’s not really a great job pipeline for that at this time. Meaning there’s not a great span of an agreed-upon set of skills that we needed an entry person to get.

And also, a lack of PHP education, unless you’re specifically looking at Laravel. So Laravel is another PHP framework. There’s not a lot happening as it relates to PHP in boot camps. There is a mindset of “We’re going to train people with a generally front-end mindset.” The catch is that front-end devs in WordPress, entry front-end devs still need to understand nuances about things that would otherwise be thought as backend, just to put a theme together.

So for the WordPress people that understand this part, the template hierarchy would be almost bordering into what a boot camp would consider backend, even though the goal is to put the WordPress theme together for a very front-end experience. How that gets assembled, people that are not familiar with a content management system or WordPress, in general, have a disconnect happening mentally at that point.

And it’s an area that I would love to see the community rally behind and say on Learn, “Hey, here’s what we need.” It’s a spot that I think would help level the… Help people that aspire to get into this, have a clear roadmap of how to do that.

I know that recently, Matt Mullenweg also indicated that contributing to open-source is a great way through that process. I’ll tell you the way that I learned and joined the training team, foolish, silly me in 2014 was all about post formats. And we saw that post formats weren’t as big of a deal in WordPress as we eventually thought.

But that was actually how I learned PHP more proficiently was to figure out how to write a lesson plan for a user and how to write a lesson plan as a developer wanting to implement that. And so it helped me learn in that process too. It was pretty interesting.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Is there a certificate… You mentioned getting into some badging or certification. What do you see in WordPress in regards to those things? And like you said, there’s a lot of stuff around teach you how to become a freelancer or agency owner and stuff like that, but on the development side, what’s out there?

Courtney Robert…: Yeah. So WordPress already uses badges if you contribute to various Make teams, and it will also note if you have spoken at an event. So if you look at some profiles, someone has worked on a plugin, they might be the developer of a plugin. I think there’s one for if you’re a support staff for a company that owns plugins, there’s a way to file that.

The same thing is true with themes. If you contribute to the WordPress.tv team, there’s a badge for working on that team, as opposed to being a speaker at a WordCamp who has their video published on WordPress.tv. There are badges already in place. And during last year’s State of The Word, which is Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, his address to the WordPress community. And this is an annual address that would be considered really his most important or significant one addressing the WordPress community.

I asked him that very question like where are we going with this with Learn and what are his thoughts around that? We have had discussions over the years about WordPress certification and just having a flat-out certification process could be heated and have a lot of opinions because then employers need to enforce that.

If on the flip side, there are badges that coincide with completing a course; say that we, on Learn, have actual courses aside from lesson plans or video workshops, putting together an entire course program or perhaps even bigger than a course. So if you think about, again, I refer back to my school years myself, if I were a high school student in one particular grade, I had multiple courses that year. Right?

So if you have a whole series of something, by the end of that… I’m dodging naming anything because we’re still figuring out what that name of that should look like. But if you have multiple courses that roll up to something, then having a badge for that something might be really helpful on the employer side of things when they’re reviewing profiles for who they want to hire, checking to see if people have the skills that they have, giving people ways to continue their own personal learning journey through that process. All of that is wide open and we’re green-lighted to continue working on that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. We have that feature in LifterLMS, by the way, we call them course tracks. And some people turn that into a degree program, some people call them learning paths, learning journeys. It goes by a lot of names. So I get the challenge there.

Courtney Robert…: Yeah. Naming things can be hard. I’ll tell you, even the word “chapters” could refer to a segment of a video or it could refer to the five minutes about that one little piece of that entire course. [crosstalk]

Chris Badgett: Something we’ve learned… Just a pro tip in development that we’ve learned in building a product is giving people the ability to rename something is powerful. Some people are like, “I don’t want to call it a course, I want to call it a class or I want to call it this other thing. It’s a module. It’s a section. It’s a chapter.”

I wanted to dig in on a concept that I’m super passionate about, and I’m sure you have some thoughts around it, which is social learning, both in this context with WordPress. And there’s a couple of different versions of that. There’s the in-person thing, which makes WordPress really special with meetups and WordCamps and these kinds of things, and other niche WordPress events that happen both for-profit or in a more nonprofit style.

And then there’s all the online stuff from forums to Facebook groups, to websites and all kinds of stuff where there’s content, but there’s also conversation. What are your thoughts around social learning? How does it work? And maybe what does WordPress do really well there? Because it’s the bizarre, not the cathedral or whatever. So there’s all these conversations happening all over the place, not just from the Pope.

Courtney Robert…: Right. Yes, exactly. So WordPress does this really well. People are all making their own training and I love it. And I’m not in any way saying we should ever detract from that. I think there’s a lot of value in that. I also think about all the ways that I learn.

As I was going through the boot camp, I was also reading Brad Williams’ book about WordPress Plugin Development. So there were books studies that I did. There were video courses that I took myself through that process to evaluate what my students could use and need in their journey. I looked at docs articles, I looked at this, I looked at that. The more formats that I could refer to, the more ways that I could reinforce my learning journey.

So sometimes a little bit of repetition but in different formats can be really valuable. When you hear somebody teach the same thing, but in several different ways or different people teaching roughly the same concept, you start to gain an appreciation or a deeper level where eventually, you hit the point where you know it and you don’t have to think as hard to get to the answers.

I think that a lot of that is really valuable, I think also having the social side of it. WordPress is great at gathering people in person. When we can get through the coronavirus affecting the entire globe, I really look forward to being back in person.

And I’ve shifted roles recently into working at GoDaddy Pro in field marketing, which means we sponsor events and I handle some of the sponsorship of things. I also get to go to events and, oh man, I can’t wait for that to be a good option for me again to do that. I joined the training team because we had a contributor day and I met people and I learned about how the teams work and how the stuff happens.

So I learned a lot by going to an event, hearing the people present at the event. I learned a lot by talking to people in the hallway. I learned a whole lot by joining one of the teams and getting to interact in person with them. I also think that there are times in spaces where I have had some years where I had to step away from things. I had children and I couldn’t get to meetups.

My husband has a job that is considerably long hours as well and I had two children within 14 months. And so that’s my years when I worked at The Events Calendar and was off the radar for much else because I could clock in and work in support and other release communications endeavors during my kids’ nap time before or after they got up when they were little babies. So that’s what worked for our family.

And I couldn’t get to meetups, but if meetups would have been available online during that same time span, I would have been more able to. So I’m thinking a little through what that hybrid experience afterwards is going to look like. For some people, being able to jump in online, yeah, it’s not as exciting as being in person, but I wouldn’t have been able to go in person. There was no way I could have. So we’ve removed that barrier in some senses and that’s been really good.

I think that there’s just different formats and different approaches also for different personalities, or introverts that are extroverts might learn differently, and to make space for that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. I recently spoke at a WordCamp in Rochester and then another one in Phoenix, just from the same office I’m in right here. And I was like, “This is cool. This is great.”

Courtney Robert…: No plane needed. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And also, I just want to give, for the listener, if you’re listening in your earbuds or if you’re watching this on the LifterLMS YouTube channel, I just want to give a shout-out to Chris Lema who put on an event called CaboPress. I was not really involved in the WordPress community.

I mean, I was building an agency. This is pre-LifterLMS. Well, actually, in the early days of LifterLMS. Building a product, serving clients, trying to put food on the table, create some jobs and try not to burn out in the process. And I saw a post from Chris Lema about this thing where these agency and product people in WordPress were getting together.

I’m a big believer in masterminds, I was like, “What the heck?” I went. It was one of the best decisions I made in terms of being social about learning and just meeting other people just like me who are into all this online stuff, and this niche was amazing. So getting out of the building is super important. And later I’ve done lots of WordCamps and meetups and stuff like that. But it’s so powerful. It’s so powerful.

Courtney Robert…: I saw a picture float by close to that same timeframe that you’re referring to. I got to meet Shane, Reid, and Peter, who are the partner owners at Modern Tribe. And I forget which of these gentlemen posted the picture, but they had gotten together some years ago with comparable agencies in the WordPress ecosystem that could have been seen as competitors, but the partners of these companies got together for a mini-retreat experience. Obviously, it would have been some years ago at this point.

And they were able to talk through ideas about WordPress serving the enterprise world, so those that have very large-scale websites. What I would give to be a fly on the wall for their hiring needs at a place like that. It just was really fascinating to me to see those that would otherwise be competitors talking through some of these things, the same challenges, needs, mindset things that they needed to go through.

And so even in those contexts, getting together to go through some of that, that’s freaking amazing. Also, shout-out again, I loved Modern Tribe. We got to go to Panama for a week while I was there, paid. And that was my first time away from my littles. And it’s been a while since I’ve been out of the country when I took that trip.

The value of having your team get together, having your teams inside of a product plugin type of company, having people gather and share ideas in person is also really valuable. And contributing in our own internal hackathon day was probably the highlight of my time there. We got to do creative stuff that we otherwise couldn’t do when we were busy dealing with the regular day-to-day.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I was in Santa Cruz, California meeting up with my co-founders of Lifter, and we met up with Shane from Modern Tribe and had a great conversation, later went running with him and just picking up all kinds of nuggets of wisdom there. And a similar thing has happened where I’ve been at a private WordPress event and gone out with what you would consider my competitors and just shared ideas.

The concept there, which is really relevant to WordPress, is the infinite game where somebody doesn’t have to lose in order for somebody else to win. So we can just move this industry forward together. And sure, I consider it friendly rivals versus competitors.

Courtney Robert…: Right.

Chris Badgett: I want to get one more nugget of wisdom out of you before we go. I know you have some background in high school experience. So this web world and developers, it’s all moving really fast. The traditional school system has a really hard time having an end-to-end learning solution. But if we go back to more just traditional education with the classroom, you had used the LMS to augment the experience, an online LMS to augment the experience.

How does a traditional school teacher or a school… I often have to remind myself we’re cutting edge, we’re in tech, we’re really far, we’re seeing the future. But there’s these legacy industries that are still catching up with going online or implementing technology in a way that helps. How can traditional schools use an online LMS?

Courtney Robert…: So the first intro into open-source and/or LMS world… I’ve had college classes, by the way, on using LMSes. The one that I had was about using Moodle.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Courtney Robert…: And this would have been in 2006/7 roughly.

Chris Badgett: eLearning is not new. It’s not new.

Courtney Robert…: No, it isn’t.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Courtney Robert…: So my needs were this; I was a high school teacher, and at that point, not in a vo-tech, but in a regular ed classroom and teaching Microsoft products and getting students prepared for the Microsoft exams. I needed to collect the files. My district, before they hired me, had somebody that had just retired who trained my mother to be a teacher, literally.

And so her method was typewriters and print the papers. Right? And that doesn’t teach me on the resumes if they’re hitting space bars or tabs like I tell them to. So I needed to electronically collect the files. So I have my own Moodle server to gather the files, right? I needed to get their files and look at them electronically, and so I found my own way to do that because the work-provided laptop didn’t include a floppy drive at that point, and I had no means of otherwise collecting the files efficiently.

I also used a WordPress-based LMS when I was teaching at a vo-tech and there it was. I had lots of links and resources to direct students to and I wanted to track their progress through, did they see this page and do the thing? And I could not gather that type of feedback from using just a website, right? So eventually, I found WordPress.

I couldn’t find a way to track them that way, so I definitely knew I needed an LMS to do that, along with some quizzes and grade book feature add-ons and things that would augment what I was doing in my regular classroom. And what was really nice is that it was a lot easier to distribute the links and a lot easier for students who are out sick to get the replay and catch up.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. The internet was literally invented, well, for the military, but also education stuff; transfer of knowledge, professors, and stuff like that. Courtney, this has been an awesome conversation. This is Courtney Robertson. Where can people get involved with your work or see you around with GoDaddy?

Courtney Robert…: Yeah. So if you are interested, we have meetup events of our own that we run at GoDaddy at events.godaddy.com. And I’ll be in the ones that are North America-centric, and you can check into the GoDaddy Pro area for that. You can also find me at lots of the WordCamps and WordPress-related events online, hanging out. And if there’s a sponsor booth, look for GoDaddy and you’ll find me in the booth.

Likewise, hopefully, in the future in person, but I get to hang around with Sandy Edwards, Maja Loncar, and Adam Warner, who are all great people. You could also find info about the training team for WordPress, the ones that wrangle the content that goes on Learn at make.wordpress.org/training. Make.wordpress.org/training.

And there we recently put out a call for folks to help with UX testing. We want some feedback about your real experience of using learn.wordpress.org and also to watch you, if you’re interested in joining a little cohort kind of a group to do some UX testing for us, gather some feedback in that regard. They’re kicking off in the very near future. So you can find me in all those places or at courtneyengle.com.

Chris Badgett: And also follow her on Twitter. She’s always got good stuff out there. Courtney, thanks for having this conversation. These are my favorite topics. We’re talking about WordPress, we’re talking about learning, and we’re talking about community. These are the things that light me up. I look forward to contributing more to the Learn WordPress project.

That’s kind of part of the WordPress ethos is I benefit tremendously from the WordPress ecosystem, I try to give as much as I can. I’m happy to help with Learn WordPress and what I can do there, so I look forward to connecting more around that. Thanks for coming on the show. I bet I’ll see you one of these days at some WordPress event somewhere. And thanks for all the value you dropped today. I really appreciate it.

Courtney Robert…: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS.com/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post The WordPress Education Ecosystem Challenges and Opportunities with Courtney Robertson appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Learn how to start making course sales now with Jon Schumacher in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. Positioning your online course offer is 80% of the work when finding success in sales and marketing. Jon shares methods and takeaways you can apply to position your course to get the most success possible with your sales and marketing campaigns.

We wanted to feature Jon on the LMScast podcast, because a lot of people need help with a couple of things that he specializes in. One of them is just sales in general, and the other is structuring around a sales conversion event (also known as the moment or experience that helps facilitate a sale). Jon shares what needs to happen for a sale to occur in the modern online world of 2022 and beyond for the online entrepreneur, whether they’re building a course, a coaching program, or another type of online business.

80% of the success of a marketing or sales campaign comes down to whether you’re matching the right person with the right offer in an offer that’s so good for their situation that they’d be stupid not to take it. That’s 80% of the success of a selling or marketing campaign. The other 20% are aspects like your persuasion skills, your copy skills, the frosting on the cupcake, communication, and messaging. Having the wrong offer in front of the wrong person will always leave you asking, “What happened?” That’s the highest level as far as what to think about before you do any kind of sales or marketing campaign.

Jon runs a challenge called Grand Slam Webinar Offers, and this applies even if you don’t have a webinar. The focus of this methodology is to position your offer around how it helps your ideal customer instead of what you have to offer. Highlighting and writing the desired outcome that helps the ideal customer get what they’re looking for.

To learn more about Jon, you can Google ”Jon Schumacher webinar” and you’ll find him. You can also head to JonSchumacher.com for his primary personal brand, or head to WorkWithJon.co to meet with Jon to see how he can help you with sales for your online course or membership platform.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name is Chris Badgett, and I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Jon Schumacher. That’s Jon with no H. It’s jonschumacher.com. Welcome to the show, Jon.

Jon Schumacher: Hey, Chris, appreciate it. And yeah, you got my name, right? That’s always a tough one for people to get. So, I appreciate it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And if you just want to Google something, just Google Jon Schumacher webinar, and you’ll find him. I want to bring you on because a lot of people need help with a couple things that you specialize in. One of them is just sales in general and the other is structuring, especially around what I would call a sales conversion event, or this moment or experience that helps facilitate a sale. But just to the absolute highest level for the online entrepreneur, whether they’re building a course, a coaching program, or some online business, what needs to happen for a sale to occur in the modern online world of 2021 and beyond?

Jon Schumacher: Yeah, it’s a great question, and we’ll just keep it as high as level as I can think of first, and then we can drill down into specifics. In the context of let’s say a marketing or a sales campaign that could be to drive people to conversation, a sales conversation or a course sale or whatever, I look at things at the highest level and then we can go deeper as three elements. The first is who you’re marketing to, understanding them, their situation, their mindset, their current world views, what they think about themselves and their situation. Really understanding the who at the highest, highest level is critical and then getting really good at putting together offers.

If you’re looking at 80% of the success of a marketing or sales campaign, it’s like 80% of it is like, “Okay, are we matching the right person with the right offer in an offer so good, they’d be stupid not to take it, right?” That’s 80% of the success of a selling or marketing campaign. And then the other 20% are things like your persuasion skills, your copy skills, the frosting on the cupcake so to speak to make it… communicating it, the messaging. All these things are really important as well, but you could have all of that stuff dialed. Have the wrong offer in front of the wrong person, you’re going to go, “What happened?” So, that’s the highest level I can think of as far as what to think about before you do any kind of sales or marketing campaign.

Chris Badgett: Well, I’ve been in online business and online marketing specifically for about 15 years, and I’ve recently been revisiting the offer because it is so fundamental and foundational. And it’s easy to get focused on the latest, greatest tactic or some nuance that if the offer is wrong, none of that matters.

Jon Schumacher: Yes.

Chris Badgett: How do we make a winning offer that’s a no-brainer or any tips? And especially for the experts out there, I just noticed a lot of them have a problem with coming up with an offer because they’ve been in their field for sometimes, many decades. And they’re having a hard time just condensing 30, 40 years into a statement. So, how do you do that?

Jon Schumacher: Yeah. I have a challenge I run called Grand Slam Webinar Offers actually borrow the title and some of the methodology. And this applies even if you don’t have a webinar, but I’ll share what that is. I got it originally the idea, or the naming rather from a guy named Alex Hormozi. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him. He’s blown up a little bit. He has a great book called 100 million dollar offer, so that’s where I got the grand slam title for this, but anyway. Yeah, so I always like to say that people buy your offer. They don’t buy your product or service, and those are not the same things, right? A lot of people say, “Well, I sell coaching on this or I sell a course on this or a software on this.”

It’s like that’s great, that’s the thing you sell, but that’s not your offer, right? And the offer are all the elements around it that make it more compelling. How do you come up with something like that? Well, the first thing to really understand at the top is what’s the desired outcome that your offer gets people, right? If you have a piece of paper, let’s say you get a piece of paper out or Google Doc or whatever you’re doing, write that out at the top, the desired outcome that my offer helps my ideal customer get is X. And then below that, draw a line down the middle of the paper, or the document or whatever.

On one side, write the problems that would stop that person from getting the outcome, and ideally problems they understand, and then the solutions that you can offer them that remove those problems. And this is what some people would call an offer stack, or creating an offer that clearly addresses all of the potential problems that your ideal buyer would have to getting to that outcome and preferably as easy and with as low effort as possible. If you’re selling a course, I sell a webinar course, very meta of course, right? Selling on webinars with webinar courses. I know what all the problems are for beginners to launch a webinar, right? Like tech, I don’t know how to structure my webinar.

I don’t know what to say to invite people to my webinar. So, I have a checklist, a script, a swipe copy file for every single one of those problems. So, that when I present my offer, I clearly call out the problem, and then here’s the solution problem, here’s the solution. So by the time I’m finished sharing my offer, they understand that my offer solves all of the potential problems with as easy a button and low effort solutions as possible to getting them the results that. That’s how I look at putting together offers now is like okay, what’s the problem, what’s the solution, how can I make this as simple and easy for the buyer as possible, so that they can get to the result faster with less effort that will definitely make your offer more compelling.

Chris Badgett: I love that, and the course itself is really just a mechanism of delivery. It’s not what you’re selling, right? It’s…

Jon Schumacher: Yes.

Chris Badgett: It’s the result that they want. I think it’s easy to lose sight of that and focus on the mechanism or what’s in the box, but not the result.

Jon Schumacher: And most people make the mistake of burying all of that within their core offer, let’s say in their course and then they only talk about the modules and the number of documents in their course. And that’s like the kiss of death, right? Feature based, boring. No one wants more videos and modules. People want to understand that your offer has elements checklists and frameworks and swipe files. And it depends on what you sell a little bit, but easy button solutions that you clearly present to your buyer that’s going to make your offer way more sellable. I mean you’re talking double or as much as 8X your conversion rate. If you can present your offer in the right way, that’s a huge factor.

Chris Badgett: I know you’re an expert in what I call conversion tools. How does one know whether a one-on-one phone call, or schedule a meeting thing versus a webinar, versus just a sales page with no means of contacting the company behind it? Maybe there’s a contact form on another page or something, but how do we know the right conversion tool for our product, or our price point or whatever, or should we do them all or try certain ones, but not certain ones? How do we figure this out?

Jon Schumacher: Yeah. I mean there’s no hard, hard rule. I mean I’ve heard people sell crazy expensive stuff from a document, a google document. I mean I’ve heard all kinds of different things. Some things to think about though, one you mentioned is the price point. Is this just an impulse buy? $37, $100. People will usually just buy that kind of thing. If you have a good hook, a good headline and present a decent sales page, in my experience selling those things, people can just buy from an email or something and do that, right? You don’t need to get on a call someone to sell a $30 thing, right? So, that’s usually the case for that. So, part of it is price point.

And then the general rule is if you’re selling something let’s say under a couple thousand dollars, you can sell it directly let’s say from a webinar, or some kind of a workshop or conversion event. Whereas if it’s higher than that, something that requires a little more trust and a little more commitment from them to you, sometimes you’ll need some kind of a sales conversation whether that’s texting, whether that’s instant messaging, whether that’s getting on a Zoom or a phone call or something like that, that can be the case, but really I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen people sell crazy high stuff from just a document too. There really is no hard fast rule.

I would say if it’s a lower ticket item, you look to sell it directly, either on a sales page or if it’s a little higher, let’s say I don’t know $200 to $2000, you can sell that on a webinar or something like that. If it’s higher than that, let’s say it’s a higher price or a higher time commitment or an energy commitment from somebody who maybe doesn’t know you as well, then you might want to look at actually having some kind of a conversation with that person, but those are just general rules.

Chris Badgett: In terms of more general rules, regardless of whether it’s a phone call with a sales structure, a script or a webinar with a certain path you go down or a sales page, what are the common… and maybe using the webinar as an example, if it was a 3-act play or a 4-act sequence or whatever, what are the common steps you move through in a sales conversion event that doesn’t really change based on the medium?

Jon Schumacher: Yeah, I’ll give you a framework. I mean there are some slight tweaks depending on the medium you’re using. Is it a webinar? Is it a 3-day workshop? Is it a 5-day challenge or some… There’s different mediums that does affect the flow a little bit. But as a general rule, you could call it a demand narrative, or I call it magnetic messaging, a messaging that pulls them towards your offer. And there’s a series of things that should happen in order to do that. I call it why, what, how, now. That’s the flow that people can write down from this interview; why, what, how, now. I’ll walk through that at a high level. Just remember this though, your sales narrative whether it’s a sales webinar, whether it’s a workshop, whether it’s something should be 80% context and insights and 20% content, right?

The worst thing you can do is share a bunch of how-to content, spray them in the face with a bunch of granular details on these sales events. You’ll either confuse them, or you’ll give them so much that they’ll think that they have enough to go and try it on their own, and either one of those will absolutely kill your sales conversions. Your sales narrative, whether it’s inside of a webinar, whether it’s inside of a workshop or something like that should be 80% context and insights and 20%… And that’s a general rule. It does adjust a little bit depending on what you’re selling. The why, what, how, now thing really is a high level sales narrative, so basically why. Why means context, right?

You always want to start with context. Why is what you’re sharing with them so important? What do they need to understand about themselves in their situation? What’s their world view? Why is their situation need to change, and why is the opportunity that you’re talking about important for them? I guess you want to start with why, right? Before, you don’t just start with, here’s how you do something. It’s like no, you need to give it some context and some build up. So, that’s the why part. The what part is all about teaching them what to desire. So, you want to teach them what to desire and this is usually built around what I call a paradigm shift, which is basically a big idea.

It’s like okay most people think X, but really it’s Y. Most people think you need a 2-hour webinar to sell your course, but really all you need is a 30-minute presentation with a crazy good offer, and you’ll do just as well. It’s like that’s a shifting of people’s paradigm of what they think they need, and this is really important for you to develop for your business. It’s like most people think X, but really it’s Y. According to the research, most people think that it’s your product or service that makes people loyal to your brand, but really according to the research, according to the challenger sale research, it’s how you sold the person initially that endeared them to your brand the most, right?

And it’s like that’s a paradigm shift for someone who’s selling like a sales system or something. Does that make sense what I shared there?

Chris Badgett: That does, that’s super cool, super cool.

Jon Schumacher: Yeah. You need to shift their thinking. And when you shift their thinking, it excites their physiology and opens them up to what you’re about to share with them, which is the how, which is really a road map to results. I call this a road map to results. Usually, it’s a 3-part… either it’s linear, three phases to get a client from being stuck to getting the results, or it’s three elements of your product, or services genius that helps that person. You’re showing a roadmap and then now is really why should they take action now? Why should they either book a call to speak with you right now? Why should they buy your program right on this webinar, or this event right now? Why is now the time for them to take action?

They understand the context. They understand what they should be desiring and how they should be shifting their thinking. You’ve shown them a roadmap for how they can get there to this newly discovered desire. Now, it’s okay why right now? Why is this the time to do this? Because we both know if people leave these kind of events, their excitement and their momentum starts waning pretty quickly. So, that’s a broad level sales narrative that you can look at for your webinar or your event. It does vary a little bit, depending on the medium that you’re using and the promise of the event, but that’ll give people some ideas.

Chris Badgett: On the now piece at the end, I think that’s what people are most contaminated by, closing or feeling like they have to do something pushy or whatever. What’s a graceful why now close that anybody can do that isn’t super pushy, or just feels natural and it’s the obvious thing to do?

Jon Schumacher: Yeah. If you’re just using that event to generate sales calls or something, let’s say you’re selling a service or something like that, it’s super simple, right? It’s super easy. You just name your call, describe the benefits to the person for booking the call, reiterate who it’s for, remind them again of where to go. I mean it’s super short. Doesn’t need to be super involved at all. If you’re selling that, it’s totally easy just to invite people to an attractive sounding next step with you, which is to talk with you. If you’re selling directly, let’s say on a webinar or some kind of an event, I do recommend that you have a fairly robust pitch so to speak or offer presentation.

This is how I’m currently doing it and advising others to do it because it works, right? Part of it is a mindset thing. You need to get past that and be able to just start… If you have a good offer that’s helpful to people, you need to do your very best to describe and present that offer in as compelling of a way as possible, whether that’s through an offer stack. I don’t know, you’re probably familiar with what that is. I’m sure some of the people here listening are as well, but it’s really presenting all of the elements, again all the elements of your offer that solve all of the potential problems in as easy as possible manner to get the result for that person. You do need to spend some significant time.

And again, this is if you’re selling something directly from a webinar let’s say or a workshop, people are going to a sales page or a checkout page and you’re saying go over there and buy this thing right now, that is one way to do it. Having a great fast action bonus is another way to increase your conversions.

Chris Badgett: What’s an example of fast action bonus that you could go in?

Jon Schumacher: If you’re a coach or consultant or course seller or something which I imagine a lot of your audience is through your LifterLMS, right? A lot of them build online courses.

Chris Badgett: Right.

Jon Schumacher: Giving access to you as the expert is probably one of the better fast action bonuses that you can give.

Chris Badgett: I’ve done that before myself with our software, and it works.

Jon Schumacher: Yeah, it works really well. It’s really if you’re looking to increase your live webinar conversions let’s say, presenting your offer correctly which is hugely important. And then presenting the fast action bonus at the right moment, just boom, it just takes people over the edge. And people will rush in and buy [crosstalk].

Chris Badgett: What do you recommend on that in terms of time? Is that before the call ends or within 24 hours, or within three days? What is the timezone of that?

Jon Schumacher: Yeah. Before the end of the webinar, so what I’ll usually do is I’ll if it… I just did a webinar recently. I had 730 people registered for a webinar, and I had 10. The first 10 who joined got a personal, and this was a webinar and webinars, very meta, first 10 who joined got a personal Zoom call with me to review their slide deck once they’re finished and people were like…

Chris Badgett: For how long?

Jon Schumacher: And I sell that for $5000 on the low end for consulting companies and stuff like that. It was [inaudible]. I sold 10 like this because it was very attractive. You want your most attractive element of your offer to be your fast action bonus you could set a limit, like a first… depending on the size of your webinar, 10 or 15 or 20 would be one if you have a bigger webinar, or bigger events. Whereas maybe the first three to five or something for a smaller event, but that does push people a little bit to get in and it works. And that can be either a review or an audit from you, or it could be a personal clarity session with you, or strategy session or something like that.

Depending on what you sell or do, that will definitely increase your live conversions significantly. To answer your question, how do you sell without being salesy, I mean if you’re doing lead gen webinars, it’s easy. If you’re selling a course or program, you have to get over it a little bit and put your best foot forward. Part of it’s how you deliver it too with your voice, and are you this used car salesman sounding person? Are you somebody who understands your client and has a great offer, and is not ashamed to present that offer in a strong way? I’ve gotten to that point where I’m okay doing that, so that’s just me.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, the first sale you make is to yourself and yeah, that makes sense.

Jon Schumacher: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about online events, and I wanted to talk about challenges and summits particularly. Do we think of these things as before… sometimes, those things are free, sometimes they’re paid. Are these products or are they sales conversion events, or are they part of the ladder of what we offer? Where do they sit?

Jon Schumacher: Yes, it depends on the type of event.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Jon Schumacher: So, you want to talk about challenges and summits, those two in particular?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, yeah.

Jon Schumacher: Those two?

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Jon Schumacher: Yeah, so those are more what I would call audience events, so building your audience. A challenge with just for people listening usually, usually is five days. It’s usually a short little assignment that you drip out, and then there’s live Q and A around it and stuff like that. Sometimes, you’ll have promotional partners send traffic to it or you can run ads to it, or you can promote it to your own audience, all of those things.

Chris Badgett: Quick question just on the nuance of that.

Jon Schumacher: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: I’ve seen people use it LMS for that. If it’s a 5-day challenge, let’s say we had a five lesson course, do you recommend that they have already seen some content on the day, and then there’s a coaching session that follows, or the content is delivered live? I know you could do it lots of different ways, but what do you see that works the best?

Jon Schumacher: Yeah, so you can do it either way. What I’m currently doing and what I see working best for my own stuff and also, I collaborate with others in the industry who are like they look at a lot of this kind of stuff, is to record the lesson for the day. And that’s usually a short video on a challenge, so under 10 minutes with a little document, or a little task for that day. And then have a Q and A session later in the day on that specific topic.

Chris Badgett: To help people get through it?

Jon Schumacher: To answer questions and to get help people get through it. Plus, when you record things, people have multiple timezones and stuff like that can access it and things. And the big goal also of the challenge is not only is to have a challenge built around one promise. Mine is the Grand Slam Webinar Offer challenge. Even if you have a webinar or not, I’m going to help you make your offer two to five times more sellable from your webinar, or from your online event. That’s really the promise of that and I tell people…

Chris Badgett: Is that a free or paid challenge?

Jon Schumacher: I offer mine free, and then I sell the recordings as an upgrade. I’ll have an upgrade for the recordings and/or a VIP session after the challenge that I’ll sell as an upgrade. I do it for free because I have my joint venture partners email to it. And that gives me the widest net to capture as big a list as possible, and then I’ll segment out the buyers based on if they want to buy the recordings, or the VIP session. There is some selling on the front end of this, but it’s usually I’m currently doing it for free. Some people are doing it for $17 or something very low ticket, but I’m currently seeing the best practices doing it for free, and then having an upgrade in that.

And the goal of the challenge is to build rapport and connection that’s really the goal. Build it around one simple topic that is a win, and you want to position your challenge as the promise of your challenge as the step before the thing you’re going to sell after. It’s like…

Chris Badgett: Yeah. If you’re selling it, you’re almost getting paid to get your customer in the perfect position to be able to buy from you, or if it’s free…

Jon Schumacher: It’s about.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Jon Schumacher: It’s about building rapport, and you want to get as many people as you can on the live sessions with you. It needs to be good content, but it needs to be very light, not too intense with a challenge. Otherwise, people check out, or they’ll drop off. So, it needs to be something that’s really good. If you’re in marketing and sales like you and I are Chris, helping people create their offer or clarifying their big idea or something simple, but profound is so good as a challenge. And then of course, the next step would be come up with your course idea. Could be for you, and then the next thing is you sell LifterLMS as part of the solution with maybe an offer stack around that.

You could do a 5-day challenge Chris, and then look to sell your software, or your programs behind that. Because I mean coming up with the idea for your course or the framework for your course, cool, I have the idea now or I have the offer, but I don’t know how to put it together and implement it. That’s the second step, right? That could be where you come in and be like, “Well, here’s the next step right and just to do my stuff, or buy my stuff.”

Chris Badgett: You raised my mind. You’re jumping ahead to the free consulting part of the interview where… I think this is important for anybody watching and this is part of the whole expert’s curse. And if you have more of a complex thing, for me as an example, I got software, you can do a lot with it. If I only have five days and I have 10 minutes a day of content, it’s highly unlikely I could get somebody to build their first course in 50 minutes or…

Jon Schumacher: No.

Chris Badgett: But what you’re saying what works for you, for the webinar thing, all the webinar stuff in the world doesn’t matter if you don’t have a good offer. So, let’s get that dialed first. So, go ahead. What are you going to say?

Jon Schumacher: The biggest mistake you’ll make is you give away the primary promise on your challenge. In your case, it could be we’ll help you build your course in five days. One, you’re probably not going to do that. I mean you would know better than me yeah, but two, you’re killing the next step which is you want people to work with you to do that, right? You got to ask yourself, what’s the step before the thing I’m selling? That’s your challenge, and it needs to make sense obviously. again, as I mentioned for people in marketing and sales, it’s usually around creating an idea, or creating an offer, or creating something like that so that they have the initial seed in place. And then your next step is to sell your stuff.

For you, it could be your… and this could be cheesy, but your 6-figure course idea or whatever it is, right? And six-figure course idea could be the name of your challenge, a 5-day challenge on crafting and coming up with your best course. or your signature course, right? And that could be you because of course, you have a learning management system company, right? So, that’s the seed. That would kill it by the way. Five days and then after the five days, you’ve built some rapport, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then you host a webinar selling an offer that it could include LifterLMS, and I don’t know if you have any other training programs. You probably do yourself.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Jon Schumacher: You put together an offer for that. That would be a marketing campaign that you could use, and then you could leverage partners or others traffic sources to fill that challenge.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And I think one of the cool things, I’ve thought a lot about this is something that’s on my to-do list is I would want my challenge to be valuable even if they didn’t choose-

Jon Schumacher: It is.

Chris Badgett: … my software. They went somewhere else because like you said, you want the widest net as possible. It’s not a lift or pitch fist.

Jon Schumacher: No.

Chris Badgett: It’s like let’s get you further along the course creator path.

Jon Schumacher: You may not even mention lifter much. I mean you could say it’s sponsored by. You could have it just subtly put through the 6-figure course idea, 5-day challenge sponsored by LifterLMS. It can be lightly seated, but yeah, everything you do should be valuable, right? Everything you do should add to the people. Otherwise, they’re going to get sick of you, right?

Chris Badgett: Right.

Jon Schumacher: I agree. Yeah, you definitely want it to be really good, but how powerful would it be, how inspiring would it be for someone to come up with that idea, that initial things? It’s like yes, I can see it, I have some clarity and then someone…

Chris Badgett: [Crosstalk] a tool to implement it.

Jon Schumacher: Now, I need a tool and some guidance to actually create it. That’s what your company does. If you could run that event a couple times a year two or three times a year, be no problem. You could probably do really well with that. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool, and you mentioned something talking to another sales professional I wanted to ask you about this. It’s come up a lot lately, and you even hedged it in your comment. You said it may sound cheesy 6-figure course. I’ve been struggling with how do I say create a valuable course or premium course, or there’s a couple layers to it. One of it is there are in our industry business opportunity type things, where you have to be careful about making income claims. And I know you’re not a lawyer. We’re not going to get legal right here. And then there’s also people feeling a little jaded, a little burnt around some people call it the guru market or something like that.

I’m struggling to come up with how do I say that without saying that? And I see some people saying things high ticket, and I can water it down with words premium or high value, but any tips on how to say that, create a super valuable course that has a high likelihood of making good money without sounding cheesy?

Jon Schumacher: Yeah, I mean I think so you’re asking how would you name your challenge or something like that?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, yeah without saying 6-figure challenge, even though that’s what I would want to create something that would give people a very high likelihood of being able to do that.

Jon Schumacher: Yeah, no and partly it depends on who you’re marketing to. I mean yeah, there’s a lot of cheese in the marketing industry, so maybe you don’t say 6-figure course challenge or something like that. It could be the signature, and part of it’s the headline could be your signature course challenge, or create your signature course challenge, or you could even say creating your signature course or… I’ve had workshops, I could sell with virtual presentations. That was one of the name of one of mine, that’s not super cheesy.

Chris Badgett: Right.

Jon Schumacher: But I have a good sub head too. So, you don’t have to put everything in the headline. You can have a sub head that describes a little bit more, right? My next workshop I’m hosting in February is called profitable online events.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Jon Schumacher: Simple?

Chris Badgett: Not…

Jon Schumacher: And then it describes underneath it, it’s a 3-day workshop where we’re going to help you just select and start putting together your own profitable event. For you, it could be profitable online courses. It should have some an outline or an outcome in the headline though, and it’s clear. It needs to have passed the two second tests like, “Oh, I get what this is or yeah Chris is going to show me how to create a profitable online course, or something like that.” It doesn’t have to be six figure, blah. I mean depends on who you’re marketing to, some people that resonates with too. Yeah. So, I found that that works fine for me. One of my colleagues Alina Vincent, she’s a challenge expert.

I think the name of her workshop is Profitable Online Programs I think is what hers is, and she helps you basically put together the structure for an online coaching program and things like that. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: I’m pretty high touch with the market and my customers and my prospects. So, I hear the words they use all the times, and one thing that stuck with me is I heard somebody who was struggling to get started and it’s taking longer than they thought. They just wanted to know the fastest path to revenue. It’s not that they don’t need to make millions. They just want to get it to market, and I don’t know. The customers give you hints of what it should be.

Jon Schumacher: But yeah, I’m not a super hypey. I sell with force now, but I don’t promise the moon or anything.

Chris Badgett: Right.

Jon Schumacher: I try not to be overly hypey. So, it depends a little bit on who you’re marketing to. What I do won’t resonate as much with the biz up or make money online crowd, but I resonate more with coaches and consultants and service providers who already have a business, but they want to get more clients online and stuff. That tends to be who I work with more.

Chris Badgett: That’s more my crew too, so that’s…

Jon Schumacher: They appreciate the clarity and a little more directness than the, “Hey, here’s the best opportunity in the world. Like…”

Chris Badgett: Here’s my house and my car.

Jon Schumacher: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Jon Schumacher: I don’t do any of that. I mean you don’t have to either man, but the structure makes sense, but you do need to think about what’s their desired outcome. A lot of people following you would probably like to map out an online program or an online course, and that aligns very well with your business, right? A lot of things are how you deliver it. You don’t have to be use car salesmen to do it. Challenges or webinars or a platform that we can use how we want for our own brand and our own following, they get a bad rap, but that’s because a lot of people use them-

Chris Badgett: Poorly.

Jon Schumacher: … crazy ways.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. You mentioned working with partners and stuff. If somebody’s an expert and they’re like, “Okay, why would a partner promote my challenge?” Let’s say they’re at the beginning, maybe I need to make a list of certain people to approach, and then what’s my offer to those potential partners? How do we build this machine in a win-win way for everybody?

Jon Schumacher: Yeah. So, people partner with you for different reasons. Some of it is just the relationship that you develop. They like you, or they like what you sell. I mean when I started doing JV webinars back, I think in 2014 was when I started, I didn’t have a list really or anything. I couldn’t reciprocate. His list was way bigger than mine, but he liked me and he liked my product. He’s like, “Yeah, I’ll promote you,” and I gave him a cut of the money to promote me. So, that’s one way you can do it, is to share some revenue with a partner. Another way to do it is to do what I call swaps. You’ll send some emails to your list, they’ll send some to theirs. It could be all for the webinar, it could be for a lead magnet or something else.

There’s a bit of an exchange. You try to keep that with people that are similar size as you, but that doesn’t always work out. And some people get mad about that and some people are cool with that. But I would recommend for most people out here listening, if you want to get involved in partnerships which I do recommend everybody do because one, no algorithm will ever screw that up. It’s evergreen, and the lead quality tends to be a little higher than paid traffic. It’s not quite as scalable as paid traffic, but it is an evergreen source. It’ll work 10 years from now as it works today sort of thing, but most people out there, I recommend you do a couple things. One is there are JV networks that you can join.

If you’re in health, if you’re a speaker, you’re an author, you’re selling services or marketing business, any of those, there are partnership networks out there that you can join usually for a reasonable cost. Some of them are free even, that you can start collaborating and connecting with partners. That’s been my number one way. I’m in a group right now. There’s 150 of us, and I’d say my top 10 to 15 partners are all from that one group. And they’ve added literally thousands of subscribers, and lots of money and stuff too from promoting my stuff over the years. So, that’s a great way to meet people is to go where they are. Networks, there are virtual networks out there as well that you can join.

Another is to interview them. Invite them like you’re doing Chris. I mean you’ve met me. I’m sure you’ve met a lot of your just friends and colleagues and potential partners, and all that kind of stuff by doing interviews, right? I’ve done interview content for a long time as well through my summits, and I’ve had podcasts and stuff in the past that I’ve used to get to know people, right? I think those are two great strategies if you’re new and you’re looking to grow your network, start become a reporter, have a podcast or it could be a YouTube series. All it is firing up Zoom like we’re on right now. There’s nothing too crazy about it, and a lot of people will say yes to an interview.

Whereas if you just hit them with, “Hey, would you promote my thing or do this,” it’s a lot less likely for them to… because they don’t know you to do that. So, those are a couple of strategies for meeting people.

Chris Badgett: I love that. Yeah, and relationships take time, right? It’s not like…

Jon Schumacher: It does, yeah. It’s not as scalable as they had and just flip a switch.

Chris Badgett: Right. You mentioned summits there. I guess I say I’ve seen people do summits. It’s common that with it, they’re free, but then the replay or the evergreen is paid. I know there’s different ways to do it. I’ve also heard lately in current times that oh people have Zoom fatigue or whatever. But just whenever somebody says a certain thing is dead, email marketing is dead or summits are dead or Facebook ads, they’re not dead, but take us into the world of summits and how do we think about it, and how do we build one, or at least our first version of one that’s not insanely huge. If we want to commit and we want to use that strategy, how do we get started?

Jon Schumacher: Yeah. Yeah, so I’ll let you know there are a lot of work. Putting together an online conference is a lot of work to do. So, you’re looking at a four-month, I’d say especially for your first one, around four months of work, gathering up speakers, interviewing them, putting the marketing materials together. I do recommend…

Chris Badgett: Pre-recorded or do it live?

Jon Schumacher: The main sessions are recorded, that’s how I do it. And then I have live sessions throughout. So, all of my challenges and stuff, same thing with the summits, I record the… The last one I did, I had 34 I think speaker sessions. So, I had to record quite a bit, right? Thirty-four sessions, I interviewed them and we collaborated…

Chris Badgett: Quick question there. Sorry, I’m going to ask you a bunch of tactical stuff as you go. When you interviewed them, or how much of their content was like they just showed up and they had a presentation that they probably have done before, they’re ready to go, or how much of it was did you have to pull the content out of them through an interview?

Jon Schumacher: Yeah, so it depends. I always find out beforehand, do you have a presentation that is relevant to the theme of the summit? My summit was the Webinar Mastery Summit. One of the things is what do you want to be known for when you do a summit? So, that was my niche, but to answer your question, I asked beforehand, do you have a presentation you’d like to use? Some people did. I’m like, “Cool, that’s great. Let’s screen share and do an actual visual.” I like it when they have that actually because people can follow along a little more easily. If they don’t, then we do a talking head you and I are right now. In which case, I come up with a series of questions that they can tweak on a Google document beforehand, and we go through that to keep it organized.

I try to keep it higher level if it’s just talking head because there’s no visuals, and I try to recap some of the main points as we go along, just so the viewer of the talking head style video can extract what they can from it. But yes, we record them ahead of time. And then I do, do usually three live sessions. Well, make that four live sessions. I do a pre-party before the summit, and then I have three live sessions with me to answer questions and again, build rapport with some of these people that are coming into my audience. A summit is really you could make…

Chris Badgett: So, is this a 3-day event?

Jon Schumacher: The summit was a 5-day summit

Chris Badgett: Five -day event. So, during the work week or…

Jon Schumacher: Yeah, Monday through Friday.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Jon Schumacher: Yep, yep So, that’s how I did it, but yeah. I mean as far as the summit goes, I mean think about what you wanted to be known for. Summits work really well in certain niches. The marketing and sales world like you and I are in Chris, a little more saturated, right? It’s a little harder to get tons of people, but the last one I did this year. I mean we had 4900 people register for it, so not…

Chris Badgett: That’s a lot.

Jon Schumacher: Not bad, right? And a lot of those come are new people, coming to me it. So, that grows my audience and my visibility. And yes, I make some sales, there are some things to sell during the summit.

Chris Badgett: Do we prioritize building an email list or an audience, or is it more about selling out the back end or both, or do you have to choose what you want to prioritize, or how do you think about that?

Jon Schumacher: I don’t think you get to choose. It’s mostly for me an audience building thing.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Jon Schumacher: It’s an audience event, like a challenge is an audience building, rapport building event and then the conversion event. So, there’s audience events and conversion events. The conversion event would come later. Now, the summit is free to sign up for. I have what I call a premium pass that I offer people that they want lifetime access to all the stuff instantly. I also have an offer stack that’s pretty compelling. I think we had about 8% of people take that who upped it in for free last year, which isn’t bad for a low ticket front-end offer. So, you can sell little things off the front of the summit, but the main thing is the audience and building rapport with them.

And then after the summit’s over, I would do webinars or other things to sell the next step into what we’re doing together. Yeah, you can make money from the summit directly, but usually, it’s more of an awareness and a audience building strategy.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. And do you ask the speakers to be available at all during this summit, or even during the time theirs is supposed to drop or whatever, or are they just that’s the recording and they’re done kind of thing?

Jon Schumacher: That’s how I usually run it. I know others do have panels and stuff. They’ll interview multiple people and stuff. I don’t think it’s a bad idea. The way I run my summits now is like you say, I try to keep it as easy for the speaker as possible. Now, there are some people that want to participate. I guess I could do that and I’ll consider that moving forward, but mainly, it’s just like you say a recording. And most of them promote the summit as well. So, I select my speakers based on what are the experts in the topic and two, do they have an audience that they’d be willing to share the event with, because that’s how a lot of the new list growth and audience growth is coming from is those people’s audiences. So, that’s how I do it.

Chris Badgett: Jon, you’ve added a ton of value today. You really gave me a lot of clarity around some challenge funnel idea I’ve been playing with.

Jon Schumacher: Yeah. I think you’d do really well with that. That’d be a great model for you I think.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, appreciate it. What’s the best way for people to connect with you and if you could drop your name spelling again, so people definitely find it.

Jon Schumacher: Yeah, yeah. So you’re welcome to just Google my name, Jon that’s J-O-N, Schumacher S-C-H-U-M-A-C-H-E-R. That’s Jon Schumacher ad yeah, you can go to Jonschumaacher.com. That’s my primary personal brand, or just Google me, or you can just go to workwithjon.co work, workwithjon.co work.

Chris Badgett: It’s good to…

Jon Schumacher: That’ll take you to my calendar page, which will then you can click around on my website and those kind of things as well too, but my specialty is in webinars and online events from a consulting perspective and a training perspective. So, that’s my primary focus for people if they want to check me out more.

Chris Badgett: Awesome, Jon. Well, thanks for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.

Jon Schumacher: You’re welcome, Chris. Thank you so much.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post How to Start Making Course Sales Now With Jon Schumacher appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Learn how WordPress pro Alex Standiford runs an agency, teaches plugin development, and homesteads debt free from his RV in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. Alex is coming to us from his new homestead in New Mexico. He’s the creator of a WordPress plugin development course at wpdev.academy. Alex has been around the WordPress community for a long time, and he’s also an expert at AffiliateWP.

Alex currently lives in his camper off grid, and he runs off of about 250 Watts of solar power. So it’s not enough to do much more than charge the batteries in his computers. Air conditioning is definitely not even remotely on the table with that kind of power, but Alex and his wife are still comfortable most of the time. He’s living the bootstrap lifestyle where he’s starting with literally nothing, building a driveway for their camper, and throwing some temporary solar on to make it work. Alex and his wife have plans to expand on the property and grow from where they’re currently at.

Alex initially got into WordPress because he wanted to be remote and work from home. At the time it was because he wanted to spend more time with his son, Bennett. He was busting his butt working at an in-person job, and now that he was working from home, he was basically living the exact same lifestyle as before. The only difference is he didn’t have to commute to work. Alex felt very fortunate to have this opportunity that he can literally be anywhere in the world. That’s when he decided to make the move to become a digital nomad and move, as he was living about 30 minutes from where he was born and wanted to extend outward and travel.

The idea of distributed work and working remotely had just been so thoroughly ingrained into the DNA of WordPress, and that really spoke to Alex. He started going to WordCamps and started doing plugin development and really tapping into WordPress to eventually build his course teaching others how to develop plugins.

To learn more about Alex Standiford head to wpdev.academy, and check out his blog at AlexStandiford.com. He’s on Twitter at @AlexStandiford, so you can connect with him there as well.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by my friend, Alex Standiford. He’s coming at us from New Mexico, from his new homestead. He’s the creator of a WordPress plugin development course. You can find that over at wpdev.academy. Alex has been around the WordPress community for a long time. He’s also an expert at AffiliateWP and has done some stuff with that plugin. He’s been around the block a little bit. Welcome to the show, Alex.

Alex Standiford: Hey, thanks Chris. Glad to be here.

Chris Badgett: I feel as we were talking before the show, I’m looking into my past, there was a moment where I left Montana in 2016, and I lived in an RV with my wife and kids looking for a place to live for a year. And then even after we landed where we lived in Maine, we still based out of the RV for a long time. It’s cool to see your journey. We even went to Taos for a little while, we found, there’s this great hot spring down below this brewery on this dirt road. I can’t remember where it is. Good to see you. I’m excited to get into it with you today. Give us a report, what’s the status of the homestead

Alex Standiford: First and foremost, that brewery is actually about 15 miles from where I’m located now. I didn’t know it had a hot spring, but I did know that it’s there. I’ve only ever gone to that one in Taos proper. I will be revisiting that because it is actually a lot closer. Taos is awesome. New Mexico is awesome. We’ve just completely fallen in love with this area. At the time of this recording, we’re in late July, right? People always think that it’s super hot in New Mexico, because it’s in the Southwest. We’re 7,000 feet up here and I’m sitting outside and it’s quite comfortable. It gets a little hot when it gets above 85, but the air and the breeze is really cold and it just always feels really good.

We live in this camper right now off grid and I’ve got 250 Watts of solar, so it’s not even remotely close enough to do much more than charge my batteries. Air conditioning is definitely not even remotely on the table. Heck even if I want to run the fan on this thing, I got to turn on the generator. And even with that, we still are pretty comfortable most of the time. We have a couple of days where we get a little warm, but other than that, it’s great. I’ve really enjoyed just coming out here and just living on this land, is completely unrestricted. Bootstrapping, we’re starting with literally nothing. We’re building a driveway, we’re putting the camper on here and we’re throwing some temporary solar on to make it work. We’re getting some water delivered here and then we’re making plans on how we can expand on it and grow from here.

Big conversation point for my wife and me has been sweat not debt. We’ve been trying this idea of just, you know what, this is what we can afford right now. This is what we can do right now. Let’s start there, instead of going to a bank and putting ourselves deep in debt to be able to have the home and the space that we ultimately want. It’s been a lot more rewarding than I thought it would be and obviously a lot less expensive. Hoping that we have something to show for it here in a couple of years beyond a camper and a couple of solar panels.

Chris Badgett: What caused the initial decision to hit the road? What was that inflection point like?

Alex Standiford: Well, I’ll never forget that day. I’ve always, whenever I first got into WordPress, it was entirely because I wanted to be remote. I always wanted to work from home. At the time it was because I wanted to spend more time with my kid, Bennett, my oldest one. Over time it’s evolved and I got that, I finally got that job and I worked and I busted my butt to be able to have that. Now that I have it, I’m like, I was living in this house and I was basically living exactly like I was living prior to, the only differences is I just didn’t have to commute. There was just this existential thought of I’ve been gifted and I’ve worked and I’m fortunate enough to have this, this opportunity that I can literally be anywhere in the world. If the moon had Wi-Fi and I could be on it, I can work there. Why am I 30 minutes away from where I was born? I couldn’t let that thought go.

I floated the idea. We bought this camper not to live in it, but to just use it. I floated the idea to my wife about it off and on over the course of a couple of months. One day in January of 2019, my wife, I was working and my wife came over to me and she leaned up against the door and she goes, so how serious are you about living in that camper full time? I was done working for the day because I absolutely could not concentrate on anything else, but that opportunity. Just one sentence, it was like, it’s over, it’s happening. Two weeks later we were gutting this camper and making it work for us. Three months later we were living in it. Eight months later, we were on the road and we haven’t looked back since.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s super cool. I think this is one of the great things about WordPress, it’s just distributed in such a way that it gives you this incredible freedom and also this just really interesting, awesome community. For example, I know, I have another LifterLMS customer who lives in Taos near you, in an earth ship. You know who I’m talking about?

Alex Standiford: There’s one, two of the houses down from here. Yeah. Very familiar.

Chris Badgett: His name is Marco Schmidt. He’s been on this podcast before, he uses LifterLMS. He does a lot of entrepreneur work in the Taos area, but this is all WordPress stuff. There’s this incredible network and incredible freedom that is created. One of the things I wanted to ask you about specifically as a WordPress developer, your course, you’re teaching WordPress plugin development, I believe it’s through teaching people how to build a beer plugin, we’ve got a custom plugin about a certain topic, beer, which I’m a big craft beer guy. That’s awesome. I just went through a hiring process at LifterLMS to hire another WordPress developer for the lifter project. It is very, very, very, very hard to find WordPress talent, which isn’t just WordPress, but all of the stuff that goes into plugins and themes and just all the stack and WordPress is changing and evolving.

If I was talking to somebody younger, earlier in their career, and they’re into this tech world, there’s just such a huge opportunity in web development and specifically around the WordPress ecosystem. Can you take us from your beginnings as a developer to teaching plugin development now through your website?

Alex Standiford: Yeah, definitely. Whenever I switched, I was a mechanical engineer for 10 years.

Chris Badgett: Doing what?

Alex Standiford: Point of purchase displays. I worked in sheet metal and a particle board and things like that. Actually you couldn’t spit without hitting a display that I had some part in, in a Best Buy for a couple of years there. Like I said, I wanted to work remote and I actually tried to do the freelancing thing as a mechanical engineer for a while. This was 2014, I think, maybe a little earlier than that. The culture wasn’t there. We as a society, globally, we just weren’t there, but WordPress was and always has been. It’s just this idea of distributed work and working remotely had just been so thoroughly ingrained into the DNA of WordPress that it’s not like, you’re not special, you don’t get special treatment or you’re not feeling like you’re being treated in some weird outsider manner because you happen to work remotely in WordPress, you’re just a part of the WordPress, that’s just what it is.

That really spoke to me. I started going to word camps and I started plugin development and really my journey from tapping into WordPress to actually building this course, ironically enough, starts and ends with a beer plugin. Whenever I first got into it, I realized that I wanted to do more than just make themes and building themes. I wanted to build plugins. I wanted to get into this, go deep and that’s all in the plugin side for me. I learned how to build a WordPress plugin. My first WordPress plugin that I built was a beer plugin, that created a custom post type and played with the metadata. I learned so much just from building that and learning how to do that, that I basically started building plugins for other people. I think between now and then I’ve built, I just pruned my GitHub repositories.

And at the time that I pruned them, I had 127 different plugins that I had built, between now and then. It started with a beer plugin. It continued with me just building a ton of different plugins for different purposes. Some of them were literally a single file with a filter in them, but a lot of them weren’t, a lot of them were custom database tables and just a ton of custom post types and different things like that. That’s how I ended up getting here. From there I started working, I got notified that Sandhills was looking to hire another person a couple of years ago. I’d always had my eye out for Sandhills, because quite literally when I started this, like I said I built that beer plugin and at the time I was actually trying to market myself toward breweries because they were really exploding at the time.

Every time I talked to somebody who knew Pippin at Sandhills, they would say, man, you got to meet Pippin, because he’s got a brewery. Right? It made sense. I’d always had envisioned that I would eventually, or always wanted to work there. It was one of those, man, if I could work some WordPress, this would be a really cool place to go. And then I heard that they had a job opportunity. I wrote an email, I gave my details and all that stuff. Just gave them one of the plugins that I built, which was a synchronization utility for Oracle’s NetSuite. Basically integrates NetSuite into WooCommerce to automatically create products using that sync relationship. Anyway, I ended up getting that job and I’ve been working at AffiliateWP for a couple of years. Just from there I learned even more and now I’m just trying to dump all that out and give it to other people in some way.

Because I think that a lot of tutorials and a lot of courses and things in WordPress right now are so focused on WordPress specifically. I don’t feel like they talk enough about fundamentals of actually using PHP and actually using JavaScript. I think that a lot of people hit this dead end with learning specifically about WordPress, because they decide that they’re going to learn WordPress instead of PHP and JavaScript and React and all these things, deeply. Right? My courses are focused on very practical advice. You build something on every course that I make. The intent is to use a wide variety of different skills and focus on not really being gentle about it. You know what I mean? My courses aren’t intended to be, most of my courses, at least as I go, I’m making more, aren’t going to be these courses where it’s just like, okay, we’re going to learn how to make a custom post type in this course.

It’s going to be, we’re going to make a custom post type and then we’re going to create a CLI command to automatically generate data. Or we’re going to use this composer package here to do this. And then we’re going to actually integrate all that into some custom blocks and all this stuff. It’s going above and beyond just making specific facets and specific features of WordPress and actually just focused on building something that’s actually production ready that you can actually when you’re done take that and say, I built this, I took this course, here’s what I’ve learned.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. Project based learning I think is super smart. I love how your story starts with the beer plugging and it ends. It’s almost like giving back and you’re going back to where it all began. Tell us more about, if somebody wants to get into web development, I’m seeing this huge opportunity for people to become a WordPress developer like you teach and the market is just, it continues to grow, you make good money, there’s all kinds of great reasons to do it. If somebody wants to learn, what are some just getting started tips you have for them?

Alex Standiford: Well, the first thing I would suggest is that they try to build a WordPress site. You know what I mean? You may not have to do the custom work and all the custom coding and all that stuff, but just learn it, mess with it and create an installation and see if it’s something that you actually want to work with more. And then from there, if you want to dive into the coding and all that, learn PHP and then learn JavaScript and then start messing with building plugins of WordPress. I think for me, whenever I did it at the time, it was on, my first course I ever took was through Nettuts. It was Jeffrey Way, and he taught me, I learned PHP from him. And then from there I learned JavaScript through Codecademy, I think. Basically just took those pieces, I’m not talking about learning, it’s super deep and going crazy. You can learn that as you go with WordPress, but learn the fundamental, the very basics, what’s an array, what’s what’s the difference between bullying and typecasting and all these things.

Just some things to just get yourself started, so you understand what you’re looking at. And then from there, after you’ve taken a couple courses on both of those, then get into WordPress, perhaps take my course from there or take maybe JS for WP, which is another great resource out there that does a lot of WordPress stuff like this, and just start. But for me, the best way I can think to learn is just by doing it, just build things, build a bunch of things, not just one or two plug-ins, tons, tons, and tons, and tons of things, just build stuff. I think more than anything, you’re going to learn what works and what doesn’t work just from that. I can tell you that the reason why my plugin framework uses registries, I can tell you until I’m blue in the face, why it’s awesome and why it’s great and why it’s scalable and all those solutions it solves.

But until you’ve built a plugin and you’ve created the technical debt that makes it to where you wish you had a registry, you’re never going to really care. Do it, make mistakes and just build a bunch of stuff.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. In my journey, I found three different characters in this WordPress ecosystem, and I’m stealing this from somebody else, I can’t remember where I heard it, but they talked about the hipster, the hacker and the hustler. The hipster is like the designer type person. The hacker is kind of like you, the developer, the coder. The hustler’s a little more like me, the business entrepreneur kind of thing. When these three characters come together, they make really cool stuff. You mentioned you were doing some building themes and maybe agency work. How did you discover that, wait a second, I’m this hacker character? How did you know? I guess you were already a mechanical engineer, so you were already there. How did that happen? Your side, by the way, it looks good. You have design skills and you’re very entrepreneurial. It doesn’t mean you’re not those things, but you’re primarily a developer. Right?

Alex Standiford: Right. Yeah. I do still run an agency called DesignFrame Solutions. The way that agency fundamentally works is everything is outsourced by its very design. One of the things about that that I like, is that when work comes in, if it’s something that really excites me and I want to do it, I just do it. The stuff that comes in that I end up doing is almost always a plugin. It’s never a theme. It’s never anything like that.

Chris Badgett: So it’s what you love to do, you have the most fun doing that?

Alex Standiford: Yeah, yes. Interestingly enough, I can answer this question when I realized I was a hacker through DesignFrame and that’s why I’m bringing it up here. My agency has always, has been there and I’ve got all these great ideas and all of these implementations and things for it. But I’ve always had trouble with connecting with my customers, because they’re talking a very different language than me, right? The value proposition I’m offering them, I just, I have a lot of trouble translating it and getting it to them. But then I turn around and I can bust out 12 different blog posts in a week for WP Dev Academy, because it’s what I talk about. It’s what I think about. It’s just naturally a part of it. Right? That’s actually what made me hire, at DesignFrame, we brought in another partner who’s in marketing specifically so that she can communicate to our clients because she actually understands what they’re asking.

It’s so funny because I’ll give her ideas for content and she’ll be like, you know I think it’s cool and all that you’re excited about the merits of a registry pattern and you know 10 different ways you can use a hash in your plugin, but your customers really, what they want to know is why they should use WordPress. I’m like, I don’t want to talk about that. If you have to ask that question, you’re not ready, I don’t want to talk about this. It really just made it apparent to me that I need to just lean into this instead of trying to take what I am and where I work best and trying to shoehorn it into working on custom work. Once I realized that, it became obvious to me that I just need to get back into tutorials. because 10 years prior to this, I actually did, my first WordPress site I ever built was called gimptutorials.com. It was literally just a bunch of tutorials on the photo editor GIMP.

Chris Badgett: I remember [crosstalk].

Alex Standiford: I ran that for a while. It’s weird it just comes back full circle. I’m coming back to doing that. Working with my partner DesignFrame to take care of the content while I’m simultaneously writing courses and teaching people how to build WordPress plugins, doing all these things really well. I’m also getting really good, I’m gathering and collecting a good pool of developers who are really good at this and who I know understand how to write code in the way that DesignFrame writes code, because it writes code the way that I write code. You know what I mean? It’s-

Chris Badgett: Maybe you’re a unicorn, you’re also very entrepreneurial. You’re building the pipeline for your agency while at the same time having great designs. Maybe you just do it all.

Alex Standiford: There is a lot of synergy in what I’m doing for sure. Because I’m talking about the things I want to talk about. I’m earning these opportunities to find developers who I’m literally teaching them how my agency works. You know what I mean? Not how it works, the machinations of the business side, but the actual development process and the expectations and the standards that DesignFrame is upheld too. And then I’m also, thanks to Lifter actually, I’m able to see who’s completed the course. S0

Chris Badgett: You know who your all stars are.

Alex Standiford: I already know who I need to reach out to whenever the time comes, if I need a new developer or somebody else to come in to do some contract work with us. We’re building out that talent pool while simultaneously earning some income and teaching people how to use this, and if they don’t want to work with us, that’s cool. Go ahead. Do whatever you want, everything I’ve written, the framework and everything that I use is all open source. You’re welcome to use it. You’re encouraged to use it. But if you want to come over here, I’ve got some gigs for you too. It’s not just that, DesignFrame also has these different partnership programs with WordPress, affiliate programs and plugin partnership programs for support and things like that.

If you happen to be on the team and you are aware of that, then you’ll be able to actually see different ways that you can work with us. I’m tapping into this market that I’ve been a part of that just fits for how I communicate and I’m using that to potentially help with DesignFrame. But if it doesn’t, I’m still earning something with it while simultaneously working with my partner and DesignFrame to actually communicate to the actual clients.

Chris Badgett: That’s really cool. You’ve built a neat system there that feeds back on itself, but it doesn’t have to, it’s every piece is valuable in itself. That’s amazing.

Alex Standiford: Right. Yeah. It’s fun.

Chris Badgett: How are some of the ways you’re finding to get students? I know WordPress there’s a lot of people on Twitter and various places, what’s working for you? You already have a big network in WordPress, you’ve been around for a while. What advice do you have or what’s working around recruiting, finding people?

Alex Standiford: Well, the first thing I did was I just asked people who I know, who are in this space that I wanted to have big followings, to basically just share it.

Chris Badgett: That’s a good lesson right there. A lot of people think there’s people that want to support you, just ask them. Right?

Alex Standiford: That’s literally it, I just got in some DMs on Twitter. I think I messaged you actually.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I shared it out. I was like, cool. That’s awesome. I would have done it if it wasn’t Lifter or it was something, I don’t care. I’m like, dude, a WordPress person has got some, I can’t wait to help him share that out.

Alex Standiford: Heck yeah. That was the thing. I just asked a couple people, honestly. Before the course came out, I literally created a landing page on alexstandiford.com. I hadn’t even WP Dev Academy yet. And to be clear, alexstandiford.com is actually a React app, so it’s not even full blown CMS or anything. I literally created a React component that was specifically my landing page and straight up just, it was so just, this is not intended to be used for long. This is literally just, I need to get a landing page up.

Chris Badgett: You MVP it.

Alex Standiford: I MVP the crap out of this. I just did that and I sent out a thing and everybody signed up, people signed up to the email list. I got a pretty good idea. pretty strong validation that there was interest in what I was doing. I took that and I got to work, I built WP Dev Academy and moved the landing page over to that, set up a redirect, so anybody who goes to the old page goes to this new one. And then once the course was ready, I just flipped the switch over to the LifterLMS course page and sent out an email to everybody who I’d collected in the meantime. From there I got a handful of sales, made enough money for me to be able to say, okay, let’s do it again.

Chris Badgett: How long did it take you to make the course? From all right, it’s time to roll up my sleeves, I’m going to show people how to make a beer plugin. I don’t know if you had challenges around, my video’s not perfect or maybe you didn’t care. You’re like, I’m just going. How long was that, start to launch and what was the experience like in the middle?

Alex Standiford: Okay. I learned a lot from this first course. I always jokingly refer to Bob Ross whenever I think about these courses because fun fact, Bob Ross actually made three versions of every painting he did. One he did before the show. And then I think he did, I don’t remember what the other two were, but one of them was done obviously during the show. He practices and understands what he’s going to do before he does it on the show, otherwise he’d never be able to get it in in 30 minutes.

Chris Badgett: It is challenging to teach and do at the same time.

Alex Standiford: Yes, absolutely. I took that method and applied it to this course. The first thing I did was actually built a plugin. Right?

Chris Badgett: Dry run.

Alex Standiford: Yeah. Right. The dry run. I built a plugin. As you’re building it, you’re thinking about the different, oh yeah, we totally need to talk about this. Right? And you’re building the course while you’re building the plugin. And then from there I built the actual course. Well, I built the syllabus basically. And then I built the course. And then I did editing as I went along. Basically the course took about, or the plugin itself took like three or four days for me to do. I’ve already done this, again, I’ve already built a beer plugin. So I already knew the problems, I already knew the challenges. If you hear me and you hear, oh my God, he built that in a couple of days just on the side, that’s crazy. It’s not crazy. If you already thought through the problems and you already know what you’re doing, it’s just practice at that point.

I built the plugin and then I started recording. I’m on Linux, so I’m using OBS and I’m using KdenLive for my video editing. Before this interview, I was actually sitting in my truck because that was my first spot. I was literally just getting up every morning. I was in Eagle Nest, New Mexico. We were parked with our camper and I would just, every morning I get up at five and I would go over to my truck and I would start it up and I would just start recording until the sun came up enough for it to get into the truck and it got hot. And then I would stop for the day. Recording wasn’t too bad. The thing that tripped me up the most honestly was the editing, that just takes forever to do. I actually was doing them in batches. I would record the video and then I would edit.

The reason why I was doing them like that instead of recording everything and then editing everything was, at first it was because of just logistics [inaudible], so many hours. I need to stop and switch over to be able to actually keep it moving. I realized after doing a couple of lessons, that it was better that way, because I was learning as I was going, what I needed to record next. If something went wrong or something didn’t happen as expected, I was able to catch it early enough that it wasn’t a real pain for me to have to go back, because you remember I’m building this plugin as I go. If I recorded everything and then I found out in editing that I skipped a step or I forgot something in lesson four, my plugin is done, I don’t really have that context to go back to it.

Now, I will next time be using Git, to actually at the end of each lesson, I’m just going to save a different tag so that I can go back to that version of history. I did not do that with this first course. That was fun. The editing was just slow and meticulous. I think I put more time into editing than I did anything else in this process. My next course, I actually hired somebody to help me do the editing.

Chris Badgett: Where’d you find that person?

Alex Standiford: Twitter. Because everything I do is through Twitter at this point. That’s just where the WordPress people are.

Chris Badgett: Nice. Yeah. That makes sense. Same thing, every time I’m doing something, I’m like gosh, I could do it so much better the next time, but that’s just the life of somebody who values continuous improvement and is learning and teaching while doing is challenging. You find these interesting workflows of, okay, I’m going to do these sections and bring it all the way through the process and then move on or do the ability to back trace through GitHub or whatever. I could totally see that needing to come up. Because not only are you creating and teaching, you’re in a completely different head space when you’re editing, you can’t do all that simultaneously, so you definitely learn a lot as you go, which is awesome. Well tell us about building your site, the WP Dev Academy. What brought you to Lifter as the tool to do that with?

There’s a lot of membership plugins and there’s other LMS stuff. I would say hosted solutions, but you’re such a WordPress guy, those aren’t even on the table, forget about those things. Why’d you choose Lifter for this? What’s the story there?

Alex Standiford: Well one of my clients a few years back used Lifter to build their site. That was my first exposure to the concept of an LMS at all. It was cool, it was feature rich and it had everything I needed at the time. I already wrote some code for it, so I already knew what to expect. I went with it. I went with that for this. It’s crazy because it’s been really good because it has more, there’s been features that I didn’t know I needed until it was too late. It literally just has them. That’s been super nice. The voucher system comes to mind. After I released the course, one of the first things I was asked was, hey, I’d like to buy your course company-wide, is there a way for me to do that? I was like, maybe. I shot your support team an email and they were like, yeah, you can do that with vouchers. I was like, oh yeah, that makes sense. Okay, cool. That’s one less plugin I had to build.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s what it’s like for us. We’re so in the trenches with customers, we’re really a user focused company, and how we drive our roadmap that, as soon as you started talking about that, I can think about five years ago, somebody like you being like, hey, how do I get a company in here? I’m like, well, we got to solve that, so then we developed the voucher system and then we have something called groups for that. I take that as the biggest compliment, when a piece of software is one step ahead of you and it’s like, we solve problems you don’t know you have yet. That’s one of the biggest compliments, so I appreciate that.

Alex Standiford: I also just appreciated that I’m usually more of a modular person where this plugin does one very specific-

Chris Badgett: Component?

Alex Standiford: Yeah, component I mean. Don’t get me started on my house. But I really liked that Lifter just does all of it. I didn’t have to worry about the e-commerce side. I didn’t have to worry about the membership custom post site, the courses, and all the different ways I can use it. It’s been really good. I tend to think of pretty weird ways to go about doing things sometimes. I have yet to find something that I can’t just do with Lifter. Literally in the settings, not even with a filter or a small plugin or something like that, it’s just like, no, we already do that. You got it. You’re good. I’m borderline gushing here, but I can’t possibly say how great it’s been. It’s an awesome plugin. You guys really did good.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, thanks for that. That’s a hat tip to the team. There’s a lot of people that make the magic at Lifter happen. Appreciate that. We market it as an all in one solution, which you can’t really say in WordPress, because is anything really all in one? Because you have themes and hosting, all these other component plugins that you ended up adding.

Alex Standiford: It’s a fun game, so you try to do an affiliate program.

Chris Badgett: AffiliateWP, by the way, I love that. It’s just such a great solution. I’m the same way, I use things in different ways. I’ve used AffiliateWP to create an internal sales commission tracking program that has nothing to do with Affiliate, but I made it work for that. It’s a great tool. And one of those problems I didn’t know I needed solved with AffiliateWP is, what if this affiliate who’s not really a pro affiliate links us up, but then they don’t put their affiliate link in there, but it comes from their site, and you’re like, oh yeah, we just do that in those [crosstalk]. That’s cool. That’s that same kind of compliment there. Well, what’s the future of WP Dev Academy or what you’re up to? Where are you trying to go? Because in WordPress, people change fast, they evolve fast and then sometimes they just doubled down and just dig in on where they are. Where are you going?

Alex Standiford: I’m digging.

Chris Badgett: You’re really digging in New Mexico.

Alex Standiford: Yeah. God, no kidding. Let me start up. The course right now, like I said, I built one course and then I kept on getting people asking me about if there’s going to be a membership option instead of buying the course, which of course Lifter, again, one step ahead of me, it was already done. I debated on it for a little bit and I sat down, I took some notes and I realized, I only have one course, so the value proposition for having a membership based site isn’t super strong right now, because I don’t have a deep, I don’t have a litany of courses for you to choose from. I had to think about how could I turn this into a membership site and give people that value now, right? How can I get people to do that?

Because that’s my goal, I really want to get to the point where it’s a membership site, where the courses are all handled through that. What I did was, at this time now, I’ve committed to building four more courses over the year. I’m sorry, three more courses, not four, three. I’m drafting up, every time I finish a course, the next thing that I do is I create a page that only premium members can access, that allows them to basically vote on which course I make next. All the content and everything that happens, at this point you would be buying in early, not because I have a deep well of courses, but because you want to have a say in what content is coming. That’s been nice because I’m simultaneously getting really good ideas, and also giving a sense that they are a part of this, a part of this community.

We also set up a Discord community on Discord. There’s some private channels in there that are premium only for discussions about next courses and things like that. That’s kind of the direction that it’s heading in. The last couple of weeks I’ve been focused hard on just writing a ton of blog content, just trying to get myself as far ahead as I can on the calendar, so that I can actually sit down and write the course without having to worry about the blog drying up in the process. That’s where I’m at right now, is just content, tons and tons of content. I have other ideas on different ways to show content in different networks and all these things. That’s just the goal, is to just create the go-to resource for learning how to become a WordPress developer.

Chris Badgett: That is awesome. Couple of unsolicited ideas just from seeing a lot of course creators, and maybe you’re doing some of this, I see some people take one or two of their best lessons in a course and put them for free on YouTube as a lead generation thing, it just builds a natural funnel. And then you mentioned getting into membership something I’ve seen people do, it’s really easy to over commit with a membership. It’s been like a recurring monthly membership where you’re like, all right, I’m going to release a new course every month. But even just, I’ve seen people have success doing, you mentioned community with Discord, but doing a weekly office hour mastermind call, where you don’t have to prepare, all you need to do is show up on Zoom or whatever and just be a resource for people as a membership. Maybe you already have that, I don’t know, but that’s-

Alex Standiford: No, I don’t. But I have lobbies. It’s just, I haven’t structured it enough yet, but yeah, that’s a great idea.

Chris Badgett: I’m literally getting ready to run one of those in a 10 minutes from now that I’ve been running for four, five years now or whatever. It’s one of those things where in my experience, not everybody who could use it, uses it, but there’s some people who will come in at the beginning and then they get oriented and they’re good. And then there’s some people that just come and they become regulars for a long time. It adds more value. And then I’ve seen in these communities people start connecting with each other, starting businesses partnerships and other things, it’s pretty neat. Wow, well, Alex, let’s land the plane around a note about family and entrepreneurship and this lifestyle choice to not go into debt and to really bootstrap in the truest sense of the term, as all these things come together for you. If somebody is inspired by that idea, what advice would you have for somebody to take that leap of faith and take the road less traveled if you will?

Alex Standiford: Well, I think that my wife talked about this a little bit in a blog post that she published on Casual Weirdness, which is another blog. It’s our blog focused on this, casualweirdness.life. She talked about how something that we hear a lot is, I respect the hell out of what you’re doing, they’ll say that. I really respect it. I think it’s awesome that you’re doing this.

Chris Badgett: But I can never do that.

Alex Standiford: I could never do that. Yeah. They’ll justify it in their head, that you can’t do it, that it’s too hard, that you need a bathroom that’s bigger than my bedroom, and you don’t, you’re wrong. You’re just wrong. I’m sorry. I guess the biggest thing for me, one of the first things we did that made me realize how wrong we were about that, was when we were first working to move into this camper, we were still like, okay, seems a little crazy, I don’t know if we can do this or not. Was whenever we took the cabinet space in this camper and we converted into bins, that gave us an approximation of what our space would be in the camper. And we went into our kitchen and we said, okay, these four bins have to hold everything in this kitchen basically.

We started putting stuff in there. You realize that everything that’s left is like the expired mayonnaise in the fridge, or the very specific spice that you bought three years ago for that one recipe, that one time, that you literally never did again. Just things like that. We accumulate stuff in big spaces. If you’re in a smaller space, you don’t get to do that. People whenever they say I can never do that, what I hear is, I can’t commit to keeping myself to that standard. Right? I would argue that it’s easier now, now that we’ve done it for a while, cleaning up this camper is a 15 minute process. I guess I would say that, start by visualizing your spaces and just really think about what it’s like. Whenever we transitioned into this, not only did I do that with the kitchen, but I stopped working in my office.

I actually just made myself work in the living room where everybody else was, because it’s basically what I do in here. Right? It sucked, not going to even beat around the bush, it sucked. That was one of those moments where I was like, I don’t know if I can do this. But then I realized that if I get some earplugs and some noise canceling headphones, and I face myself to a wall, the rapture could happen and I would have no idea. I apply that same thing here. You figure out solutions to those problems as you go, you’re not going to always be super comfortable. In fact, most of the time you’re not. I literally sleep on a Japanese mattress with a foam pad on it, because we have to be able to fold it up and convert it.

I’m not going to pretend that it’s a comfortable luxurious life, but if you’re like me and you believe that there’s a better way than to spend $40,000 on a solar system, whenever I’m over here spending $150 on enough to be able to power my camper, and you believe that there’s a way to stop using so much plastic and stop using so much energy and just stop using everything. I would like very much for you to just look at what we do and see that it is possible and it can be done. We’re just people, we’re not anything special. We’re just people who woke up one day and said, I think I could live in a camper and you probably can too.

Chris Badgett: That is awesome. That’s Alex Standiford, he’s from wpdev.academy. And the blog, is that on your name site, which is?

Alex Standiford: Yeah. If you go to alexstandiford.com, you’ll be able to see links to, I link to Casual Weirdness, I linked to DesignFrame. I link to wpdev.academy. My personal site has basically turned into a syndication [inaudible] this point.

Chris Badgett: What’s Twitter URL? I love following you on Twitter and seeing what you guys are up to. What is that?

Alex Standiford: It’s @AlexStandiford. All one word.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, thank you for sharing your story today. If you’re looking to get into WordPress plugin development, you’ve got to check out Alex’s course. Thanks for coming on the show and thanks for inspiring the people with what you’re up to and wish you all the best in your homestead and enjoy the journey.

Alex Standiford: Thanks, man. I really appreciate it.

Chris Badgett: That’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post How WordPress Pro Alex Standiford Runs an Agency, Teaches Plugin Development, and Homesteads Debt Free From His RV appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Learn how Michael Wiley transformed his life flippin’ mobile homes and teaching others how they can do it, too in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. Michael shares insights into how he turned 2016 census data into a profitable business.

Online course or membership websites are rarely successful when all five hats of course creation are not covered. You need an entrepreneur, an expert, a teacher or coach, a techie, and a community builder. Michael wears all five hats himself, which is very difficult for most course creators to succeed with, but he shares insights into his personality and how he pulls that off for his business.

A lot of people think about mobile homes as places with beer guards, mugshots, stray dogs and cats, broken down cars, and junk in the yard. And you do have that element in some places. But at the same time, it’s a very profitable niche market. And it’s important to niche down, because you’re never going to get all the money in a large market, but you can get a big chunk of a smaller market.

When you look at it and break down the numbers, according to the 2016 census data that Michael had looked at, there are over 11 million people in this country that fit the criteria to be in a mobile home. So he decided to help people make money, but also give people a chance to get involved with the real estate world who otherwise probably would not have been able to get the funding from traditional sources.

To learn more about Michael Wiley, be sure to check out FlippinMobileHomes.com. He also has a YouTube channel, so head over there and subscribe to check out what Michael’s coming out with in his niche to promote his course content. Go over there and like a video. It really does help him out with the algorithm. And if you want to join in the public group Michael runs and network with some people and learn about investment opportunities, join Michael over in his Facebook group at Flippin Mobile Homes.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Chris Badgett:

You’ve come to the right place, if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest, his name is Michael Wiley. He’s from flippinmobilehomes.com. When I see Michael around the internet, he’s like what I think of when I think of an education entrepreneur. Somebody who’s trying to teach online, he’s building an online business, he’s creating a ton of value, he’s making an impact and helping other people in business make money and figure out this world that he’s in. But first, Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael Wiley:

Man, it is great to be here, Chris. I cannot believe I’m actually on a podcast with you. Oh, my God. [crosstalk 00:01:03].

Chris Badgett:

That’s a lot of fun. Do you remember where you first heard about LifterLMS or us?

Michael Wiley:

I want to say it was probably about maybe three years ago and I was doing a lot of research at the time. I wanted to start up a course and I was like, “Man, I’ve got some cutting edge and everything. I want to learn.” So, of course you hit the interwebs and stuff and you get to floating around and you get all this information, and everybody’s talking about Udemy and [crosstalk 00:01:37]-

Chris Badgett:

Kajabi.

Michael Wiley:

Kajabi, yeah. [inaudible 00:01:40] right there for the the lazy course creators and everything. And so eventually I got to a point where I just kept on hearing the word LMS, LMS, all over, all the time. So I was like, “We’ll, just look up some popular LMSs and everything.” And eventually that led me over to Lifter. And when I got there, I was like, okay, I think it was little baldhead guy on YouTube as well.

Chris Badgett:

WPCrafter.

Michael Wiley:

Him. Yes. [inaudible 00:02:11] right there. A pretty cool guy. Puts out great content, very helpful person. And kind of led me over there. He was talking about the modules and everything, and when I got there to the website, when I got to the website and you had the demo up there, I was like, well, let me try this out. And it was just so, it was very easy. It was very easy, especially for a mind like mine where I can, you don’t have to be a wiz everybody, okay? You don’t have to be a wiz, but you do have to have some technical knowledge, at least. And I got on there and I was just blown away. And then what really did seal the deal for me was you, man. People don’t buy products, they buy you. And so I saw you and how just so laid back you were, already living the entrepreneurial lifestyle, I was like, this is the product for me.

Chris Badgett:

Wow. That’s awesome. And when you got into that, did you have WordPress experience yet? Like building websites or not yet? [crosstalk 00:03:12]-

Michael Wiley:

Yes, I did have some WordPress experience. I think a lot of people will kind of start off with Wix and everything and eventually migrate on over when you want a little bit more liberty. So, yeah, I had experience and stuff playing around with templates and everything, and it took a little bit, because I didn’t really understand how the other themes and everything kind of worked well with what you had going. And then once I got that down, I was like, we’re here. We’re here. Get it out. We’re out. We’ve arrived.

Chris Badgett:

Awesome. Awesome. One things I want to interview you for is that you kind of embody what I think of as somebody as an education entrepreneur who wears all five of the hats, which is really hard to do. And just to list those out, you have to kind of be five people at once. You have to be an entrepreneur, you have to be an expert at something, you have to be able to teach or coach or communicate as like a a teacher, you got to be a techie, and then you got to know how to build community. You’ve been able to figure all this out. Before we kind of get in and unpack some of those areas, could you describe who you help and what your main teaching is all about?

Michael Wiley:

Sure. So the people that I help are entrepreneurs just like you and me, with the exception of mine is more buying and selling mobile homes. Now, when a lot of people think about mobile homes, it’s always beer guards, the dregs of society, mugshots, stray dogs, and cats, broke down cars and stuff in the yard. And true enough, you do have that element and everything, but at the exact same time, it’s a very profitable niche market. And that was another buzz word and everything that I was hearing at the time that it was important to niche down, you’re never going to get all the money but you can get a big chunk of a smaller market. And so anybody who wanted to get off into like real estate who found themselves meeting some kind of a financial ceiling, like there’s a very low financial barrier to get into it and the profits are comparable, right?

So if you look and say, “Okay, I can get a home maybe if the bank takes me through these seven stages of approval and everything to get a home and maybe if I go on ahead and flip it, maybe I can ind somebody.” And so a lot of maybes in there, right? “Maybe somebody will come along who has the credit and everything to be approved, and then we’ll sell it.” And for crying out loud, when you’re just getting started off, you’re probably bootstrapping the hell out of it at that point, right? You’re out there on a prayer. And so with mobile homes, it’s like, okay, let’s say you get yourself maybe a house or something like that. You can flip. I’m going to go with just a ballpark range of, let’s say a starter 70, 80,000 dollars, okay? Bare minimum.

Now you got to flip it. Now you got to have your contract and everything. Whereas with a mobile homes, like, okay, maybe I can put in about 10 grand. Put in something like that and I can still make comparable profit margins with very little and like I can still put somebody into a home and it’s just easier to manage that way. And I think a lot of people at the time they were just blown away. They were like, “Oh, my God, [inaudible 00:06:41].” I was like, “Yeah.” So this is something that could work for the average person who wants to get into what I like to call alternative real estate because mobile homes are not real estate, they are treated as vehicles. They actually do have VIN numbers on them.

And when you look at it, when you break down the numbers, according to the census data, and I haven’t looked at the 2020 census data, but according to the 2016 data that I had looked at, there are over 11 million people in this country that fit the criteria to be in a mobile home. So I was like, “Hey, you know what? If you’re an entrepreneur and you like helping people and you want to make some money and you still want to work with real estate and everything but you also want to be able to give people a chance who otherwise probably would not have been able to get the funding from traditional sources, this is probably going to be something for you.” And so, dude, I’m not going to get off into the success story shit because I don’t want to jump the gun on any questions that you might have, but some of [inaudible 00:07:49] that I’ve seen people have from the things that I’m teaching. Man, if I was crying person, I would definitely cry because I’ve seen people just blow up. Yeah.

Chris Badgett:

That’s awesome. I love a good niche story. It reminds me of a, there’s another person who uses LifterLMS named Angela Brown. And she talked about how she helps house cleaners start and grow their career. And the market is just so massive. And like you’re saying like this niche of mobile homes, it’s a big market and maybe it’s an underserved market from people learning how to get into it. Not everybody’s going to be flipping condos in some big city or whatever it is. [crosstalk 00:08:29]-

Michael Wiley:

You’re right. Yeah. That’s kind of the image that gets put out there and that’s something I actually talked about earlier on when I had the whole PowerPoint presentation and everything. And it was like, now it’s like I don’t do that. But early on when I talked about it, I was like when you think about people who are doing any kind of flipping, it’s always the perfect couple and everything that you see on HGTV, they’ve got the power suit on and everything. “Hey, why don’t you come on in here for a open house and everything.”

And at the end of the day, what I see when I’m out doing everything, and I’m talking about, you would not believe or you wouldn’t think about it, but I’m actually, when I’m doing my thing, I’m actually around a bunch of silent millionaires. These men and women are out here, they drive pickup trucks, they wear flannel t-shirts that you can get from Walmart or Target and some jeans and boots and everything. They don’t splurge. They don’t go out here showboating for anybody. But if you actually take a look at the things that they’ve got, they might have about three, four parks or something like that and they swim in it with scrooge. [inaudible 00:09:41].

Chris Badgett:

I’ve heard that from some bankers before that the people that have the most money are often not like the most fancy dressed when they come into the bank or whatever, which is [crosstalk 00:09:54]-

Michael Wiley:

Yeah, that is often the case.

Chris Badgett:

Well, if we’re like in the expert hat, how did you learn this business?

Michael Wiley:

All right. So here’s a pretty dope story, man. Are you ready for this?

Chris Badgett:

I’m ready.

Michael Wiley:

All right. So in my, before, all right, so I used to work a factory job, okay? Just like anybody else, I was a nine-to-fiver, trading out my time for a paycheck. And as you know, and I’m going to say this for your audience, I live in Southeast Alabama. It gets stupid hot here in the summer, okay? Stupid hot. And so, you know what they’re saying in the Southeast, it’s not the heat [inaudible 00:10:38], it’s stupidity. But I’m just going to say this right here. So when I worked in this factory, let’s say you have a 90 degree day, and it would be like 10 degrees hotter because I used to work in a textile factory.

So at the time I had graphic design skills, Photoshop, Illustrator, and stuff like that, and I was using that as a side business to kind of like try to get out of that, lots of drama in the factory, employment space, and everything like that. So I got a few clients up under my belt. They were bigger. They were wealthy clients. People who could just fly me to New York and Miami and stuff and just kind of tell me what they wanted.

I’ve had the opportunity, the biggest client I ever had was BET. And so they used to have this program, I think they still do, it was called Stars or something like that, but we were a bunch of big names like Kevin Hart, Yolanda Adams, Anthony Anderson, people like that, that you know from shows like Blackish and they put on this big show, and they would give out these scholarships and everything for these people and they would do like a one-hour special and everything. I actually handled the graphics package for that, so it was pretty cool.

Chris Badgett:

Wow.

Michael Wiley:

So doing, in that creative space you have to be in a mental space to be able to be like upbeat and come up with something that’s going to, because people can feel it when you put together your presentation. You do presentations all the time. And if you’re not feeling it, it’s going to show. Well, I got to a point to where I was facing a lot of depression and I had gotten out of a relationship and everything and I just felt like a failure. And so at that point in time, I had already quit my factory job and that was how I supported myself. And because I had never experienced the entrepreneurial slump that people will eventually feel. The feelings of-

Chris Badgett:

Like burnout?

Michael Wiley:

Burnout. Imposter syndrome is a very real thing. I had read about that all the time and I was like, “I’m not an imposter. I’m the greatest [inaudible 00:12:44].” So that was not me. And then I experienced it and I just, things went downhill from there. So fast forward to my story a little bit, I was depressed. I was down. I was broke. The bank and stuff is calling. They were like, “We’re going to sell you your car and all kinds of stuff.” Could barely keep my lights and stuff on at that point. And I was actually sleeping on a friend’s couch and she was very helpful. To this day we’re still friends and I always tell her, I’m like, “No matter where I go at in life, I’m never going to forget what you did for me back then.”

And so I’m sleeping on her couch and everything like that, eating her food, showering and stuff in her bathroom. So I get a call from a friend of mine, a voice from the past. And so he calls me up, he’s driving trucks at the time, and he’s like, “Hey Mike, what are you doing, man?” And I’m not one of those kinds of people who lie just for posterity purposes, right? People will tell you, “Oh, man, it’s all going good.” And I’m like, “You know what, dude? I’m just going to be honest with you, man. I am shooting bad in life right now. All right? I am broke, I’m depressed, and I no longer have the will to go on.” Not suicidal or anything, not that there’s anything wrong with that. People, if you’re feeling suicidal, get some help. But I wasn’t at that point, but I was definitely down.

So he says, “Well, I got something for you.” And I was like, “Well, what’s that?” And he was like, “Man I need you to take some pictures of a mobile home for me.” And he was like, “I’ve been looking into investing in mobile homes.” And he was like, “I’m thinking about it.” I’m like, “Well, the more you explain it to me, the more it sounds viable. So I’m not going to put it down,” but I was like, “It sounds great for you. You’re driving trucks. You’re making decent money. You have no kids and anything like that. You basically got your rent, which you’re never at your apartment and stuff in Atlanta. So you can spread the love around a little bit more. Me, I don’t have that.”

So he was like, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll explain everything later.” He was like, “There’s this address right here to this mobile home. I want you to go take a couple of pictures of it for me. Here’s what I need. Kitchen, hallway, interior, exterior, all that stuff right there. If you can get that, send it to me on your phone. It would help me out a lot and then I’ll help you out.” I was like, “Okay, cool, no problem.” I go there to this mobile home. I think a cat lady stayed in there, all right? So when I go in there, there are turds all over the place. It’s been closed up. I think she had moved out probably about two or three months prior. So the place was closed up with all this pet smell in there and everything, right? Amplified to super salient levels. You know what I’m saying? [inaudible 00:15:36].

So, I go in there, open up the doors, open up all the windows, make a beeline outside, and I sit out there for about 15 or 20 minutes while it airs out some. I’m like, “Okay, I’m doing this. I am doing this.” And so I go back into the mobile home, take all the pictures of stuff he had requested. And I just want to make a little side note right here for a quick second. A phone, all right? A lot of people don’t think about this. This is a piece of technology that is a million times stronger than the computers that first put mankind on the moon, all right? And a lot of people just take it for granted, all right? So I’m in there taking these pictures and I’m like, “This is a tool that you can use to make money.” So I took these pictures, I send them off to him. Fast forward, two days later, he is in town now and he sends me a picture of him standing outside of the very same mobile home.

And with one hand, he’s shaking hands with some guy I’ve never seen. And then the other hand has got a big stack of cash and I’m like, “Teach me.” And that’s just kind of how I got introduced to mobile homes and from there we kind of partnered up for a time and he kind of took me under his wing. And I was like, “Oh, my God, I cannot believe just the amount of opportunities that are out here because…” Tony Robbins talks about this thing called a Reticular Activating System, right? And it’s a real thing. There’s a more technical term for it, neurons and all this stuff right here, but to give like a layman’s definition of it, have you ever bought a new car, Chris?

Chris Badgett:

I’ve never brought a brand new one, but I’ve definitely been shopping for a certain model.

Michael Wiley:

Right. Okay. That’s cool. And whenever you see that model or something like that, do you normally like, is it like a window opens up in your mind and you start seeing everybody driving that car around?

Chris Badgett:

Absolutely. Yeah, right now I’m kind of curious about Teslas or whatever so I see Teslas everywhere.

Michael Wiley:

Because that’s on your mind. Your Reticular Activating System is telling you that’s important to me, so now I notice it. And a Tesla is a high-end car, but it’s not necessarily one of those, it doesn’t get Lambo attention, you know what I mean? Like some of those people out there, what I call them, the try hards or whatnot, but if you want to Lambo, no hate there. But the thing is that your brain is telling you that that’s important to you. Same way when you learn a new word. You learn new words. You start hearing it everywhere. And it’s not like it didn’t exist before, it’s just that you weren’t paying attention to it. It wasn’t important to your brain, but now your Reticular Activating System is telling you, “Hey, this is important to me.”

So when I started getting into mobile homes, I see them everywhere now. Oh, rubberneck and all over the place, I wonder how much that’s worth. I wonder what I can get for that. I wonder what to sell it for. I wonder what kind of opportunities that I can unlock for myself if I just go talk to somebody. Knock on a door, hand out a card, and see what’s going to happen. What kind of magic will take place. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my journey into mobile homes and it has served me well.

Chris Badgett:

And how long ago was that when you first went and took pictures of that first property?

Michael Wiley:

October will make four years. October will make four years. I’ve been doing this for about four years now and I knew at the time that I wanted to get off into this because I had a friend girl of mine and she was just all about these courses and everything, and I had no idea about online courses.

Chris Badgett:

So how do you go from real estate flipper to teaching the craft of that type of real estate as well?

Michael Wiley:

Well, I was just about to explain that. So when she started telling me about these courses and everything, I stuck my toes in the water a little bit to see if the water was colder, whatever, what it feels like. I started getting off into it more and then I came across a few people who are just always talking about it. Dan Henry will be one of them. Russell Brunson’s a big name in the marketing space. And so I was like, okay, maybe I can get off into it. And so I, at the time, I didn’t know what I would teach. I knew about courses but I didn’t think I had anything that I could teach. But then when I started learning more about mobile homes, when I flipped my first mobile home, four years ago, I went into it with the mindset that this is what I was going to teach one day. [crosstalk 00:20:20]. Yeah, I’ve found my niche. I wanted to share the wealth with people.

Chris Badgett:

That is cool. There’s a saying we have at LifterLMS, like you’re a customer, but it’s our customer’s customer that we’re really focused on, like in the sense that, your success story is awesome. Your customers’ success stories is like really awesome. Because we’re, it’s just like, that sends out a ripple of impact in the world where people get success or learn something super important to them. Can you tell us a story about some of your people that have taken your program and what they’ve been able to achieve?

Michael Wiley:

Oh, man. Yeah. I really shine on this right here. So, I’m like telling my story, but I love it when everybody else has a success story as well. So one guy in particular, I just interviewed him. That interview is up on YouTube. The name of my YouTube channel guys, shameless plug here is also Flippin Mobile Homes on YouTube without the G, just Flippin Mobile Homes, okay? So, one guy named Lamar, he came to me, and I want to just let people know, like, okay, maybe I’ll touch on this a little bit later, but Lamar and I hop on a call, we talk for about 30 minutes. And like I said, he had this guy that was down the road from me. He had an old trailer park. Now this guy is like in his 70’s or something like that.

And you’ll have this a lot of times. A lot of times when people have done really well in life, which is what everybody is working towards, I think, having some kind of a legacy of something to leave behind and your family, and eventually you’re going to get to that point to where you’re just ready to live out the rest of your years and stuff in peace. So this was that guy that fit that criteria. He had a couple of trailer parks, I think. And he knew that he wanted to kind of chill out. Like I said, the guy is like in his 70’s and everything. It was him and his sister that was running it.

So he was like, “The guy’s got several mobile homes out there that nobody is staying in and I think maybe I’ve got a shot.” And I was like, “Okay, you don’t have any money, right?” And he was like, “No.” And I was like, “Well, go over here and do this to this guy. Go ahead and let him know that you’re here for him and you want to go on ahead and sell their home. Kind of tell them your situation. Don’t make it a sob story or anything like that, but just be real with the person because there are no magic words.”

So he goes down there and does exactly what I said. And they guy was like, “Okay, make me an offer for the mobile home and I’ll think about it and everything.” And so I was like, “Uh-oh, think about it?” And I was like, “Look, just go ahead and let them, do this first.” And I told him how to get him a buyers list before he ever approached the seller. Did the exercise. I have a little free exercise that I do which is something that I actually, it was an idea that I got from one of your earlier, I think it an article that you had done with somebody who was kind of using like little quizzes or something like that to kind of get people off into your course. And so it was a test your market exercise that I had made. And I was like, “Do this first and then go over there and talk to the guy.”

So the guy was very resettling. He was like, “If you bring me $5,000 for this mobile home or at least a seller,” he was like, “You can charge whatever you want for it.” So it was a wholesale deal. So what it was was he actually found like a couple of buyers and so one of the guys showed up, tried to play him and everything for that. I was like, “Okay, that’s not your buyer right there.” So the next guy showed up and he was like, “I like that mobile home. And it looks like you’ve got some other mobile homes out here.” And so what happened was he wound up buying that one mobile home. So there was a mobile home for $5,000. He half-whole sold it for like $10,000 and so so now he’s got 5,000 in his pocket to play with.

So the rest of these mobile homes, the guy had told him, he was like, “Look, if we do get business on this one mobile home, I’ll let you get the rest of these homes right here and sell them as well.” So the guy that bought the mobile home from him was like, “What about the rest of these right here?” And he tried to go and talk to the owner and everything but the owner was very loyal to Lamar because he had given him his word and he was like, “Well, if you want those mobile homes, you’re going to have to talk to Lamar about that because he’s the guy that we’ve entrusted to go ahead and handle that for us.”

So long story short, after all that was said and done, Lamar, putting nobody down, comes out of this with about, I’d say about 10,500 in his pocket. Tells me about it and everything. And I was like, “Dude, take a hundred dollars or maybe 150 or something like that. Take the wife and kids out. Stash the rest of it for another investment. It’s time to go to work.” And since then he has made thousands, right? And he continues to be an asset and I really want to kind of hammer that in there, because like you were talking about, yeah, I’m your customer, but I also have customers as well. And when you give that expectation or that hope for people, that’s one of the things that bolsters an entire community when you have those success stories like that. So yeah, that’s a very powerful event that I can make a difference in somebody’s life and I never look back. [crosstalk 00:25:54]-

Chris Badgett:

How do you attract or find people to learn from you?

Michael Wiley:

Well I have a couple of different avenues, but I will say that my biggest one is going to be YouTube. I use a couple of different tools out there like VidIQs, kind of like TubeBuddy. But before I get off into the weeds on that, I’m making videos telling people how to do something. And I’m like, “Okay, I have this topic and everything like that.” And so-

Chris Badgett:

I was actually looking before this interview and I saw one, I think, where it was like how to take a free mobile home and turn it into $10,000. And I think somebody just wanted it off their property or something and then… So tell us, this is like an example video like this, right?

Michael Wiley:

Yeah, it is. Actually, and it was just a guy, he had bought some land, and it had a mobile home on it. And I’ve got… People around my area know me for what I do. And it was like, “Hey man, I got a friend of mine. He’s got a mobile home he wants to get rid of, and like okay, he’ll sell it to you for a dollar.” I’m like, “No problem.” Understand people that a dollar makes everything legal, okay? I tell people that I’ve bought mobile homes for a dollar before and they’re like, “Get out of here.” I’m like, “No way I’m telling you the truth,” because you got to look at it. You got mobile homes that go for like 300 grand out in California, right?

So the guy gave me a mobile home. I went on ahead and did exactly what I said I was going to do with it and made that money. It got on somewhere. And that was just about the size of it. So I make videos of people out there, they already have the curiosity. Like I said with you, I had the curiosity about courses. And so, lo and behold, you had some content out there and I liked it. The personality was there, which I know a lot of times, software developers and everything don’t really have the personality to be able to pull people in, but you did. And that’s why I’m here. Most people tell me is that they’re comfortable with the things that I talk about and I really do provide value because I’m not the only person that they’re talking about mobile homes, but it’s the personality and the expertise that I display in my videos that really does bring them to me.

Chris Badgett:

I think you’re absolutely right. I’ve seen it. I can feel it in your energy and how you write and your social media, and like your videos I was watching and you were going into a mobile home and like the grass was high and you were explaining why these are good countertops. These cabinets are a little swollen and stuff, but your energy is like, you can feel the optimism and opportunity and it just bleeds through just the marketing or the brand, like that energy is everything.

Michael Wiley:

Yeah, it is. Don’t get me wrong now, it takes a little bit because like if you’re not, back to the whole phone thing that I was talking about, it’s an asset, but you have to be comfortable when it comes down to talking to people and you have to get in the mindset of, I’m not talking into a camera, I’m talking to people and they need me. Have you ever heard of a guy named Miles Beckler?

Chris Badgett:

I do know that guy. He teaches some marketing stuff.

Michael Wiley:

Yeah, he teaches some marketing stuff. Great advice from that guy right there. And he’s another guy that I learned from, I like his energy and everything, and I really did get in with him when he first got started. Like he built his YouTube channel from nothing. And so, nothing fancy, nothing in particular about like his productions or anything like that, it’s just straight from either his camera or whatnot to his desktop and back and forth. And I was like, I want to have that same kind of energy, even though it’s not fancy schmancy, you can feel how enthusiastic he is about talking what it is that he talks about. And so I kind of wanted to mirror that.

Chris Badgett:

That’s cool. That is super cool. Any tips on community building? Like how do you… Like you can attract your customers and you can create content, what is the, I’m sure there’s like a mobile home entrepreneur type community, do you have like a Facebook group or how did these people connect to each other?

Michael Wiley:

All right. So I do have a Facebook group. I have a couple. And this is like a little technique that I learned from Dan Henry, right? So this is a guy who basically just came out of nowhere. I was friends with a girl that works with him. Anyways, long story short, he had launched his course in, I want to say 2016 August. And it was like a 10K agency or something like that. And by December, he had hit 500K in sales.

Chris Badgett:

Wow.

Michael Wiley:

And then by January, he had hit 700, no, he had hit a million in sales, in revenue. And I was like, whoa, that’s major. But I noticed one little thing that he did. He had a public Facebook group and then he also had a private Facebook group. These are for the people who have paid for the course, and they want to get like the knowledge, because, excuse me, you never want to give out free knowledge that people have paid good money for it. You kind of want to give out snippets and everything like that.

And so when it comes down to community building, I would say, you have to keep that same energy in your group and once you get past a certain threshold, I’d say, I don’t know, maybe four or 500 people, they really do start to create their own kind of community based around the things that you’ve already taught. And I was just amazed because you never wanted, like you were talking about earlier about burnout, right? It’s a real thing. And when I did it, I kinda got burnt out again. I was like, “Man, I’m making way too much content. I’m on this all the time. [inaudible 00:31:55] is not why I got into it.”

And so what happened was this, I started logging on everyday and looking into the group and I’m noticing that they’re networking with each other now. And I made a video and I was like, “Hey guys, I noticed that you guys are doing this right here and this is not what I had originally envisioned and everything for the group, but I will allow it,” because it actually did help out. Like they were actually in different parts of the country like, “Hey, who wants to do a joint venture? Got this home right here, got this right here.” And there were several deals that came out of it. And I was like that’s great, so I encouraged that. And so eventually I got to the point where I was like, “Okay, we’re going to have certain days to where, I call it Mobile Home Mondays. You need to be posting pictures of stuff that you’re actually looking at because the internet, it attracts the intellectuals and the idiots alike,” you know what I’m saying?

So you got people who are just like, “Oh, mobile homes. That’s cool.” And then they’re off to something else. And then you have those serious people there. And there’s no way for you to be able to tell really who’s going to be who. You can just tell by who’s there when the dust clears and it’s time to go ahead and break ground on a project. And so you still want to nurture those relationships with people and you have to kind of do it that way, like, okay, keep something for them to be engaged. I don’t care if there’s a couple of days where you ask for some engagement from your group, post some pictures or something that you’re doing this, that, and the other.

And that really does help out people a lot because they can get feedback from people who either have experience or don’t. And there are people who were in there looking and it really does help them to, just because you don’t want, even though you’re probably the face of your brand, and I’m talking to other people who are course creators out there, even though everything is going to be centralized around you, you don’t want everything to rely solely on you. You do want your community to help each other out. And from there, information gets disseminated, so there.

Chris Badgett:

That’s awesome. One Flippin Mobile Homes question, and then I want to move on to some technical stuff, but does this usually involve moving the mobile home somewhere else or is it also sometimes flipping it and just reselling, but also getting the property it’s on and reselling it? Or is it both? What do you teach?

Michael Wiley:

It’s all of those things. So, you’re not, all right, so I get this question asked to me all the time like, “Okay, Michael, what do you do when it comes down to buying a mobile home? I don’t have anywhere to put it. Where do you move it?” And so I tell them all the time, it was like, once again with the whole car question that I asked you, but different approach, “When you buy a car from a lot, do they ask you if you have a driveway? No, they don’t. They’re not concerned about that.”

The buyer needs to understand, okay, if you’re buying this mobile home, and I post all the time, I post on Facebook whenever I have a mobile home for sale. There’s tons of buy-sell-trade groups out there. And one of the things that I tell people, I was like, “You need to be in 10 buy-sell-trade groups, populous buy-sell-trade groups in your area.” It’s one of the first things you need to do, because the more eyeballs you can get on your offer, the better. So with that being said, you’re going to have people, obviously who don’t have land. At that point in time, it becomes imperative that you go on ahead and let them know, “Hey, I’m not offering land with this mobile home. It’s going to have to go somewhere, so you’re going to have to iron those details out when you get it.”

Now, when I buy the mobile home from the seller, what I will try to do is if it needs any flipping, I’ve bought mobile homes that don’t eat any work at all, all right? But if it does need to be flipped, I’ll tell them, “Hey, I’ll need a little bit of time to work on the mobile home. And if it’s all the same to you, I can pay you some lot rent as long as the home sits here and give me, I don’t know, 30, 60 days or something like that to go ahead and get it out of here,” because you just never know, because even if you do get a mobile home, you’re still at the mercy of the movers, right? And so these guys will have garnered relationships with mobile home dealerships and everything, and so they have contracts for that. These are the big dogs at the top of the food chain. They’re going to get moves before anybody else. And then there’s a little guy who was going to be you and you come in on the back end of that.

And also weather does play a factor. I don’t know what part of the country you currently stay in right now.

Chris Badgett:

I’m in Maine.

Michael Wiley:

You’re in Maine? So have you gotten any of that rain and stuff that’s been coming up?

Chris Badgett:

Yeah, it’s been really wet this summer.

Michael Wiley:

Yes, really wet. I swear to God, there’s rain just about everyday, this summer. So that actually impacts you. So when it’s raining like that, movers will not touch it. So, it just so happens that I was like, “Okay, you need to garner a deal with these movers. Number one, if you tell them you have a higher volume of moves, they’re more likely to pick up the phone when you call. Your meal ticket now.” So, you’re not just an entrepreneur, there are going to be other businesses that rely on the business that you have now started. So bear that in mind. I’m talking about just lots of different people, contractors, supply stores, everything. Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, right? So when it comes down to that, just ask them to go ahead and have their affairs in order.

A lot of the time you will have people who do already have land. They’ll probably live in rural areas or something like that. They’ll probably have an anchor or two. Maybe they have a younger family within their clan who wants to get a start and they’re helping them out. Getting them a mobile home. Or maybe they’re just going on into a park. And a lot of the times, what I tell people also is if you go into a park, let them know that, okay, when you see an empty mobile home lot, what does that mobile home lot represent? It represents loss revenue for that park. They’re not making any money off of it.

So when you go in there, tell them, “Hey, I would like to buy and sell mobile homes in your park, if you do have private owners.” Not every park allows people to own mobile homes in their park. Sometimes they’re greedy. “So, if you allow me to come in here and do that, my goal is to keep that mobile home in here and also probably move other mobile homes in here that will fit your criteria. And that way the park is making money. You’re making money. You don’t have to worry about where to take the home to.” And you’ll basically run them through the process of the application process as well, because the parks wouldn’t know if the people that you’re moving in there can actually pay their lot rent and everything. If they have the disposable income, then we’re going to be able to cover their bills, so that’s that.

So, yes and no. People will have their land. Sometimes they won’t. Garner relationships with parks. And also, last but not least, I have sold a mobile home with some land and that’s where skip tracing comes into play. When you’re dealing with real estate, I don’t care if it’s mobile homes or regular homes, there’s going to come a point in time where you’re going to have to know who the land owner of that is. So you’ll probably want to get on something like white pages. I’ve hired a PI before for like $150 to look up who the owner is. And from that $150, I’ve made about even grand off the sale of like an acre-and-a-half or something, off in the country.

Chris Badgett:

Wow. That’s super cool. This is the power of a niche. Like it’s so specific and so nuanced and it’s also a relationships game. There’s all these different characters from the park owner, to the mover, to the contractor, to the supplier, and all kinds of stuff. That was awesome. [crosstalk 00:39:53]. Well, packaging all this up in a website and creating a learning opportunity, let’s talk about LifterLMS a little bit. What do you like most about it? How do you use it to teach?

Michael Wiley:

Okay. My favorite feature about Lifter would definitely have to be the course builder, all right? It’s dope. What I did was I actually had, I went off into Microsoft Word and if you’re looking at this live and everything, you know about Microsoft Word, you know the powerful tools and everything that it has in that. So I just started making out my course and typing out everything that I wanted to do in that course.

Chris Badgett:

Like the outline kind of thing?

Michael Wiley:

Yeah, the outline, I was typing out the outline and everything. And so I was, with the course builder I was able to replicate that. I was like, wow, I can make out the course, all right? I don’t have to do anything with it right now. Just make it and leave it. And then I could just make out the module, okay? Then I was like, okay, I know my course has like six modules in it. So I made out the modules, and then I made out the lessons. Then I just started copying and pasting and everything from my outline right over into [inaudible 00:41:09]. I had all that built out. And I was like, now, the only thing I have to do is just make videos for that. I’m the video maker, all right? I was making videos before I ever had a course, before I ever flipped my first [inaudible 00:41:21], I’m a video guy.

Chris Badgett:

So that’s the easy part for you.

Michael Wiley:

That was the easy part for me. It was just the structure of it and everything. There were a few things that kind of puzzled me first because I didn’t have any experience like dealing with APIs and things like that, but it was very quick. I think I was able to find like a few videos of yours on YouTube that explained it. And you also had it like in a little mini course that you have on the main site as well showing how to do all that stuff. And it was quick, it was easy. And, yeah, didn’t require me to build a rocket ship to Mars or anything like that to go ahead and put it together and I really did like it.

Chris Badgett:

Well, that’s awesome.

Michael Wiley:

It was clean and just very professional look and I really did like it. Yeah.

Chris Badgett:

I appreciate that. I saw you giving a shout out to Lifter in our Facebook group, which I appreciate. I think it’s good, when you use technology or learn something from somebody it’s always good. I try to spend a little time, like you, sharing the love a little bit, showing some appreciation out there, so I appreciate you doing that. One of the things you mentioned is you were talking about like the WordPress and LifterLMS versus like a Kajabi or something. If somebody is, like how are these different in your mind and why has WordPress and LifterLMS ended up being a better fit for you?

Michael Wiley:

It all boils down to one word and that’s going to be ownership. When it comes down to it, you’re putting in a tremendous amount of work. I do not want to mislead anybody, okay? And if you’re going to be successful in this course space, you are going to have to work like a one legged man in a bucket kicking contest, all right? So, you’re going to have to put together your modules. You’re going to have to nurture those relationships and everything with people. And at the end of that, at the end of that, for somebody to, in no uncertain terms, tell you that your material that you have worked hard for, belongs to someone else, it boggles my mind. And then I’m going to have to give you a cut of my hard work when all you’ve done was set up a website and you’re literally curating content from something that I have had to put in blood, sweat, and tears. It does not compute. Okay? It does not compute.

So whenever I hear somebody saying something about Kajabi or Udemy or something like that, it might be for you at the end of the day, but you got to ask yourself. And I do remember that post that you were talking about when I was giving a shout out to Lifter. And at the end of the day, at the end of the day, when you’re putting in that work for yourself, you’re not doing it for somebody else, you’re building a brand. And just to be able to have that stuff as an asset for yourself, as a monument to your work, you’re going to have to say, “Yes, I’m going to have to put in the work, but how far am I willing to take this? How far am I willing to take this?”

There’s a poem that’s one of my favorite poems. And every time I hear it, it brings a tear to my eye. It’s Go All The Way by George Bukowski, all right? And he was like, “If you’re going to try, go all the way, otherwise don’t even start.” And I feel like you to me and Kajabi, you’re not going all the way. You’re asking someone who owes you nothing, who’s going to dip into your profits, to meet you halfway. When you just go on ahead and take the leap, I literally have that as a signature on my phone, so whenever I open up the screen, everything, it just says, take the leap right up there in the top corner.

I took the leap with Lifter and I have not been disappointed. You guys have been super helpful. Anytime I want to do anything, I think maybe, in the three years or so that I’ve been using Lifter, I’ve maybe only had to do one support ticket or something like that, which was answered promptly. And you have a very awesome team over there. I really like you and your team of people that seem very nice and very helpful.

Chris Badgett:

And, yeah, thanks for sharing your perspective on creating an asset and going all the way. I’m going to have to go find that poem. Can you tell me the name again of the author?

Michael Wiley:

Yeah. Charles Bukowski. He’s got several poems on there, but if you find it on YouTube, just type in Go All The Way and it’s going to come up. I think it’s like, maybe one of the more popular videos is going to be like two poems or one, but both of them are super powerful. Super powerful.

Chris Badgett:

That’s awesome.

Michael Wiley:

Yeah. Just to give like a little bit of nuggets from that poem. He talks about, he was like, basically seeing your dream out. He was like, it might mean jail time. It might mean derision, mockery from people, because when you’re starting a course or something, and I have wealthy friends, okay? When I first started, like I said, I was broke when I started off but I still had wealthy friends. I got personality. Money is not the only currency out there. And when I told them about mobile homes, the look on their face was, mobile homes? And I’m like, “That’s the look I’m looking for, right there, because I know I’m in a spot where you guys are not at. It’s not to blow about it or anything like that, but I know that I have a niche that people turn their noses up at when everybody else turns that market down, you know you’re in the right spot.” Do you know who the most wealthy mobile home investor in the United States is?

Chris Badgett:

No, who is it?

Michael Wiley:

Warren Buffett.

Chris Badgett:

Oh, wow. Oh, that makes sense, because he’s a value investor [crosstalk 00:47:35] and I know he does a lot with RVs and stuff, so that makes sense.

Michael Wiley:

Yeah. If the value is there and it makes sense, he’s a practical investor. If it makes sense to him, he’s invested in. Close second would be a guy you probably never heard of, but he’s also very wealthy, I think he’s at about eight billion, Sam Zell. When you get like that, and he said, “Poor people should not envy rich people, they should emulate us.” And so it wasn’t like this elitist kind of thing.

He was like, “If you spend less time looking at, oh, so-and-so is trying to get out of paying taxes and [inaudible 00:48:10] they’re a bad citizen, all this stuff and I work hard and everything like that, look, you can learn a thing or two,” but about that poem, he talks about that, and like I said before, I’ve had friends that kind of, they look at you like you’re crazy when you’re trying to make it happen. That’s going to happen to you, I’m talking to the viewer. You’re in a good spot, okay? Don’t let it get you down. If you’re going to start this thing, you need to see it through.

Chris Badgett:

Yeah. Yeah, that reminds me of that quote, like first they laugh at you, then they ignore you, and then something, whatever, then they follow you or something like that. It’s [crosstalk 00:48:46]-

Michael Wiley:

That is it. I have a great friend of mine who is a self-made millionaire. He was the mayor of my city at the time when we became friends and I’m down there having a couple of beers in this bar and he comes in the door and he finds me and he sits me down and he tells me a story. And he was like, “Michael,” his name is Mike too and he’s the only guy that calls me Mikey. And so he says, “When I first got started,” though he owns like a lot of car dealerships and everything like Mercedes-Benz and Harley and all this stuff here. And so he said, “When I first got started, man, people at the country club couldn’t even remember my name.” And he was like, “But I’m going to tell you something. Success is a very sweet revenge.” You don’t try to get up all this money in order to get revenge on people, but he was like, “You see how differently they treat you when you were right.”

Chris Badgett:

Yeah, that’s a great point. My last just kind of Lifter question before we get out of here is, what would you say to someone who’s on the fence and they’re shopping for LMS software. I know people do a lot of research. Like you mentioned, you got into it and you’re like you’re in learning mode and you’re learning about all these different things. And I see a lot of people that are just a little bit overwhelmed at just all the research, trying to figure out the tools they need, any other, you’ve given a lot of great experience on how you processed all that and your thoughts on it. Anything else about somebody who’s just kind of in that world trying to figure out what tech to use?

Michael Wiley:

Sure. Let’s talk about it from the point of the person who’s sitting on the fence. Now, why are they on the fence? Like anybody else, you’ve probably got analysis paralysis. There is a lot of information out there and I understand you just don’t know who to go with or anything like that. I was the same way and there are a lot of other people who are also Lifter customers. People are not being paid to say this, but they are satisfied with what they get. If you like being in control of what you have created, if you like having a great team of support behind you, if you just like something that looks great. I think I’m running the Astra Theme with mine. And it’s just so easy. I’ll say this. Like this past week, like I said before, and I knew I was going to revisit what I was talking about, I undervalued what I had, right?

Initially when I launched, I knew I needed social proof and everything like that. You got to have that. Everybody talks about that and I’m like, “I have nobody. Nobody is in the course or anything like that.” So I started off at like an entry point of about a thousand dollars. And then I was like, “Okay, so for my first X amount of people, you can get in with this early bird coupon.” That was another thing that I liked about Lifter is that you could make coupons. So I made out 20 early bird coupons, all right? And for like half off, all right? I had like 997, so when you put in the coupon, it dropped you down to 497, you’re in the course, you can learn everything like that at your leisure and it’s mobile friendly.

So I was like, “Man, you can eat cookies in the bed and you’ll still learn something from me if you want to, at your own leisure and everything when you get some downtime and everything at the house,” so cool. Boom. Got that. Then I started getting in like reports and stuff from other people [inaudible 00:52:25] got a course over here and they’re charging seven grand for it and I’m like, whoa! Whoa! I’ve really been shortchanging myself. I live in the South and the cost of living here is just astronomically low here. Like if you’re making 60 or 70,000 dollars a year, you can live like a king or a queen in the south, okay? This opens up everything.

Another thing I liked about Lifter on that same vein of thought was, I was like, okay, it’s time to move forward with my next phase of my plan and I’ve got all the social proof and everything. So I changed up my sales page. I do use Thrive Themes for my sales page, all right? It’s a great product for that. Not to plug anybody else’s stuff, but I don’t see a lot of people talking about marketing enough in the course space. It’s a very important factor. You can have a great course, but you don’t have anybody over there. You can’t get anybody to it. You’re never going to sell anything. You need to get that hammered out. But once I went on ahead and decided I was going to go up in price, because it was worth it, it was going to come anyways. I was like, okay, the coupons are gone. Everything is going up in price and everything. And it was just like so easy with Lifter to where I could go to my backend and eliminate one of my sales options or purchase options.

Chris Badgett:

Access plans, we call them. Yeah.

Michael Wiley:

Yeah, exactly. The access plan. So I had a payment plan. I was like, “That’s gone.” Gone on to hit up in the price and it literally took seconds for me to do that and people were just like, “Okay, we’re here.” And I’m like, “Okay, cool. Now we’re rocking and rolling along and everything.” And I did well at 500 bucks, but then when I went down and hit up the price to like two grand, nobody batted an eyelash or anything like that, it was still a great option. So with that, the ease of access, how beautiful it looks, and I like the little tabs and everything, they kind of come down to where they can actually toggle things down and see their course progress. That was a bell and whistle that really did wow me about that, and so it was just great.

So I’ll tell anybody this right here, man, if you’re on the fence, you only have, you can look this up, there’s a chart online, and it’s just a bunch of squares, right? And each one of those squares represents how many weeks that a person has to live in a typical lifetime. We’ve gotten through quite a bit of those weeks and you have so much time left. Do not look at this video and do not look at LifterLMS two years from now, wishing that you had taken some action today that you should have done already. You know what I mean? Do it now. For God’s sake, do it now, because I have no idea where Lifter is headed in the future. I’m sure you have some great players and everything in the future, but you have the opportunity to take advantage of somebody and a product that really is easy to use. And if you don’t know what you’re doing, there’s a great support group behind you, but it’s just awesome.

You guys aren’t in my inbox all the time trying to push X, Y, and Z and everything all the time. It’s always some kind of help. You guys are very helpful. You always make sure that you keep the end-user and everything in mind. What do you do this? And the people that you interview too, I watch those as well. And they just give up so much great value. And there’s great life out there, and it’s got your name all over it. But as long as you’re sitting on the fence, and as long as you have all this analysis paralysis, and what do I do? The only thing you have to do, like Les Brown says is, the only thing you have to do is decide. Make the decision to be great. You can wake up today at 20, 30, 40, 50-years-old and just decide that you are going to do something different. That is the only thing that separates the successful from the habitually unhappy and the unlucky.

Chris Badgett:

Michael, thank you for being a shining example of what an education entrepreneur is. You really combine three things well that really shine through and I’ve just learned more and more in this interview is, and just for you who’s listening in your earbuds or watching this on YouTube, you have a, just like niche real estate focus, which is super powerful, and you help other people build business, which then it just keeps entrepreneurs and small businesses, the main engine of our economy, and you have found a great niche. You’ve also invested in your technology learning in terms of learning WordPress, learning how to do video, being excited about it. So you’ve done the investment in getting the tech skills you need which are really important in our modern world, not just for course creation.

And then you have this passion. I can tell we watch a lot of the same videos. I love a good Les Brown video to get me pumped up. And I’ve seen those posters with all the squares for every week and you can check them off as you go. I’ve been meaning to get one, but, yeah, I think those things combine together to really, it just helps to accelerate you. And I appreciate your honesty too around, hey, there were some not good times and you were down and out and there was a mentor who came into your life that helped you with that and kind of helped you out with your taking those first pictures of the mobile home. And then your curiosity pulled you into that world and you were open to learning and growing, and now you’re doing that for others at scale through the website, which is awesome.

So, that’s Michael Wiley. He’s from flippinmobilehomes.com, no G in that. Is there any other final words for the people or anywhere for them to go to connect with you?

Michael Wiley:

Like I said, I do have my YouTube channel, so I would appreciate any subscribers over there. I’m doing a 90-day content push right now. I kind of took a little break in there because I think, like this little sickness and everything going around kind of broke my momentum up a little bit, but, yeah, pushing out videos over there. I would appreciate a subscriber over there. Go over there and like a video. It really does help me out with the algorithm. And if you want to join in the public group and everything and probably network with some people, maybe learn about some investment opportunities you probably didn’t pay attention to, join me over in my Facebook group at Flippin Mobile Homes, and you can find me on there and it’ll be like, there’s two of them that’ll probably pop up. One is orange, that’s the public group. The green one is the private group from when you actually buy into the course, but join the public group. I’d love to connect with you.

And you have to trust that the dots will connect, folks. I learned about course creation before I ever knew anything about mobile homes, but all those dots connected. And you have to trust that they’ll do the same thing for you. Just keep learning and keep pushing forward and make a decision.

Chris Badgett:

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post How Michael Wiley Transformed His Life Flippin’ Mobile Homes And Teaching Others How They Can Do It, Too appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Learn about how to use conversational commerce to scale your online education business with Paul Ace in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. Paul is coming to us from the UK, and he works with conversational commerce to scale and really eradicate roadblocks for course and membership site growth.

There’s a famous quote by Martin Luther King, Jr. that says, “You don’t need to see the whole staircase. You just need to take the first step.” We can look at the customer journey in the same way. So instead of looking at it from a perspective of trying to get prospects from the start point to an end point, you can focus on how you can get them to the next stage of the customer journey. What happens when you start breaking that down is that you can see more clearly where people are dropping off in the process and understanding how you can enhance the customer experience.

Paul has a seven figure audit tool. You can use that resource to go through your business checklist and what your score is to see what you may be missing from getting to the next level. If you’re at six figures wanting to get to seven figures, or even seven figures and you want to get to eight, this audit will be for you.

You can also connect with Paul’s team over SMS or over email about your results. And you can book a call off the back of that if you’d like to connect further. If you feel like you’re burning a lot of money in your business, head to amplifyccom.com. Click the video at the top to watch that, and then click Book a call to schedule. You can book a call personally with Paul, and if it’s a good fit, you can do something together and make some magic happen. To check out Paul’s podcast, be sure to head to www.amplifyto7figures.com or search on iTunes Amplify to 7 Figures. And you will be able to see Chris Badgett featured on there, too.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name is Chris Badgett, and I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Paul Ace. He’s coming to us from across the pond over in the UK, and we’re going to get into an awesome topic today, which is how to use conversational commerce to scale and really eradicate roadblocks. And before we get into the main event here, Paul, welcome to the show.

Paul Ace: Super, super cool to be on the show, Chris. It was great to have you on our show the other week. So I thought I’d return the favor and give some value back to your audience as well.

Chris Badgett: Absolutely. And Paul is over at amplifyccom.com. And what’s the name of your podcast show? I just want to make sure we get that right.

Paul Ace: Yes. Amplify to 7 Figures. You can check out amplifyto7figures.com and you’ll hear Chris’s episode dropping in about three months time. I think something like that, depending on your listeners.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And your interview was really good. It was a no brainer for me to get you on here. Let’s start at the core for everybody because when I learned this and then I realized I had a lot to learn, I still do. So I’m sure I’m going to learn something for you about the customer journey and how important that is. For the new person out there, who’s getting into online courses or coaching or training based membership sites or the agency owner or somebody who’s already moving and thinks they have a good business, but they’re kind of stuck at a ceiling and they want to scale, if we really zero in on the customer journey, what is that?

Paul Ace: Yeah. So there’s a famous quote. I think it was by Martin Luther King that says you don’t need to see the whole staircase. You just need to take the first step. So we look at the customer journey in the same way. So instead of looking at it from a, “Okay, cool. I’ve got to get them from this start point to this end point,” you just go, “How do I get them to the next stage of the customer journey?” Because what happens is when you start breaking that down, then you can see where people are dropping off in the process and understanding how you can enhance the customer experience.

So what is the customer journey? Well, it’s every step that someone takes. So imagine like a staircase. Imagine the top of the staircase is where the end goal that you want people to do. So that might be a sale. It might be an up-sell product. It could be that your high ticket backend product. So imagine that at the top of the staircase, and then you’ll have that customer starting at the bottom. They’ve never heard of you. They never know anything about you. What are the steps that they need to get through to get to the top of the staircase with you?

Then how can you hold their hand through that process so they don’t go and fall down the steps or fall off the steps. And they feel like that experience of walking up the steps is like have you ever seen those piano steps that you can get?

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Paul Ace: So it’s a magical experience, right? So the journey of climb, not the steps is a magical experience. That’s what we’re looking for throughout the whole customer journey to improve conversion rates and referral business, because people love it.

Chris Badgett: Do we need to, like, it’s super clear on our customer avatar? If we’re going to really map a customer journey, I find, especially newer people they’re really focused on, “Okay. It’s about me, my course, or my membership, my contents all around sales.” But it’s not the full journey. So how do we get started?

Paul Ace: Yeah. Here’s the best way to know your avatar, ask him. There’s this disconnect between online and offline. So you see a lot of brick and mortar businesses. What would happen if someone walks into your store or you go, “Hey, how can I help?” What happens when someone walks into our online store or course, or whatever it is, they go, “Can I automate that?” He’s like, “I don’t want to speak to anyone. I just want this laptop lifestyle where I can sit on a beach and money just magically rolls in.”

So what we look at is, well, how do we create that feedback loop right from the customer? So it’s like, “Oh, why are people dropping off at that stage?” Well, ask him. Well, I haven’t got time to go and ask every single customer why they didn’t buy. Yeah, you have. You can automate that part and then take the responses in a manual way. So we look at this 80% human like experience where let’s use the words that we would use if you’re having a normal conversation.

So just think back to anytime that you’ve sent an email out in an autoresponder, did you write that in exactly the same way as you wrote it, if you were just reaching out to someone normally, right? So if I were just sending you a message to say, “Hey, Chris. Listen, I’d love to have you on a podcast. I saw you did this and this and this. We’re great to have you on.”

It’s very different from the way a lot of people go, “I need to write in this very particular way. When I write on emails, I need to sell the benefits and structure everything in this way.” So we break that process down and go, how do we create the feedback loop from our customer? Where, for example, the first message, let’s say, someone comes to your site, they opt-in to watch a webinar, and then they don’t go and buy.

So instead of just going, “Hey, you missed the webinar or go back and watch the webinar. Hey, we just wanted to see, what did you think of the webinar?” If they watched a little bit of it, “What did you think of what you watched? I’d love to hear your thoughts.” Or, “Hey, I noticed that you missed a webinar. Did something break or something that work? Just let me know. I’ll get it fixed.”

Super, super simple. And then what you can do from the customer support team, whether that be you, if you’re small or whether you’ve got a customer support team on hand is then say, “Hey, take that information, put that in a Google sheet, and then we can analyze that. And then we can see what is the exact, not just what are the problems or the challenges that people are facing, but what is the exact language that those people are using and who are they? Right?

So then you can take more detail from that. So if the customer service person wants to say, “Oh, curious, what business are you in?” And then you can go, “Okay, fill that in.” Then suddenly, instead of going, “Who’s my avatar?” You go, “Well, who am I attracting right now? And then how can I position my messaging based on what those people are telling me to improve the conversion rates and improve that buyer experience?”

Then you take that information and then automate some of that. So if someone’s saying over and over again, that the number one reason is we’ve got a client at the moment in the mom niche. We take a swig out of this one. So let’s say you work in that space. What mom’s got a lack of a lot of the time? They’re coming back to you saying, “I’ve got lack of time.”

However, instead of they might not be saying to you, “I’ve got a lack of time.” They might be saying I’m really busy all the time. If we went on the sales page and put in the headline, even if you’ve got a lack of time, moms go, “I haven’t got a lack of time. I’m just really busy.” Right? So then we look at the emails that we’re sending out afterwards, and then we start automating objection handling videos and objection handling emails based on the exact phrase and the exact wording that they’re using, rather than what we think they’re saying.

Chris Badgett: I love that.

Paul Ace: That’s the customer journey process.

Chris Badgett: I love that. When people ask me how to increase conversions, I like to say optimize for conversations, not conversion. And conversions will follow. But it really ties into what you’re talking about there. Is this predominantly coming through email replies, forms, chat, talking to people, if you go to a conference or just all of that? Where do you get it all?

Paul Ace: Yeah. You hit the nail on the head.

Chris Badgett: Social media too. I’ll just throw that out there too.

Paul Ace: Yeah. So like any place where you can talk to your customers, go and talk to your customers. Yet if you’re at scale, you might not be able to get on the phone with every single customer for 15 minutes. However, I would recommend at the very least having exit surveys that go at the end of your show respondents to find out why people didn’t buy it. And then send one as well to the people who did buy. Because a lot of the time we focus, “Why didn’t people buy?” But we all should be focusing on why people did buy. So then to answer that question, looking at email, SMS, messenger, personal video messaging, personal images, voicemail drops. We’re just putting in a process at the moment where, when someone buys a $37 product, that then will trigger an automation that manually calls that person’s phone, like the onboarding specialist phone and it says, “You’ve got a new person who’s just bought the call desk. Press one to accept.”

So instead of that delay of like, “Oh crap, I need to ring that person. They’ve just bought.” It goes straight to the phone. So then they just go, one accept. Hi, no issue. Just purchased. And then they ask him a few onboarding questions and then make sure that they get their login access, make sure they get in everything. And then we can guide them to either the next product or introducing them. We’ve got a concierge process that we’re building at the moment for a client as well. Then we guide that concierge process where it guides them through the whole steps of the customer journey, which is again, 82% human-like, 20% human.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

Paul Ace: I know you should write that one down as well.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. We’re going to get into conversational commerce and kind of your three pillars in a second. But before we do that, I got to ask for the audience, and this is going to be like a broad generalization, but in your experience, what is the… We were talking about… Your sweet spot, I think is really helping people at seven figures scale up to eight figures. So pretty much what that means is if you’re making a million dollars with your course or your coaching program or your info products or whatever they are, getting to eight figures, like $10 million is hard.

You need help from professionals like Paul Ace here to unlock your next level of growth. There’s kind of a saying is what got you here, won’t get you there. And in the spirit of that, if you could just paint some broad brush strokes on the difference between somebody who’s making zero, somebody who has achieved a milestone of six figures, which is awesome. And let’s just call that like 70K or 120K or something. And then somebody who actually gets up to a million which is the seven figure, and then that really scaled out a figure. What’s the difference there? What have you seen in these different avatars here?

Paul Ace: So if you’re just getting started, let’s start at the start at the first stage of ladder, and then we’ll work our way up on that. If you’re just getting started, the first thing we want to do you just start having conversations with people. Our role is not to figure… I want to talk about figuring out the message and I don’t want this to get confused of, “Oh, but I thought that’s what you do.” Yeah, but we don’t want to go, “Okay. Who’s your avatar? Let’s figure out if the product has got a market fit.”

Your first role in that is finding a product that people want. We used to have a bridesmaid’s dress business. And we started that from zero because I’ve built this dream in secrets box, which was essentially an info product and we sold it for 1295. I think we get free shipping with it as well. So it was basically, we had about seven pounds to acquire a customer. And we were breaking even on that because no one else in the space was doing it. So while I was doing them, reinvest in every sale and bringing them into a Facebook community. Then we have three and a half thousand brides in this Facebook community. And then we did a poll. We just went, “What do you want?” Ask them what they want, give it to them. So they said, “We want bridesmaid’s dresses at a reasonable price.”

Then we built a whole business around that because we’d built the community first and then asked them what they want and give it to them. So something that’s key when you’re first getting started is just having those conversations with people and build relationships. For example, with those, we’re not a mass market product at all. We are very, very particular about who we can fit. So we’re more of a, “Hey, all I want to do at the start is start a conversation with people.”

So I’ve not got massive lead flow because I don’t need it. I just need the right people coming through. So when they come through, I don’t go, “How can I sell them?” I look, “How can I get a response? How can I get someone to raise their hand and respond to that first message?” They don’t respond to the first message. Wait three hours, try different angle. Can I get them to respond to this message? All of these are not sales messages, they’re just conversational messages. Right? So it might be like, “If you went through the audit, what did you think about your score you got.” Right? Or “Hey, I’ve got the resources.”

Chris Badgett: Good questions.

Paul Ace: Yeah. Just questions, questions, questions, questions. Because as soon as you get the first response, then everything else starts to come into play. So if you’re just getting started and you’re between that zero to 20K a year, then you want to be looking at just having the first automations. I’ve been a basic autoresponder of like, what went wrong? Or asking them a question, what business are you in? Or whatever that is. So in your email responders, rather than trying to do these big drip sequences and automations, just ask questions. Send three, four line emails that ask questions to your audience. Get them to engage with you because, here’s the thing that’s going to put your email open rate right up and also deliverability writeup, because then it’s going to be a lot like, “Oh, wow. Look at all these people responding, and responding, and responding.”

So do the legwork yourself when you haven’t got the cash. So you’ve either got cash or you’ve got time. One or the other. So when you started, focus on the time piece and just put as much effort in as you can, then when you get to the six-figure level, then you want to be looking at, “Okay, how can I automate a little bit more of that?” And maybe bring on one customer support person to start handling some of that.

One of the big things there is starting to SOP out as much as possible, because the more that you start to SOP, so a standard operating procedures, the more… so we have a system that every… and we still want to get better and better at this, but everything in the business needs to be a system. I very rarely record an SOP myself, the team do it. So if you do something that you’ve never done before, you record a Loom video. That Loom video gets sent to our customer support person. She then turns that into an SOP, then sends it back to the person who recorded it. So then they can check it to make sure that it’s got everything in there.

Then what happens is it enables you to scale faster because not everything is relying on you as a hobby. You will get stuck at early six figures if everything goes through you all the time. And then when you want to bring on another team member in the same kind of role, then you can do that because you’ve got the SOP. So you just go, “How do I do that? Is it in an SOP?” So have you read the SOP? If not, let’s go and create one. So that’s the six figure level where the big difference is in the conversational side of it.

When you get to seven figures, then you move the conversation down the flow a little bit. So that the amount of personalization moves down the journey. So what I mean by that is the start of it, right? You might bring on a customer support team and expand that out and have that what went wrong email and things like that on the front still. But the owner is not going to be dealing with those what went wrong messages because they haven’t got the time or the inclination to do that because they want to focus on strategic things.

So then, well, where does the owner get involved in it or the CEO? They get involved further down the pipeline. So when you look at a customer journey, you want to be looking at, let’s say someone’s paid a $500 deposit for your high ticket program, but hasn’t paid the 10,000. So they’re stuck at that pipeline stage at the moment. So remember, we’re talking about the steps with Martin Luther King at the start, right? So they’re literally two steps off the finish, but then they’ve just gone, “Oh my foot is stuck on some gum. I can’t get it off.”

We’re like, “Okay, cool. How do we do that? Are we going to just encourage them? Or are we going to use a blowtorch because they’re going to soon get things moving. Then we we look at the personalization there of, well, what if we recorded a personal video message of that stage? So then we trigger anyone who gets to that stage and doesn’t move to the next stage. After 24 hours, then the owner can go and record a personal video message to that person. So like, “Hey, Chris. No issues submitted to get your deposit. Really excited to have you as part of the customer, have you part of our community.

I know you haven’t submitted the full deposit at the moment. I know you might be getting the funds together and putting all that together. But listen, if you want any help at all with that process, just let us know. We are here to help and to support you on your journey. Congratulations, all the action that you’ve taken so far are looking forward to having you a part of this journey. Now that little bit of personalization, then people feel understood. They fit in the field. They’ve got the know, like, and trust, and then it speeds up the sales cycle.

So that’s what we do is seven figures. We go, how do we get into the next stage of the journey? And where can we put the owner in that so it doesn’t put too much pressure on them? Then after that, when you get to eight figures, then it’s all about the numbers, right? So we have this tri-factor of psychology, technology and datarology. So the psychology is a lot of the stuff we just spoke about. If understanding the customer’s language patterns, what are they using? How are they using it? The technology is then how do we leverage that to automate 80% of that? And then the datarology is while they dictate the decisions.

So when we look at the KPIs on a weekly basis, so what’s the conversion rate on the front end? What’s the conversion rate for a high ticket sale? How many people are dropping off in the middle of that? So look at each conversion point. Where do we need to put that focus over the next seven days? And then we also understand then from a lifetime customer value, and Chris, we were talking about this before. So we just had a client go from $180 that someone spends with people in the lifetime of them being a customer to $450 in the course of, since March.

So we’re now July. I know that doesn’t make very good evergreen content by saying the date, but it’s like about four months. So improving that month to month to month to month, because we know if you can spend more money to acquire a customer, you win the game, right? So if a customer’s worth $2,000 to you instead of $500, then you can spend four times as much to acquire a customer and still break even. So that’s what we look at then, that seven figure to eight figures. A big difference is then how do we apply this conversational techniques and understand where we need to apply them? So it’s kind of like, “where’s the pain? Where’s the pain on the body?” And then go, “Okay, I’ve got the perfect thing just for that to solve that pain.”

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. How do you define high ticket? What’s that amount of money or what’s the range for a program to be high ticket?

Paul Ace: Yeah. High ticket has got a bit of a weird connotation that a lot of people talk about different levels of high ticket. Personally, we’re looking at something that 5K onwards really is why we want to be looking. A lot of people call high ticket like $25,000. Plus we see it as… another way of phrasing it is frontend offers and backend offers. So frontend offers might be $37, $7, $97, maybe even up to $497. But then above that, then you’re looking at backend office.

So the journey is different than it is on the frontend office. Someone’s not just going to come to the sales page and go, “Yeah, I’m going to drop five grand. I’ve never seen you before.” They need some nurture there. So a backend offer is something that needed nurture before it got there to get to that sale. Or if you are selling 5K straight off the bat with that, and you nurture, then what you find is your refund rate is usually higher because you’re selling on high.

Chris Badgett: For a backend offer, high ticket offer, what is the ideal… I know there’s different ways to do it, but what are the best ways that are more effective to nurture and convert at the high ticket price point? There’s calls, webinars or sales pages. There’s strategy sessions. I don’t know. What works for high ticket these days?

Paul Ace: Sure. So we did quite a lot of stuff with challenges at the moment.

Chris Badgett: Challenge funnels?

Paul Ace: Yes, challenge funnel. So we’ve got one client we’re just onboarding at the moment. They do a free challenge on the front. We’ve got another client that just a $37 challenge. We took that average order value from that $42 to $81 within like, I think it was about six, seven weeks. So we were like, great. We’ve now got double the amount to acquire a customer. So then we look at the backend part of that and go, “Well, what’s the best way to bring them through that customer journey?”

They didn’t have a sales team when we came in and we’re only just building out for them now and just helping them and guiding them through that process. So we were like, “Well, what if we close these sales over SMS?” $5,000 sale over SMS. When we first tried this for a live launch that they had, we were like, “Okay. Let’s take the people that haven’t applied, haven’t submitted a deposit, haven’t done anything.”

So they haven’t responded to any of that process. What if we sent them a message on SMS to all those people? So I think there was just over a thousand people on that list, started a conversation with those people and then close them over SMS. It was like, “Cool. Let’s give it a go.” Made $75,000 over the course of about three or four days with just having no sales calls that was.

Chris Badgett: And that was people who were in the challenge or had done the challenge?

Paul Ace: Yeah. So they’ve been in the challenge, but they hadn’t applied for the high ticket. So we have an application and then we have a deposit and then we have to submit the full amount. They hadn’t applied. They haven’t raised their hand and said, “I’m interested.” Then we took those people, had the conversation with them over SMS and made an extra $75,000. [crosstalk] Yeah. Those kinds of things are really, really effective. Bear in mind, that was only a list of a thousand people on SMS. It wasn’t crazy. What were you going to say?

Chris Badgett: If somebody is not familiar with a challenge funnel or what we’re talking about here, how would you describe a challenge if somebody wants to put that in front of their main backend offer sale?

Paul Ace: Yeah. So a challenge is someone would go through… it could be a five-day challenge, seven-day, 30-day challenge, occasional personal seem to have a 90-day, but that’s kind of crazy. And then what happens is each day you watch a Facebook live or you watch something in a member’s area and then you get homework or actions to complete. And then each state is bringing you further towards the goal that you want.

The psychology and the strategy behind the challenge is to break through people’s limiting beliefs in a drip-fed format, where over the course of the first two or three days, it’s all about the mindset side of things because you sell people what they want and give them what they need. So you sell them the fact of, “Hey, this is the outcome that you want.” First, two days of the challenge, you sell them about all the mindset side of things and then we go into, “Okay. Here’s how to take the next stage of the journey.”

So then when you get to the last day of the challenge, you can pitch your high ticket offer and they’re already pre-sold. So you’ve already took them down the customer journey. Imagine the Jeff Walker product launch formula, but done just in a different format, or imagine it like a webinar that’s broken up over the course of five days or seven days.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. If we’re looking at customer journey, what might somebody put even before, earlier than a challenge?

Paul Ace: Yeah. Our experiment at the moment, for example, I can do a day one preview. So it’s a sales video, but at the same time, it gives them like such a strong tangible that then they look at it and go, “Okay, while that process works, I understand the concept.” Then they start to sell on the idea. Another way you could do it is lead magnets. Quite often, the challenge does become the frontend, but then just looking at different ways, we can do that. So at the moment, I think we’ve got lead magnets, we’ve got day one previews, we’ve got go and buy get a free hat and then we’ll give you the offer for the challenge. So we’re just trying loads of different things to see which converts the best. And then we track all that data to go, “Okay, which one is creating the best lifetime customer value and the best ROAS, ROI.”

Chris Badgett: So ROAS, return on ad spend, there can be a lot of pain around that. People run ads that don’t produce, or they can’t figure out how to make it positive. What are some tips you have around… let’s just say Facebook ads is a specific example around making a campaign or a strategy that’s likely to have a decent return on ad spend or ROAS?

Paul Ace: Yeah. So number one thing is track because if you’re just using Facebook’s tracking on its own, then-

Chris Badgett: Like the pixel?

Paul Ace: Yeah. If you’re just using that and you’re not looking at the lifetime customer value, then you might have the best funnel ever, but you’ve switched the ads off before you’ve even got it to profitability. Let’s say for example, someone on average, it takes someone five days to buy your frontend product. Now, you look at your ads after 25 days and you go, “Okay. I’ve spent $200 to acquire a $30 buyer.”

You’d look at that at the front and you go, “Well, that’s broken. I’m going to need to switch that off. I need to switch that ad off.” But then let’s say after 30 days, that lifetime value with that customer, because you know after 30 days they’re going to buy your high ticket. Then that customer then becomes worth $400.

Now, you’ve got a 2X ROI on your ad. But most people when you’re first starting out, too scared, or haven’t got the cashflow to go and do that and actually understand what the 30, 60, 90-day process is. So if you’re just getting started, I don’t recommend going 90 days and go fingers crossed. Let’s hope it works. Because you haven’t got the cashflow for that. However, do that in an organic way to start off with look at the organic acquisition channels that you can bring in. Is there anyone you can partner with? Is there any affiliates that… Giving them the lion’s share of the call, just to understand your numbers and your funnel.

So you could say to an affiliate, “I will give you 95% of the frontend sale, and I’ll give you 20% of the backend.” Because it doesn’t matter if you make any money, you’ve acquired a customer for free. Because if you know, then over 30, 60, 90 days, that you’re going to make another $400 from that person, you pay 100% of the frontend all day long, right? And the only reason you don’t say 100% is number one, refunds, and number two, strike fees and things like that at any general cost of goods.

You give people 90% on the front, you know within 30 days that that person’s worth 10 times more than what you’ve just paid out, then you’re onto a winner. So do that first, then grow on cold traffic once you know that funnel works rather than going planting loads of money into cold traffic and then go on, “Oh, crap. They don’t turn into backend buyers.”

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. Good advice there. I noticed when you start working with funnel and getting professional with your marketing and strategy and stuff, I see people sometimes get a little disorganized. Do you have any tips on how to map a customer journey and how to visualize a funnel? Are we using spreadsheets? Are we using whiteboards? Are we using some funnel software? How do we keep all this organized without just ending up in a spaghetti mess?

Paul Ace: Yeah. So the first thing we do when we go into any business is map out the customer journey.

Chris Badgett: So what do you do that in? What kind of tools?

Paul Ace: We use Funnelytics. We use Funnelytics a lot of the time. When I say map out the customer journey, most people would just go and map the funnel steps. Right? So they just go, “Okay. They go there, and there, and there and then that’s the end.” We go, what is every single email, every single SMS, every single communication point that is going on in that customer journey? What are you already doing? Then we go, “Well, what’s working?” Okay. That’s working great. We’ll keep that one. Or that one needs a Monday. The positioning was that one isn’t positioned in the sale. And then we find majority of the time there’s only tax blasts going on if they aren’t doing any SMS.

There’s no conversation on SMS going on. So it might be like, “Hey, join today.” And that’s about it, right? Rather than how do we position that in a more conversational way that we can guide people to the sale set and we go, “Okay. Well, where could we put SMS? Where could we put voicemails? Where could we put personal video messaging?” And then how can we then improve that customer experience down the whole journey? And then for example, if you’re looking for analytics, if you’ve got… let’s say you’ve got a 15-minute sales video and a page, then you look at the analytics on that. And the average time on that page is five minutes.

You’ve got a problem because no one is getting to the pitch. And it’s the same when you actually look at the video analytics. If the average watch time is four minutes and no one actually knows what the offer is until you get 15 minutes, then you’ve got a problem.

So you either go, how do we make the frontend part be more engaging to get them to the 15 minutes? Or how do we make the video short, so they see everything? You’ve always got one or two options there. So yeah, that’s the mapping the customer journey is understanding every single communication piece that is happening. And then get that into the project management when we use Monday, and then we’ll have a set process of everything that they go through. And then from a client perspective, in terms of the onboarding, we send them over a slide deck when they get onboarded. So that slide deck goes, this is your first four weeks. This is what’s going to be happening. This is how it’s going to be happening. And then they know exactly what the customer journey is for them as they’re going through our process.

And that’s really, really important because then you don’t end up with the… The last thing you want is people go in what’s happening. I don’t know what you guys are doing right now. Rather than every single call that you’re on, you’ve got this regular cadence. So first thing we’re going to do, we’re going to set schedule that meeting to be in the same time every week, all the time. So you can be updated on the progress.

Hey, cut short. And we only need this 10-minute call. Great. That’s fine. We can enjoy the rest of the day, go and have a party. But the first thing we want to do is make sure we got a regular cadence because an aspect of someone else who’s a Facebook ads agency, they said their retention went from 90% down to 50% when they stopped doing weekly calls. Which is crazy. Hopefully that answers for you in a long way.

Chris Badgett: No, that’s good. That’s what I was looking for, specifics. So what I’m hearing is, if you don’t map it, you can’t manage it. So Funnelytics helps that. Then once you have the map, you need to be able to diagnose every single step to see if it’s working. And that could be watch time. It could be open rates. It could be sales happening. It’s not just sales. What else do you track that would indicate success?

Paul Ace: [crosstalk] customer journey.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Paul Ace: Yeah. So every conversion point. So opt-in rates. Let’s say it’s a webinar. So we could have opt-in rate, short rate, amount of people that booked a call. How many people showed up for the call? How many people bought off the back of the call? How many people bought the second product? Every single stage of the customer journey, then we put that into weekly KPR report as well as it’s red and green.

So if it’s trending up, great. We’re probably not going to focus on that quite as much because we know we’re doing something in the right direction, or we might look at it and go, “Great. What we did last week worked. If it’s in red and it’s trending in the wrong direction, that’s where we need to focus.” And then that’s the focus for the next seven days.

Chris Badgett: If you could just propose like a simple customer journey for somebody, who let’s say they have a course and then a challenge and then maybe a membership on the backend. What could be a possible funnel flow for that?

Paul Ace: Yeah. So opt-in to the funnel in terms of opt-in to get access to the challenge. Let’s say it’s a free challenge. So opt-in to get access to the challenge. Then you’re going to have upsells in there to recoup some of that ad spend.

Chris Badgett: To the course?

Paul Ace: To be like a VIP thing.

Chris Badgett: Okay. Oh, like you’re saying you can do a free challenge and you can do a more premium version of the challenge that costs money? That’s cool.

Paul Ace: Exactly. So those kinds of things. Just laying all those things out where if you’re going to do a pay challenge, you want an order bump on that. Right? So there’s some way of getting them to buy more because our order form take rate, we tested some price points. We found $27. You hit about 50% take rate based on-

Chris Badgett: On a challenge? On a paid challenge?

Paul Ace: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Paul Ace: 50% take rate on the order bump. If you put it on to $47, it goes down to about 29%. Now, you’d look at that and you go, “Oh, the conversion rates have dropped.” Yeah, but you’ve made more money.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Paul Ace: Right? Don’t look at the conversion rate on its own. Look at the conversion rate alongside the price point. Because if you triple the price of something, but only half conversions, you’d still make more money. And that’s why a lot of people are afraid to that. It’s called price elasticity. Right? How far are you prepared to go in terms of the price point? So for example, we went, “Hey, what about if your second OTO was more premium? Can we put a $500 offer on that for a client?” And they went, “Yeah, cool. Here’s what we could do for that. Great. That works.

So bear in mind, that was not an offer. There was no opportunity there. So we’re like, “Well, if 2% buy it, that’ll work.” First week, about 2% bought it. Great. That’s fine. Then we keep optimizing it and optimizing it. And then we went, “Well, what if we had a six pay into that?” Oh yeah, that’s a good idea. Now, we’ve got 10% of the people buying that five products off the first same product.

So what that means is the average cart value has gone up $49. So that means every single person that you send to that site who buys is worth $49 more than they were before. So is it a game of, “Oh, how do I target the best audiences on Facebook and YouTube?” No. It’s how do I get someone to buy more stuff? So it doesn’t matter what they spend on Facebook because it’s just going to work. Because you’re making so much money from every customer that comes in.

Chris Badgett: That is cool.

Paul Ace: That’s the process.

Chris Badgett: Do you have any just recommendations if people should try a webinar for sales versus like a one-on-one call? Is there a certain price point where one will likely work better than the other? Or just any tips around… I call them conversion tools. You have like a webinar, you do one-on-one calls or just a sales page and no conversion tool? How do you know what you should do or should you just test everything?

Paul Ace: Yeah. Number one, test everything.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Paul Ace: Number two, preference wise, and what I’ve seen that’s worked well is if you go above that 495 price point, then if you’re not doing some kind of conversation or communication, that’s got that back and forth elements too. Right? Whether it be a sales call or whether it be even an SMS back and forth or a messenger back and forth, whatever that is.

Chris Badgett: Or even an Application form, right? You can’t buy it. You got to apply. And then that creates a conversation.

Paul Ace: You got to apply.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Paul Ace: Exactly. You can, one, create the conversation and two, creates people… For example, we just put our house on the market. Right? We put a house in the market and we already know there’s a house that we want to go buy. However, I can’t go and buy it. So I found a buyer for mine. So I’m like saying to the estate agent that we signed up with yesterday, just go in, get it on the market, get it on the market, get it on the market. Now, what’s happening over the course of this week. It’s making me want the house more and more because I can’t have it.

Chris Badgett: Right.

Paul Ace: So the psychology is the same with the application. So if you’re going to do apply and then you just go, “Great, you’re accepted.” Nope. It’s not a good idea. Right? You’re going to apply. We’re going to review your application. Then we’re going to come back to you. It might be eight hours later. It might be 24 hours later. You don’t want to leave it too long because then they drop off. However, just that little bit of waiting time can be really helpful. We have the phrase, removal friction, then add the friction back in. So removal friction to see what the lead flow is, how you can get as many people through the journey. And then how do we qualify more through the journey by adding the friction back in?

So we did this with a client last year, which was really surprising. It was costing him $250 for what calls. So it was like a 20 minute VSL. And then they were putting him to a book call. $250. We went, how much friction can we remove? So we were like, remove that page, remove that page, remove that page. We removed the amount of questions at the [inaudible] and everything like that.

We took the book call cost down from 256 to 46, in three weeks. Then we went, okay, great. We’ve removed it down. Now, let’s start putting more questions back in and more friction, more behavioral task in throughout the sales process to get them to take more action before they get on the call with us. So remove all friction, then add it back in.

Chris Badgett: I love that. And that’s actually a really good strategy around pricing too. You mentioned price elasticity. If your product’s newer you can discount it and then keep testing the price points and then even go higher after you’ve been established for a while. Price is friction. Steps is friction. I don’t know. What are all the different types of friction would you say that you could remove to just test a concept?

Paul Ace: The best ways to understand what friction you could remove or what you could do to optimize the journey, there’s a book called DaVinci and the 40 Answers. And here’s the great thing. It’s free. There’s only 40 ways in the world to solve a problem. That’s it.

Chris Badgett: This is cool. This is cool. This is a learning audience. They’re going to love that book recommendation. I’ve literally never heard of that book before.

Paul Ace: You probably won’t have. So I went to an event in Austin. So it’s a secret place. I wont even say the name of it. However, he was one of the speakers that we got the whole day with him. We start drinking wine at 8:00 AM in the morning because it helps with the creative juices. Everything is designed in a perfect way for learning even the way like they have the curtains and stuff. So the guy who spoke, he was the youngest chief engineer at NASA, 31 years old, chief engineer at NASA.

So this guy is pretty damn smart. And there’s something called DaVinci and the 40 Answers where you write the book on. There are 40 ways to solve a problem. So what happens is when you look at problems in these different ways is over time, then you start coming up with stupid answers or funny answers because what do we do? We exhaust all the normal answers that we could come out with to start off with. So it’d be like… let’s take the friction thing. So you just said like change… Let’s ask the question, what could we remove?

Chris Badgett: Price points, steps, having to talk to somebody in order to get in. I don’t know. There’s three.

Paul Ace: Right. So we could remove the sales team. We could remove the high price. We could remove a step. They’re all the generic things. Now what happens is if you do that in a brainstorm situation, because I remember we did this and there’s like 15 others around this whiteboard and we’re just writing it all down, writing it all down. And it gets about 15 minutes in. Maybe sometimes sooner. And everyone just goes, “What else? What else?” You’re like, “No, I’ve got nothing left. I’ve got nothing left.” You have silence in the room for about two or three minutes. And then someone just comes out with the most stupid idea and it will be like, “What could we remove? Remove the wallets?”

“What do you mean remove the wallets?” “I don’t know. I just felt…” And then everyone has a little chuckle. “Okay. Well, how could we?” And then you go back to the stupid answer. It’s like, “What could we remove?” “I don’t know.” “Remove the funnel.” “Okay. How would we do that?” Right? So then you start asking these different questions. And like I said, there’s only 40 different answers. That’s like three days of training and I still haven’t got them all ingrained in here, but just that one, if you just ask that question, what could we remove? Or the opposite, what could we add in? Right? And then all the things that you could add in, I don’t know. And then you’ll end up with something like a trip to Hawaii.

Chris Badgett: A gift box in the mail.

Paul Ace: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: How could we do that? I don’t know. What could we add in? I don’t know. Morgan Freeman. [crosstalk] Yeah, exactly. Or you could be like, “Well, what about Cameo? What if we couldn’t have Morgan Freeman, but we could have a Morgan Freeman impersonator on Cameo or something that sends a video to every person who buys?

Or we buy his training on masterclass and send it to people. You just build on of each other.

Paul Ace: Yeah. You build on it and just see where it goes. So I’m encouraging our team at the moment because we were like, “Hey, we’re starting to look at problems in too much of a technical way. And then we realized sometimes it’s a simple answer. So I was like, “What I want you to do over the next seven days as a team is write down all the things that we did try, and then what thought process we used to do that? So one of the ones we used today was a side-by-side comparison.

Okay. Let’s see what’s working over here. And then what are we doing differently over here? Why is that tack thing not working? And then when we did that, we realized we didn’t even need to solve the problem because we only needed to flick one button and it all worked, but there was nothing, no information anywhere that you could do that. We had to find it out. So when you look at problems in different ways, then you can improve your conversion rates, right? All links back to the same thing about the customer journey. Just look at the problem differently, and then you can remove the friction and everything.

Chris Badgett: I love that. Dare to make mistakes or fail, but also give yourself permission to be creative. The book is called DaVinci and the 40 Answers by Mark Fox. So check that out. Paul, you’ve been a legend today. He’s at amplifyccom.com. Any final words for the people? If someone’s listening to this and they’re like, “You know what my course is doing really good or my coaching program and I’m really a perfect fit kind of scale up phase,” what would you say to that person? How could they connect with you? Or how could you help somebody like that?

Paul Ace: Yeah, So we’ve got a seven figure audit launching in the next few days. So you can go through your business and go through all those things that we spoke about and basically, go through the checklist of what is my score? What am I missing from getting to the next level? So if you’re at seven figures and you want to get to eight, then, great, this audit will be for you. If you want to get to seven figures, then great this audit will be for you. So just go through and you’ll be able to check off what that is. And obviously, there’s some processes behind that as well, where then we can have a conversation over SMS or over email about your results.

And if you want to book a call off the back of that, great. If you’re the kind of person who’s an action taker and is like, “Listen, everything you just spoke about, we need in our business like yesterday. We’re missing out on burning so much money right now,” then just go to amplifyccom.com. Click just under the video at the top, watch that and then click book a call. You can book a call personally with me and if it’s a good fit, we’ll do something together and make some magic happen.

Chris Badgett: Paul, thank you for coming on LMScast. I really appreciate it. It was fun to jam with you today. You dropped so many nuggets for everybody listening. And if you could just plug your podcast before we sign up again. If you’re listening to this in your earbuds, go to this podcast next.

Paul Ace: So go to www.amplifyto7figures.com or search on iTunes Amplify to 7 Figures. And you will soon be able to see the wonderful legend that is Chris Badgett on there too.

Chris Badgett: All right. Well, thanks for coming today, Paul. I really appreciate it.

Paul Ace: Appreciate it, Chris. Have a great day.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post How to Use Conversational Commerce to Scale Your Online Education Business with Paul Ace appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

We dive into the journey from personal trainer to million dollar online fitness course creator with Jono Petrohilos in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS.

Jono lives in Australia, and he runs a Facebook group for the course creator community. He used to be a fitness trainer, and he ran a face-to-face bootcamp working at a franchise with about 75 different locations across Australia. The franchises were ranked on a leaderboard, and Jono was dead last out of 75. But he really loved his work and just wasn’t good at it. To get better, he attended a whole heap of courses and workshops, watched YouTube videos, read books and blogs, and attended other trainers’ sessions. After about 12 months of that, he worked his way to being number one in the franchise.

He then opened up another location. He was always upskilling, always attending other courses, workshops, sessions, and conventions. It got to a point that Jono decided to give course creation a try himself, and he’s done 10 in-person courses already. And every course he went to, there were about 20 other trainers, so he knew there was a market for it. His first course was called How to Run a Successful Bootcamp.

In 2014 the course platform started focusing on online trainers and not just individuals who wanted to get fit, and in 2018 he grew that to about a million dollar a year business. That’s when he started to get over the fitness side a little bit, as he was no longer running the bootcamps and was spending all his time online working with funnels in sales and marketing. Jono’s passion shifted from fitness to online course creation and promotion.

A great tip shared in this episode is how a good first step to work your way into a Facebook group or community online is to do a podcast episode with the group admin and make it a win for that person first. Connect with heavy hitters. Get them on your podcast without any expectation of return, and then it will probably come back. And if you do it properly and do a podcast every week, the results will waterfall on.

Be sure to head to Facebook and look up the Course Creator Community Facebook group and find his podcast Course Creator Community Podcast on iTunes to learn more about Jono Petrohilos. Whatever social platforms you usually use, type in Course Creator Community, and you’ll find Jono’s group.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Christ Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name is Chris Badgett, and I’m joined by a special guest. I’d like to introduce you to my Facebook group competitor. His name is Jono Petrohilos. He’s from across the world. He’s in Australia. I’m in the United States. We both have Facebook groups for the Course Creator Community. What I love about Jono is he’s a course creator. He practices what he preaches. He has a long history of teaching fitness online.

He discovered a love for helping fellow course creators and just kind of going deep in this whole industry of online business and online courses. But first, welcome to the show, Jono.

Jono Petrohilos: No, thank you very much for inviting me on, Chris. I’m a huge fan of yours. Your Facebook group was one of the first ones I joined when I was like, you know what? I want to see what’s going on in the Course Creator Community. You’ve done well with your SEO on the Facebook group, because I found that and I’ve been there for over a year now. It’s an honor to be on this podcast. If I can give your listeners some value, I’d be happy to do that.

Christ Badgett: That’s awesome. I appreciate that. If you’re looking for Jono, it’s just Course Creator Community. He has a podcast by that name and that’s also the name of his Facebook group. Go check that out. Can you give us, Jono, a high level overview and also like a timeline, like how long ago did this start? You teach fitness online and certain aspects of that, and then you got into helping course creators. What was the broad arc of that story there?

Jono Petrohilos: Yes. Well, it’s a long story, but I’ll summarize it in about a minute. I used to be a fitness trainer myself, and I’d run a face-to-face bootcamp. I used to suck at it, right? I was at a franchise. There were 75 different locations across Australia, and you were ranked on how good you were, one being the best, 75 being the worst. Take a guess what you think I was ranked, Chris, starting off?

Christ Badgett: 74.

Jono Petrohilos: I wish. 75, right? Dead last. But I loved what I did. I really loved it. I just wasn’t good at it. To get better, I was like, what can I do? Let me study. I attended a whole heap of courses and workshops and YouTube videos and read books and blogs and attended other trainer sessions. After about 12 months of that period, I actually got to be number one in the franchise. Then I opened up another location and I got really, really good at what I did. I was always upskilling, always attending other courses, workshops, sessions, conventions, whatever it maybe.

It got to a point and I was like, you know what? I’m still learning. Every convention I go to, every course I do, I’m learning, but I feel like I could put together something that’s better or at least different to anything else out there. I’m like, you know what? I’m going to give it a crack. It’s a proven concept. I’ve done 10 of these courses already. And every course I go, there’s 20 other trainers, so I know there’s a market for it. Let me put something together. I put together my first online course, How to Run a Successful Bootcamp.

This was 2014, and this was tailored just for fitness trainers, so not for the general public who wanted to get fit. If you’re a certified personal trainer and you want to run a better bootcamp with the business side, the workouts, the retention, all of that, you would take my course there. Now, that’s a whole nother story, that course there. But just in the overview, that’s how I created my first course. And then usual deal, sucked at the start, but got better, better, better, better, better.

Long story short, by about probably 2017-2018, I grew that to about a million dollar a year business. I was like, okay, this is cool. A couple things started to happen there. Number one, I started to get over the fitness side a little bit, because I was no longer running the bootcamps, right? All my time was spent online, in funnels and sales and marketing. My passion shifted from fitness to online course stuff. I didn’t know what I wanted to do at that stage, but I could feel passion shifting. Also, it was something inside of me as well.

The major thing in that bootcamp course is, hey, you’re a fitness trainer. Here’s how you can make $100,000 a year working one hour a day. That was sexy. It was a good hook, you know? But now here I am doing a million dollars. I think there’s some conflict inside me where it’s like, hold on, I’m a bit of a hypocrite here. I’m telling people to go and run this bootcamp thing to make $100,000 when I’m sitting here doing this online making a million. Also, just a bigger thing. I feel I’ve got a bigger skill than just helping fitness trainers there.

Just recently, about a year ago, I started the Facebook group, the Course Creator Community. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do that in that space, but that’s the direction that I’m heading is I’m going to put together something to help course creators sell more course. How that looks exactly, I don’t know. I’ve just got a membership site there at the moment. I’m just having some fun and helping some people out, but that’s the direction I’m going to move going forward.

I’ve still got the Fitness Education Online business and that’s pretty much running itself now. I’ve got a staff. I’ve got a team, and that’s freed up my time to focus on other stuff. That’s a high level overview of what I do.

Christ Badgett: That is really cool. Go check out coursecreatorcommunity.net. There’s a couple things you said in your story that I want to highlight. One of them is that in the beginning, first of all, you kind of went after a market that you understood. You basically scratched your own itch, and then you stayed focused. It’s not fitness in general. It’s for fitness instructors. And then you just stayed with it. You launched without getting all hung up in the, oh, it’s got to be perfect. Like you said, you just get better and better and better.

I see that pattern a lot with people that make it is they are okay with imperfect forward progress. Why are you okay with that? Why didn’t you get caught in the weeds of, oh, it’s got to perfect, or my videos have to be perfect, or whatever?

Jono Petrohilos: Okay. That’s a good story. I’ll share that. 2014, when I was like, right, I want to put a course together. I didn’t know what an online course was, because most of the courses I was going to was actually face-to-face workshop. But I knew I didn’t want to do that because I was so busy with my fitness business. The online thing was always just going to be a side thing. I was reading Think and Grow Rich and they talk about passive income and whatever, and I was like, right, this seems like a good idea here.

I didn’t even know what an online course was. I thought you had to get a web designer and they built a website for you. I got a quote. I think it was $15,000 and I didn’t have $15,000. I was like, okay, it looks like I’m not going to do this online course thing. But then I was scrolling through Facebook and I saw an ad. This was back in 2014, and it was, hey, purchase my eBook, because eBooks used to be valuable back in 2014. Now it’s just like, it’s used to get your email address. But I was like, an eBook?

What the crap is an eBook? I purchased it for whatever it was, 50 bucks or something. I’m like, hold on, this is just a Microsoft Word document saved as a PDF. I was a technical dunce, but I know how to open a Microsoft Word document and I know how to save as for a PDF. I was like, you know what? I think I can do this. That was my first online course, literally a PDF that sold for $300. But even deeper than that, I looked at it. And before it went to market, I was like, you know what? It just looks like Microsoft Word document.

I need to do better. So I went to make it look better. I put some borders and some headings and some numbers. And because I suck at tech, I actually made it look worst. It was indents all over the place, and I’m like, oh man. I was depressed. I was going to give up. But then I was scrolling through Facebook again and I saw an ad for this website called Fiverr and said you can get anything you want done for $5. I’m like, is this a joke? I opened it up and I’m like, man, you literally can get anything you want for $5.

There was a gig on there from a guy that said he would slap himself in the face if you gave him $5. I’m like, what? Anyway, I paid both of them. I paid the guy $5 to slap himself, and I also paid $5 for the formatting. The formatting made it look better. I was like, okay, this is getting better. Then I got an email from the guy who slapped himself in the face. He didn’t hold back. He really slapped himself in the face. This time I felt sorry. I’m like, man, there’s things some people do for money.

But then I looked at what he sent me. It was actually an unlisted YouTube video and it had 100,000 views. I’m like, hold on, this guy slapped himself in the face once and sent it to 100,000 people for I don’t know how much. Even if they take half, that guy has made hundreds of thousands of dollars from slapping him in the… This guy wasn’t some guru. He looked like a bit of a loser, had glasses, braces, wasn’t that good looking. I’m like, man, if this guy can do that… And all these things were just coming in my head.

I’m like, man, this person sold me a Microsoft Word document for $50. This guy slapped himself in the face for $5 and made $200,000. What the crap is my excuse? Even further still actually, going back to my bootcamp days, my mentor at the time was the person who owned all 75 locations. She told her story. She’s like, “Hey, look, I’m not the smartest person. I’m just actually the dumbest person always in high school. I actually dropped out of high school. My first job was at Walmart. I actually got fired from Walmart.

I didn’t steal. I wasn’t late. They just thought I wasn’t good enough for the job, so I got fired from Walmart. I started up a one bootcamp and then another and another and another.” I’m just like, man. Especially in that fitness, I’m degree qualified. I’ve got a degree in exercise physiology. I’m just like, man, this woman’s a high school dropout, fired from Walmart, can open… What’s my excuse? I just had all this confidence going. Actually going back to the unlisted story, then I discovered unlisted YouTube videos.

I was like, hold on, maybe I can also put these links into my eBook to make it look like a better product. Then the final product, I mean, it still wasn’t great. I would be embarrassed of it today, but it was good info at least. The info in there was really good. There was text. There was video. It was formatted so it didn’t look horrible. I put it out there and still I was nervous. The reason I was able to get it out there was just all this confidence. I was just like, you know what? I’m going to do it. This person’s doing.

This person’s doing it. This person’s doing it. I can do it too. It was all that confidence. I still remember when I sold my first one. I was so scared because there was a feedback form at the end of it. I’m like, man, they’re going to ask for a refund. They’re going to say, “You sold me a Microsoft Word document for $300. I already knew this stuff.” I was so nervous. But then I got the feedback form and it was all positive. It was like, “I love the course. It was great. It was online. I could do it in my own pace. All these ideas I didn’t think of. Well done. You’ve done an awesome.”

At the time, I was just relieved. I was like, whew! Okay. It wasn’t a refund. Then the second feedback came in, same thing. Third feedback came in. After about the third, then I’m like, okay, I’m onto something. I have three people who’ve done it. They’ve all given me raving reviews. Then my confidence just skyrocketed. And then the quality probably went down a little bit, to be honest, because I thought I was king of the world.

I was like, ah, this online stuff is easy, and I just put a heap of stuff out where I could have done better, but now I’ve obviously gone back and improved that. But that’s essentially how I did it. I just saw all these other people doing it. I was reading books and listening to Tony Robbins and all this other stuff. The mindset was just like, hey, I’m going to do it. I’m going to get it out there and see what happens, and then I did it. The quality wasn’t great at first, but it was good enough.

The reason why that’s I think so important is I was able to get it out there so quickly. I didn’t have to spend years. You probably know better than me. What does the average course creator take from idea to selling?

Christ Badgett: I don’t know, but I see far too many people take more than a year.

Jono Petrohilos: Yeah. I think it’s a year, year and a half, maybe two. I was able to get that in a couple months. I probably had three courses or four courses by that stage and a bit of a list just because I was able to get it out quickly, make some money, and then reinvest that… I didn’t make any money, because it was reinvested back into the business to start with, but it just enabled me to springboard really fast just because of speed.

Christ Badgett: Well, let me ask you some more questions about that. You said 2017 you hit a million. It was like a three year from zero to a million thing. Was there…

Jono Petrohilos: Maybe four actually. Probably about four.

Christ Badgett: Four years?

Jono Petrohilos: Yeah, something like that.

Christ Badgett: Was there a market outside of Australia, or was this for Australians only?

Jono Petrohilos: Australians only.

Christ Badgett: You got a tight niche. It’s also geographically bound. Was there a governing body or some kind of standard you had to be approved or something?

Jono Petrohilos: Yes, that’s a good point. You didn’t have to be, but you could and I went for that option. It’s the best thing I ever did for a couple reasons. I put the course together and I was like, all right, let me reach out to Fitness Australia and let me see what I need to do to get it approved. They sent over this long document. It looked like a pain in the ass, but I just really wanted it. I had the qualification. The major thing was the qualifications. It was like you need to have a higher qualification than the people you’re talking to, and I had a degree.

I was like, okay, sweet. The rest was just boxes you had to ticked, but there was like a hundred of them and it was a pain in the ass. But I just was so passionate about doing it and it’s the best thing ever for a couple different things. Firstly, it got listed on their website.

Christ Badgett: You get traffic from them.

Jono Petrohilos: 100%. That’s how I was able to prove the concept, right? The first three sales, it maybe took three months, but I did absolutely nothing. All I did was put the course together, went on their website, and there were three people… About one person a month would give me a call. “Hey, I see this thing on here. What’s it about? Tell me about it,” yada, yada, yada, right? I was able to make the call and prove the concept there. Moving forward, that helped my SEO because their domain authority is ridiculous.

I probably didn’t know what that was at the time, but it was just good to get it on there. It just made it a little bit more trusted, right? Because if someone was going to buy the course, it’s like a minimum standard. It’s like, oh, it’s registered with Fitness Australia. How bad can it be?

Christ Badgett: Are the people that buy the course, do they have to buy it for their license or something, or is it more of an optional thing, somebody is just trying to improve?

Jono Petrohilos: Both. As a trainer, you don’t have to register with Fitness Australia. If you do register with them, you need to complete 20 CECs every two years, and my course is counted as part of those CECs there. There was a third thing I was going to point on that as well. And then there’s just collaboration opportunities. Now I can pay them and they can send it out to their list of 20,000 people.

Christ Badgett: Of your perfect fit customer.

Jono Petrohilos: Of my perfect fit customers. It’s like the perfect joint… There’s no better joint venture than that. The way I do it as well is I set it up as an opt-in. And even going back, I think it was about $1,000 to get the course registered, but I was like, well, I’m charging $300 for it. If I sell three a year, it’s worth it, or four a year, I’m in the green. I saw it from that side of things there. And that’s something I haven’t pushed, but I’m going to expand on that as well. Just recently when I have been expanding into the course creator space, I’m like, hold on.

It’s not just fitness trainers that do these CEC things, here in Australia anyway. There’s nurses. There’s physical therapists, osteotherapists, real estate agents, nurses. I’m like, you know what I think I can do? I’m going to put together anyway a LinkedIn for health professionals. Not personal trainers like your physio, your chiro, your osteo, and get it approved with that thing there. I think that’s a market too.

Christ Badgett: That’s awesome. That is really cool. I’ve heard this story before so I wanted to highlight it where when you have a partnership with an accreditation board or governing body, it can create a real win-win between the two. You’re not just trying to get all your traffic from scratch. You get to borrow the credibility. You can even pay for more exposure like the email list or featured listing on their site or whatever it is.

Jono Petrohilos: Obviously it’s different for different organizations, because I have also done it in America this year and it’s completely different. In America, it’s NASM. Because they sell their own courses with NASM, right? If you on the NASM website, there’s a section that says, “Here are our external providers,” but it’s like an Excel sheet that you can download with like 500 names there, with just the name of your business and your course. Whereas the Australian one, it’s actually a clickable link.

You can go there and it’s a list of people. You can click there. You go to my website, yada, yada, yada. It’s different for different organizations. But if you can find a good one that supports you, it’s by far the best thing ever, especially to start with, because I think the start is the hardest to get those first few sales. For me, it wasn’t too bad because it was always a side thing, but enabled me just to make consistent sales as a side thing without doing too much. The limitation is it will only get you so far.

It’s like you make one a month doing that, which is better than zero a month, but it’s not going to get you $10,000 a month or a million dollars a month, but it’s enough to get you started, and then you can get your own genius and expand it out there.

Christ Badgett: Let’s fast forward from the early days to today. If you want to look at this site, you can see it at fitnesseducationonline.com.au. What has the site become after six or seven years or whatever?

Jono Petrohilos: Got you. It’s me and a business partner as well. Travis is my business partner who co-own Fitness Education Online. The first two, three years, we just put everything we know together as a course. It started off, how to run a bootcamp, how to run a bootcamp level one, how to use kettlebells, how to use kettlebells level two, how to use medicine balls, how to use social media, how to do sales, how to do marketing. Probably about three years, every single bit of information that was in our brain was in a course.

Christ Badgett: You ran out.

Jono Petrohilos: Yeah, we ran out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you do a launch, you always make a few more sales. We’re like, oh man, what do we do? We relaunched. It’s like promote the same course three months later, but it’s never as good as the first one. Anyway, then we’re like, all right, cool. There’s all these other things that fitness trainers need to know, but we don’t have that skillset. There was a nutrition course, and there was a training pregnant women course. Two very hot markets among certified trainers.

Every trainer wants to get better in nutrition. Majority of especially women trainers want to get better at training moms and women in general. We didn’t have the skillset to put those courses together, but there were people that already had those courses together. I did a Google search. I found some online… Well, there’s only one at the time actually, like an online nutrition course, that sort of fit our criteria, where it was like, okay, it’s the same sort of link. It’s 100% online.

The assessment is online. Let’s do a collaboration. We then got that woman’s course on our website. Same with pregnancy as well. Now we’re like, great! Now we’re getting more courses out there. We’re launching more. We don’t have to use our own info. Yeah, we give away 50% of the revenue on that side of things, but there’s no work involved. Instead of spending a couple months putting the course together, someone else has got the course and we can just launch, launch, launch, launch. Then it went to the next step.

Then we’re like, all right, cool. There’s these markets out there that are untapped and people don’t have courses for, but there’s experts out there. There’s another course on there, pelvic floor essentials. I know a woman who her specialty is training women with pelvic floor issues or to help strengthen their pelvic floor. Now, she’s never going to be an online course person. She likes actually training people, right? But she’s got that skillset. We’re like, hey, let’s work together. We’ve got the audience.

We’ll put an email out. We’ll sell your course, and then you deliver it via Zoom for five or six weeks, or whatever it is. You don’t need to do anything marketing. You don’t need to do any sales. We do all that on our end. You just present the content. We then record it. We put it together as a course. We sell it. We split it moving forward. We’ll get it ready with Fitness Australia. It’s a really good win-win for both parties. It’s even more powerful, because now we own that course.

Even though it’s still 50-50 split, there’s more power in our way if it’s a Fitness Education Online course that’s presented by that person than someone else’s company that just happens to be our website. It works better that way. And then even summits now as well. We’ll put together a summit, because we’ve got the audience. We’ve got 15,000 emails, 15,000 people in the Facebook group. If we get a topic, we can just sell that. So now we even put together summits maybe one every maybe couple year actually.

Put together a summit, four different speakers, each speaker will present their one session. We then put together as a course, and then we own that course. We pay the speaker to do the one hour or nine minute session or whatever it is, but then we put it together as a course with the five or six different speakers, and then we sell that moving forward there. We must have 40, 50 courses there now. Not that I’ve created myself, but 40, 50 courses that we sell. Some of them sell well. Some of them don’t.

But now we also know how to predict the ones that are going to sell well as well. But that’s the major thing on that website. We’ve got also got some other things. We’ve got a podcast. We’ve got a blog, YouTube channel. But they’re sort of icing on top. The major thing is website and Facebook group for that business there. They’re the two things there and everything else is just like a bonus on top. We do a lot of live workouts anyway. One, I’ll put them on YouTube. One, I put them on Instagram, but our major thing is website and Facebook group.

Christ Badgett: What’s the VIP membership?

Jono Petrohilos: Oh yes. We also a subscription membership. I’ve actually got three different levels, right? The major thing is our courses, which sell for about 500 bucks give or take.

Christ Badgett: They’re like ala carte, standalone…

Jono Petrohilos: Exactly.

Christ Badgett: Okay.

Jono Petrohilos: Give or take. We’ve then also got a coaching which is like, hey, you want to grow your bootcamp, but you want actual coaching? We got group coaching programs. It’s about $2,000 for about an eight to 10 week program. We’ve then got a subscription membership, which is 50 bucks a month, cancel anytime. That’s got similar content to what’s in the courses. Even a lot of the videos are exactly the same, but it’s a different way of presenting it. We find that some people will go for the 500 bucks because they want the step by step by step.

And also with the 500 bucks, you get lifetime access. You get the certificate. You get the CECs. You get all that as well. The membership, yeah, you get some of the similar content, but once you cancel, you’ll lose it all. It’s like a different… Also, it’s not… Because we got so many different courses. We kind of have all of them in the membership site. But the membership site is similar to what’s in the bootcamp course. Those three things, the membership, the courses, and the coaching is a very similar product.

It’s just like slight differences in support and what you get. The VIP is like, yup, you just log onto there and there’s videos all over the place that you can go and find. The course are like a step by step, first do this, then do this, then do this, then do this, then do this. Also with that, you get a certificate, you get lifetime access, you get CECs. The coaching is basically that as well, but you get a weekly Zoom session as a group.

Christ Badgett: Wow! Lots of nuggets of wisdom there. Tell us more about the transition to not away from, but to also serve the Course Creator Community. Why did that happen and how did that happen? Sometimes people, they just move on, but you still have this other business. You’re not going to let it go away, right? Tell us that story.

Jono Petrohilos: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The reason why I’ll never let the Fitness Education Online one go away, firstly, it’s just so profitable, right? Even now, I do pretty much nothing in that business. I’ve hired someone else to run everything, and I profit about $10,000 a month in my bank account. Pretty much purely passive amount. I’m like, why would I give it up?

Christ Badgett: Hold on, one question there, that person you hired, what do you call them? Are they like a manager, a president, a CEO?

Jono Petrohilos: I’ve got a few actually. It’s me and my business partner. It’s the two of us. Then we’ve got on the sales and marketing side of things, we’ve got a sales and marketing manager. She does all our emails. She does all our Facebook ads. She does all our social media sales sort of posts. She’s also hired a sales team with two people that do the sales course underneath her. We’ve got also two VAs, virtual assistants, who do the organic social media stuff, which is under her direction there. That’s like one side of the business, sales and marketing manager.

And then she’s got a couple sales staff and a couple social media stuff underneath her on that side there. Then on the other side of things, we’ve got the operations, which is the coaching, putting together the courses, collaborating with the people, writing some blogs, that side of stuff there. My business partner was mainly the operations manager there, but we’ve got an operations worker there as well who does some of that stuff there too, and then some virtual assistants over that side as well that can help with the little fiddly bits over there.

But if we had to summarize it, me and a business partner at the top, and then let’s say a sales and marketing manager on one side that does all that side of things, then an operations manager on the other side, and they do those side of things there. And then my role is basically to just make sure those two are talking together. Hey, operations, what are we launching? Cool. Sales and marketing, here’s the plan for this year. Get this ready. Get that ready.

Christ Badgett: Very cool. Very cool. Let’s get back to the transition to Course Creator Community. What happened there? When did the light bulb go off that, hey, I want to do this other thing too?

Jono Petrohilos: Yeah. It was always sort of there, because there were a couple things. It’s just I’m really passionate about it. I just love talking about it. I’d go to different conventions, Social Media World and Traffic and Conversion Summit and all that sort of stuff, and it was similar to my journey in the Fitness Education Online space, where like I’d go to all these courses and I’m like, I think I can put something better. Everything these presenters are talking about these courses are doing, I’m doing it and I think better as well, but I’m not teaching it to…

And also the other thing is a lot of stuff I wasn’t teaching because it’s completely different. Yeah, it’s completely different. I shouldn’t say completely. There’s differences. There’s obviously similarities in any business and marketing, but there’s a lot of things that I do to grow my own Fitness Education Online business that I can’t teach face-to-face personal trainers. There’s differences between an online course business and a fitness business. I had the skillset that I know in my head, but I’m not teaching it to anyone.

It’s something that fired me up where I’m like, ah, I feel like this stuff that people doing, I know and I can do better or different to some of these people here. I want to put something together. That was like years, to be honest. From about 2019 I’d say I was thinking about it. Now I don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like, right? But even from that 2019, I was like I really want to do something in that space, but I was so busy in Fitness Education Online that I couldn’t really do it. I couldn’t really focus.

Then my focus was like, how do I get hands off Fitness Education Online? How can I just get everyone else running else for me so I don’t need to do anything so I can clear up my space there? And then even then, I didn’t know what it was. I’m like, okay, I know I want to help course creators, but I don’t know what I’m going to help them with. Because in my business, Fitness Education Online, I used every trick in the book. There’s Facebook Ads. There’s Google Ads. There’s SEO. There’s putting the course together.

There’s sales calls. There’s webinars. There’s a Facebook group. There’s a podcast. It’s like, man. Also, it took me three or four years to master all this stuff. I’m like, I can’t just say to someone, “Hey, just do my three to four year course and do all these different things and you’ll be like I am now.” I just dabbled with a few different things. I was like, well, the first thing I’m going to do is start a podcast because it’s easy. I’m just going to start a podcast.

I’m just going to speak to different people in the space there and just network, see when that goes there. I was like, you know what? The next thing I’m going to do is create a Facebook group. Because if I have a Facebook group, I can make it about the community. It doesn’t need to be just me trying to spread a message. It’s like, hey, we’re all course creators. Let’s create a community. That’s where I am there. That’s the space there.

I think the direction I’m going to go is the Facebook group space, where I think I’m just going to say, “Hey, you’re a course creator. You need an audience. There’s plenty of different ways to do it. My recommendation is go on a Facebook group because of bang, bang, bang, bang. You want to grow a Facebook group? Here’s the perfect course for it. I’ve used these different strategies to grow this Facebook group to 15,000, this Facebook group to 5,000 in less than a year. Here’s how it gets engagement,” yada, yada, yada. That’s the direction I think I’m going to go.

Christ Badgett: I love that. I love that. I’ve watched you come up in the Course Creator Community with your Facebook group. You came up fast. I was like, whoa, what’s this guy going? What did you learn in having Facebook groups for fitness? What are some tips you’d recommend to people who are looking to do some community building with a Facebook group?

Jono Petrohilos: Yeah, 100%. This I think is my specialty as well. Because even going back to my bootcamp days, one of my biggest skillsets… With those 75 franchises, you had your bootcamp, but you had to have a Facebook group as well. At the start, I thought it was a burden. It was always like a 25 year old guy or something. I remember when I was coming last, I had to have a meeting with the franchise owners. They’re like, “Jono, one of the problems is your Facebook group. That’s where you’re coming last.”

I’m like, “What? Out of all the issues I have as a personal trainer, I’m pretty sure it’s not the Facebook group that’s the problem.” They’re like, “Well, we kind of think it is. We the 75 that are doing better than you. They’ve got a better Facebook group.” I had a bit of an argument. Then I thought about it. I’m like, well, hold on, I’m coming 75th out of 75. These people own all 75 locations. Maybe they know something that I don’t. Put all my effort into just making that Facebook group engaging, right?

Just knowing what post would work, what post wouldn’t work, and I got it ridiculously engaging. But that was easy because they were also my clients as well. It’s easier if it’s a face-to-face end on one thing. But when I started Fitness Education Online, didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew I was good at Facebook groups. So I started a Facebook group, and I was able to test out what worked there. That was a lot of trial and error as well, but it was like, cool, I know what worked solely online.

When I started the Course Creator Community, I was just able to use everything I learned from those and started off with a bang. This is what I’d recommend for everyone starting off. There’s two things I do… Actually I’ll go step by step. Yeah, step by step. The first thing I recommend if you want to start a Facebook group is don’t start a Facebook group until you have about 100 ideal members for a few different reasons.

When I started the Course Creator Community, I was networking for a few months beforehand, going on podcasts, having a podcast myself, connecting with people on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, people that I met at conventions. I purposely didn’t start the Facebook group until I had about a hundred people I knew that I could say, “Hey, Chris, I’m starting this Facebook group and I’d love to have you in there. Here’s the link. Do you want to join.”

The advantage of that is I didn’t have a Facebook group with 20 people in there, because that’s hard to build from there for a couple different reasons. I was like, “Chris, I have this Facebook group. Come and join,” and I got 20 people in there. Chris is going to be like, “Ah, yeah, all right, Jono.” You would join and then you’ll leave the next day. There’ll be no conversation going on in there, so there’s no real value [inaudible]

But because I waited until I had a hundred people, then I did a bit of a launch for the Facebook group there with email and post on my Facebook and some messages to my friends that I knew would be a good fit, I was able to start that group off with a bang. It started off with a hundred people on day one. And then also, they were also my friends as well. I was able to say, “Hey, make a post and introduce yourself. Let everyone know what you do.” It wasn’t just a random ask. It was a friend or a person they actually knew, right?

From day one on that Facebook group, had a hundred people with everyone just posting, “Hey, here’s what I am. Here’s what I do.” There was a bit of a buzz because it was a new group and people are liking and commenting and friend requesting. That’s tip number one, wait until you’ve got a hundred people to join because then you join with a bang. The other advantage is it means you’ve got some form of lead generation strategy. There’s plenty of different strategies out there. We can go into detail in that as well if you want.

Christ Badgett: You mean like a plan for how you’re going to get people out of Facebook into your email list?

Jono Petrohilos: Exactly. That was my plan. It was like, okay, before I can grow this group, let me build my email list and also ideally I had friends on Facebook as well. But it was ideally the email list. I was like, all right, what can I do my Facebook to grow my email list? What can I do on Instagram to grow my email list? What can I do on LinkedIn to grow my email list?

Christ Badgett: What can you do on a Facebook group to grow your email list?

Jono Petrohilos: Okay. On Facebook in general?

Christ Badgett: Yeah. Yeah, and a Facebook group. How do you end up getting emails out of Facebook?

Jono Petrohilos: From my Facebook group or from someone else’s? Because they’re two different strategies.

Christ Badgett: From yours. Maybe both, but from yours to start.

Jono Petrohilos: Okay. Give me one second here.

Christ Badgett: Yeah.

Jono Petrohilos: Sorry, my phone alarm just went off. In my group here, there’s a few different strategies. The basic one is the welcome question when someone joins. If somebody is going to join my Facebook group, I’ve got three questions: are you a course creator, to validate them. How did you hear about me, just so I can sort of see how my marketing is working, and drop your email below if you’d like a free copy of my online course, insert lead magnet there, right? That’s the base. In my experience, if it’s a good lead magnet, about 30%.

If you’re getting any less than 30%, the lead magnet is probably not juicy enough. That’s option one. 70% of people won’t do that. That can’t be my only strategy, because then I’m only going to cover 30%. I then do a welcome post in the group for the new members. Hey, new members. Welcome to the group. You get a free copy of insert lead magnet. Just click the thing here and I tag all the new members there. There’s a second shot at it there.

Christ Badgett: Do you set up that manually, or do you use that automated one that Facebook throws up to welcome new members?

Jono Petrohilos: Yeah, that automated one. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Christ Badgett: Yeah.

Jono Petrohilos: And my VA does that. I’m pretty sure she does that, because we get 50, 60 people joining a week at least. It’d be a pain in the ass to manually that there. And then I’m just always constantly throwing freebies out there. I’ll do at minimum a webinar every month. “Hey, guys. I’m running a webinar on how to grow your email list. Comment below if you’re interested.” People who register for the webinar got to put their email in, and then I’ll just throw lead magnets out there as well probably even every week, because I’ve got a heap of different freebies.

Every week or every couple weeks, I’ll just throw some sort of lead magnet out there to capture leads. There’s a heavy emphasis at the start, but it’s not the end at the start. Every week I’m probably doing something to try and grow that email list there.

Christ Badgett: That’s amazing. What other kinds of content do you put in there? Maybe not to get an email or anything, but what do you do in your Facebook group? I think I’ve seen you do some live streaming.

Jono Petrohilos: Yeah, yeah. Actually both groups actually. There’s simplified version. There’s two types of… Yeah, say two types of non-sales content that I’ll post. I’ll do a weekly live stream. Just five minutes, just sort of one tip. It’s similar to like an email. If you’re going to send an email, you do an email, you send one tip. Hey, buy my thing. I’ll also do that in a live video as well. I’ll just jump online and I’ll give one tip there. The key I found with the live is always have a call to… A, always get some sort of interaction.

Hey, guys, what’s happening? It’s Jono here live. Here in Sydney, we’re in lockdown. Where’s everyone else in the world from? Some sort of question to get… Hey, we’re all course creators here. Out of curiosity, what platform does everyone use? Oh, everyone uses LifterLMS. Oh, okay. Cool. Cool. Cool. Yeah, awesome. Always some question to engage people, but also a call to action at the end. Hey, by the way, I’m running a webinar this month. Comment X below and I’ll send it over to you.

Hey, I’ve got this free thing. Comment below and I’ll send it over to you. Hey, I’ve got this membership site. It covers this. Comment below and I’ll send it over to you. There’s always something, because the key and the key to growing your own Facebook group is engagement, but ideally engagement from other people. I don’t want it just to be me posting. That’s why I just do the one live stream a week. The other thing I post myself is just engagement posts.

I just want to post something on there to get people to engage, but not silly posts like what do you prefer, Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad? I mean, that stuff’s not bad. You can do elements of that, but what I want to do is just find the points that fire people up in my audience. My engagement questions will be things like… I’m thinking of a few recent good ones I did. One was like, hey, guys, I’ve got to win an argument. Correct me if I’m wrong, nobody prefers Dropbox over Google Drive.

It’s not really going to get me sales, but there were so many people just like, “Dropbox sucks. Dropbox sucks. No. Google Drive sucks.” In the fitness world, it would be things like, guys, correct me if I’m wrong, no one prefers dumbbells to kettlebells, right? And then same thing, the people that like kettlebells are going to be like, “Yeah, dumbbells suck.” The people who like dumbbells are like, “What are you talking about? You’ll hurt your back if you do kettlebells. Beginners can’t do it.”

I purposely try and find posts. I’m not doing it to get likes and comments. That’s the result of me knowing my audience well. It’s like, okay, let me do this post. And if I do it properly, my audience is going to get fired up and comment, which shows that I know my audience well, which is going to help me come through with sales. I’m very strong on those things. Also, it helps with the algorithm. If you do a post like that, people like and comment on it.

Then on the next post, if you want to sell something, you’re going to get more traction because your previous ones have been like that. And also, it just gets people involved in the group. If they’ve liked and commented on your post, they might see other posts from the group that pop up in their feed. They’re the two major things I do that aren’t sales based. But the other major thing I focus on more than those is getting other people to post.

That’s the other thing I did well from the start is I’m like before I start this Facebook group, and that’s what I recommend everyone as well, have a strategy on getting other people to post.

Christ Badgett: Like introductions, like introduce yourself?

Jono Petrohilos: Well, I’ve got nine different things.

Christ Badgett: Wow!

Jono Petrohilos: Yeah, I’ll run through as much as I can in the next nine minutes because I want to respectful of your time, but that’s definitely the best first one. Especially if you have a small group and there’s not a lot of people coming in there, then it take… I get my virtual assistant to do it anyway. I’m just like, hey, anyone that joins this group, add them as a friend and just send them a DM and say, “Hey, I’m the social media manager from the group. Thanks for joining. Anything we can help you with? Great! Oh, that’s what you do? Cool. By the way, make a post in the Facebook group and introduce yourself.”

Christ Badgett: Hey, a quick question there, your virtual assistant has your main Facebook log ins?

Jono Petrohilos: No, no, no. She does it from her account.

Christ Badgett: Who’s she friending?

Jono Petrohilos: Anyone that joins the Facebook group.

Christ Badgett: From the Facebook page? Go ahead.

Jono Petrohilos: Let’s say someone joins my Facebook group or request to join the request group. She takes care of the accepting. She’ll do a screen. Is this person a fit? Yeah, great. Accept. Great. Let me also add this person as a friend. Then she’ll send that person a DM, “Hey, what’s happening? I’m the social media manager of Course Creator Community. I see you jointed the group, yada, yada, yada. What do you do? Oh, great! Hey, go and make a post and introduce yourself.” Some people will accept. Some people won’t.

Some people do the post. Some people won’t. But the key is some people will, so it gets something going. The people that will are then more engaged because other people are going to like, comment they’ve posted, yada, yada, yada. But also what happens is it lights the fire. Because let’s say someone doesn’t accept Phoebe’s friend request, but they join the group and they see there’s two or three posts of people introducing themselves. Oh, I guess you just join this group and introduce yourself. I’ll make a post and introduce myself.

You do the manual work at the start, but then it builds from there. Another one that I do is I’ve always got action tasks in my courses, even my free courses. Let’s say, for example, let’s use the Course Creator Community as an example. One of my free courses is how to create your first course in 48 hours. You’re essentially creating a mini course or a lead magnet, right?

I teach people how to do that mini course, but I say, “Hey, I’ve given you the five minute overview. What a better idea is go and make a post in my Facebook group and say, ‘Hey, guys. I’m looking for ideas for my mini courses and my opt-in page. Can everyone post theirs below so I can get an idea?'” Someone does that. It’s a win-win-win. Because if that person makes that post, everyone in my group wants to get their freebie out there for other people to see. It’s going to get a heap of different comments there.

But it’s also value for the person posting. Instead of them just seeing my one example, oh shit, here’s 50 examples. Let me check out this one, or let me check out this one. Let me check out this one. And then it’s a win for me because it’s engagement in the group going on. I’ve got them all scattered down below. If we go into the fitness world, if you do my kettlebell course, one of the questions is, hey, guys, what’s your favorite kettlebell workout? I’ve given you my 10 favorite, but go in this Facebook group, there’s 15,000 in there.

You might get heaps more. Same in the fitness world, everyone wants to share their favorite kettlebell workout because they think it’s the best. If you do my kettlebell course and you make a post in that Facebook group, then you’ve got a whole heap of different kettlebell ideas and it’s a win-win-win again. And also, the mindset is this group is sick. I make a post and I get 50 comments. I’m always posting in this group.

I’m not going to Google to find workouts. I’m going in this group. I’m not going to YouTube to find out the best lead magnets. I’m going to this group here.

Christ Badgett: They feel supported. I mean, that’s the whole point of community is to feel supported. I can tell you can just keep going. This is awesome and this is why you definitely need to make a course about how to use Facebook specifically groups the right way. Go to coursecreatorcommunity.net and check out more about Jono. I did want to ask you before we sign off here.

You did mention something about getting leads out of other people’s Facebook groups without being spammy or getting kicked out or whatever. How do you do that? What do you recommend?

Jono Petrohilos: Yes. Well, I’ve got a whole heap of different strategies there as well.

Christ Badgett: What’s your best one?

Jono Petrohilos: I would say the best one or the one at least to start with is collaborating with the group owner. This is a perfect example of you and me.

Christ Badgett: Like you’re doing right now?

Jono Petrohilos: I’ll give an example. Chris, I check my Facebook group this time last week and I’ve got like 10 new friend requests in an hour. I’m like, what the hell? And then I checked it. One of my questions is, where did you hear about me, it’s Chris Badgett, Chris Badgett, Chris Badgett. What the hell is this? Then I checked my notifications, Chris made a post saying, “Hey, go and check out this guy’s Facebook group.” I’ve now got 10 new people in like an hour. It’s a record.

That’s where we see the perfect example, but I’ll share the overview and then we’ll go from there. I’ve got a podcast and that’s the major reason why I have my podcast is networking. [Inaudible] Well, I guess that’s how I use my podcast for lead gen. It’s not so much to get it number one on Apple, because I’m not good at the podcast stuff. But I’m like, all right, if I want to do a collaboration with Chris, I can’t just hit up in the DM and say, “Do a collaboration with me.” It’s not going to work. He’s probably got heaps of them and he’s going to…

Christ Badgett: You invited me on.

Jono Petrohilos: What’s that? Exactly. I was like, all right, let me get Chris on my podcast.

Christ Badgett: You have an audience of course creators. Hey, you want to come talk to my people? How can I not say yes?

Jono Petrohilos: Made it a win for Chris. Not everyone is going to do what Chris did and make a post in their Facebook group and say, “Join this guy’s Facebook group.” That’s the best one I’ve ever done, so thank you for that. But there’s always going to be variations of that. Most people if they have a podcast will invite you on that podcast, or if they have a Facebook group… And even just prompting. Even if Chris didn’t ask me to be on here, I probably would have hit him up in a couple of weeks.

I would have been like, “Hey, Chris. Out of curiosity, what could I do to pitch myself as a guest on your podcast?” And then see what he says. Most people say if you’ve done a good… And also, the way I try and work my podcast is to make it as a much of a win for that person as possible because I want to make it about them, and then that increases my chances of them having me on either their podcast or if they’ve got a Facebook group can be live… By the way, Chris, do you ever do like live streams in your Facebook group?

Would you mind if I did one or if we could do one? I won’t sell anything. I just want to give value to your people there. Most people are cool with that there.

Christ Badgett: You should totally do a live stream in my Facebook group. I love to see members make content. I know you’re going to make useful content because you’re helping course creators. I do got to wrap it up, Jono. Was there one more thing you were going to say there?

Jono Petrohilos: Well, I was just going to add onto that as well. Then you sort of got options. Once you’re friends with the group admin, then everything becomes a lot easier. It can be a matter of, hey, do you want to do a lead magnet swap? Or also the person will feel less threatened. If I was to go and interact in Chris’ group now, he knows that I’ll do just as much to promote him as possible, so he won’t feel threatened if I’m answering in there or whatever.

But if I hadn’t collaborated with the group admin, they maybe, “Oh, who is this? He’s also got a course creator group. Ban him there.” I think the good first step is do a collaboration with the group admin, and the easiest way to do that is make it a win for that person first. The podcast is the easiest way to do it. It doesn’t have to be a… [Inaudible] The easiest I think is start a podcast. Connect with heavy hitters. Get them on your podcast without any expectation of return, and then it will probably come back.

That’s the easiest base one to do. And if you do it properly, you do a podcast every week, get someone else on a guest, and it’ll waterfall on. Next week, I’ve got another podcast with… I don’t know if you know Melody Johnson. She’s got another course creator podcast. The week after that, I’m with John Ainscow. He’s got another one. All these podcasts I did the weeks ago, it’s coming back in return now. And then I’m going to hit those people up in about a month’s time and say, “Hey, do you want to do a lead magnet swap?”

It’s a bit of work at the start, but then it just becomes this waterfall and you’ve just got a bunch of people that you can collab with.

Christ Badgett: I can’t wait to see the course about this. I’m buying it. This is Jono Petrohilos. His Facebook group and his podcast is called Course Creator Community. Jono, it’s great to connect again, and I want to thank you for coming on the show. Is there any final thing for the people listening or watching of how they can connect with you?

Jono Petrohilos: Whatever platform you use, type Course Creator Community in there. I’ll pop up something. You’ll probably get a DM from my assistant just saying, “Hey, join the Facebook group.” No matter what platform you join on, it leads back to the Facebook group.

Christ Badgett: Awesome. Thanks so much, Jono. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action. And I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post From Personal Trainer to Million Dollar Online Fitness Course Creator with Jono Petrohilos appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Learn about how to create a mobile app for courses and membership sites with Juliana Meyer from SupaPass in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS.

At LifterLMS we get asked a lot in the WordPress world and the LMS world about how to build a mobile app. And a lot of people go down the rabbit hole, and they just end up getting stuck. Or they do some research and find a mobile app developer, and it ends up being over six figures to develop. Juliana found an easier way to make that happen, and in this episode she takes us to school on creating mobile apps the easy way.

At SupaPass, they’re really excited that they’ve been able to make a game changer for a lot of course creators who prior to finding out about SupaPass basically couldn’t afford to have their own app. And now they have some customers that actually did spend hundreds of thousands building their own technology and then realizing that there are still a whole bunch of features they needed, and maintaining it is really expensive. And they’ve gone through it all the way and came to SupaPass, because what they’ve built is better than what cost them hundreds of thousands. It’s a complete game changer for people.

SupaPass is not just for course creators. It’s really for any content that you’re making. So if you’ve got a podcast, it can also have your podcast in there. If you’ve got music, if you’ve got an audiobook, if you’ve got blogs and articles, you can store all your content together. You can build a community there and have a pay for it, or you can have a subscription. You can do patron donations, but you keep 100% of all the money. There’s no revenue share. It’s completely your platform.

To learn more about Juliana Meyer and the awesome work she’s doing to democratize app development for everyday people, be sure to head to SupaPass.com. And if you’re interested in chatting with them about your goals and challenges, feel free to message them through the website or jump on a call with them.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay until the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Juliana Meyer from SupaPass, which is an easy way to make mobile apps, and it’s also a website builder. Welcome to the show, Juliana.

Juliana Meyer: Hey, Chris.

Chris Badgett: I’m really excited to get into it with you. We get asked a lot over in the WordPress world and the LMS world, the course creation world about how to build a mobile app, and I see a lot of people go down the rabbit hole and they just end up getting stuck or they do some research and find a mobile app developer and it’s going to be over six figures to develop. You found an easier way to make that happen. Can you take us to school on creating mobile apps the easy way?

Juliana Meyer: Absolutely. So yes, so we’re really excited that we’ve basically been able to be a game changer for a lot of course creators and content creators and entrepreneurs who prior to finding out about SupaPass basically couldn’t afford to have their own app, and we do actually even have some customers that actually did spend hundreds of thousands building their own technology and then realizing that there are still a whole bunch of features they needed and maintaining it is really expensive, and they’ve actually gone through it all the way and came to us because what we’ve built is better than what cost them hundreds of thousands. So it really is a complete game changer for people.

And basically, what we’ve done is it’s so affordable that it’s basically less, it will cost you less than some of the pricing tiers on Kajabi or Teachable or some of the SaaS e-learning platforms, but with us, you literally have your own mobile app that out the books looks and feels like Netflix, Amazon Prime or Spotify.

And also, the other thing for content creators listening is that it’s not just for course creators. It’s for really any content that you’re making. So if you’ve got a podcast, it can also have your podcast in there. If you’ve got music, if you’ve got an audiobook, if you’ve got blogs and articles, you can literally have all your content together. You can build a community there. You can have a pay or you can have a subscription. You can do patron donations but you keep 100% of all the money. There’s no rev share. Literally it’s your platform.

So that’s really key to I guess why I founded the company, was to give creators and entrepreneurs complete control and complete ownership of everything in a way that they can’t get on those third-party platforms in social media and streaming platforms but where it’s yours and it’s your brand. It’s your brand and it’s yours. You search for your name in the App Store or you go to your custom domain on website and it’s all there but you haven’t had to mess about with coding or plug-ins or software updates or any of that. It’s just made for you. The same way as you’ve created a Facebook group, it’s made for you but it’s your brand.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That is awesome. Well, I get asked a lot about mobile apps, but I’m not a real mobile app expert. So I’m going to pretend like I’m the prospective customer for you because I get these questions all the time. The first one … so I have a lot of little questions just around the process and how it works.

Juliana Meyer: Awesome.

Chris Badgett: The first one is does this work with Apple and Google apps or is it … Yeah.

Juliana Meyer: Yeah, exactly. So it’s a native build. So sometimes when you buy apps from a company, it’ll be cross platform which means that basically it’s built in one code base that then is distributed across both, but the user experience in those, it feels more like a website experience rather than an app experience. Whereas, what we’ve built, they’re both completely different stacks where they’ve built natively, so we’ve built an iOS native app, which is … We’ve got two apps. There’s one for iPhone and one for iPad. And then you’ve got the Android native app, which is then specifically for the Android stack, and it means that it uses all of that beautiful native functionality. The audio player looks like a beautiful player that you get on something like Spotify.

You’ve got really great functionality like push notifications and things like that. So every time you’ve got new video or new podcast episode that comes out, you can send a push notification automatically that says, “The latest content is up,” or you can send custom ones saying, “Oh, let’s all hop into Zoom now,” or whatever it is that you’re doing. It just makes that really easy to engage your audience and your students or whoever is your audience because it’s bringing them all into one place in a really engaging way that cuts through the noise.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. And getting set up on SupaPass, is it a SupaPass app or if I’m your customer, is it my account on the App Store or whatever?

Juliana Meyer: It’s yours. Yeah. It’s yours. So let’s say that you wanted a LifterLMS app, then you would register with an account, a developer account with Apple App Store and Google Play Store, and then we would do all the build. So basically, you’d sign up with SupaPass. You’d have your SupaPass dashboard. You control apps, really everything from that dashboard, so upload all your courses there. You can pull in your podcast automatically through the RSS. If you’ve got a podcast, you actually can create … And actually, it was interesting hearing your chat that you had a couple of episodes ago. Who was it with?

Chris Badgett: About podcasting?

Juliana Meyer: Yeah. It was the Divi Addicts podcast.

Chris Badgett: Oh yeah, Keegan Lanier. Yeah.

Juliana Meyer: Yeah. And he was saying, “Oh, it’s too much effort to create a website for the podcast.” But actually with this, literally within two minutes, you can have a beautiful podcast website that automatically pulls in all … And he was saying each time he’s got a plug-in and each time, he has to go and spend two minutes approving the episode. It automatically pulls in the episode and publishes it each time, sends out the email notifications, push notifications, post to social media, all that stuff literally out the box.

Anyway, I digressed from your original question, which was so you basically, from the dashboard, you can create all that stuff. And then with the app itself, it’s pretty much a form within the dashboard that you fill out, which includes things like what is the App Store copy? What keywords and categories do you want? Is there an age restriction for the app? That form takes about three minutes. Obviously, if you have to think about what the marketing message is, that’s going to take you longer, but if you already know what that is, literally just fill out that form, it takes you three minutes, press build and that’s it. That’s literally it. We do all of the rest of the magic behind the scenes.

So then we go and we create the builds, we create all the screenshots. For anyone that has built apps before, you’re familiar with the fact that you have to create screenshots for every single device, five to 10 screenshots for every single device that’s out there. You multiply that. You end up having to do 300, 600 screenshots for every single app release for every time you do an update. But we do all of that for you so you’re just not having to worry about any of these technical things, which normally is such a barrier when people want to make an app. You literally don’t have to worry about those things with us. You go to the Apple or Google Play Store review process and then your app is published.

And then from there, the other thing that we do once it’s live in the store is we constantly update the app. So every year, Apple brings out a new iOS update, which means that … and usually it deprecates previous things. So if you’ve got your own app that you’ve built yourself, you’ve got to then invest time basically upgrading it and rewriting bits of it to work with the new devices and operating systems. But with us, you literally just don’t have to think about any of that. Actually, probably a lot of our customers don’t even know we’re literally doing that every year all the time. We’ll do all of that for you. You just don’t need to think about it. We’re constantly adding new features, so our clients often would be like, “Oh my, gosh. Now I can do this other thing that I didn’t even know was coming and it’s just there.” It’s released. It’s just added to the suite of tools that you get to enjoy. So we really do aim to take all the pain points away, make it really, really easy.

And probably the most complicated bit is actually just creating your developer account in the first place because with Apple, you have to prove who you are and things like that. Honestly, that is, for us, the most restricting stage because we can’t make that simpler.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And you’re giving the power to the person. It’s your account. It’s your app, so you got to set up the thing. Right?

Juliana Meyer: Well, yeah, exactly. So we want to give you all the control, but unfortunately we can’t just create the account for you, but we can do everything else and we do. And then also having your own Apple, Google Play Store account, that means that you can then see all the app downloads, see the territories, any in-app purchases that you have. You can see all of that money and you get paid that money directly. You basically have control of everything, apart from we take care of the tech for you. So yeah. And we’re constantly doing more to make it even simpler and to bring down the price even more because basically, my mission and my aim is to enable any content maker on the planet to be able to have that level of technology that Netflix or Spotify can offer your audiences. Most individual content creators can’t afford that kind of content experience for your audience, and that’s what I think, I want to level that playing field.

I want us to enable anyone to give that experience but in an affordable way that they don’t have to go through all the pain and that it’s as affordable as building something on Wix or Squarespace or WordPress wherever people currently build websites. They can actually have their own mobile app and their own website out the box for those same price points.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Michael Wiley is getting excited in the Facebook group.

Juliana Meyer: Awesome.

Chris Badgett: If you have any questions-

Juliana Meyer: Hey, Michael.

Chris Badgett: … we are broadcasting. The recording of this is live, so if anybody is watching this, feel free to drop a question in the chat. But let’s talk about timeline. Let’s say I have a bunch of materials together, some video files, audios. I just know what I want my app to do and I got the content. How long from that moment to having my app is live in the app stores?

Juliana Meyer: So the answer to that question most of the time depends on you. So I’ll give you an example. So we made an app for Podfest, which they’ve actually got a Guinness World Record for that conference for the most podcasters to attend a virtual conference. So this was last August.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Juliana Meyer: And the conference finished on a Friday. And on Monday morning, it was about 500 half an hour sessions that they’ve had through these 500 video sessions, and on the Monday morning, we started uploading all of that, creating the apps at 9:00 in the morning. By 2:00, we’ve uploaded all 500 videos, all curated, set up all the price points and products, created the build and submitted the builds to the app store by 2:00 that same day. So when you have got absolutely everything ready and you know exactly what you want it to be and do, it is possible to literally create it in 24 hours. Then after submitting it to the app stores, it can take, particularly Apple more than Google, it can take a week for them to approve it through the app store, but sometimes they can turn around in 24 to 48 hours so it just does depend. Very rarely, it can take even longer than a week if there’s some copyright that they needed to prove that you’re … Particularly if you’re a big influencer, you might to prove legally that you are who you say you are.

So the app stores can take a bit longer, but on our side, it can literally be done within a day. I would say that that’s not normal though. I think most of the time, what we see is that people aren’t quite ready with absolutely everything when they sign up. So quite often what people will do is they’ll sign up, they’ll get the initial, the homepage, landing page for the website and the podcast and other things. That usually will even for people that don’t necessarily know what else is fitting for the rest of that, that usually happens in the first 10, 20 minutes anyway. So that can go live straight away even if you’re not organized with the other stuff. And then the other stuff, it just depends, but we are talking a matter of hours once you have everything.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. I’m not sure how it technically works, but what if I want to have, let’s say it’s a private app that I’ve already got these existing customer. Is that possible to do with SupaPass?

Juliana Meyer: Absolutely. Yes. So we work with loads of entrepreneurs who already have a really cool ecosystem, whether it’s a community on Discord or courses on Udemy or whatever it might be. There are so many different kinds of examples that we have where they then want to add the app as well. And so it’s very, very easy to invite all of those existing customers in where they’re not having … So let’s say you set up, so you’ve got a course and it’s on your website. You’ve got your LifterLMS course and then you want to get all of those students into your app as well so you’d set up-

Chris Badgett: But not the general public.

Juliana Meyer: Yeah, not the general public. Exactly. So you may want to also have the app … If new people come along and want to buy the course that they could do that within the app.

Chris Badgett: From the app side.

Juliana Meyer: Yeah, on the app side if you wanted.

Chris Badgett: Cool.

Juliana Meyer: But then all your students that already have enrolled, they’ve already paid, you literally can just … We can generate a unique link for each of them and then you just send that link to each student. They click it. It automatically redeems their access. That link is unique to them. It can’t be then reused. And then they’ve got access and that can be for … And you can really control on a really granular level what you’re giving them access to. So let’s say they bought 10 different courses. With that one link, they can then have instant access to all 10 of that content. If you maybe wanted to create a secret space that no one else can see and just that cohort, that group of users can see, then you can do that too, so you can have a unique link that’s just specifically to that secret space.

One thing that seems to be quite popular is people are doing a lot of Zoom sessions or webinars with a group of students that they’re training and then you probably don’t want to share that on a website that other people could then ever access that video even if they were paying. So you probably wanted then to share that recording with the people that were part of that session, particularly if it was an interactive session, so you can just create a space, a secret space just for the people that attended or maybe it’s a weekly thing so you do it across all the videos that they attend. And then you just give them access and then every time you have another session with that group, you can just then upload that and give them access.

So it’s a really, really nice way to granularly control private content, paid content. You can also have free content that has an email gateway, which is a great lead magnet and a way to grow your email list, and you can just have free content if you want to have people just come straight there, play stuff, find out more about what you’re doing. So we find that people tend to use all four different kinds of access types across different content as well. You can have infinite permutations so it’s a really nice way to curate everything.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. What about let’s say where we sell annual subscriptions to our website and somebody churns, can we remove somebody off that we gave the unique link to, to get access? Can we kick them out of the premium stuff?

Juliana Meyer: Yes, exactly. So you’ll be able to control all of that. We also do the other direction. So if people have signed up through the app and let’s say you’re then connecting their details through to your CRM. Maybe you’re using Mailchimp or something to send regularly emails to everyone and you only want those emails to go to the people that are actually subscribed. If they then unsubscribe, then we’ll actually automatically update Mailchimp to know, okay, this user is no longer subscribed to that. Going from our system out, it’s automated, but the other way around, if you had a system that then that person is not subscribed, you can just go into the dashboard and say, okay, let’s remove access for that person.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. And that thing to Mailchimp, is that an integration or Zapier or what is that?

Juliana Meyer: Yeah, exactly. It’s Zapier.

Chris Badgett: Oh, so you have Zapier.

Juliana Meyer: Yeah. So we have Zapier integration to whatever CRM you’re using. You can also post that automatically to social media whenever there’s a new piece of content. So there’s loads of different ways that you can integrate with your existing system.

Chris Badgett: Cool. And Michael had a question related to this just about how they work together, but I think Zapier is answering that, but a question around video specifically. When you’re doing an app and you’re working with video, let’s say we have a WordPress site that has Vimeo videos on it, do you actually upload videos to the app or do you embed your Vimeo Pro links or whatever in there or could you do both?

Juliana Meyer: So the majority of our clients will upload stuff directly so we do include video hosting because that gives the best content experience, then people can just come in and all the players work beautifully both on the web and in the apps. So that’s what most of our customers choose to do. You can also, if you’ve got a lot of stuff on Youtube, you can actually just have those show directly. It’s not really an embed. It’s more that you put the link in to the dashboard and then it will still curate it into beautiful categories and collections in the same way as the other videos, so it’s a really nice, cohesive experience across all your content. We actually don’t support Vimeo at the moment, but if we had a lot of people that wanted that, it’d be quite easy to add it, but at the moment, people basically have really to upload directly or in the case of Youtube I guess is the only time they’ll share some existing stuff within it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Native video makes sense. It’s really been the best. What about … I’m giving you all the hard questions I get [crosstalk].

Juliana Meyer: I like your questions. I love these questions, Chris.

Chris Badgett: So what about offline? What if I have video content but then I get on a plane with no internet or whatever, what happens there?

Juliana Meyer: Cool. So at the moment, we have offline for audio so you can-

Chris Badgett: Is that a download option within the-

Juliana Meyer: Yeah, exactly. So you can download everything to offline so that then you can listen when you’re on a plane or underground. We don’t currently have that for video but it’s on our roadmap for this year.

Chris Badgett: Oh, that’s cool. What are some ideas? There are videos. There are audios. What else can people put? What have you seen somebody who’s just some kind of subject matter expert in whatever it is, yoga, business, health, whatever? What kind of stuff can we put inside of an app?

Juliana Meyer: Anything you make, anything that’s video streaming, audio streaming, written content. Yeah. We have the most wonderful entrepreneurs that we work with across course creation, podcasting, music, TV and film, charities, conferences, membership organizations, through to local councils and care homes and massive … and chamber of commerce, business, so many different things. It’s really cool that, yeah, these days, most businesses have content and even for bigger organizations, it’s really annoying. It’s a pain to work out where is all this content going to live? Because the thing is for most … and I guess I’m talking about bigger organizations rather than specific content. But a course creator or podcast, obviously, the content is the business.

But if we’re talking about bigger organizations that have a website that needs to also have content, quite often if you just have six or 10 videos or something, it’s really easy to add that. But if actually, you’ve got an archive of 100 video resources or in some cases, we end up having hundred of thousands of different resources, that’s really hard to create with a really nice user experience. To have a really nice design and UX that is intuitive for users to find what they’re looking for, that’s not easy to do, and that’s really the pain point that we really solve for people, is they don’t have to hire a designer or a developer or have any of the expertise. We’ve literally figured that out for you, and within that first, whether it’s the 10 minutes or the few hours, depending on how much content you’ve got, you don’t have to think about the build or the design or the layout because that comes out the box. We call it the smart builder, and it basically will make it look like Netflix for you just by uploading.

Chris Badgett: That is cool. Well, if somebody is listening to this or watching on Youtube, how should somebody who’s more familiar with building websites with WordPress and just thinking about websites, how should somebody think about app building? Is it just like a website that’s really skinny or any ways for people to think about approaching an app that come from a website building background?

Juliana Meyer: So with us, there are two different ways that people use what we’re doing. So sometimes we’ll have people that already have an incredible website that has everything on and really, what they’re looking to do is add a mobile app. And in that case, it’s really easy to just create all of that and then they won’t really be using the website part of what we’re doing. And then we’ll have others who have a great website to showcase their businesses up but they don’t really have a content or members’ areas part of it so they’ll then use both the mobile app side of what we’re doing and also the website, but the website will be a sub-domain of their main website so they’ll have their website as their shop window for everything and showcasing their services. And then they’ll have a sub-domain which is basically their content and members’ hub, and then we basically are creating and hosting all of that side of it.

And then you’ll have the … I’d say probably about half our clients that literally replaced their website with this and then have this for all of their everything, so everything on their website, all of their content, all of their members’ area and the app. Then, the benefit there is that everything is controlled from one dashboard. You upload the video once and it’s in both the app and the website, and somebody registers either on the app or on the website and they’re registered in both, and a comment they might write is it shows in both and everything is synced. So in that sense, it definitely saves people time.

But some people absolutely love their website and then they just want to create a mobile app and this is the easiest way, particularly if you’ve got more than videos. If you’ve got a podcast or want to create one or have articles or blog, there isn’t really a better option than this for creating a mobile app across all of those different content types. There’s a few products out there if you are just creating video. They tend to be a lot more expensive than what we’re doing, but if you are looking to create an OTT video streaming service, there are other options out there. But if you also have a podcast or also have written content and things like that, there isn’t really anyone that’s offering what we’re offering.

Chris Badgett: Can you tell us a little bit about in-app purchases like how that works and what are some examples?

Juliana Meyer: Yes. So within the app, you can have an in-app purchase that could be a monthly subscription, a yearly subscription. The thing to always be aware of with in-app purchases is that Apple and Google like to take their cart. So it used to be 30% for everyone, but they’ve now launched … So Apple launched the small business program in December, and Google have just added their own now this summer where now if you qualify for that, which I’m assuming most people listening would qualify for that, I think you have to have revenue under several million. Then, the cut that they take is 15%, one-five percent instead of the 30% so that’s obviously a huge difference. And I guess Apple and Google, their stake over that revenue share is that they’re saying customers who come to you through the app are their customers that they’re directing there.

But with our service, what you can do is if you do have the website as well, people can actually subscribe to the different content you’re making within the website and then they can go to the app and log in there and still access the content in the app and they haven’t had to buy an in-app purchase and then that’s the reverse of what Apple and Google are saying because then you’re saying, “Well, this is my customer. I brought them to my website first and then I told them to go download the app. So I’ve brought you the customer.” I guess it depends where does the customer originate from to whether Apple and Google have a stake over that revenue.

Chris Badgett: That is cool. And we’ve got a question about storage. So if I’m uploading videos directly into the app, is there a limit or is there additional cost for storage or how do we think about all our content size?

Juliana Meyer: So for most creators, it’s like there’s no limit because-

Chris Badgett: Most people don’t create like Netflix. Right?

Juliana Meyer: Yeah, exactly. We do have some clients that they have thousands of content pieces. They will be in our enterprise tier and there are additional costs there that encompass that. But for most solopreneurs, you probably are dealing with a few hundred videos, that would all be included in our standard pricing. And if you did want to go over that then there are bolt on packages which again, they’re really affordable, so I think it’s $50 for I think it’s up to 20,000 HD minutes of streaming and half a million audio minutes. It’s really affordable even if you’ve got ridiculous amounts of content. But yeah, so for most people, the answer is there wouldn’t be a limit that you’d notice, but yes, there are limits because transcoding and stuff like that does cost us quite a lot. So at some point, we do need to pass that cost on if you’re of that size.

Chris Badgett: That makes sense. So it looks like you’ve taken some inspiration from Netflix and Spotify. What are some of the features that you’ve been inspired by there? If somebody is thinking about creating their own version of Netflix or Spotify, what kind of things could they look for to in the feature set?

Juliana Meyer: So I guess the key things are really around the content discovery process. So everything is very, very image-led. It’s really bright, bold images. We often say to clients, particularly those that maybe don’t have those images, is really invest time in getting some really bright popping images because that makes the whole experience through content discovery so much more enjoyable and intuitive for the audience-

Chris Badgett: Like a video placeholder image kind of thing?

Juliana Meyer: Yes. So if you look behind me, I’m sorry for those just listening to the podcast that can’t see the image behind me, but all of the images behind me are really, really bright and bold, and every single place that you go to in the app to find content is led by what those images are. So rather than it just being like words and topic based, it’s very image-led, and I guess that’s where we are quite different to a lot of the other e-learning and LMS systems.

The way that you navigate around content is based on that principle that you see in platforms like Amazon Prime or Netflix where you’ll have your categories. They’ll scroll along sideways and you can scroll down and you can, with that vertical and horizontal scrolling, you can very intuitively see what area or topic you want to dive deeper into and then you can click into that. Let’s say each of those is a module. You can then click into it and then you’ll have a module with a list of all your course videos listed. They’re not a list but to get to each list, it’s in this beautiful collections and categories that do scroll in that really native intuitive way.

So what we find … So in the early days … So just to give you a bit of SupaPass’ history. So we have been around about 10 years. And when we started, we were actually completely focused on music which is where the Spotify user experience stuff comes in because we were very much focused on building an amazing audio streaming platform. It was really our roots. And then in the early days of starting to have course creators come to us, we have some that were on the more traditional very university structured LMS systems and they were on both that and us and then they gave access to their students to both. And the feedback that they got from their students was overwhelmingly that they preferred this.

And particularly so, that very first client, his students were actually, they were university students so he used us as a B2B deal to the university that gave access to that university to all 10,000 of their students in that one deal. So it was all that university age students. And when they saw both, they just absolutely intuitively just … They instantly could find what they were looking for in the app, whereas, in the more traditional structure, yeah, it’s just a different approach.

So I guess most LMS systems and course structures is more traditional, although I think things are changing now. I think in the last four to five years, things have changed quite a lot in that area. But we’ve always just been like … One thing we don’t do is if you want to restrict what videos people can see next. We actually don’t support that. We may add it, but what we always say to people is that users always say, “Look. People’s attention is here. They don’t necessarily want to have to be restricted of what they dive into next.” And so we actually actively recommend doing it this way. And basically, it’s never been a barrier for us. People always prefer that once they understand why that’s good. But there will be some content creators out there that will … It’s really important to them to just restrict whether people can move ahead in the course. So in that case, we by need to build that feature for them.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. Let’s talk about … Go back to your audio roots and talk about podcasting. I’ve been podcasting for seven years and I still don’t understand how all this works. It’s complicated. So if somebody is listening to this and they don’t have a podcast yet, you mentioned earlier about getting your RSS feed from your podcast. So when you have a podcast that you published at the Apple store and stuff like that, can somebody just create a podcast through SupaPass only and it goes everywhere it needs to go? How should a first-time podcaster think about using SupaPass?

Juliana Meyer: So most of the podcasters we work with already have a podcast, so they’ll already have a podcast host so that might be Libsyn or Buzzsprout or Anchor or Podbean or any of the awesome services out there for podcast hosting.

Chris Badgett: The problem is when people are over there, there’s all kinds of other competing shows.

Juliana Meyer: Yeah. Well, that’s exactly it. So what we say is, okay, so instead of you having to move from this ecosystem that you’re already familiar with, you could just within two minutes have a website with us that has that same podcast on our service and we’re basically just pulling it in through the RSS feed. So the same way that your podcast is on Spotify or Apple Podcast or any of those other places where those are the player, we basically turn your website and your app into a player for the podcast. But unlike most other tools out there for creating a podcast website, one of the really frustrating things for people is you’ll have a page or an embedded plug-in where they’ll play the podcast and then they’ll go look at a different page in y our website and the podcast will stop playing.

Whereas, with the website we provide, you’ve got an in-built audio player across the whole site, so it’s a site-wide player. So they press play in your podcast and then they go look at other things and go write some comments and go have a look at something else you’ve written somewhere else and the player is just playing all the way through. Again, this comes from the music background of us being really a streaming platform. We create your own streaming platform for you where your website becomes a beautiful player no matter where in your website they go.

So yeah, one thing we don’t do yet is if you’re a new podcaster that you would just put your podcast on our dashboard and then that distributes everywhere else. We don’t support podcast RSS distribution in that way. But we do, do is that … Sorry. My phone is going. It’s so terrible. I thought [crosstalk].

Chris Badgett: I can’t hear it.

Juliana Meyer: Oh, good. Excellent. Well, it’s gone. The thing that we do, do is if you wanted to just have your podcast on your app or your website. Sometimes people want to do premium episodes or premium podcast. That you can do directly with us. So if you have certain episodes you want to just upload straight to your Apple website-

Chris Badgett: It’s not for the public. It’s like a private podcast.

Juliana Meyer: Yeah. Exactly. And we’ve actually had a few podcasters that used to have their premium patron supporters on Patreon or some of the other services like that, and because you have rev share there, you lose some of your donations from your supporters because you’ve got revenue share. With us, the pay, well, you literally keep 100% of anything you earn. And because they’ve now got their courses with us and their blogs with us and all the other things, they’ve actually moved those supporters over and now they’re keeping 100% of that money. So you can pretty much do anything you want to do with subscriptions or membership or donations or paid digital products across any content types, but you’re not just getting it on your website. You’re also getting the mobile app.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s amazing. And for an incredible price, head on over to supapass.com. That’s S-U-P-A-P-A-S-S.com. Check it out. Check out their pricing. I know from having looked into mobile apps myself, I can’t believe what you’re providing for this price. It’s amazing. What’s the origin of the name, by the way, SupaPass?

Juliana Meyer: Cool. So it’s always been about your most engaged audience so basically your super fans, so that top 1% to 10% of your followers or your listeners, whoever your audience is in the wider sense. Where do you send your most engaged audience? And really what social media and Youtube and things like that are brilliant for growing your reach, but they’re very noisy when it comes to catering for the needs of your really engaged audience, and that’s really what we’ve built this for. Where do you send them in a way that there’s not going to be lots of noise and distractions and they’ll never miss a post and they’ll really be able to get your attention and all those things that really those other platforms aren’t sufficient for their needs. That’s who this is for. So it’s always been for super fans. And I guess with the origins of it being a music background, it’s all about that VIP pass, backstage pass, so that’s the SupaPass. But it still really holds now for what we’re doing because it’s all about turning your listeners or followers into paid customers.

Chris Badgett: That is awesome. And as we’re wrapping up here, what was the origin story of SupaPass? Where did it grow out of?

Juliana Meyer: Cool. So basically, I was a musician. I was running my own label. I’ve been making content and websites and stuff since the ’90s so I very much come from that DIY just work out how to do it background. And then it was about … Well, we started 10 years ago, but it was about three years before that that I thought micro subscriptions was really the way forward to enable independent creators to be able to afford to spend full-time on making stuff rather than it being a side hustle. And it was always about enabling that. As a creator myself, I was waiting three years for someone to do it. I thought this is pretty obvious somebody is going to make this, and in three years, no one was, and I thought, oh, all right, let’s go for it and let’s start it. So that was where it started.

And just to give context of what was happening 10 years ago. So this was when Netflix had only just started their subscription streaming service. They had been doing the DVD subscriptions, but this is when they just started subscription streaming. Spotify had just started in the US that summer as well. And things like Patreon and those other platforms didn’t even start for another three years after that. So this was really very much going, okay, micro subscriptions is way for individual creators to empower themselves to earn a living, and no one was doing it, and I’m so excited that now it’s mainstream. Everybody knows, yeah, subscriptions is everything. Micro subscriptions is everything and it’s a mainstream market now. But I feel like for the first few years, most of what I was doing was going around and telling people, trying to convince them why they should be thinking about subscriptions. I’m so relieved I don’t have to do that now because now, everybody is doing it and we’ve just evolved through all of the changes.

What I’m excited about at the moment is it feels like … We’ve moved. I always like seeing where the gaps are and seeing what is missing. Maybe that’s why we’re not as big as some of the other platforms and maybe it slowed us down, but I guess I’m always thinking of what’s the next thing and where’s the next cutting edge opportunity? And I feel what’s really cool about what’s happening now in the market is I feel like everything is converged. Everybody understands why its important to own your own audience, why you can’t rely on social media platforms that might just kick you off tomorrow. It’s been happening to quite a few people recently. Why the small revenue share cuts that you get from the mainstream streaming platforms and things like that isn’t necessarily enough for the majority of creators to actually earn a living. Why you should be building your own email list. Why people should actually have a great website.

And all these things is now where everybody is heading and we’re here with basically a solution that addresses all those things and solves those things for people in a way that’s really simple, doesn’t require any technical knowledge, it’s pretty much affordable to anyone who’s serious about their content and their business, and partnering with really amazing other businesses who are really killing it in the space and doing amazing stuff And, Chris, I love what you’re doing. Yeah. It’s so cool to be able to talk about this stuff with you.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, that’s Juliana Meyer. She’s the mayor of democratizing app development for the everyday human being like you watching or listening out there. The website is supapass.com. If you haven’t thought about creating an app for yourself or your client, this is definitely the easy button, and I can’t believe how affordable it is to get into. Juliana, thanks for coming on the show. Any final words for the people and how can they best connect with you?

Juliana Meyer: So I guess it’s worth mentioning that it’s super with an A, so it’s S-U-P-A-P-A-S-S.com. I guess if anyone is interested in what we talked about today, we love chatting with people, hearing about your goals and your challenges, so just send us a message through the website and we’d be happy to jump on a call with you and talk about how we could help you get to that next level or even just recommend some other things that you could be doing. So I guess that would be my parting message, is we love to help people, so get in touch.

Chris Badgett: All right. And Michael just said in the chat, “The pricing is incredible, so go check it out.”

Juliana Meyer: Thanks, Michael.

Chris Badgett: Head to supapass.com. Juliana, thanks for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.

Juliana Meyer: Awesome. Thanks so much, Chris.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS.com/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action. And I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post How to Create a Mobile App for Courses and Membership Sites with Juliana Meyer from SupaPass appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Learn about building online academy websites with professional marketing and CRM integration with Daniel Vargas in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. Daniel has used LifterLMS alongside many other tools in the online LMS space, and he shares his experience with Lifter in his journey entering the website development space.

Daniel is a great guy at marketing automation in WordPress and LifterLMS. His company name is Laboratorio de Éxito, and you can find that at LaboratoriodeExito.com.

Laboratorio de Éxito is a project that started after the pandemic began in 2020. Daniel used to work in the United States providing services to landscapers and contractors. Then one day Daniel worked on a referral job helping someone in the real estate world sell her training courses. At the time Daniel had an academy that he was building with LifterLMS and Keap, after many trials of many tools, so he knew exactly where to start on her project to get her training courses sold.

After several other site building referral projects, Daniel decided to create Laboratorio de Éxito to help people create momentum, and based on the momentum they create, they can scale their businesses. Daniel emphasizes the importance of integrating with a CRM tool, in his case, Keap.

The main part of Daniel’s business now is building marketing strategies for customers. One of the resources he provides is recording calls with his customers around marketing and selling their products, and he has those calls available for the rest of his customers to build that sense of community and educate by answering questions people really ask.

Daniel recommends keeping it simple when thinking about having a CRM. And when having an online course, using a CRM is always a good tool to have in place, because a CRM will help you be more organized and be able to be more strategic by using lead magnets and digital offers to capture leads, prospects, and customers.

You can find that at LaboratoriodeExito.com. You can also find him on YouTube at Daniel Vargas, MKT (acronym for Marketing) and at DanielVargas.com.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful Learning Management System for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Daniel Vargas. He’s an awesome guy at marketing automation, at WordPress, at LifterLMS. His company name is Laboratorio de Éxito. That’s it Laboratorio de Éxito.com. Welcome to the show, Daniel.

Daniel Vargas: Thank you, Chris. Thank you. I’m actually happy, so excited and blessed. I feel blessed to be here. So thank you.

Chris Badgett: Well, tell us a little bit about your sweet spot. The internet is a really big place and you’ve got some specialties around like Keap, around the Spanish speaking world, around WordPress, around Lifter. What’s your sweet spot? Who is Laboratorio de Éxito for?

Daniel Vargas: Well, Laboratorio de Éxito it is actually a baby project that started after the pandemic last year in 2020. And it was by accident I made it there. Here in the United States I provide service to landscapers and contractors. Then one day I’m showing up to a referral from the real estate world. She needed to sale her training courses. I’m like, oh, my God, I have an academy that I’m building actually with LifterLMS in Keap, after many trials of many tools. I’ve been through so many tools over 10, maybe more like 14, 15. I don’t know. I lost the count, but it’s definitely 10 plus tools. That I had tried before building my own experience, building my academy and I show this lady what I was building for me.

And then she was like, oh, how much does it work for this? How much are selling it for? And I’m like, no, wait, wait, wait, I’m not building this for selling. But let me see what I can do. Long story short, that started creating momentum because then I started getting referrals and then life is beautiful. And then I was getting random opportunities where I had to stop to build my little corner where I wanted to give access to my customers, to trainings and courses. So to start building for people because of the pandemic, because more people was making that digital transformation going from the analog to the digital and then started working in and helping with professionals in the knowledge industry. That’s the way I like to call it, the knowledge industry.

And there you can see coaches, teachers, professors, consultants, I don’t know so many, so many people using their knowledge basically to create a business model and create well, wealth for them and improve their quality of lives. And that’s where it led me to the pandemic. And so everything is like a trial and error, marketing it’s like a trial and error. And every time you think about life, not only about marketing, practice makes the master, practice makes the teacher. Practice makes all of us the best. So I started with mine, but then by practicing while providing service to a new niche, I ended up creating a new niche, a new ideal customer, a new avatar for my business. And then this year I said, now, I need to take this even more seriously.

So I create Laboratorio de Éxito because of that. So I like to help people create momentum and based on that momentum that they create, they can build success and LifterLMS has been a really important ingredient in the mix. And you’ve mentioned Keap as well. So for me, it’s really important that I’m able to make an integration with a tool, with a CRM that I use. I’m a Keap certified partner. And for me it was crucial to make something really special and powerful. But most importantly, that has a learning curve that for my customers and the people that I serve, that it’s easy for them to learn. And right now I’m basically helping more people to basically have a no line academy/membership site, which is the greatest of all things that with LifterLMS you can have it all.

You can have membership, you can have course, for me, that’s really important. And that adds layers of, oh, what if I can grow my business later? I can… Like the people that I work with now, they start thinking about selling a course, but later they might be interested in getting that to the next level, building a community and then building a membership program, which is really cool. And that’s why… I’m like over exaggerating. Maybe I’m not over exaggerating, I’m so happy because I found LifterLMS-

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome, man. So I love how you said, the course is the fundamental building block and maybe they’ll add like the full academy or the coaching, or more stuff in it later. And you said it started with you building your own academy, trying to educate your customers or your clients. What were you teaching then?

Daniel Vargas: Yeah. So they what I do for my customers, I built marketing strategies for them. And a marketing strategy doesn’t have any flavor if you don’t drive any traffic, if you don’t create any momentum, if you don’t know how other elements within the marketing world works and how they compliment each other in how they come into what we marketers know as the marketing mix, maybe not many people use that word, that marketing mix. But I have a BS. I actually have a bachelor of science in marketing. That’s why I think about first my marketing mix and everything that comes into play. So not many people knows everything and small business owners and solopreneurs it’s too much what they need to learn or what they need to be exposed. So there’s just too many information out there just too much, just too much.

And so I since I started on this journey as an entrepreneur, after being in corporate America for 20 plus years is that yes, there is so much information. But people continues after I was helping them they continue to look for more information. I’m like, okay, I need to give them access to the training and the information and the knowledge I need them to have. I need them to dominate so they can have a marketing that works for them. And so basically I was not even looking to sale my courses or to sale any courses. All I wanted was to have a little corner inside my website, where I can record my [calls] with my customers. And then I’m making those calls available for the rest of my customers. And it’s just building that sense of community.

They know that I’m recording them and they know that every experience is going to turn into a learning experience to help others as well. And so that’s how I basically, I don’t know if that answered your question-

Chris Badgett: That answers it.

Daniel Vargas: That’s the way I want it to have an academy. I wasn’t even thinking about selling training courses or building a membership site. All I wanted was something really right from my point of view something simple, but then it turned out that it was not as simple as I thought and because of a few complexities, that’s why I ended up like leaving so many solutions behind. For example, because of the mastermind calls, how focused I am in how what is my approach about tagging about categories and about having some model that it’s organized so I can have control and a house that’s organized, it’s a happy house and there’s a [inaudible] behind the organization. So I didn’t have that level of… I mean, that for me sounds simplistic, but I mean, so many things out there, I was able to find it with anybody else. And that’s basically what triggered me to basically, I said, I feel home now working with LifterLMS.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I like what you’re saying the academy or the course, it’s not always for sale, like on the other side of marketing and sales is customer success. So you were using it as like a training as a [crosstalk]. Yeah. Onboarding activation customer success.

Daniel Vargas: Exactly.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You mentioned that you had tried a bunch of tools to teach or to structure content and the courses and protected or whatever. What were the limitations or the walls that you were hitting that was frustrating that made you decide to try something else?

Daniel Vargas: Many of them was about for example integrations and what I could do with the capacity or the limitation of the capacity of every tool. There’s many solutions out there selling themselves as a not only one solution. And we know that life is not perfect. But many of the things where, for example, about, for me tagging, can I say any name?

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Daniel Vargas: Well, I don’t know for example and many of these tools, it is not because it was not the limitation of the LMS specifically, but maybe some of the other features, for example, if it’s a normally one solution on the cloud, there’s many out there that you, for example, like the Thinkific, the Teachable, Kajabi. Kajabi for example, is one, they try their best to be unknown only one CRM, LMS solution. But when you want to have a custom build experience, yes, there are some templates that you can use to build individual pages. But if you want to have your signature in those custom templates that you want to build, if you don’t know coding, you’re not going to make it happen. And I’m not a coder, I’m a marketer. So I don’t know anything about coding. I mean, I can have like a color in a text and use an HTML. But then that’s it.

Then I’ll be basically using their experience and not building my experience. And that, for me, it’s really important. It’s so important that I just recently, I don’t know if I told you before, but I recently launched a new YouTube channel. It’ll be all in Spanish. And the first video that I recorded was actually about that experience, the experience I went through, through all these different tools until I made it, to what it is, the perfect combination for me which is basically Keap, LifterLMS, WordPress, and look, I’m even saying LifterLMS before I say WordPress. Yes. That is basically a combination. Of course, I will need some other tools to make that connection happen. But it’s things that are pretty easy. For example some of the other tools I tried. I tried LearnDash, and I don’t know why, but I think, and I’m saying this from a non-techie point of view, what I think that when I had LearnDash in my site, my side was really slow.

I don’t know. I’m still using the same hosting service. I’m still using Bluehost. I don’t have the most of the advance of the hosting services, but I think for the type of volume that I get in my website, the traffic volume if it makes my Bluehost hosting lag a little, if it makes it slower a little is because there’s something there creating that. So before, when I had that combination, I mean, LearnDash, I had to use [inaudible] for me to be able to have a membership site. To basically to be able to have a layer of extra security to the access, to my content. And that combination made it really, like, it was really tough, like creating a custom experience from a non-techie experience, working with the short codes from them, it was challenging.

today, for example, a customer last night. She’s really creative and now she is looking for a new way on how to structure her courses. And now she has three different types of programs with the chances that she will be increasing the number of programs she has. She wants like one called program, another one called classes, another one called meditations. She asked me yesterday, if she somehow can have everything structured like that. It took me like seven minutes to find the documentation in the LifterLMS website find the short code. And then I watch that short video from Mapleton-

Chris Badgett: Wil Milton?

Daniel Vargas: From Wil. I watch a video from Wil. I mean, all of that within seven minutes like, okay, boom, boom, bam, send a text message to my customer last night. And then she was jumping, really happy that she was able to make it happen that easy, that fast before it was not that. And before it was for me, I was just dealing with my expectations, my demands. I was not dealing with my customer’s demands before, in my earliest stage when I just wanted to build something for me. So I didn’t have to learn anything like really fast. It was just finding the right short, put it in, bam. That’s it, she’s happy. I’m happy. Everybody’s happy.

Chris Badgett: Well, let’s talk about these clients. So how did you start getting these clients that were in need of an academy or some course or membership site?

Daniel Vargas: Let’s say, well, it was basically like the virtual word of the mouth somehow. Somehow virtual word of the mouth somehow. Okay-

Chris Badgett: Same thing happened to me by the way in my agency days is all of a sudden I was specialized in this niche and I was around Infusionsoft a lot. So a lot of similar overlaps there.

Daniel Vargas: Yeah. But some of them, for example, like I have customers in Europe, in Portugal, and Spain, and because I’m in that area sometimes I will be like, the way I generate energy towards my business, towards what I do is I run advertising.

Chris Badgett: Like paid ads?

Daniel Vargas: Like paid advertising. Yes-

Chris Badgett: Actually think I saw one of your ads earlier today. Yeah.

Daniel Vargas: So I do paid advertising, but I’m not so invasive. I don’t do any retargeting. I should be doing retargeting, but I don’t need it. All I need is to get people in my funnel. Then I engage with them in conversation. That’s it. I’m not being annoying. But so I do advertising. I also do social media here and there in a weird way. I don’t have a content planning for social media, what I’m going to be posting today. No, I think everything, [inaudible] on me surrounds about what is my priority right now, for example, my priority is to help more course creators. I’m launching a new initiatives in the upcoming weeks. Then that will be, I mean, that momentum that I will be creating, it will be because of paid advertising.

I’m not sitting down for my radical organic social media interactions to develop anything, social media interactions. This is just PR, people don’t get this. This is just PR you need to inject a little, so you can get a little, and then you go like that increasing you inject that little, you get a little, and then you go like that, creating more momentum and growing more. But the way I find these customers basically it’s paid advertising and sometimes because of the radical social media interactions even just looking for that opportunity and create that momentum like this year, I mean, last year we had the new thing in the social media clubhouse, it was new. I piloted, I started there trying what is this new thing everybody’s talking about and it’s only available for iOS, now it’s available for everything.

But when that happened, a lot of people was really excited looking into what is clubhouse? I use that momentum inside that new platform to grow a little, my social media in as well to create new conversations and from there, I was able to engage with people and then get them in a phone call and there, I let them know what I do. So when I engage with them, that’s almost for sure, it’ll be a long less than relationship in which I will be helping them. And it will be helping me because it’s a two way learning experience.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I think you have some specialty too where you’re at the intersection of marketing and also marketing automation with just general website building, and then also understanding the course creator, somebody who’s trying to create training. Those are three separate skills and you’ve spent time and iterated in all of that. So the specialty emerges, I mean. And there are certain tools are experts in like Keap, and LifterLMS, and WordPress. So that’s a very tight focus.

Daniel Vargas: Yeah. But I’ve been like most my marketing career lives has been around marketing automation. I did my first implementation transformational change back in 2002, that was my first major project. It was in the financial industry. And then I did like four more like, no, it was like six, six more between 2002 and 2007. And then I was a little quiet change roles. And then I was working for a large corporation in high-tech where, part of my priority verticals where education, and that’s where I learned a little bit more about education. Start learning a little bit about WordPress, not because I needed to do it. There I was just the marketer, but I mean, this life was ahead of me and I knew the skills that I needed to learn if I wanted to succeed and yes, you’re right.

So you need a little bit of many skills to make it happen. The marketing automation is really important. WordPress is really important. I tell people don’t try to reinvent the wheel, WordPress that’s the tool. There’s many options out there don’t go anywhere, WordPress is the tool. And then I’m not a professor, for me building a course. Oh, my God. Building a course. I never paid to learn that. And I’m going to tell you this, because this is a pat in the back. Although I tried Podia, Thinkific, LearnDash, Kajabi, even Patreon. If you know what Patreon is, I even tried Patreon, Teachable, CustomerHub. Guys, I love you. You know I love you, but I also tried them and a few more.

But anyways, I’m trying to think about how to create a course for my customers. Keeping in mind the instructor and the organization that you need to have for a course, when I’m not a teacher, I was never a coach. Now people call me mentor. I feel thankful like they’re calling me a mentoring coach, but I was never that but now after I started working with LifterLMS, it is actually way more easy to understand what is a module for example, or how to divide the different topics of your course, and then how to have that organized in how all out comings like how to see it all, like from above and see everything organized, like being able to build, for example, like I’m not creating courses for my customers, my customers, they are experts.

And usually they already have a course program that they just want to have it digitally. And for me, it’s really easy to tell them, give me your blueprint, give me your curriculum. And then just taking in less than 10 minutes and create that structure, create a different sections or modules, and then add in the different classes. And then I’ll help them with the first one, for example, to create that course. And look, here’s where you add the link for the video. Here’s how you add the content for that specific lesson. And that is something that is priceless, and this priceless because it is easy to teach others to do it with ease.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. While you’re on the subject, I just want to ask, what do you like most about LifterLMS? What are the top benefits for you?

Daniel Vargas: Okay. I can use the LifterLMS experience, or I can build my experience. That’s the bottom line. I use the LifterLMS experience, or I can build my experience. And when I say I can build my experience is for example, when you create a course, or a sales course page with the LifterLMS experience. It’s really nice. And then you have the buy now buttons, or the pricing options and the way you sort through everything. It’s really easy to do it. I liked that experience, but if when a customer comes to my website, I say, no, I want my signature here. And let me create a funnel. And then for example I use CartFlows. I use CartFlows to create a funnel and then to sell my course, and I can do that with this, and I can do it all from within WordPress. So I can use either the LifterLMS experience or I can build my experience now.

Chris Badgett: So that’s where Lifter has the sales page feature. So you can use the regular sale course page, or you can build a custom, which is what you do, and it knows which one you chose. Right?

Daniel Vargas: Exactly. For example, I’m actually building one now for a financial planning professional out of Maryland, and I’m building her the LifterLMS experience. Like I’m not going to be using any of the funnel builders that you can get out there. It’ll be just LifterLMS, Astra and Elementor. That’s it. Because that is everything she needs. She’s not selling trainings. She needs a corner where she can train her 80 plus agents across, I mean, national wide. So it’s just building a community. Well, she already has the community. She’s already building the learning portal for her teammates. And I mean, the experience is just the [inaudible]. So it’s the experience, I can build.

I can use either the LifterLMS experience or I can use the one I can build, but this one… That’s why I’m building this as well with the LifterLMS experience, because it is more like easy-peasy for me. It takes me less time to do it and I can do it really fast. The other experience is just me trying to be more creative, reinventing the wheel.

Chris Badgett: I’ll take that as a compliment, as the Lifter’s interesting. And really this is WordPress too, is it can be really simple and then it can scale to infinite complexity. So the tool should be able to expand to where you want to be at. Do you want the straightforward version? Do you want the medium or do you want the advanced? So that’s cool to see for you. Sometimes you’re in the base version. The other times you’re bringing in things like CartFlows and building in a big funnel with custom element or sales pages or learning pages. That’s awesome. What else do you like about Lifter?

Daniel Vargas: Wait, I’m here talking to you. I mean, again, I’m going to go back to the experience, but this is a different perspective of the experience and it has to be with the things, the resources that you can have at the reach of your hand, when you are being creative about the things that you like to have in your academy, for example, going back to the example I’ve mentioned before with my customer, she asked me yesterday how she can do something. I didn’t know if it was going to be possible. But I didn’t even go to the LifterLMS website to find the right information. I Googled it just in case, we’ll have something somewhere or somebody else have something somewhere else, but no, I mean, the options I found was the LifterLMS documentation page with the right information I needed.

And there, I have the compliment of Wil’s video in I continue looking for some more stuff. And then it’s what’s available, that support that we have and also… So that for me, it’s one of the things that I really like. Documentation is really important.

Chris Badgett: And one thing too, I did the exact same thing, which even though I might know where something is even for on LifterLMS on YouTube or wherever it is, or maybe somebody else’s video, using the Google search, like as a power user. That’s how I used to find anything, because even the LifterLMS documentation has a search, but when you use Google, you can end up on YouTube. You can end up on the Lifter site, you can end up on somebody else’s website or somebody else’s video. Super powerful.

Daniel Vargas: And wait, wait, wait, wait something else. Can I say something that I don’t like?

Chris Badgett: Sure.

Daniel Vargas: Okay. I’m going to say something I don’t like, but first let me tell you something that I like. Okay. Something else. It’s the amount of features that LifterLMS has.

Chris Badgett: It’s pretty comprehensive.

Daniel Vargas: Yeah. It’s pretty comprehensive. But you have so many good things that you can do even with a free version, even with the paid versions. I mean, you can scale it up, like you said, to unthinkable levels or just leave it simple or you can escalate the complexity. But what I’m mean is for example having for WordPress LMS plug-in to be able to have membership sites and course creation. I don’t think you can get at any that combination at the same time. And I’m going to talk about the free version of the application. So when what was the one of the things that people like, oh, my God, I’m helping people to get started with their academies, like with that. So here’s the free version. So you can create courses, you can have membership levels. That’s one.

And then the different features that you have in the different levels of the LifterLMS packages. What I don’t like, let me tell you, is that you guys, I’m not going to say to you, Chris, you should be talking more about the good features you have inside each one of the packages, because when you compare apples to apples, the LifterLMS with other tools, you see these tools here on my left trying to, can I say a brag?

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Daniel Vargas: Trying to brag about things that it’s like, common sense. Okay. And there are many things that they don’t have, of course here LifterLMS has everything they have, plus a few things that you cannot find here that you should… You guys are going to be bragging more than the rest of the people out there.

Chris Badgett: I appreciate that. We need to level up our marketing.

Daniel Vargas: Yes. So people needs to know exactly everything, all the goodies, but that’s good because when they find everything by themselves they, like me, yeey, amazing. I can do this too.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. One more question about Lifter before we go onto something else. We have an office hours mastermind call that we run, which is unusual in the space to have a live screen-sharing a camera on call with me and other people at LifterLMS and other power users that come, what do you like about that call? Because I think it’s unique in this space?

Daniel Vargas: What I like?

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Daniel Vargas: That I didn’t tell you that part of the questions I was able to solve yesterday for that customer. I have a few questions for you for Thursday. [inaudible] mastermind.

Chris Badgett: Okay. That’s the thing, this is part of our customer success. I mean, you make yourself available and sometimes we don’t have a course or documentation for everything. So you can’t replace the human entirely. Right?

Daniel Vargas: Exactly. And that acts is to a community of like experts that not because we all have in the mastermind community, not because we all use LifterLMS, we have the same approach, so we all have different approaches. And like learning from how each one of us do things. I mean, how better than that to push creativity and, let me say, to ignite the skills that you can have. There are things there that I’ve been able to learn how to do, that I wasn’t looking… Well, it thinks that not necessarily have to be with creating a course or using the LifterLMS, but it could be something that could be complimenting myself in a project.

I’m going to give you an example. There was this day we were in the mastermind and I think I was one of the call I took from Dominican Republic. You guys were talking about how to do like dynamic image mapping, and then to have some like dynamics areas where you can highlight or show more information. At that time, I’m starting to work with a customer. She’s a doctor and she does thyroid-

Chris Badgett: Thyroid. Yeah.

Daniel Vargas: Yes. I don’t remember the specialty, but yeah, but she deals with thyroid. Anyways, when I’m in that call when you guys were talking about someone that was using that type of application to show something more information in a customer’s website. I’m like, oh, my God, this is so nice. Let me talk to my customer and see if she will be interested in having something like that. I mean, people is interested to learn more about how your hormones works in your body. Everything in your body like about hormones, it’s controlled by a thyroid and being able to get that information, get that learning that I was not looking for that day, that afternoon, and then talk to my customer. That’s an added value, skill that I had there. I knew it was just a tool that you guys refer me to, and then you guys were showing how to use it basically.

And I just transferred that knowledge over to my customer and that was added value. So that was an impact directly from attending the mastermind. So it’s not only about what you are expecting to learn, because maybe we have a question because we didn’t find documentation on the LifterLMS Website. I mean, there is so many things that can come up that make us coming to the mastermind and ask for more information, maybe we’re not looking at the right information the right way. And you weren’t just pointing me or showing me, sharing your screen, where to find it. And then you just share the links with us and then we all, as a community learn and share and practice and enjoy.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s very cool. Yeah. Sometimes it’s about, you go in there and you don’t even know what you might walk away with. You might not come with a question that you walk away with the gym or whatever.

Daniel Vargas: Exactly. Like that day I didn’t come with a question. I just came to the meeting just to be there. That’s it. I know I’m walking out with something.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And for those of you listening image mapping, it’s like where you have an image in certain parts of it, you can pop up and link to things and have videos play. There’s a plugin called draw attention that, that we’ve seen a lot of our users using. That’s like that. You’re a Keap expert, Daniel, marketing automation, CRM, tagging expert, for somebody… And in my opinion, by the way, like, yes, I had market LifterLMS as being an all-in-one solution, but I genuinely believe that you also need to have a additional CRM, whether that’s Keap, or active campaign convert kit, MailChimp, Groundhog, whatever. There’s lots of options out there for somebody just getting started with a WordPress LMS site and they want to do the CRM. What are some core concepts they should keep in mind for strategically approaching the CRM with their WordPress LMS site or project or academy business.

Daniel Vargas: Understanding-

Chris Badgett: I know it’s a big question because you’re an expert. You’re like, how much time do we have?

Daniel Vargas: I’m trying to keep it simple. When thinking about having a CRM… Well, first, when thinking about having your own line course, I will definitely recommend using a CRM. Because a CRM is going to help you be more organized and be able to be more strategic in my case, for example if I use lead magnets so I use digital offers to capture my leads, to capture my prospects, my ideal customers-

Chris Badgett: Not everybody’s ready to buy all at once all the time.

Daniel Vargas: Exactly. Not everybody is ready to buy from you right away. And having a CRM is going to help you one, to capture, retain those contacts that you just generated, then is going to allow you to segment that list that you are creating the money. It’s not a joke. The money is on the list. It’s not in social media, it’s on the list, it’s not on social media because you are getting leads out of social media, but then get them into your CRM and build list, organized those contacts segment them by the type of segment that, I’m not going to turn this into a segmentation class.

Chris Badgett: Group them in different ways.

Daniel Vargas: Yes. Group them in different ways. But something that a really good starting point is, who am I selling to? Who bought from me? Who still needs to buy from me and remember this, when we get prospects, not everyone’s going to buy you. And yeah, you cannot be trying to promote your product to the same audience over and over because then they’re going to hate you. But that’s going to happen, we people we are like that. So what I’m trying to say is, when you have a structure in your database with your CRM, you can see who’s getting information from you that is not taking action? Who’s getting information from you that is not buying from you, but it’s engaging with you with your content? For as long as they are getting your content and they’re happy with it. So that means that there is an opportunity for you to sell your courses to them-

Chris Badgett: And I just want to add some color here. It’s not uncommon for me to see somebody in our CRM, who’s been on our list for two years and then they decide to buy something. So it’s a long-term thing. Yeah.

Daniel Vargas: Yes. But they’ve been engaging.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Daniel Vargas: That’s the thing. Yeah. They might not be buying from you now, but they will later if they’re still there now. But also if we have a list of people that it’s really, really, really cold with a CRM, we are able to identify them. And then, I’m going to say this blunt. I would get them out of my CRM so I can create space and get fresh blood inside my contact list so I can continue to build more momentum and more sales. So that’s basically, a basic way of having a CRM. Get structure, get organized, sale, grow your business, and then yeah. A happy community of customers.

Chris Badgett: That is awesome. For the WordPress professionals out there. Number one question we get asked a lot is like, hey, this is awesome. I’m sold on Lifter, do you know anybody who can help build my site? That’s why we built the LifterLMS experts program. Daniel is on there. He’s a verified expert. What advice do you have for WordPress professionals working with clients, trying to build academies?

Daniel Vargas: Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Don’t just go for what you hear out there as the mainstream. In my case, I get involved with a lot of for example elementor site creators, and in those communities, sometimes, it’s like, they try to just repeat the same that many others are saying. Don’t get stuck with what you traditionally know. Open up your mind to new solutions and to explore but continue looking for that sweet spot. That’s going to make your life easier when you are creating a website, when you are working on projects for your customers. At the end of the day, what we all need is a way in which we can sell faster, but provide service even faster. So we can go back again and sale and repeat.

At the end of the day when thinking about having building a no line academy membership site, think about how easy it is going to be for you to build an experience that’s going to be awesome for a customer, but think about how easy it is going to be for you to build that, even if it’s for you or even if it’s… Because you’re not selling you all you want is an academy like I wanted at the beginning back in the time that’s all I wanted. I didn’t want to sell any membership courses but you don’t know where that’s going to take you. So just think about going with the option that’s going to make your projects with ease, easy life, better life for everything, for everyone.

Chris Badgett: Nice. So that’s Daniel Vargas. He really is a special dude because I know a lot of website builders and I know a lot of marketers and they’re often different people. I, like you, I can carry both of those. And I also have a passion for course, creation and academy building. So there’s a lot of website builders out there. There’s not a lot of website builders who are also really talented marketers and CRM specialists like Daniel. That’s why I want to get you on the show. What’s the best way for the people listening or watching this on YouTube to connect with you?

Daniel Vargas: Well, the best way right now, I have a new channel. It’s a new YouTube channel. It’s Daniel Vargas, MKT, the acronym for marketing. Daniel, D-A-N-I-E-L, Vargas, V-A-R-G-A-S, MKT. And you can also find me, well, danielvargas.com. You can find me there as well. I’m trying to bring that page over to English. It’s in Spanish now. I thought about having it in English now, maybe use a WordPress plugin to have a real time translation there. But you can also find me in, well, that’s a full, Laboratorio de Éxito.com. Yeah, just find me at Daniel Vargas, MKT. And from there you can find me on every social media out there. Some of them I’m not as active as I like to be, or as people would like me to be. I’m just there to have fun and not to have followers.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Daniel, thanks for coming on the show. I appreciate you sharing your story and you’re a great example of what’s possible with Lifter. It’s so cool to see how you started just using a tool yourself and then it became a focus for many of your clients. That’s super cool. I love what you’ve done. Love what you’ve built and I appreciate you sharing here today.

Daniel Vargas: Thank you. Let me add just to that. Yes, I’ve started using LifterLMS, but I didn’t know it was going to turn into part of my business model and that’s the reality and yeah, I’m happy for that. And thank you for having me here in the show.

Chris Badgett: Excellent. Well, it’s great to be on the journey with you. We’ll see where we go. Maybe we’ll check in a couple of years and to see what’s happening-

Daniel Vargas: A couple of years, a couple of months.

Chris Badgett: Right on. Well, thanks Daniel-

Daniel Vargas: Thank you.

Chris Badgett: For those of you listening, go check out his YouTube channel and go check out the website and thanks everyone for coming. Daniel, have a great rest of your day.

Daniel Vargas: Thank you, Chris. You, too.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post Building Online Academy Websites with Professional Marketing and CRM Integration with Daniel Vargas appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Learn about Cristian Raiber’s story of transitioning a WordPress agency to a theme business and later to a multi plugin business in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. Cristian is from WPChill.com where he sells many products, including Strong Testimonials, Download Monitor, KB Support (a knowledge base plugin), and WP Modula (an image carousel tool).

Cristian thought he knew theme development inside and out working as an agency, since he was building themes for about five years. When he submitted his theme to the WordPress repository, he submitted another 63 updates, because that’s how many issues he could spot in his code. That’s how many things were wrong according to the WordPress guidelines. Once it got approved into the WordPress repository, he made serious money starting off on day one. With the first month at about $15K.

The WordPress team decided to change the way themes rank on the most popular page, and Cristian’s theme went from ranking top 10 to ranking top 100 at the bottom, and overnight their income dropped as well. So if you can picture those hockey stick figures you see for SaaS is going up, up, up, and then down. But by that time, they had already hired about four people. There was no talk about changing the way WordPress ranks themes. And for the next two and a half years, Cristian and his team struggled again just to be able to pay the bills.

They tried launching a lot of products, but unfortunately none were too successful. For the last few years there has been a huge race to the bottom for themes around price and feature offerings. Every new player who came to the market was offering more for less. Making it impossible to compete.

Cristian and his team at WPChill now are 100% focused on plugin development. They still maintain two theme shops from back in the day and still offer updates and support for those clients who want to continue using those themes. But focusing on niche plugin development to solve problems brought up in the community has been a way for them to stay afloat in the space and grow their business.

To learn more about Cristian Raiber and the products he offers at WPChill, be sure to head to WPChill.com.

Modula: Get a beautiful gallery on your WordPress site in less than 3 clicks!
Strong Testimonials: The #1 WordPress plugin for collecting, managing and displaying testimonials.
Download Monitor: The easy way to manage digital downloads in WordPress
KB Support: The ultimate help desk and knowledge base support tool plugin for WordPress
Kali Forms: The powerful & user-friendly WordPress form plugin.

You can also find Cristian on Twitter @CristianRaiber.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest, his name is Cristian Raiber. He’s from WPChill.com. WPChill has many products including strong testimonials, download monitor, KB Support, which is a knowledge-based plugin, and WP Modula, which is an image carousel plugin. But before we get into all that, welcome to the show, Cristian.

Cristian Raiber: Thank you for having me. This is my first time ever on a podcast.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

Cristian Raiber: Thank you so much for having me. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: There’s been a lot of first peoples podcasts on this show. LMScast, for example, I’m Sujay over at Brainstorm force did his first podcast appearance on the LMScast podcast. And the cool thing about that is the WordPress community is really special. It’s big, it’s distributed and people are all over the place and we’re professional online workers and remote business operators, we have customers all over the world in most cases even as agencies and stuff like that. But I wanted to dig into your WordPress story a little bit. I became a WordPress product guy out of an agency and it was extremely painful. My product stories started seven years ago. But what about you? What is your WordPress origin story? And for those of you listening, we’re recording this in the early Summer of 2021. So how’d you get started with WordPress?

Cristian Raiber: So I started off with WordPress, I think 10 or 11 years ago. Well, I personally started with WordPress back, way back when WP beginner was just a small blog, wasn’t the authority it is today. And I started off with WordPress initially by building small websites that I got ranked on Google and monetized through Google’s AdSense. I think I was like 14 or 15 back then.

Chris Badgett: So was it like the make money online? Like I’m going to [crosstalk] online business.

Cristian Raiber: Yeah. I used to have a blog as well. I didn’t maintain it. So the domain expires because I was still a young kid and well, being from Romania from Europe, it was super private… It was super hard for us to actually make money online. PayPal didn’t arrive into Romania until I think maybe 2015, something like that. It’s not such a long time since we can accept PayPal payments. So I have like 10 PayPal accounts with money locked into it because I was hoping that someday I’d be able to take that money out of it, never happened. And I think I fell in love with WordPress because of its ease of use even though I was a kid back then and I struggled with understanding code because back then building a theme was not what it is today. Was way much harder to building on a simple theme and it required to understand so many different components to CSS, HTML and they weren’t as documented as they are today.

Cristian Raiber: Right now you can go on YouTube, pull up a search on how to do CSS in WordPress and you’ll find like 10,000 people explaining it to you exactly how to do it. And I think I continued using WordPress. I had that technology blog at some point, that was fun thing to do. We got into the game of acquiring users via websites such as Dig or StumbleUpon. So Viro sites basically and I sold that one off. I think that was my biggest money I made online at that age. I think I sold it for 20K or something like that.

Chris Badgett: That’s pretty good.

Cristian Raiber: Well, for a 21 year old, it was amazing.

Chris Badgett: It is amazing. Yeah.

Cristian Raiber: It felt like 2 million, 2 million, not like[inaudible]

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Cristian Raiber: And naturally I just… At that point I knew SEO and I understood content marketing. And I started off with a dream of building my own small agency, local agency that focuses on more [inaudible]personal helps clients. And we started off with the idea of offering marketing support, marketing services actually. So that was SEO, ad words, Facebook ads, content, these kinds of things. We struggled to find clients-

Chris Badgett: Locally.

Cristian Raiber: In the space. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Cristian Raiber: It was insane. So what we did find though, was clients who wanted to have websites built for them. So one month we weren’t able to make rent or space, but we had like two or three clients lined up for development work. And I said, “Okay, I’m going to do it. I’m going to teach myself web development. I’m going to start doing it.” That’s how I learned how to do web development or WordPress starting with themes, custom themes, are not the best themes by today’s standards. They are not, they are not good products but they get the job done. And five years into this space, we were making decent money. But as you probably know, dealing with clients on a monthly basis is super painful. And we realized at that point that we have to get into building a product. We didn’t know what product to use.

Chris Badgett: What year is this are we at right here in the story?

Cristian Raiber: I think we’re at maybe 2015, 2016.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Cristian Raiber: So I don’t know if you’re familiar with a theme that used to be super popular maybe three or four years ago. It’s called Zerif.

Chris Badgett: I’ve heard of it.

Cristian Raiber: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So when Zerif was getting the WordPress depository and making a lot of money, I built a product and just-

Chris Badgett: Theme?

Cristian Raiber: A theme. Yeah. A theme that was going stronger than Zerif.

Chris Badgett: Zerif for those of you listening, you’re saying Zerif had a free version on the WordPress repository [crosstalk]

Cristian Raiber: Yeah. Yeah. Which we follow the same model obviously. And what was funny is that I thought I knew theme development inside out, I was building themes for like five years, I thought I knew. I remember to this day that during the waiting period I had before, when I submitted my theme at up until it was approved on WordPress repository, I submitted another 63 updates because that’s how many issues I could spot in my code. That’s how many things… Yeah. That’s how many things were wrong according to the WordPress guidelines. Once it got approved into the WordPress repository, we made serious money starting off on day one. I think first month was like 15K and-

Chris Badgett: On your first month?

Cristian Raiber: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s amazing.

Cristian Raiber: What’s funny is that we weren’t expecting anything like this. We weren’t prepared for anything like this. I was the only person doing everything. I was doing… I was handling updates. I was handling feature requests, I handling support, I was hiring. I was doing everything myself, it was crazy. It was a bit difficult at that point. And we just though we made it, we were looking at the stats and we’d go, “Well, this is it. We’ve made it.” It was climbing above Zerif. And this I think lasted for about three or four months. Every month we’d see even better sales, better sales, it was amazing. And after four months, the WordPress team decided to change the way they rank themes on the popular page. It was where we were ranking and where we were getting most of our traffic from. And they made a switch that simply took us down in a second. They made the switch of night and it was-

Chris Badgett: Took you to second place or like off-

Cristian Raiber: Off.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Cristian Raiber: They took us… In a second, they took us off the grid. Our product was nowhere to be found. I think we went from ranking top 10 to ranking like top 100 at the bottom and overnight our income dropped as well. So if you can picture those hockey stick figures you see for SAS is going up, up, up, and then down platoon. But by that time, we had already managed to hire like four people. We weren’t able to predict some people, I guess. I mean, no one could see it coming. There was no talk about changing the way they rank things. And for the next two and a half years, I think we struggled again to just be able to pay the bills. We tried a lot of products, none were too successful, unfortunately. And as about two and a half years, there was this huge race to the bottom for themes, right? Price of themes.

Cristian Raiber: Every new player who came to the market was offering more for less. It’s impossible to compete. We have these… There are certain countries that facilitate a lower price point because the average cost of living there is still much lower than ours. So they could get by with, let’s say, 20% of what we were doing and still think that they’re making good money and to the client’s eyes all themes were equal at that point in time, especially when you’d have a theme that have first like 50 layouts and we’re just offering like the one, it’s hard to justify it’s value.

Chris Badgett: It was like a themes arms race. I remember this time period. Were you on a… I mean, you’re on the WordPress repository, are you also doing Themeforests?

Cristian Raiber: We tried Themeforest at some point, I don’t like it for a lot of reasons. One was lock-in and second was the fact that you never got access to claim data, you could never see who bought it. You could never announce new releases. It was super Locked in and the fee they took didn’t play well with me, I was just super competitive and I think Avada already hit the market. So again, it was impossible to compete with first place. And after about two and a half years of doing themes and struggling with it, I decided it’s time to shift to plugins. We spent all this time learning so much about themes. We built crazy amount of frameworks and killed. We built the first page builder on top of WordPress customizer. I don’t know if you would still remember the customizer or if you still use it, we built a page builder on top of it.

Chris Badgett: Wow.

Cristian Raiber: Yeah. Yeah, it was crazy to you to get it done. We built an entire framework. We had an onboarding wizard, we did it all and we still weren’t able to compete. Asterisk was coming to market, OceanWP was getting the market, Elementor was getting ground. It was becoming more and more difficult. And I said, “Well, this is not a race I want to be in.” And we just switched to plugins, probably to Modula, which was our first plugin acquisition, I think. We acquired it for I think 10K, was making about $400 a month and I acquired it and I just let it sit for one and a half years because I didn’t know what to do with[crosstalk]

Chris Badgett: Did the developer that originally had it, did they come and work for you at all or it was just a straight-

Cristian Raiber: No.

Chris Badgett: Handoff, you got the plugin? You just took over-

Cristian Raiber: Handoff. Yeah, entire handoff, yeah. So after a huge hit that we’re [inaudible]made a lot of money in four months, we had two years of huge down where we spent all the money we made in those four months, as well as anything else that we were making monthly, just to be able to keep our employees that we wouldn’t have fired anyone. And then we spent everything we… All the profit we saved in one year, we spent to acquire a [inaudible]WP March and we just looked at it and we didn’t know what to do with it, all our knowledge was in theme. And I think I realized at some point that we can get ahead by launching a certain feature that no one else has, which is what we call the custom grid. It’s this feature that allows you to freely resize images, so you can take the image and drag it by its corner and resize it any way you want straight into your plugins backend.

Cristian Raiber: And this allows you to create galleries with multiple image ratios sitting next to each other. So it creates some sort of masonry but with… Allow you define by dragging images. So this fixed the problem for many photographers and it allowed us to carve out a small space for us in the photography niche because as you probably know, the big competition is NextGEN Gallery and [inaudible]FooGallery. These guys have been there for way, way before us and normally when users think of galleries, they just say, “Well, use NextGEN,” because that’s what they had been using for 10 years. It’s kind of legacy that we have, right? It’s this uphill battle, which is insanely difficult. They’ve had way more time on the market. They have way more experience than us with this audience. They have the deals in place. They have the team, they have everything and-

Chris Badgett: So how did you differentiate? With the custom grid?

Cristian Raiber: That’s one of the features that help us differentiate. Yeah. Another one is the automatic image optimization and CDN, unlimited CDN, we offered to any of our paying users. So-

Chris Badgett: And just to clarify here, this is one of my… It’s not really a pet peeve, I just hate seeing people do it where they’re building an LMS site, which is already a complex site and then they start uploading these giant images, which gives you a big performance hit. Are you saying that this plugin just automatically protects the user from themselves of putting way too heavy images on a webpage?

Cristian Raiber: That’s a great way of putting it. Yeah, that’s pretty much what it does and it doesn’t sacrifice quality either because we’re not handling the image optimization ourselves, we are relying on a third party solution, which is ShortPixel and they’ve got a great API. We just leveraged that. And I think it’s pretty tweaked as well for our photography use cases so it doesn’t affect image quality-

Chris Badgett: Which is super important to photographers.

Cristian Raiber: Yeah. Yeah. So you’re basically getting super fast low in images without sacrificing quality, which is what we all want in the end. And after ShortPixel is done with the image, we just push that to a CDN, professed CDN powered by StackPath and yeah, that’s pretty much how it works. And where we’ve been able to innovate is offering a lot more customization options. So we have a lot of customization options for our clients. And this allows you to create a really unique layout for your portfolio. This was, again, one of the bigger problems in the market and the solution would go with you, you’d end up with pretty much the same result. You just should be changing brands.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. That’s cool. And during this time, are you still running the agency or have you made the pivot to par product 100%?

Cristian Raiber: If I were still running the agency, I think I’d be looking like 20 years older than I look today.

Chris Badgett: Well, that’s why I’m curious because themes are very different from plugin businesses and then agency life. There’s only so many horses you can ride at once. You know what I mean? So-

Cristian Raiber: Yes. Yes. Totally. No, no. It would have been impossible to also run the agency as something on a sideways, 100% focused on plugins right now. We still maintain two theme shops from back in the day, we still offer updates and support for those clients who want to continue using those themes. But every year we see the number of new sales go down and down and it’s normal because there’s so many better offerings right now in the market than what we did there for themes when we did it like five years ago, so now those teams are not competitive anymore. But luckily our plugins are doing well and that’s where I like spending most of my time anyway. So yeah, that’s the story. It has lows and highs. Right now we’re somewhere in the middle, we don’t know what’s going to come

Chris Badgett: Well, before we talk about your other products, I’m curious, I am also a big of Freemium and WordPress as a community but also WordPress is a distribution model. And in some ways what makes WordPress strong is the contributions that companies like yours and mine make to the free tools that people can use completely for free all around the world. It’s amazing.

Cristian Raiber: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: But what’s your advice to somebody who’s exploring the Freemium model, specifically… And if you’re watching this or listening, maybe you might… Maybe you’re not making software but there’s probably some lessons in here. What have you learned about Freemium, to do and then maybe not to do?

Cristian Raiber: Sure. Sure. Before I tell people about this, I want to mention that our products are currently being used by about half a million active users have been done a little more than 6 million times. So a bit of a usage there. So my first advice to anyone who’s looking to get into the Freemium model is don’t do the Freemium model.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Cristian Raiber: This is my personal advice after so many years. I mean, it’s not a broken model. It’s just-

Chris Badgett: Well, it sounds like in your story with the theme, you did it and it was working and then it got shut off, right?

Cristian Raiber: Yeah. Yeah. So I think it’s still working. What I see a big problem now is that the Freemium model is being turned upside down by big hosting companies who are stepping into the market. They are willing to lose the sale on the Freemium product, as long as they get you as a client on a hosting packages, right?

Chris Badgett: What do you mean by that?

Cristian Raiber: I’ll dig deeper into that, just a sec. So for example, imagine someone from a hosting company, I won’t name them, but just think of a big hosting company in the WordPress space, just steps into the, let’s say speed optimization game. So right now, image optimization, right? Is a huge part of the whole process of speed optimization for your website. And they suddenly decide to say, “Well, these guys are charging you money for, be it ShortPixel or Imagify or whatever plugin that does image optimization you want to think of. These guys are charging you for 1,000 images, they’re charging you. I don’t how much money they are, but I’m giving you away for free. I’m also going to get you free CDN and also give you an end point you can leverage to minimize CSS, JavaScripts, Modulas to get it and whatnot. So what you have to do though is to come onto my hosting company, come host your site with us. And this might… This seems like a super good deal. I mean, you’re already paying for hosting.

Cristian Raiber: They’ve matched the price. They’re not asking for anything on top of this and you simply can’t it.[inaudible] So they’re losing the potential sale on the product, on the Freemium model but they’re getting a long time customer on their hosting package, which has a way better rate of sickness because once you’re in a host, it gets super hard to switch away from it. But with a plugin, you always have options, you can switch away from it. So this is why I think the Freemium model is no longer a viable option, unless you either create a product that will… It’s a hard balance to create a product that’s usable in the free version, not crippled, not scoped, but also incentivizes the user to actually upgrade, that’s hard balance to strike. And I think I read something about three or four years ago, it was published by someone from our Automatic that read something along the lines of, your plugin has now been accepted in the WordPress repository. I feel sorry for you.

Cristian Raiber: And I couldn’t understand what they were trying to say at that point. And I think that I understand a lot better why that happens, the expectations of free users are equal to the expectations of paying users. If they get a plugin for free, they don’t expect it to come with no strings attached. You do not download the free product and you’re hands off you can say to the user, “Well, it’s free. We call off to support for updates. You have to do that. It’s expected of you to do that.” That costs money. A good example of this is Yoast who’s been scaling up his team for years because-

Chris Badgett: Plugin or theme?

Cristian Raiber: Plugin. Plugin, the Yoast. The team, the people behind-

Chris Badgett: Or the team. Got you.

Cristian Raiber: The team, sorry. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry, the team behind it. So they’re a good example of this because they’ve been scaling their team for such a long time because they can’t offer the same the level of support and features for the free users that they want to offer for the paid users. Basically, they’re trying to offer the same service for anyone. They don’t care if it’s paying users or if it’s not paying user. So yeah. My advise freemium model, don’t do it right now.

Chris Badgett: Isn’t the distribution good though? I mean, I started as a free Yoast user and then I’ve been paying Yoast for many, many years now.

Cristian Raiber: Yes. Yes. The Yoast had like 10 years to finesse that process to get you to pay, right?

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Cristian Raiber: And Yoast has like-

Chris Badgett: It’s huge.

Cristian Raiber: Yeah. And the similar to the NextGEN story I said earlier. Everyone who’s talks about SEO and WordPress instinctively thinks of Yoast SEO, because-

Chris Badgett: I think I’ve heard this called the king maker problem. If you were there early-

Cristian Raiber: That’s the one.

Chris Badgett: That’s the thing, right?

Cristian Raiber: Yeah. Yeah. That’s the thing. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Because you know how word of mouth functions. So if you’re happy with yours so you’re going to recommend it to me, going to recommend it to your friends and I’m not going to look for another solution, I trust you and I’m going to use what you use and then I’m going to end up paying as well. So I think the better way to do this in the space right now is start off with premium from the get-go, don’t build a free version you have to maintain and support and just build a paid version for your product. This is WP Rocket has done. I think I can think of others who’ve done this, Gravity Forms does this, has been doing this for like 10 years or more and they’ve been hugely successful with their product approach.

Cristian Raiber: No one’s complaining, “Well, I don’t have a free version so I can’t test it out.” Yeah. So this is my advice to anyone who wants to start out right now. Don’t start with the freemium model unless you set your proper expectations because the market’s been routed… Has been crowded, I’m lacking the proper term here. There’s a lot more competition on the market right now for plugins for anything you want than it used to be like three or four years ago. Four years I’d have different advice but now there’s a lot of… A lot of people are stepping into these markets. And if you don’t have an acquisition channel that’s outside of wordpress.org allows you to build active installs so you can climb the rankings of wordPress.org for search terms. Then you almost don’t sell a chance to have your product ranked. And that simply eliminates the distribution the WordPress repository can actually provide in this particular case.

Chris Badgett: So there might be some just inequality there of fairness kind of thing, right?

Cristian Raiber: I think it’s still a good option-

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Cristian Raiber: But don’t use it as your main distribution channel because this is the thing that most people I think get want today. It used to be true like five or six years ago, wordpress.org was a great distribution channel. It allowed your product to be discovered. now since you’re competing with… So let’s take a quick example. If you search for image gallery on wordpress.org, I think you’re going to get at least 50 pages of results.

Chris Badgett: 50?

Cristian Raiber: 50, yeah. That’s how competitive it is, because anyone thinks building an image gallery is easy. I think this is the most difficult product we had to build. All of our product lineups we have, this one is the most difficult one. If anyone thinks the images on a website are easy, I think they’re most… One of the most difficult things to do. You can do it but you also have to do it right. And the final step… The final advice I’d give to anyone who’s willing step into… Looking to step into this market try to deanonymize users as quickly as possible-

Chris Badgett: Figure out who they are?

Cristian Raiber: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Those are your audience or your community and so-

Cristian Raiber: Yeah. That’s the other biggest pain point the freemium model has, which you don’t have access to how your clients… How your users are actually using the product. So it’s impossible to make informed decisions on what feature they use, what they don’t like, how much time they spend on doing certain actions. So try to figure out a way to do this as quickly as possible and learn as much as possible because otherwise you’re going to iterate on your own ideas. You’re going to just look at it and say, “I think this is going to be a good idea.” I think we’ve done this like 50 times in the past. I think we only got it right like 10 times out of 50. So-

Chris Badgett: That’s a good lesson. That’s a really good lesson. One of the things that makes great products is having feedback loops with your users and it is harder in WordPress. It’s not a walled garden and the software goes out into the world. It’s harder to get that feedback loop, but that’s cool. Before we talk about some of your other products, do you have any, since you have a history in themes, any kind of ideas about the future of themes or how people should think about where that’s going or you’re not… You’re more of a plugin guy now and you’re not really in it?

Cristian Raiber: Well, I have ideas in a lot of places. That’s probably one of my biggest problems, is many ideas.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Let me put it to you this way. One of the things I say to people when… Especially a new WordPress user. I help a lot of people get into WordPress for the first time. They want to build a course, they want to train their employees, they want to provide a remote learning solution for their school. So I often have to teach people the words of WordPress and I… One of the things just for beginners I say is that themes are just for design plugins or for functionality, but there’s some nuance to that. I can see you-

Cristian Raiber: There’s a lot of nuance to that. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: But where are theme going? Especially in page builder, Gutenberg, full site editing, where are we headed here?

Cristian Raiber: I think going forward, we’re going to have at least two big audiences. One of them is going to be light and focused on Gutenberg designs and this is going to facilitate a new type of designer who only has to deal with minimal CSS and JavaScript and HTML because the new way of building full site editing experience that’s coming into Gutenberg makes it so much easier than working with, let’s say Elementor or Beaver Builder or any other of the other bigger players out there. And I still think we’re going to have the, at least for the time being and probably a few years going forward, the audience of Elementor and Beaver Builder and dd and all the other ones, because they’ve already bought into this ecosystem and it’s hard to justify moving out of it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Cristian Raiber: Yeah. If you train your clients, if you train your employees, it’s hard to move quickly out of it. But I think going forward, even though I’m… I still have a love, hate relationship with Gutenberg. Sometimes I go ahead and say, “Wow, this is amazing.” And sometimes it gets so much in my way that I hate it. And I think to myself, “Well, it was so much easier before when we had the classic editor and you just wrote code in it,” because it was easier for me to just use code since I used to code as well. I think going forward Gutenberg will see a huge adoption just because, well, it’s built into WordPress and it comes on by default. And the biggest selling point here, I think for users is going to be the fact that no other page builder can compete on speed.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Cristian Raiber: I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a comparison test, but the same layout built on Gutenberg versus Elementary is like three times faster. So there’s no way to-

Chris Badgett: Wow. Yeah.

Cristian Raiber: Yeah. There’s no way to sell that to users. If you push on this pain point and you say, “Well, we’re so much faster, here’s the results.” You don’t have to do a lot of work. They just pick from themselves at three times loading speed. It’s almost noticeable with the naked eye. You just hit refresh on your browser and you see how fast, much faster it is. I don’t think Gutenberg is going to be as feature rich as Elementary. So I still think there’s space there for people to go into other solutions might not be Elementary in two years, might be something else that does this but it started off as a content writing tool, it didn’t start off as a page builder solution, Gutenberg. So it’s still lacking in many areas.

Cristian Raiber: It can do them, but not in the way that you’d expect it to do it or… So I think theme shops will have to choose a side, if they’re going to stick with the current big names out there, Elementor, Beaver Builder and keep building products for these niches hoping that they reinvest a lot of money into the market and try to steal a small percentage of[inaudible] both Elementors going into self hosted solution.

Chris Badgett: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Cristian Raiber: So pretty much like if you want to compare it with Wix or Squarespace, it’s a self hosted solution. So for example, if they’d be able to steal like maybe 1% of the entire market WordPress has, then yeah that could be a viable solution, but otherwise I put my money on Gutenberg because there’s no way to fight-

Chris Badgett: The core.

Cristian Raiber: Yeah, the core solution, it’s impossible to fight it, even though you might have a better offering, they’re still going to beat you by being the default option that people get to use. And it’s still going to be a broken experience when you write your content in Gutenberg and then you have to switch over to something else with a different UI and build your landing page. That’s-

Chris Badgett: Right.

Cristian Raiber: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: That makes sense. I appreciate those thoughts. We’re coming up to the end of the show. So I want to do a lightning round through your products. And if you’re building sites for the LMS industry, schools, businesses, the expert industry, whatever you’re… Or you’re doing it yourself with WordPress, how could somebody who’s building a learning site benefit from download monitor and that’s a download-monitor.com. What does it do? And by the way, I just want to say course creators schools, they have documents and download stuff that they… It’s not all about just video lessons. So what can somebody do?

Cristian Raiber: Well, first as the name says, they can monitor that downloads. So I know you like this as well, but I like names that-

Chris Badgett: Says what’s in the box.

Cristian Raiber: Yeah, says what’s in the box. Yeah, exactly. So not only helps you monitor the way your downloads are performing so you can… You get stats on your downloads. What’s your most popular… Most downloaded product, which one’s performing the best, where is it… Where’s the traffic coming from? You can also set up different access type rules. So for example, you’d be able to let’s say if a user has downloaded this thing three times, you’d use one load for four times in a month.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Cristian Raiber: It’s normally a tool that’s useful for people who are looking to lock downloads to find either an email collection form, opt-in form, Twitter share, Facebook share that kind of stuff or-

Chris Badgett: So like a lead magnet kind of thing?

Cristian Raiber: Yeah. It’s a hybrid solution. I mean, it was built like 10 years ago, so different needs back then but it can do all of these things and it does it well.

Chris Badgett: So check that out, download-Monitor.Com. You have knowledge based product, which is kb-support.com. A knowledge base is super helpful. Software companies get it. They end up using knowledge base too. They find themselves answering the same questions over and over again, whether it’s in pre-sales or in support, they’re like, “We need a knowledge base item about that.” It’s not a blog post. It’s not a piece of a landing page, it’s like a knowledge…. It’s its own unique type of content. What can you say about your knowledge based tool?

Cristian Raiber: I think this is one of my favorite plugins out of our toolbox. I love this plugin because it combines two of the things I haven’t seen anyone else combine, which is help desk plus knowledge base at the same time, because most of the times questions users have, have already been answered. And they’re not able to search real time before submitting a question. They’re not enabled to search to your documentation before actually submitting a question. So our plugin solves this.

Chris Badgett: Is this like… If it’s a help desk and knowledge based, does it replace a SAS solution or Help Scout or is it integrate with something like Help Scout or how should somebody think about that?

Cristian Raiber: It replaces entirely Helps Scout. And that’s one of the main reasons why I like it because we have a flat pricing structure compared to Help Scouts, which is per seat.

Chris Badgett: Trust me, I know I get to expensive Help Scout bill every month.

Cristian Raiber: Yeah. That’s one of the reasons why you even acquired those plugin because we ran into the same problem last year. And it’s not like they’re not worth it, it’s just, you get to the point where paying like 2,000 or $3,000 a year, just to have access to help desk and knowledge base justice makes sense anymore. And you’re not benefiting from that SEO traffic you could get from your knowledge base because people search for that on Google before contacting you. And that traffic goes to Help Scout instead of going to you and you don’t have access to look at that traffic and see what people are doing, how you could push them to your products and get them to use them more and pay for your products. So just the end goal.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Well, most, most learning sites benefit from having some testimonials on there and it’s something, especially if you’re not trained in marketing or whatever, you might not realize the power of social proof or just reviews and testimonials. And in our pre-chat you mentioned something called a wall of… What’d you call it? Wall of fame. I’m like, as a marketer, I’m like, “That sounds good.” And it’s hard. I mean, to collect and do all this stuff. So what is a Strong Testimonials do and that’s at strongtestimonials.com.

Cristian Raiber: Yeah. So-

Chris Badgett: Another good name by the way.

Cristian Raiber: Yeah. Yeah. I’m glad you like it. Yeah. Yeah. So it allows you to collect testimonials on your website through a simple form. Right now we’re working on adding video testimonials support. So you send users to a landing page where you’ve already placed our short code, users get one of the two options, leave a text testimonial or a video testimonial. And after they’ve sent in their testimonial, it gets saved into your media library. So you can reuse this as you want, for example, on use case you could schedule this to go out to, I don’t know, Barfly, let’s say, and post this on Twitter and Facebook and basically syndicate it everywhere you want to set a condition, so no reviews lower than four stars go out, basically. [crosstalk]

Chris Badgett: Can you put moderation on there? Like, ‘Hey, I want to read stuff before it goes live on my site?”

Cristian Raiber: It’s built in. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Cristian Raiber: It’s built in. It has a built-in. So what’s… Biggest strength right now is that it allows obviously to pull in reviews for your business from multiple places, such as Google my business, Yelp, TripAdvisor and even your WooCommerce, it pulls them in into our database and then it allows you to create what we call the wall of fame, where you have all these testimonials mixed and matched together. So you can create an actual page that automatically loads even more testimonies as you scroll down so it fills infinite and it just… It’s your social proof, right? It’s an automatic tool… Almost an automatic tool that continuously enhances your wall of fame and it allows you to syndicate content out on your social networks. It’s almost automatic. So it’s a great way to build more credibility for your business.

Chris Badgett: That;s great. And for those of you who are unsure about this just look at Amazon, do you ever read an Amazon review before you buy a product? Like the five stars, the one star? I mean, of course you do. This thing is really important.

Cristian Raiber: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: One more-

Cristian Raiber: It’s what most people actually read.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, and what you want to see is the five stars and the four stars and the one star, that’s what people really want to see and then they can gauge there and if it’s authentic, if it’s just pulling in, obviously from TripAdvisor or whatever, you know it’s the real deal, which is great.

Cristian Raiber: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about Kali Forms real quick. So that’s K-A-L-I Forms.com.

Cristian Raiber: So this is a form split in right now which is built on top of react. So it has… There’s no other… “Well, I think gravity Forms is now built on react as well, but at the time we did it, no one else did it. So it was like the fastest form plugin on the market both front-end, back-end. And I don’t know if you know this, but a big problem in the WordPress space with form makers is that once you want to build a long form with a lot of conditionals, so think of 100 fields-

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Cristian Raiber: Most plugins slow down or crash entirely.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. So it’ll scale.

Cristian Raiber: It was scaled well, yeah, it scales perfectly. And our next… The way we were positioning Kali Forms going into the future, this is still a work in progress is mostly a tool for marketers. It’s going to be a wave to help marketers understand what problems their users are facing at that specific stage in their funnel. So I think this is called profiling. This is called user profiling. So you can basically ask them questions based on the stage they’re at in your funnel and then at the end you can build those answers together, put them together and you get a picture of who your ideal buyer is.

Chris Badgett: And there you go, again, opening up the feedback loop. This is how a WordPress companies build great products is they’re in touch. So you’re even building that methodology that you use into your tool, which is super cool.

Cristian Raiber: Yes.

Chris Badgett: Cristian Raiber he’s from WPChill.com. If you go to WPChill.com, you’ll see all the products we mentioned today, which included download, monitor, Strong Testimonials, KB Support, Kali Forums and WP Modula. Thanks for coming on the show, Cristian, and thanks for sharing your WordPress story. It’s fun to connect with other people innovating in the WordPress space and I love where you’re going and I wanted to bring you on here because a lot of the people that listen to this or watch these videos on YouTube are looking for a solution. Everything you’ve mentioned here is relevant to an LMS website. So I wanted to get people in front of great products like you have. So he’s at WPChill.com, any final words for the people?

Cristian Raiber: Thank you for having me. Thank you for listening through this episode. I don’t know if you could tell, I think you could, but I had, I was… I’m nervous because this is my first podcast ever. So I’m sorry if that that was super obvious. I’ll do better on my next podcast, I promise. But other than that, feel free to hit me up with any questions you might have. I’m active on Twitter. You can hit me up on Wpetula.com. I think we have an email address there that’s public. I answer those emails personally. So anytime you want, just reach out to me either via our contact form panel websites just ask for Cristian and they’ll step in and answer any questions you might have or feel free to Google me and you can find me easily.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Cristian. Thanks for coming on the show. We’ll have to do this again-

Cristian Raiber: That’s for having me. Yes, please.

Chris Badgett: All right. Cheers man. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to LifterLMS.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post Cristian Raiber’s Story Transitioning a WordPress Agency to a Theme Business and Later to a Multi Plugin Business appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Learn how to create a document library in WordPress with Katie Keith from Barn2 Plugins in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS.

Barn2.com has a bunch of really great WooCommerce plugins, as well as some table related plugins, which Chris and Katie are going to get into and talk about what all that means in this episode. At Barn2 they have come out with a document library plugin called Document Library Pro, which is really useful for people creating training based membership sites and online courses.

In 2010, Barn2 started as a WordPress web design company, and then started doing small websites for local businesses, eventually scaling up to international companies that needed a WordPress specialist. But they always wanted to sell products rather than services. In 2016 they found the time to launch their first plugin, and that started selling within a couple of days. So that year they focused on launching more plugins. And within about six months, they were able to stop providing websites for new clients and switched predominantly to selling the plugin products.

The first plugin Barn2 developed for WooCommerce was a password protected categories plugin. They found that on the WooCommerce ideas forum where people publish feature requests, it’s all public. And they went for the top idea that was not being planned to go into the WooCommerce core and that was realistic for them to develop and achieve as a small company. Barn2 also launched a generic table plugin, which is called Posts Table Pro. That lists any post type in a table, including WooCommerce products. They had requests to create more complicated tables, and that eventually seeded the creation of Document Library Pro.

Document Library Pro was developed as a dedicated plugin for documents rather than post types. It looks a lot like Post Table Pro in the front end. But behind the scenes it’s a proper document management solution. So you can upload documents either manually one at a time, or via a kind of bulk importer that they built. You can add document links and choose things like how people download the documents, so it’s powerful for your documents.

If you’re building a course website with a lot of resources involved, Document Library Pro is a good way to list them out in each lesson and show documents and resources in a table format where students can search to find the resources they need. To learn more about Katie Keith, Document Library Pro, and the great developments Barn2 Plugin has going on, be sure to head to Barn2.com

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest, Katie Keith. She’s from Barn2.com, which has a bunch of really awesome WooCommerce plugins, as well as some table related plugins, which we’re going to get into and talk about what all that means. I wanted to get Katie on particularly recently, I’ve known her for about a year. And it’s been great getting to know Barn2 and their business, but they have just come out with as of this recording, a document library plugin, called Document Library Pro, which is really useful for people creating training based membership sites and online courses. But before we get into it, Katie, welcome to the show.

Katie Keith: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I’m excited to talk to you. Let’s just for quickly for the audience, how long have you been in WordPress and what was your story getting into WordPress plugins?

Katie Keith: We started in 2010 as a WordPress web design company. And we started doing really tiny websites for small local businesses. And then scaled up to international companies that needed a WordPress specialist. But we always wanted to sell products rather than services. I know that’s a common story for lots of WordPress companies. In 2016, we finally found the time to launch our first plugin and that started selling within a couple of days, which was amazing.

So that year, we focused on launching more plugins. And within about six months, we were able to stop providing websites for new clients and switched more predominantly to selling the plugin. And we haven’t really looked back since.

Chris Badgett: How did WooCommerce enter the story? Did you have clients that were doing online stores or something, or how did you get all this expertise in WooCommerce?

Katie Keith: Kind of two directions. Our first plugin, was WooCommerce because from the web design side of things, we knew that there was a big market there and we have some experience of it. So to find the idea for our first plugin, which was really specific plugin, WooCommerce password protected categories. So that does a very specific task. We found that on the WooCommerce ideas forum, where people publish feature requests, it’s all public. And we kind of just went for the top idea that was not being planned to go into WooCommerce core, that was realistic for us to achieve as a small company.

So we launched that and that got us down the WooCommerce route. But we also launched a generic table plugin, which is called Posts Table Pro. And that lists any post type in a table and including WooCommerce products. So we advertised it generically to list all sorts of things, but loads of people said, “I want more WooCommerce features, I want add to cart buttons, I want to be able to choose variations and things like that from within this table.

And so, it was very clear to us that we needed to launch a dedicated WooCommerce table plugin. So we still have Posts Table Pro and other plugins as we’ll talk about later, have sort of shut off from that. But that also got us into the WooCommerce direction, because WooCommerce product table has always been our best selling plugin. Simply because it featured request for a different plugin.

Chris Badgett: I love that story. It’s really around community driven demand. You’re not guessing.

Katie Keith: Exactly.

Chris Badgett: You’re looking at what people are trying to do. And when I look at your products, it really shows that they’re solving problems, very specific problems, which people are asking for. That’s cool. How do you kind of co-exist with WooCommerce? Think of yourselves as like an add on to extend further. How do you manage what you’re going to build, versus what WooCommerce may build one day?

Katie Keith: It’s always a risk that something we do, will get put into WooCommerce itself. It’s become more of a risk because they opened up their marketplace to third party developers a year or two ago. We have and … Kind of every plugin we’ve got, there’s a very close copycat on the WooCommerce marketplace, that from another company. There’s nothing we can do about that. And they’re often very similar to our own plugins.

And they have a add it all authority, because they’re on WooCommerce.com. And we could put our plugins on and try to join them, but I haven’t quite seen the business case for it yet, because they take something like 70% commission if you don’t do it exclusively. And so, if we sold on our website and the WooComments marketplace, they take so much commission and there’s all the extra work to maintain it.

So I have had conversations with them about setting our plugins on there, but I haven’t managed to justify it yet, but we might one day. So all we can do, is try to be the best. Make our products the best marketing and so on.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Can you talk about how your business was impacted by COVID and the pandemic, in terms of just digital transformation of companies wanting to go digital maybe with their store, or do other things? How was Barn2’s plugins affected by the pandemic?

Katie Keith: Well, we were very lucky, because obviously a lot of businesses had a time. We were already working at home. We did rent an office, but we quickly gave up on that and we had home offices. So that wasn’t a problem. Our team was already distributed around the world so that was okay. And market wise, and our sales went up rapidly in March, 2020 and continued to for the summer. And it was across the board, there was an increase, but there were specific use cases. I know that Lifter saw that there was a huge surge in people wanting to offer training and that sort of thing online, because obviously everything had to suddenly be online.

So any of our plugins that dealt with that sort of use case increased as well. E-commerce obviously increased. And our biggest growth was in restaurant, because we had a plugin which based foods in a table in a kind of one page order form, a bit like Just Eat or Uber Eats or something. And suddenly restaurants were forced to take orders online all over the world, because they’d been made to close. But a lot of countries were still allowing them to offer takeaway food.

So to do a kind of COVID secure way of selling online, they were using our plugin to take those orders on their website, using WooCommerce plus our plugin. So there were quite a lot of growth areas and that was the biggest one. And we were very lucky.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s super interesting. What about if … Pretend I know nothing about WordPress and we’re meeting on the street, what is the big deal with tables? Whether it’s for products, or some other kind of post table. What are tables and what are people trying to do and why are they important and when it comes to building a website?

Katie Keith: Well, in our context, we’re not talking about database tables behind the scenes, we’re talking about presenting information in a table. So our first table plugin, was actually from, we built it for one of our web design clients in early 2010 and launched it as a kind of more fully featured plugin. And it just turned out that people find it really helpful to display information in a table, because it’s more structured than the standard layouts you get with WordPress.

So most WordPress themes plugin into WordPress itself, tends to list information in a grid. So you might have like a blog where there’s three columns and maybe nine per page. And there won’t be much information about each post. There’ll be the title than an image. Not a lot else really, maybe a brief exer. But with a table, you can fit more information into a smaller space in a structured format.

So you can choose which columns to have within the table and with extra things like the author, or the categories, or the tax, or whatever you want. Even embedded media players and things like that and buttons and links. And you can have a column in the table for each of those pieces of information. And also you can add other things like search boxes and filter drop-downs. You can click on a column to sort it. And you can have a lot more within the same amount of space. So there’s less scrolling required for the user.

So we’ve sort of evolved into a company that has quite a few table plug-ins. If you want to list products in an order form, well, that’s a table. If you want to list a blog post in like an index, that’s a table. If you want to list resources within an LMS course, then the table layout works for that as well. So it’s quite interesting how diverse. Just your kind of boring concept.

Chris Badgett: I mean, it’s kind of Google’s mission to organize the world’s information. And essentially a website is … And when you get more complex, like a store or a school, you’re trying to organize information in a usable, intuitive way. So a lot of it is not just about data, it’s about the structure of the data and how it user can interact with it. I can nerd out with you. I don’t find tables boring. I think they’re super exciting. I want to come back to search in a second, but since we’re here, tell us about the genesis of Document Library Pro and why it kind of became its own product and what it is?

Katie Keith: Well, because plugin active WooCommerce product table, has always been Posts Table Pro, which lists any type of WordPress content. Basically any post type, which might be pages, posts, documents, events, anything really. So that creates a table listing those sort of information from WordPress. So Posts Tables has always been interesting, particularly from a marketing perspective, which is what I focus on. Because it has so many use cases.

So people use it to create an index of their blog posts, an audio library with embedded audio players, video gallery, list of upcoming events, but its biggest use case was always Document Library. And so, I had this idea for several years and didn’t act on it that really, we should have a dedicated Document Library plugin. Because the problem with Post Table Pro, is it displays information already stored in WordPress, but it doesn’t allow you to create that information in the first place.

So if you already have a post type, or you’ve want to display normal blog posts, or something, then that’s fine. But with Document, we were having to advise people to install a free plugin, to create a custom post type. There’s a really good one called Pod Switch, that you create custom fields and taxonomies and custom post types. So people would use pods to create their backend structure for their documents and upload the documents that way and so on.

And then they’d use our Post Table Pro plugin to list the documents in a searchable table. And it didn’t really feel right, or user friendly to be advising people to use multiple plugins. Even though Pods is free. As the only premium plugin was posting pro it just wasn’t right. And I felt it wouldn’t be great for conversions of things, as well as making it harder for the user.

So essentially, Document Library Pro, our dedicated plugin for that use case, looks a lot like Post Table Pro in the front end. But behind the scenes, it’s a proper document management solution. So you can upload documents either manually one at a time, or via a kind of bulk importer that we built. You can add document links and choose things like how people download the documents, by clicking on a file and type.icon or something, none of which is in Post Table Pro. So it looks the same, but it’s much more powerful for your documents.

Chris Badgett: I love that. I remember and I’m trying to remember what year it was. It would probably be around 2015 I made, or maybe 2016, I made a video about how to embed a PDF inside of a lesson. And you kind of would just send this file up into the WordPress media library and then you need to create a button, or grab a little icon of the PDF icon thing, and then turn it into a link. And so, I mean, I’ve been asked forever, “Hey, how do I deliver workbooks and digital files as part of a learning experience?” And when I saw your solution, I was like, that’s what people want right there. I mean, you’re basically allowing people to build their own little Dropbox. And the files can be hosted in different places, right? Not necessarily on your work website?

Katie Keith: Yeah [crosstalk]. A lot of people do host their files on third party sites like that. So we’ve allowed you to upload documents to the media library, or to just add the URL of where they’re hosted. From what you just said about embedding a PDF, sounds like our documentation for Post Table Pro, because it doesn’t have these built-in ways to add a button to a third party URL. It just displays information.

Chris Badgett: Right.

Katie Keith: So Document Library, has all that built-in. It would automatically create a link column, with a link to the document which might be on your media library, it might be on Dropbox or wherever. It doesn’t really matter. It could be a YouTube video even, but you click on the button in the table and it will take people to that URL, or download the document. So it’s a lot easier than, as you said, describing how to upload it and then add a button manually and link to it and so on.

Chris Badgett: I get asked a lot about Search and I’m not really WordPress Search expert, but what can you teach us about Search? And search doesn’t become a problem for courses, or these files maybe until you start scaling and the volume of stuff and people trying to find what they’re looking for easily. It starts becoming more and more important. Tell us about Search and WordPress, just any advice or tips and how it works with Document Library Pro as well.

Katie Keith: Yeah. I’ve noticed a lot of our plugging users don’t think about this and I’d like them to more. So by default, a Document Library Pro would include a search box that’s the table. And you can also choose whether to add filter dropdowns. Which kind of do the same thing, because when you type a search, it just filters by that search term. Doesn’t it? So it really does the same thing. It’s just that the filter dropdown is giving the user ideas of what to search for essentially. But they’re kind of the same.

But people might, this is like five or 10 things in a table and they still include the Search box. And I wish they’d hide it, because it’s not relevant then. Search it’s for interrogating large amounts of data. So let’s say you have a course with multiple lessons. And at the end of your course, you’ve included quite a large resource library with maybe 50 documents and other resources that you’re linking to, to help for further reading or whatever.

And all the references from the course, you might put them all in this resource library. Well, that would require a search box. And ideally, you could also add filter dropdown so that they could narrow it down by topic, or year, or whatever you thought would help them to find what they want. You could even tag your resources by lesson. Say that even though it’s all at the end of the course in a dedicated lesson, they could select the lesson that it relates to, or something. So I think, think about the relationship between the search box and the filters, whether you need them at all because of the number of resources and just what your users are likely to be using.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. Can you tell us any more about just how Search works? If you just turn it on, what is it searching, the title? Let’s say it was … What is it actually searching in WordPress?

Katie Keith: Well, the WordPress search box that you can have in WordPress itself, is fairly basic and it searches I think it’s just the title. But there are plugins you can use with it, like SearchWP or Relevanssi, or something, which they don’t add their own search boxes. They improve the logic of the search that comes in WordPress and that’s for your site-wide search. If you use the search box that comes with Document Library Pro, which is just for your resources or documents, then that has kind of two options.

One, is that it can search through the title and the content, which is quite candy. Because let’s say you’ve got a bunch of text on the single document page, or something, but not actually in the table because that would make it too long. So that would allow you to search for that behind the scenes. The other option is that it looks within all the columns at the table. So there’s a few different kinds of logic options there.

And we’re currently working with the developer of SearchWP, to develop an integration for Document Library Pro, so that if you install an add-on that he’s working on with Document Library Pro and SearchWP, then it will let you use the more advanced logic in his plugin with the Document Library.

Chris Badgett: Very cool. Very cool. Let’s shift gears and talk a little bit about your journey as a course creator. What inspired you as a software company, to start getting into making course type of content?

Katie Keith: [inaudible] six months ago probably, that we’re always looking for ways to support our customers better and also improve things like marketing funnels, to get people to know our products before they buy them. And we already have a YouTube channel and lots of tutorials and things. All of which are publicly available, so that people can learn about these things before they make a purchase.

And we thought that for certain use cases, it would be useful for people to have a step-by-step course, an online course, about how to do something. Particularly, where our plugin is only part of the solution. So let’s say that you’re a restaurant you need to suddenly start selling online. You don’t really know what you’re doing, but you’ve been closed because of COVID or whatever. And you’ve got to take online orders.

So our plugin helps with the displaying of the products on WooCommerce website. But you might also want other things like the ability to send new orders to the printer in the kitchen, or to receive a text message notification of new orders. And there’s other things that restaurants might want. And so, I thought instead of just talking about our plugins, I could create a course that takes you step-by-step through the process of setting up a website for restaurants to use that use case.

I also, even things like how to set up web hosting and WordPress, because you can’t assume that everybody already has all those things in place. So I picked out, I think we’ve got three online courses now, all about specific use case. So we’ve got the restaurant one, how to build a wholesale store and also how to build a document library. And it’s kind of bigger than what you’d get in one tutorial.

Chris Badgett: That’s super smart to fulfill … You have your finger on the pulse of your customer and more specifically certain use cases. That’s a really interesting way you describe it, in that to really get the job done and solve their problem, we’re going to need to kind of cover things even beyond our own product, to get them the result that they want. And step-by-step training removes all the overwhelm of, oh now I got to go find this tool and how do I do this? And they ended up kind of in an unorganized way, just trying to piece together what they need. Whereas you’ve kind of organized it for them. That’s awesome.

Tell us about your experience with just getting comfortable and ready to make all this content. A lot of people get hung up in the gear, or the being on camera, or maybe you were already doing YouTube videos, so you already kind of had some practice. What did you need to do to become comfortable to start cranking these out, these courses and all these individual lessons out?

Katie Keith: I’m not really interested in the gear, but it’s really important these days. People spend 1000s of dollars on their set up, with their microphone and their lighting and things like that. And I’m just not interested. I forced my husband to swap offices with me, because we’ve got two home offices and we both run the company together. Just because the light is better in my new office. Because I’ve got a window in front of me.

So I had all these lights and they were no good. And I just … You got to find the right location so you can get really into the lighting, or you can’t just find the right spot. And then everybody does that backgrounds for Zoom and things don’t they? And make sure it looks right. And it’s interesting because in the past, nobody ever really saw your office when you worked at home anyway. And now you’ve got to think about all of those things. Will you be on camera? If, say you need a good enough camera and if your voice is recorded, you need a good enough mic.

But I’m by no means an expert. And I do hire someone to do my YouTube videos now. But I did the courses myself because I felt that that would benefit from a more friendly approach I suppose. I thought it needs to be clear, but maybe it doesn’t have to be ultra professional, because it’s about getting a relationship with your students, isn’t it?

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I love that. That way of looking at it. There’s this middle way, between perfectionism and paralysis. And everybody eventually hopefully finds the middle way. And I think you’re absolutely right. Video, it’s no substitute for in-person or whatever, but in terms of developing trust and a relationship. And people purchase software, not just from a company, but other human beings that are also going to be around as a relationship going forward between a company and somebody using the software. I think it is a smart use of time just to invest in at least creating some of the courses yourself. And the very act of creating the course, it really gets you in tune with the use case, right?

Katie Keith: Yeah. Because I was creating a whole website from scratch. I wasn’t just installing our plugin on my test site that already has tons of content on it. I was starting from scratch for the purposes of the course. So it is an interesting exercise. And then your student watches you do that and hopefully copies along.

Chris Badgett: How did you … There’s kind of two personality types. Some people like to be super organized and structure, do the outline in advance. And then other people just like, they just start and then just start making the training or whatever. What was your approach to being ready to record and to actually … A lot kind of happens. And then you go into the moment where, all right, now I’m creating the actual content. What did you do to get organized or not? Or did you just go? Yeah.

Katie Keith: Middle way really. So I put a Google doc together with just the course outline and some bullets of what I wanted to cover in each lesson. And then for some of them, for the action ones where I was actually setting up the website, I just had a kind of little note next to my computer that you couldn’t see with what I wanted to cover, but not a script. Whereas for other parts of it like introductions and conclusions, then I wrote more of a script, which isn’t ideal because you can always see you reading it on your screen however good you are.

You can use software to make it move along as you’re reading, so it doesn’t look like your eyes are moving, but you can always tell. But I did choose to do that even though you could probably tell I’m reading. So it’s about getting that balance. Whereas when you’re installing a plugin and showing how to do something, you can be a bit more natural, I think. And just talk through what you’re doing and give a few tips along the way.

Chris Badgett: So tell me about your decision to use LifterLMS. Why did you pick that?

Katie Keith: I have used LearnDash on one of our web design clients sites. We still look after actually. Or it’s … I don’t know, it just never quite did what we wanted and so on. So I thought, and I’ve obviously I know you Chris, so I thought we’ll try Lifter. And also that has a free version, which not all of the WordPress LMSs do. So we installed that and had a play with it and it did everything we wanted. In fact, I think I fed back to you that I think the free version has far too much in it business wise, that I felt we should have been made to pay. But yeah.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

Katie Keith: There’s a lot of free features like certain types of certificates and all the little notifications and batches. And tons of stuff in the free version, which I was surprised about. So that was good.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Well, how do you think about future courses or whatever? You’ve made three, it started with one. Tell us about the decision, or did you always know you were going to make multiple ones and do you have others kind of planned around different use cases? How do you think about the future and your courses?

Katie Keith: I think I’ve covered our main three use cases, which are kind of industry-based.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Katie Keith: And I haven’t fully got my head around whether to do more feature-based courses, if that makes sense. Because [inaudible] they could use case, like I need to build a restaurant. You can kind of anticipate the student’s needs from start to finish in many ways. If they want to do something like speed up shopping in their WooCommerce store, I could do a course for that, but I don’t know if it would be … It doesn’t feel like it comes together so well as a use case. So I’m sort of just keeping an ear open as I always do, for how people are using our plugins. And if any other major use cases come up, then it might be time to look at doing another course.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. I was looking at another software company that uses LifterLMS and they on their website, they had a, they called it a Learning Center. And then inside of that, there were courses, documentation, blogs. And how do you as a software company … So I’m interested in this question. How do you think about the differences as a software company between a YouTube video, your documentation, courses, blog posts? Will just leave it at those. How do you use those tools differently?

Katie Keith: Yeah. And I think your right. I have seen some software companies that bring it together very well, because it’s not about the platform from the user’s perspective. The platform is just a vehicle to deliver information. So people come to your site wanting information, wanting to achieve a certain solution I suppose. And they don’t know if they want to go on your blog, or your YouTube channel, or your courses. And I’m not saying we’ve got this right yet, that’s probably a future project. I have seen people that bring it together into a resource center, where it’s centered around the topic rather than the vehicle. And I think that is a good thing to think about which we haven’t got right yet.

Chris Badgett: How do you think about YouTube yourself? Is that one of the ways you could tell where the market demand was, based on some of your YouTube views, or virality or? How do you use YouTube as a software company?

Katie Keith: Yeah. We’re just starting to improve that. It’s so huge. And we’ve always had to sort of, I suppose a trickle of sales YouTube. But we until the last six months or so, we haven’t really invested in doing regular videos. I would say at the moment, our YouTube strategy is kind of to echo our blog. Our blog, isn’t really a blog, it’s a series of tutorials. So each blog post is an in-depth tutorial about how to do a particular task usually with our plugins, but not always.

And we track which of those generate sales. And our YouTube strategy at the moment, is to look at which blog posts are generating the most sales and to do an accompanying video, which would be published on YouTube and its own rights and also embedded within the post. Because people have different learning styles of course. Some like to read step-by-step instructions, others like to watch you doing it in a video and copy along. So for our best content, we’re trying to provide multiple mediums in that sense.

Chris Badgett: I love that. Yeah, YouTube, I’ve learned that lesson as well, that when I make a tutorial piece of content versus just talking head about ideas or whatever, the video get 10 times the views and engagement or whatever. So YouTube, especially in WordPress, is a particularly powerful for tutorials. But it’s people really want that. And they get … I mean, when I think back about it, I actually learned WordPress, started learning how to use it in 2008 by watching YouTube videos. ‘.

So there’s always been a relationship between YouTube and WordPress. It’s super interesting. Well, could you just say those three main use cases again, that are a perfect fit for Barn2? We’ve got restaurants. Who else we got?

Katie Keith: Wholesale. So that’s building a kind of hidden store for your wholesale users. The other one was Document Library. And which is basically, which is quite a wide term really because we would include any sort of resource library, which might be audio, video, document, whatever really. But bringing together resources.

Chris Badgett: Just for the listener who maybe into e-commerce and WooCommerce, but maybe new to the concept of wholesaling, how is a wholesale site different from a retail site, or can they both be on the same site? How does one think about the difference between wholesale and retail?

Katie Keith: Yeah. The key difference is pricing and user experience. Most WooCommerce wholesale price plugins only look at the pricing side of things. So if you log in as a wholesale user, then you’ll get a certain discount, which is just how shops work. You have the retail price and the wholesale price. Often you have multiple wholesale prices based on volume or something like that. But a lot of wholesale plugins forget about the user experience. Which is that, a retail customer doesn’t know what products they want to buy necessarily. They might want to spend time browsing large images, viewing separate pages for each products and so on.

Whereas a wholesale buyer, does know what they want. They’re not buying it for themselves, they’re buying it to resell. So what they want, is a quick kind of one page order form, I.e. table, where they can choose quantities and variations, few data factual stuff about the product. And very quickly add all the products they want to their carts, or from that one page. So it’s a completely different experience of selecting products for retail and wholesale.

So our wholesale plugin brings those different elements together. And yes, you can run it alongside your retail sites, because it’s when you log in as a wholesale, user that you see the wholesale layouts and pricing and so on. And your normal public customers continued to see the standard layouts and pricing, which you would always have in WooCommerce.

Chris Badgett: Very cool. Very cool. Well, let’s end it back on the Document Library. And I’ll give you a few seconds to think through what I’m going to ask you, which is all the different types of documents people may consider for a learning site. Whether that’s a training based membership site, or a single online course. One of the things that the way I like to teach people about building these types of sites is that, it resonates with what you’ve been saying in this interview in that, you like to support your use case and solve their problems.

When somebody is trying to learn something, a course, it’s just a vehicle as an example, or what they need, is they need to be surrounded with support. So that might include some video content, some audio content. But the opportunity to provide documents or digital downloadable files to help support the learning process, what are some ideas to get people thinking of why they might benefit from coming up with a recent Document Library strategy, for their online course or training based membership sites? Can you list off some ideas for people?

Katie Keith: Yeah. Well, it’s kind of, if you went to a training course in-person, in the olden days, then you would nearly always be given some sort of written information and handouts, wouldn’t You? We’re kind of replicating and improving on that experience for online learning. And because then and of course, you go to a course either in-person or online. And that’s a one-time thing. One of the beauties of online learning through an LMS, is that you can access the course in future until whatever it expires.

So that’s better than a in-person course, where you have to use your memory don’t you? Or it’s gone forever. But you’re still not realistically going to be logging back in and going back through the lessons regularly. You want to be able to download materials and save them somewhere that fits into your workflow. You might have some sort of resource, within links in your computer, or folder of things you look up for useful information. You might have a company sort of process document and you want to copy something into there, or link to it.

So there’s lots of reasons why you’d want to take what you’ve learned from an LMS course and bring it into your everyday workflow. And to do that, you need to be able to access links and download documents. That might be videos or something that you’ve saved for future reference. It might be a PDX that you’ll refer to any future. I said lots of different things, but the point is, that you would refer to it later and incorporate it into your day-to-day work. And that way, it makes it real because you can properly embed your learning into what you do in the future. You don’t just forget it and move on.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s a good way to describe it. And I’ve taken online course and content where I’ve literally gone to the print shop and printed out the workbook and then I go old school. And also the offline learning use case, maybe they’re just a …. It’s an option for somebody who’s getting on a plane or something without WiFi to take audio or video lesson with them offline. The idea of portable content that’s not requiring an internet connection, is super powerful.

One of the things that makes … There’s not that much competition in what’s called portable content. There’s music and there’s audio books and there’s podcasts. And course creators can get in the mix. Whereas when you go to the internet, there’s 1000 things vying for your attention. So portable content is super powerful.

Katie Keith: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Well, I want to encourage everybody who is listening, to go to barn2.com/courses and take the free, e-course, create an online document library. That’s on the barn2.com website. Any final words for the people, Katie?

Katie Keith: Not particularly. So yeah, I think if you’re building an LMS course, then think about how you might incorporate resources into that. And have a look at Document Library Pro and whether that’s a good way to list them. Either within each lesson, you might have addition many table at the bottom or something with the documents and resources for that one lesson. Or you might have a resources lesson writing at the end of your course, which would have lots of resources on and a more sort of searchable format. So just think about what would work for you.

Chris Badgett: Katie, thanks for coming on the show. And it’s amazing everything you’re up to. Thanks for sharing your story. And we’ll have to do this again sometime.

Katie Keith: Thanks for having me.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post How to Create a Document Library in WordPress with Katie Keith from Barn2 Plugins appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

We discuss the free training on how to quickly create, sell, and validate your online course in 2 hours in this episode of the LMScast podcast with Will Middleton and Chris Badgett from the LifterLMS team.

Will Middleton is the customer success manager at LifterLMS, and he organized the Enroll Summit and coordinated speakers to share their insights for helping course creators get their first 10 enrollments on their online course websites.

The summit features 10 lessons (2 from each speaker) focused on:

Jenni Jacobs: Instructional Design
Melissa Love: Community Building
Ziv Raviv: Expertise
Chris Badgett: Entrepreneur
Will Middleton: Technology

Often the first 10 enrollments can be the hardest as you’re validating your course offer and trying to get people into your program. Many entrepreneurs online give up after not successfully getting 10 enrollments. The strategies shared in the Enroll Summit will help you cross that threshold and get students onto your website to validate your offer and start getting feedback.

At LifterLMS, we decided to put together this enroll summit to help those users who are struggling to get their first enrollments. LifterLMS is a SaaS product, meaning Software as a Service. But SaaS Academy founder Dan Martell talks about how SaaS should really stand for Success as a Service. And at LifterLMS we’re taking that Success as a Service mentality and trying to grow outside the software itself to help users be successful with their online course or membership websites.

We don’t talk about specific tech tools in this Enroll Summit, so if you’re on any other LMS platform, the advice in this summit is exactly for you, not just LifterLMS users. LifterLMS is a flexible online course tool you can use on top of WordPress to create many different learning website setups, but the advice in this course isn’t tailored specifically to Lifter users only.

Be sure to head to Academy.LifterLMS.com/Enroll to sign up for free in the Enroll Summit. If you have less than 10 enrollments on your online course site, we recommend checking out this free summit with some great info on getting the first 10 people signed up. There’s some great info in there even if you’re above 10 enrollments, and you may get some great takeaways for your online course websites.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name’s Chris Badgett, and I’m joined by a special guest and colleague. It’s Will Middleton, customer success manager from LifterLMS. Welcome to the show, Will.

Will Middleton: Howdy. Thanks for having me.

Chris Badgett: I’m really excited to get into it with you today. This episode’s a little different. Will is an awesome person, and I love interviewing him about his story and his course creator journey. But we’re actually going to be talking about something that we’ve released, it’s live that you should go check out right now. What’s it called Will?

Will Middleton: It’s the LifterLMS Enroll Summit. You can find that on our academy, and we’ll dive into some of what is in the Enroll Summit. But yeah, that’s what we’ll be talking about today. And there’s some great content in there for getting your first 10 enrollments. And it really covers the fundamentals of having a successful course creation site. So even if you’re above 10 enrollments, there’s some great fundamentals in there. But yeah, definitely check that out.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And that is no charge. It’s completely free. It’s a service we’re doing to help the people creating learning programs out there get that initial traction, get that validation, so that they can quickly create, cell and validate an online course. Now, let’s start at the beginning of the story Will. We’ve seen a lot of failure, in honesty, in this space, people creating courses or training based membership sites, or they’re trying to bring their in-person training business online for various reasons. We’ve seen a lot of failure. Tell us about just broad brush strokes. What kind of failure problems do you see people have when they’re trying to kind of get their first enrollments?

Will Middleton: Yeah, I think I was just re-watching Melissa Love’s training. She’s a expert designer. She’s in the Enroll Summit talking about building a strong community. And one of the points she said is, “Build your community before you build your course.” And I’m sure a lot of people listening to this episode have already built their course, have already started building their course. So that’s totally fine, but she really emphasizes getting the community as the first step. So if you’re already in the process of making your course and you don’t have a Facebook group or a Slack community, wherever your students hang out, creating that community is just so for having the questions that you’re going to be making content off of. One of her quotes that I really love, and I think we’ll make an image out of it and post it all over the internet. But it’s, “Thinking you know what people want is not the same as knowing what they want. So having that community gives you that validation.” And I think a lot of course creators, first time course creators, don’t start out with the community and that can lead to creating a product, building it and no one ends up coming. That’s a massive thing I see all the time.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And you and I both have some trainings inside of the summit, but we also leveraged our community, people who are successful with the LifterLMS software and their businesses to contribute to the body of work that’s the training. So go to the academy and check that out. It’s free. So, you’ll find it right there. Just go to Lifterlms.com, click on learn or somewhere at the top and you’ll find the academy.

One of the things I think is cool to kind of look at is how we’re a little bit different as a company. You’re the head of customer success, SaaS, which is S-A-A-S, is like a software company. It stands for software as a service. But in one of our coaching programs that we went into as a company, we learned that SaaS can also mean successes as a service. And we invest heavily in helping customers be successful, feel supported, have the resources, tools, support, community that they need to be successful. Why do you think as a company that it was important for us to kind of get into training in addition to just answering people’s tech questions about how to use the tool?

Will Middleton: Yeah, I think it comes down to a lot of what you said about success as a service. The software tool itself, making that purchase alone won’t be the item that makes you successful. It’s getting your course content structured properly, getting students is what will make you successful. So having the awesome LifterLMS tool to support you along with the strategies you need really makes for the success. And that’s ultimately why most people join the LifterLMS community is because they want to have success with their online course. And they’re all at different points along the journey, but this content really focuses on the zero to 10, which is a large part of our customers in our Facebook group. Many LifterLMS customers are making that zero to 10 track. And so having resources out there around marketing, creating a community, instructional design and some of those questions that can come up when you put together your whole course with LifterLMS. And you’re like, “Why don’t I have any students? I built my course. I put it out there.” This is just some great content about getting students into your course and having that success as a service from Lifter.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Going from zero to one is like the hardest thing. To actually get a real customer that’s not your brother, your mother, your friend, or somebody you know. But, to get a real customer going from zero, that’s a huge moment. But then getting to 10, it never gets old getting a new customer, especially if you’re selling it and you get a payment notification or whatever. But, there’s a lot that goes into getting to 10. And I think one of the greatest things about the Enroll Summit content, which is a collection of 10 of the best trainings we have and that we’ve sourced from our community as well of what are the absolute essential 10 trainings people, if they had, would be way more likely to be successful. But one of the cool things about this complimentary training is that you don’t even have to be using LifterLMS to get the value out of it. Maybe you’re using a hosted platform or even another tool in WordPress. It’s really for the course creator, no matter what tech you’re using. Could you give us another example of one of the trainings in there that has nothing to do with having to use LifterLMS?

Will Middleton: Yeah. I give two talks in the summit and they’re about the tech and they have nothing to do with Lifter. We’re not screen sharing and doing a Lifter tutorial. It’s all about the mindset of the tech, what you want to consider with different tools and the mindset behind the tech and why you choose what you choose for the tech. So, there’s no Lifter specific content other than our logo everywhere because we’re the best company for building a customizable LMS. But if you’re using it any LMS, these tips apply everywhere. And I mean, they do apply broader into just business in general. But, any course creation platform, if you’re on Kajabi, Udemy, any of the LifterLMS WordPress competitors, this summit applies to you, anyone making an online course or membership.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And we launched this summit training to our existing customers earlier on in the process as we were just kind of rolling it out. But now it’s out for everybody. I want to ask you about some of the things you’re hearing about. What it’s like or what people love the most, what are some highlights people are calling out. And if you haven’t yet, open a tab and go to lifterlms.com, open up the academy, find the Enroll Summit, and go ahead and enroll for free. But keep listening to this episode, because we’re going to go over some other cool things. What are some of the gems inside the summit?

Will Middleton: Yeah, that’s a lot of the feedback is the gems. Like we talk about on these podcast episodes, sometimes there’s a golden nugget or just a piece of wisdom that you write down and put on your wall. And while I was listening to the other speakers we have, other than the talks I gave, of course, but my talks have some tips as well, not to imply they don’t. But, there’s just so many of those moments where I’m just blown back in my seat with tips, like I’ve shared one of Melissa Love’s quotes there about community before course. And Jenny Jacobs has awesome stuff as well about how to structure your content. It’s actionable items. That’s another big piece of it too is actionable items. It’s not just about the theory. There’s also executable items. Ziv talks about putting your lead magnets in your Facebook profile description. That’s something you can do in five minutes is take your course lead magnet, maybe you have a free course or something like that. You can drop it right in your Facebook profile description. So there’s key takeaways and some blown back in your seat hot tips.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I’d like to think of a good course creator when they’re making a lesson as an example that they’re take taking decades and condensing it down into days. So some of these nuggets you’re talking about are very hard won ideas, concepts. And this summit also doesn’t just have information. There’s actionable worksheets in there to actually take what you learn and put into action. So this isn’t just a edutainment video course. You’re going to learn some stuff and then you’re going to get some tools that you can immediately use to implement what you just learned, so you can get to those 10 enrollments, which is awesome. What’s another hot tip? Is there another hot tip? Or if you want me to, I think I could go through some of the gems of my talk. What else you got?

Will Middleton: Yeah, I guess in Melissa’s talk, which is the one I re-watched recently, and that’s the thing too. You’ll probably re-watch the summit and get a whole lot more tips out of it. But she really breaks down the difference between an ask me anything session, a mastermind session, a co-working session and live support. Those are all four live formats that you can do over Zoom as a value add to your online course or membership and a great way to create recurring revenue. But, that was the key takeaway too, is it’s not just hopping on a Zoom call. There’s different purposes for Zoom calls that you can integrate into different levels of your membership. That was a hot tip as well. And, I don’t want to give away too much, but Jenny Jacobs in her talk has somewhat like a controversial statement about how different learning styles don’t totally exist the way we think they do. But Jenny’s an amazing instructional designer who’s been in the community for decades, like Chris said. And she’s condensing some college degree level stuff. And she’s built her business on these foundations and she’s sharing that all condensed within her two 10 minute tactics.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome…

Will Middleton: Pretty cool takeaways.

Chris Badgett: And a couple things I put in the summit, I contributed some things around sales and marketing. So I’ve been in online business for over a decade, and sold courses and done a ton of marketing. In many ways, what you’re listening to, watching right now is actually a form of marketing. But I give away some of my best, easy to implement, high value things you can do to generate steady leads. And then also to have a way of actually closing a sale that’s not pushy, that’s structured, it’s not stressful to create, that’s actually enjoyable to do your sales process. Which not all course creators have knowledge or training in sales and marketing. So, that’s in there too.

I want to encourage you listening to go to the LifterLMS website, lifterlms.com. Go to the academy, sign up, enroll in the summit, go check it out, go watch it. Go re-watch it. And my biggest piece of advice is take action. You can go in there and you can learn and you can just watch, and that’s okay. But in every lesson there’s worksheets and action things you can do to implement exactly what you watch. So, there’s 10 trainings in there. If you were to do one training a day and then implement what you see, that means in two weeks, while taking the weekends off, you could be well on your way. And maybe some trainings will take a little longer to implement and don’t fit perfectly into a day, but you get the idea. If you give the Enroll Summit a solid two weeks, in the web world we call that a sprint, just give the summit a sprint of effort, a two week effort, and I think you’ll be blown away as some of the results you’re going to get.

In customer success land at LifterLMS, people don’t just need to validate and launch and get their first students or customers. They can go further from there. And we recognize it. Tell us about out some future training concepts we have for the future of LifterLMS, and more summits and trainings and whatnot.

Will Middleton: Yeah, for sure. I guess if I could share my screen real quick, I’ll show you, and if you’re watching the video of this episode, you’ll see this. But if you’re listening to us on iTunes, we’ll be talking through it as well, but be sure to check out the video. One thing I was thinking about kind of in customer success land is how people have different challenges at different phases in their online course.

So from the zero to 10 enrollments, I titled that The Enroll Period, which is what this summit is for, getting your first 10 enrollments. There’s a lot of beginner specific content in there. But then there’s also the journey from 10 to a hundred. And then I call that Momentum, and excuse my handwriting. I’m new with the iPad. Chris has had the iPad for a while and has years of experience with it, and you’ll see that in the summit as well. Chris busting out his iPad. But, 10 to a hundred is where you’re getting momentum. And then 100 to 1000 is Scaling. And then 1000 to 10,000 is [inaudible]. So I kind of think of the course creator journey on these four levels. And so in this summit, we’re really focusing on the first level of enrollment. But, we’ll be creating more content in the future about going from 10 to a hundred, a hundred to a thousand. And there’ll be content specific to people making those different parts of the journey in future summits.

For example, in the scaling summit, going from a hundred to a thousand, a big challenge you’re going to face is the company becomes more than you, the founder. So you might want to look at affiliate marketing when you’re at that level, where you have distribution partners and you’re not the only one doing all the sales and marketing. So, that’s at that scaling level. So we’ll definitely be coming out with some more content in the future around these different levels. And so that’s kind of what the future holds for this type of content.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I think that’s really one of the big take ways here is this was not just whipped together really fast. This is really well thought out. And if you’ve gotten some advice or you’re following some people on the internet or to learn various skills you need and whatnot, are you learning the right thing for the right time for what you’re trying to do? So if you’re still in that zero to your early first customers, you need the right training at the right time for that kind of place you are in life and business. Which is what I think another thing that makes this so cool, we’ve been in this industry for so long. We’ve Seen people in different use cases, different stages. The exact same strategy works for this person at this stage, but not this other one. But this person over here thinks they need it because there’s other people, they think they should be watching it. But, they’re at the wrong training at the wrong time. The success training at LifterLMS, you’re going to get the right training at the right time, without overwhelm, without unnecessary fluff. It’s the real deal.

So go to lifterlms.com, find the academy, find the Enroll Summit. While you’re at it, head on over to the LifterLMS reviews on WordPress. So, if you just do a Google search, LifterLMS WordPress reviews, you’ll find it. Over there you’ll see many hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of five star reviews about LifterLMS. We’d appreciate it if you would drop a review over there. And you’ll see, I think in those reviews, kind of the sentiment of people and how they feel supported by this company. Not just with software, but with being supported with questions and “Oh, these guys really do care about their customers,” and whatnot, because we do. And, we invest in it, just like putting together and going through all the stuff to make training like this.

Any final words for the people, Will, about the summit that you’d like to share?

Will Middleton: No, I guess you summed it up perfectly. Head to lifterlms.com. Do anything you can to find the summit and likely the summit will find you too. We’ll be promoting the hell out of this forever because this is a great piece of content. So yeah. Check out the summit. It’s live now, so go find it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Well thanks, Will, and you did a great job spearheading this effort, putting it together. And I’ve seen you personally help unlock growth and momentum with LifterLMS customers. So this is a great thing you’ve led up for not just Lifter customers, but anybody who’s trying to create courses at any scale. So, thanks for coming on the show and we’ll see you inside the summit. Take care.

The post [Free Training] How to Quickly Create, Sell, and Validate Your Online Course in 2 Hours appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Learn how to build an internet company teaching English to Spanish speakers online with Marcus Carter in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. Marcus currently lives in Spain and runs his online course website CarterSchoolOfEnglish.com.

Marcus grew up in the UK and traveled to Spain as a holiday destination when he was younger, and he thought that would be the place he wanted to live as an adult. He worked as a teacher in many different places and taught all ages from three-year-olds all the way to up to his oldest student who was 82.

One of the biggest obstacles he noticed in his profession was the way students learn languages and the materials that were available to teach students. That’s where he started diving deep into different methodologies and how he could facilitate learning as quickly as possible. Through this process Marcus ended up writing his own method for teaching language, which covers going from zero all the way up to an advanced level where he now uses Zoom to teach classes live.

Currently Marcus does a lot of marketing work on TikTok and Instagram Live. Getting TikTok users and Instagram users who are interested in learning English, he’s able to funnel them to his Telegram group where he markets his course offerings.

He is using the LifterLMS Groups functionality to sell to companies who are interested in teaching English to their employees. He adds in their company logo and sets up a group leader who can sign in and enroll their employees. Just because you sell to companies doesn’t mean you have to abandon individual learners. You can run both side-by-side in the same course.

Marcus also works with interactive quizzes in his LifterLMS website using Camtasia. You can work with H5P content or other interactive learning content in your LifterLMS website. At the moment the results don’t track to the reporting, but for flash cards or videos intermingled with knowledge checks, it’s a great avenue to explore.

To learn more about Marcus Carter and the great language learning content he has, be sure to head to CarterSchoolOfEnglish.com. He has an evaluation quiz there to test your level of language learning (from Spanish to English) and that helps him diagnose the level of course to introduce students to.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest, his name is Marcus Carter. He’s from carterschoolofenglish.com. He teaches English online. He’s currently living in Espania. Welcome to the show, Marcus.

Marcus Carter: Thanks very much, Chris. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Chris Badgett: I want to get into your story a little bit of language learning online. There’s all these niches or as you say, in Britain, I think niches of online education and language learning is huge. I know the pandemic and stuff changed things, but take us on your story arc as a teacher and language learning. How did you go from being a British guy to living in Spain and teaching English to Spanish-speaking people?

Marcus Carter: Okay. Well, obviously when I finished studying in the UK, I did some traveling and basically Spain has always been a holiday destination for the Brits for most of my life when I was younger. And I thought that what better place to live than a place where you would go on holiday? That’s how I sort of started coming to Spain and I met a few people here. Cut a long story short, met my wife and the rest is history as far as living in Spain is concerned.

When I started my teaching career, I’ve been teaching in many different places. I’ve been teaching in schools, in language schools, in normal schools. I’ve taught all ages from three-year-olds, which I love teaching, three, four, five-year-olds, all the way up to 82, I think was my oldest student that I’ve had. I’ve been an employee, I was an employee for the first few years of my career. Then I branched out on my own and started opening up my own schools.

One of the biggest obstacles that I noticed in my profession was the way students learn languages and the materials that we had available to teach students. So I started diving quite deep into different methodologies and how I could facilitate learning. My premise was always, how can I make this as easy and as quick as possible, learning a language, especially like English, which is quite a difficult language to learn? Especially for Spanish speakers.

That led me down quite a deep rabbit hole where I ended up writing my own method because I couldn’t actually find the materials that I really wanted. I did franchise a method, but I couldn’t find the best of both worlds that fitted with the society in which I live. So I’ve written my own method, which goes from zero all the way up to an advanced level, and that’s what we use now online with our Zoom classes, my team of teachers and myself to teach students.

I had three schools before the pandemic hit us and obviously we’re all closed down, so we closed all the schools. But we continued literally immediately, because I’ve always been quite a fanatic as far as technology is concerned and I love tech. So I very quickly got some of the teachers who were senior teachers, up-to-date with all the technology so that they could continue online, including using these tablet things to write on and things like that and using some kind of digital whiteboard.

We finally got it all together, started with Skype, then we changed over to Zoom and that’s where we are today really Should I continue?

Chris Badgett: Well, yeah, that’s good. A couple of quick questions. When they were in-person schools, how many teachers… It was more than just you, you had some teachers, how big were these? How many students? How many teachers kind of thing?

Marcus Carter: Well, we’ve had up to about 22, 23 teachers in total. That was when we were our biggest time. I will say that before the pandemic actually we were… There’s more and more competition every day it seems to be. It became like a fashionable business to open an English school even if you knew nothing about English teaching, a lot of people were just opening English schools because it was quite a profitable business when many of us and then there were more and more and more. So you just had to keep working harder and harder on marketing.

I’ve worked very hard on SEO and all kinds of marketing techniques, I’ve tried them all over the years. Not really have much luck with internet marketing at all, really throughout all the time that we’ve had the website. One of the problems I had is I used to have a different name when I was a franchise, so I was using the franchise’s name, which I gave it to myself, I didn’t have to. I popularized that name where I am. Then when I stopped working with the franchise, I lost all my rankings completely. I was on page one and we were getting much more traffic.

That sent me back sort of five or six pages, really difficult to get back up on Google. I didn’t have much luck with that. Really, if you want me to segue into how I got into a LifterLMS now, is this a good time?

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And I do want to at some point circle back to designing the Carter Method, your own teaching method, but yeah, let’s go into the tech for a little bit of… You talked about Skype and Zoom, what we call instructor-led training, then where does WordPress and Lifter come into the picture of your tech stack here?

Marcus Carter: I’ve always wished for years now to have some kind of platform where my students can go online and find and do exercises and additional material and things, but I never had the technological know-how to really build that.

Chris Badgett: Like on their own without an instructor, right? Is that what you mean?

Marcus Carter: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: On their own, [crosstalk] time, passive.

Marcus Carter: Exactly, exactly. A login area where space where they could feel that they’re members of a place and they could go in and they could find their own material and even teachers could upload their own things maybe during the Easter holidays and things to do activities for students to do. I’ve wanted that for years really, but I’ve never really… It was never a necessity before the pandemic. And so when the pandemic came in, obviously we were online, we started online.

I lost all my traffic, obviously because we used to have high street schools, so it was people walking in through the door all the time. When you’re online and you’re not ranking well on Google, that doesn’t really happen. I had to look for new ways of finding traffic. I started, I’ve been… I consider myself an expert in phonetics under the umbrella of language teaching. It’s always been something that I’ve been advocating in my methods that I’ve been teaching.

I started working on social networks and I had never had any success with social networks before. I’ve had Instagram for years and I’ve actually had times in my life where I’ve tried to push it a bit harder and 200 people following me or 200 and something people. Actually my wife, she pushed me onto a TikTok and she said, “Try TikTok. Try using that.” I’m up to nearly half a million followers now on TikTok.

Chris Badgett: Wow. What kind of content are you putting on TikTok? Because most TikTok content is like five to 30 seconds, so what are you doing?

Marcus Carter: I’m actually going… I’m using the new… Well, not the new, but it’s relatively new that they let you upload now three-minute videos.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Marcus Carter: Having quite a lot of success with those, the recent ones I’ve been uploading [crosstalk]

Chris Badgett: Are you’re teaching a phrase or what is it?

Marcus Carter: No, because basically I know that the golden rule of marketing is that you have to strive to be different and whatever… You can’t be in the same category, you got to find your blue ocean. You can’t be in the red ocean where everybody is, and there’s lots of English teachers giving phrases and things like that. What I specialized in many years ago was phonetics and I advocate that you really need to learn to pronounce like a native speaker to be able to understand the native speakers.

Because Spanish speakers, the problem they have is they find it very difficult to understand fast conversation in English. I started publishing things that I have always encountered throughout my career that were difficult for students. I knew Spanish people, Spanish speakers, because a lot of my followers are from South America were having difficulties with, and a lot of those things were phonetics-

Chris Badgett: What’s an example of a phonetic thing you would put up to help people?

Marcus Carter: Well, maybe just the difference between can and can’t for example, that was one of my recent videos that I uploaded. Because the difference in phonetics, although they’re written the same way, C-A-N with a T on the end, I know that in North America you’d say can’t, but we say can can’t, it’s a completely different phonetic sound that we use. And really native speakers, I can play tennis, I can’t play tennis. I don’t really pronounce the N or the T, is just that long A that I use that a native speaker will understand and say that I cannot play tennis.

That would be an example and some difficult structures that are different in Spanish to English, things like that. I started taking off on this on the social media platform on TikTok, although, it’s a platform where it doesn’t really matter how many followers you have. When you launch a new video, your followers don’t necessarily see that video. It has to be spectacular content every time for it to go anywhere for them to push it. Not like Instagram, where your followers are going to see your stories and they’re going to see your posts.

Which is good in some sense, because you strive to create new content all the time. Then I started going into live TikTok sessions, which really opened my eyes to a new way of driving traffic and moving people to my website and to… I created a Telegram group as well, there’s over 6,000 people in the telegram group now. It’s a place where… Because from TikTok, I couldn’t really speak to those half a million people and say, “Hey, I’ve got this course. Why don’t you try this? Or you do it live, or you don’t do it.”

My humble 26 years of experience, I’m quite comfortable in front of a camera speaking to… When I go live on TikTok, I’ve had my maximum being 1,270 people watching me-

Chris Badgett: It’s a lot of people.

Marcus Carter: … at the same time. That’s a lot of people at the same time, because on Instagram, you’re lucky if you get, even like the famous people that get a couple of hundred people watching them at the same time most of the time. I’ve got a normal average of 5, 6, 700 people at the same time watching me. I know that most of them are not really interested in what I’m saying, they’re just flicking through, but there is a constant fan base there. And I traffic those people to Telegram so that I can remarket them there and to my website.

This is where I started with LifterLMS and thinking of what can I do? How can I turn the website into some sort of platform where people could learn English with me? A lot of people ask me for classes when you’re quite popular on social media. “Can you give classes?” Obviously you can’t because you’ve only got a certain amount of hours a day and you’re talking about 100 to 1,000 of people. I didn’t have that many people asking for classes. But what I did is I started thinking, “What could I digitalize and put onto a course?” And the first thing that came to my mind was phonetics, because-

Chris Badgett: Are these free courses or paid courses?

Marcus Carter: No, no, they’re paid courses.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Marcus Carter: I have invested so much of my time and I do invest so much of my time for free for people, especially on the TikTok lives. I now do TikTok and Instagram at the same time live.

Chris Badgett: What tool do you use for that?

Marcus Carter: The thing is here in Spain, we can’t get an RMTP code for TikTok. I think you can in the states, but I can with Instagram. I use OBS with Instagram and what I’m trying to do now, and don’t tell anybody about this, it’s going to be broadcast, but is I’m trying to traffic people from TikTok to Instagram, being very careful because TikTok detects when you move people from the lives. I’m sure they do because they punished me in the past, so you got to say it very…

You’ve got to be very subtle and say, “Hey, why don’t you check out my Instagram when this finishes and follow me, because what I do is I’m using OBS software, which I suppose you’re familiar with and I’m projecting semi-transparent things onto my live sessions. Phonetic, symbols and phrases in phonetics so that people can see it, but they can’t see it in TikTok.” What I do is I download the live show from Instagram or I publish it on my feed on Instagram with those projections.

That is a reason why people who are on TikTok might want to go to my Instagram. And now, every live show I’m… It’s not to show, but every live lesson that I’m doing, which is about an hour long, I’m managing to move about between 70, 80, 90,100 people from TikTok to my Instagram account every time I do it. I presume that they are warm customers, people who are interested in what I’m doing, they’re going there, they’re following me. They’re interested in learning English, otherwise they wouldn’t go there.

That’s how I’m generating traffic now to the website because I’m then going from there. I’m also promoting every five, 10 minutes a new level test, which I have designed. I’ve got on my website level testing is also something that students really like to do. They like to know how much English they know. The level tests that are basically available online is just a grammar test where just ABC, let’s see if we can fill in the blank and it’s not very trustworthy.

It’s not very reliable really to tell you what level of English you have, because when I level test somebody through Zoom, it’s always an oral test to see what you understand, and I get more and more difficult. I’ve tried to change this to a test where people listen to things on the website and I’m actually using LifterLMS for them to register, to get their data before they do that level of test as a way of just having their information so that I can remarket them.

That’s a free test and that’s a good way for me at least to get people to go to the website and do the test. When they finish the test, according to what school they have, they are sent to one page or another, where there’s a little video of me saying, “This is your level of English, this is the course I recommend.” And then we give them the calendar slot where they can reserve a free class with us, which is a one-to-one Zoom group class.

Chris Badgett: At this time, what percentage of the training is course-based versus Zoom class-based? Self study versus active.

Marcus Carter: Right. At the moment, I would say most of it is active courses at the moment because my phonetics course is something that people don’t really understand very well yet. Only the people that have done it love it. But when you say to somebody… Look the problem with learning English,” because here in Spain, for example, people learn English throughout their whole life and they’re never satisfied and they always want to know more. And they think it means that you’ve got to learn the most advanced vocabulary and grammar to get to the higher level when really what you need to do is understand how we speak and just get that fluency.

At the moment, I’ve literally only been doing this for the last few months. I’ve had quite a few students go through the course on the LifterLMS plugin and everybody loves it. What I’m doing now since I acquired the groups plugin, which for me was a massive game changer because I have been working with companies for many, many years since I started my career here in Spain, teaching English to the employees, most of them were company directors. I realized something I could do, I could offer the different packages of licenses to companies and put them into this group package.

That’s where I am right now. I’m very, very heavily marketing companies, phoning all the dozens and dozens and dozens of contacts that I have already before I start cold calling to offer them the phonetics course as either a compliment to what they’re already doing or as a just a unique course that they can do at the moment. What I’m doing just so that I give you my… This is my marketing tactic at the moment. I phone the company, I speak to human resources.

I say to them, “Look, I’ve got this course. This is something that you haven’t seen before. It’s something that I greatly recommend and I would like to offer you a demonstration of this product.” And they say, “Yeah, that sounds okay.” I say, “Can I have your email?” And I just take their email and then I set up the group in the backend, I put the banner up, I put their logo in, I get it all from the internet. I rescale everything. I create their group, I open up three or four seats, and then I send them the link.

I enable the link and I send them the link so that they can go straight in, they can register and they can try the product. That’s basically what I’ve been doing for the last two weeks and having some success. Companies are starting to go in, they’re trying the product. This takes time, I know, but I think that one of the major outlets for my course is going to be with companies because… Well, one of the companies has already bought the large, what I call unlimited licenses.

They have lifetime access and unlimited licenses. If they need more, I just open up new seats for them.

Chris Badgett: That is cool. LifterLMS groups allows you to get a leader at the organization and then they can have a certain number of seats. You guys work out a price for their license. You have this big unlimited license. Is it fair to say that just from a business standpoint, from a revenue perspective, there’s these two different markets, there’s the individual learner and then there’s the company.

Marcus Carter: Exactly.

Chris Badgett: Going after companies, doesn’t mean you have to abandon individual learners, but there’s a lot of revenue potential there, right?

Marcus Carter: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s like the long tail, isn’t it? That they [crosstalk] where you’ve got. You can have hundreds of thousands of individual learners. And it’s something that I totally agree on that and I’m going to start a new campaign, I think next week I’ll be starting, just for individual learners to get them onto the platform. I have had quite a few individual learners go through and every time they go through, I create a little group. I did the first course I ever did.

I created a little Telegram group and I was giving them a class on Saturday as well as doing the course. And they will love that because we all go together and we could speak about things. Because obviously what I find in language learning, I’m fighting against a divided society where people want to be face-to-face with their teachers because they think that you can’t learn English if you’re not face-to-face. And also how can I sell a course that they don’t interact with really?

I’m fighting against those two great obstacles in my business at the moment. The first thing I decided to do was, we’ve had enormous success with our students this year as far as passing official exams more than any other year this year, actually. I really do think, because a lot of parents says, “Oh, I don’t think my child really concentrates as well when they’re online is when they’re in the academy.” And I’m thinking to myself, “But do you know what your child was actually doing when he was in the school? He’s in the academy, you don’t know that. You can see him now, but maybe he was worse when he was in the academy and now he’s calmer.”

What I’m doing with the digital course is turn it into something more and more interactive, because I have been a consumer personally of digital courses myself and I really liked them because you can go back to them. If you go to a school for a couple of hours a week for English lessons, you’ve got two or three hours a week, and then it’s up to you to open your book and see what you can do between now and the next lesson. Whereas with the digital courses, you can go back to that same lesson over and over again, and it’s the same one and you can learn that concept well.

That’s one of the great advantages of the digital course. And with the language learning, obviously all the courses I’ve done, it wasn’t really necessary. They were personal growth and those things, it wasn’t really necessary for me to interact with that person who was speaking to me. But language learning, there has to be some kind of interaction or something from the student. That was my massive learning curve over the last few months of how to create a course where people could actually… which was more interactive than just a video and PDF or something underneath it.

Chris Badgett: How do you do that?

Marcus Carter: This is where it gets a bit more complicated. I’ve been bouncing around what they call interactive video creating programs or software. And I sort through-

Chris Badgett: Like H5P or what?

Marcus Carter: Don’t know that one, but Camtasia, have you heard that one?

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Marcus Carter: Right. I was on Camtasia for a while, but basically the only interaction that you have is you can bring up a little quiz in the middle of the, wherever you want or you can move the play head. They can click on something and the play head moves, but it was quite limited until I discovered Adobe Captivate. That’s the game changer, total game changer [crosstalk]

Chris Badgett: For interactive content.

Marcus Carter: Yeah. But it’s just… It’s really complicated. It’s a really complicated program. I do everything. I’m the graphic designer, I’m the sound technician, I’m the video editor. I do everything myself. That was something that I was talking to your colleague, Will about, saying that we’re in a time where you might be a yoga teacher and you’ve got LifterLMS, and you’ve got your little yoga website and you want to do a course or something like that. We don’t necessarily have the means to pay graphic designers and video editors and sound technicians. We have to learn most of these things ourselves. And I consider myself-

Chris Badgett: Quick clarifying question there. You have other teachers that work with you, but in terms of running the school and the online version of that, you do everything by yourself, is that correct?

Marcus Carter: Yes. Yes.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s impressive.

Marcus Carter: My son helps me with… Yeah. He helps me with the website, the design of the website and things like that, but he’s not a professional either. He just helps me with that to take some of the load off. But all the content creation, he helped me with the editing of some of the videos in premiere too, I do it all myself, including the recording and the lighting. Yeah, everything. That’s pretty… One thing I’m very, very adamant about is quality. I like to deliver good quality.

Good quality audio, good quality something that’s visually pleasing to look at. When you’re on the website, that everything looks good and sounds good. I don’t like shabby things, so I spend a lot of time and all the little details. When I got to Adobe Captivate this program, I’m very familiar with Illustrator, Premiere, Photoshop, all of those programs, Audition, because that’s what I’ve been using for years. But Adobe Captivate, although it says Adobe, it used to belong to other companies previously and it doesn’t really look like an Adobe program and it definitely doesn’t behave like the Adobe programs.

Luckily, I did find one person in particular, who’s got lots of tutorials on YouTube and he’s very helpful tool. You can ask him questions and he’s got me out of some sticky situations with the interactive videos. But basically I’ve ended up now, and I’m just finishing the course. My course has 12 lessons. I’m on lesson 11 and then 12 to finish the interaction with the videos going back through them right the way from the beginning. I’m redoing all of them, making them all interactive.

Chris Badgett: This important point I just wanted to highlight is, sometimes when you launch a course that’s not the finish line, that’s the starting line. You’re actually revisiting your original video course and making it better by making interactive lessons, so it’s like another version, right?

Marcus Carter: Totally. Totally. In fact, I call it Pro Speech 2.0. this is the second version. Absolutely. And I agree with you, and this is probably the third or fourth time I’ve gone back to the beginning of the course and I’ve started revamping and-

Chris Badgett: Nice.

Marcus Carter: … redoing it. My wife keeps saying, “Stop going back over the course. You don’t sell it more because…” But I can’t. Because when you discover something new in the technology, you think, “Wow, I can put that into the course and then go back to the beginning. As I said, 12 lessons, it might not sound like much, but there are hundreds of hours that I’ve put into that course, literally sitting on this chair.

Chris Badgett: Approximately, how many… People ask this question and it’s really it depends question, which is how long should my course be? But how long is your 12-lesson course to in total more or less?

Marcus Carter: It’s a very difficult question to answer because one of the things that I do when I sell the course to the companies, here in Spain, we have what’s called [Funde]. Fund Day is, they give money to companies… But they don’t give money. Actually, from your social security payments that you pay, a little bit of that money goes for training that the company can then reinvest in the employees. And so it can be language courses or whatever. So anything that you do has to be within the guidelines of Funde.

One of the things they ask you is, “How long does it take to do your course?” Because they pay per hour to the students. And it was really difficult for me to think, where the video lasts 20 minutes and then underneath that, and then there’s some exercises within the video because there’s… Actually, I’ve got this interactive videos, so maybe 20 minutes, let’s hand on another 20 minutes, about 40 minutes of video. Then I’ve got all my audio exercises, then I’ve got my own evaluations, then I’ve got the LifterLMS evaluations.

And I thought, well, I could probably do that in about an hour and a half, but then I think students won’t have learned everything in that hour, they’ve got to go back over that and revise that. I find that’s a difficult question to answer actually and I don’t really have a straight answer. I don’t have a little formula to calculate how long it would take. But for example, in the Chamber of Commerce, they’ve just accepted my course here where I live, in the region where I live.

They said to me, “The course has to be a minimum of 50 hours.” And I said, “That’s it. Don’t worry, it’s 50 hours.” I just said, “It’s 10 lessons… Five hours each. 12 lessons, four and a half hours, each lesson and that’s it.” They said, “Well, how do they do that?” I said, “Well, they got a week. They go through the lesson and they revise it and revise it, and there’s things to read and things.” It’s a difficult thing to say that, and people want to know, it’s one of the questions.

People say, “How long does it take to do the course?” I had it on drip content, my course. I thought, there’s a lot of information. I’m going to release a lesson per week. Then a lot of people were saying to me, “I want to do it faster.” Since I’ve been doing all the interactions, I’ve now released the first 10 lessons. 11 and 12 will be released very, very shortly this weekend. I’ve taken off the drip content, so people can do it at their own pace.

Chris Badgett: Do you do the prerequisite, so they have to do it in order, or do you not have that set?

Marcus Carter: I don’t know if I have that active. No, maybe they don’t have to do it in order. I didn’t actually think about that. I’m not familiar with that little part of the course to actually establish that [crosstalk]

Chris Badgett: What about getting the Captivate into the WordPress site into the LifterLMS lessons? How do you do that? What tools do you use or was that hard to figure out? Because we get asked that question all the time. I’m just curious how you solved it.

Marcus Carter: Everything has been really hard for me to figure out because I’m not an expert in any of this, and everything is whatever I need to do. I’m on YouTube and I’m looking for things and I spend hours on YouTube, listening to people. Anyway, I discovered a fast hosting service called Bunny, like a bunny rabbit, bunny.net, and it seems to be very, very good and very, very cheap. [crosstalk]

Chris Badgett: And I can hold Captivate content in Bunny?

Marcus Carter: Well, yeah, Captivate content at the end of the day, it’s just HTML5. When I first did my course, everything was on YouTube and it was obviously hidden on YouTube, and I was just streaming from YouTube. But then people started saying to me, “People can pirate that and download your videos and things.” And it looks horrible at the end because you get all the offering [crosstalk]-

Chris Badgett: Just recommended your competition?

Marcus Carter: Exactly, yeah. When I discovered that this was going to be HTML5, I thought, “Right, you can’t host interactive videos on YouTube.” That forced me to look for something else. I have my hosting service for my website, but bunny.net covered all those bases much better than anywhere else. It’s a very fast hosting service, super cheap, and I’m really happy with it. All I do is I just have it hosted there. And on the course, on my LifterLMS course, I just put an iframe at the top. And I just put the URL into that iframe and there it is, there’s the video.

Chris Badgett: On the WordPress site, you’re basically on a lesson, you’re just embedding an iframe that you get from Bunny?

Marcus Carter: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Badgett: Then when you use Captivate to create the interactive video, do you upload that to Bunny?

Marcus Carter: Yes.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s cool.

Marcus Carter: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: I love how you said YouTube as a tool to figure things out. That’s where you go. I see the people that are the most successful, they don’t have all the answers, but they know how to search for answers. And they’re not afraid of spending a little bit of research time or reaching out the experts on YouTube. YouTube is definitely a place to learn, for sure.

Marcus Carter: Yes, absolutely. I agree with you.

Chris Badgett: While we’re in the tech, why WordPress and why did you end up with LifterLMS? Or how did that happen?

Marcus Carter: Okay.

Chris Badgett: Were you’re always running your site on WordPress, like a marketing site-

Marcus Carter: Yes.

Chris Badgett: … kind of thing?

Marcus Carter: Yeah. Really I don’t even know what alternatives there are. I don’t know any other way of doing it. My brother-in-law is an IT engineer and he’s got his website, and it’s on… He leaps from his website, he sells software from his website and he’s got it on WordPress, so that was a logical place to go. And as I say, I didn’t know any other way of doing it. That was the only thing, everybody said, “Well, everybody’s on WordPress, so let’s do that.”

LifterLMS, I started… I don’t want to disparage any other kind of plugin or anything, but I started with this other membership plugin and it was really, really complicated, difficult process, people couldn’t log in. It was just a really difficult thing to do, and visually, it was very… I was very unhappy with it. I did have somebody who was helping me at that time with that plugin and he was being a bit of my community manager with social media and helping me with things like that at the same time.

He was the one that installed that plugin and we were using that for some time at the beginning, but it wasn’t an LMS. It was just a membership plugin that we were using. I was very unhappy with it because I can’t stand it when people come back to me saying, “Oh, we’re having problems logging in.” When you’ve got tech problems for something that you’ve been working so hard on a course and you’ve got everything ready, and then there are other things… Silly things that they can’t overcome to get onto the course.

Literally, I will say that on YouTube, I saw this guy and he said, “How to set up an LMS,” I don’t know, “in an hour,” or something like that or… It was a long tutorial and he was really good, this guy. I think he was Danish or Swedish or something like that. I can’t remember. I can type-

Chris Badgett: It might be Ferdy Korpershoek-

Marcus Carter: That’s the guy.

Chris Badgett: … or something?

Marcus Carter: That’s the guy. I don’t know if you’re paying him or whatever, but [crosstalk]-

Chris Badgett: I’m not. He makes great WordPress tutorials.

Marcus Carter: Yeah. He was the one. Well, I didn’t even know what LMS. This is the thing. There’s so many things that you… I didn’t even know that existed, L-M-S.

Chris Badgett: As a category of software.

Marcus Carter: As a category of, yeah, to put onto the website. I thought, “That’s just what I needed.” That’s how I stumbled across LifterLMS and I followed his tutorial, I installed everything. I had to basically extract the course from where I had it before and reput it into LifterLMS. I redid lots of things, this was another one of the times when I went back to the beginning, I doubled my audios and different things like that. It took quite a long time, it took me about a month to get it back up to scratch again on the website, and then it went from there.

Then I went to the bundle, is it the Universe Bundle? I think it was, so I could get the payment gateway, then groups and that’s where I am really.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You mentioned earlier, Telegram is a tool you use. I know people are pretty familiar with social media like TikTok and Facebook, and whatnot, YouTube, but what about Telegram? Can you just for the layman who hasn’t heard of it before, explain what it is and how you use that in your tech stack?

Marcus Carter: Yeah. Telegram began at the same time as WhatsApp. I don’t know if it was a bit before or a bit afterwards, and it was like, I don’t know if you remember Beta and VHS when the two [crosstalk] 50 now, so there was a little war to see who was going to win. WhatsApp were the winners there, but people were using Telegram many years ago, and I hadn’t heard about it for a long time until this community guy that was working with me said, “Hey, why don’t we set up a Telegram group and channel people from the live sessions into the Telegram group?”

Telegram is basically very similar to WhatsApp as far as groups is concerned. The difference is that WhatsApp, you can put 250 people into a group and Telegram, you can put 200,000 people into a group. Basically, it’s just an instant messaging service, but it does have, for example, really cool emojis. Not that that’s really interesting for me, but a lot of people like that, is much better than WhatsApp in that sense. And you can now do calls, you can do a voice call to everybody in the group [crosstalk]

Chris Badgett: Like a webinar kind of thing.

Marcus Carter: Yeah. I can do a webinar in Telegram, which is pretty amazing. I haven’t tried that yet, but I will say at the same time that although I have 6,000 people in the group, a lot of people fall into the Telegram and then I think they forget about it. Because I’ve fallen into groups myself and don’t really listen too much about what they’re saying there because it tends to be just publicity.

Chris Badgett: So it’s like email list for text messaging and phone kind of thing?

Marcus Carter: Yeah, that’s right. The only thing is you don’t get the people’s information in Telegram, they’re just there, so you can publish things. The good thing about Telegram is you’ve got a channel and you’ve got, well, I call it my tribe, but I don’t know what it’s called the group or something like that. In the channel, if you want, you can open a channel. And if you’ve got interesting content with value that you’re adding to people, you can create the channel. Everybody’s in the channel, the only person that can speak is you, and publish is you.

If at the same time you want people to comment on what you’re doing, you open up the group as well and people can be in both places where they see what you’re publishing and they can comment in the other side. And if people are not interested in the comments, they just stay in the channel and just watch what you’re publishing. That’s pretty cool.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I got a bunch of, they’re going to sound random questions, but there’s like a framework that I use that you got to wear all these different hats to be successful with these kind of projects. If we put on the marketing and sales hat, one of the things we need to understand is motivation. Why do Spanish speakers want to learn English? I know you serve a bunch of different markets and target customers, but what is the main driver and motivation behind the people that buy your programs?

Marcus Carter: Well basically, I would say not only Spanish people, but also South America too. The main motivator is that everybody knows now that if you don’t speak English, your life is pretty limited to your little nation or to your little town, or your region or whatever. You can’t really go. If you want to learn anything on YouTube, obviously, there’s a lot of content in Spanish, but the vast majority is in English, the vast majority. English films whatever. If you want to travel, wherever you want to work in Spain now, the first thing…

I got a call the other day from one of the companies I used to teach at and they said to me, “Look, we want a salesman who’s going to have a very good job, but the only requirements is he has to be trilingual, English, Spanish, and French, those three languages. We’re not looking for university degrees or anything like that, or college degrees or whatever.” And so languages are… Knowing English here in Spain, it’s like the eternal subject of the Spanish speakers, because it’s never been taught very well in schools.

It’s always been like couple of hours a week, that’ll do. Not with a very good methodology, 30 kids in the class, it’s difficult to teach a language. You can’t treat language learning like Maths, because I was saying, “You have to interact.” With Maths, you can passively watch a whiteboard, see what he’s doing, calculate it, and hand your homework in or whatever. But language learning is different. Actually, it’s a communication tool that we humans have converted into an academic subject.

Why? Because we’ve studied it and all the biomechanics of language learning, but really it’s just a tool to communicate with other people. And to do that, you have to interact and you have to listen. That’s a long answer to your question, but [crosstalk]-

Chris Badgett: Oh, it’s good. It’s like it opens up opportunity, a lot of different types of opportunity. What about the friction point of… You mentioned that some of your learners are children, kids. How do you solve that technically or in terms of making the sale or whatever? I know in different countries, there are different laws and minors, and does the kid have an email address? Does the parent need to be in the loop or not? It’s just another customer, it doesn’t matter how old they are. What has been your experience around serving kids with an online education company?

Marcus Carter: We have an enrollment form online, so when parents come in and they want to enroll their children onto one of our courses, I like courses, then they have to abide by what they said, and they have to check off the regulations that we stipulate and say that… Because we record all our classes as well. That’s one of the advantages is that all the classes are recorded so that parents can see them if they want to, children can revise them if they want to, or if anything happens, we have a recording of those classes. We obviously have to have permission from parents to record the classes as well.

Basically as they enroll, they have to agree to those terms and tick all the boxes. That’s the way we do it.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. You mentioned creating your own instructional method. It’s called the Carter Method. And one of the things we have to do as education entrepreneurs is we have to be a expert and we have to be a teacher. And you were saying that the traditional methodology just wasn’t working for you, so you went back to first principles and built your own. Can you tell us a little bit about that process and what you discovered creating your own method? And if somebody else is thinking about really going back to the roots and building up a better way of teaching a subject, give us some advice around that.

Marcus Carter: Obviously, when I was first teaching, I was using materials that were famous materials, Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press and those kind of things. But I noticed that I was bored. I was bored teaching those materials. I was thinking, “This is not fun to teach.” And I was thinking, “If it’s not fun to teach, it’s not fun to learn either.” As you were saying, teachers, educators, and things, when I… I’ve had nearly 200 teachers go through my schools when we counted them just recently.

I probably interviewed almost all of them myself, personally. What I look for in a teacher, the last thing I look for is, do you know… Obviously, you have to be a teacher obviously, but what I want to see is are you a performer? Are you an actor? Are you a clown? Are you a funny smiley kind of person? Motivation is like the number one driver for any human being to do anything really, we need to have some kind of motivation.

And so I thought, “I need to…” The only way people can be motivated is if they feel that they are progressing. That’s one of the best motivators, the quicker they progress. And as I said at the beginning, my idea is to make this as easy and as quick as possible for students to learn the language, maybe a lot of… I’ve heard things from other schools, they say, “No, they keep you there for years before they do the exam to keep you hanging on.” I did the opposite.

I thought, “I’m going to teach as quickly as possible.” I prefer to have a reputation for being a fast, place where you learn quickly and you get out, and then more students come in because of that reputation. With language learning, obviously, there has to be an interaction, much more interaction. I know that language has four skills, reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Those are the four skills and most of the materials that are available are focused on teaching larger groups where it’s reading and writing, a little bit of listening, a bit of speaking.

I thought, “No, this has got to be the opposite and this has to be in the order of a child, when a child is learning.” The child starts listening to things without really understanding. Doesn’t have a second language to translate to to just decode these things that you’re saying. And after that, they start speaking, which is the second step. And then the third step, when they go to primary school, they would start reading, and then finally start writing.

So I developed a method where first students listen to the vocabulary that we’re going to be using, and I put that vocabulary into context and explain it to them. Then they use that vocabulary with me with the questions that I asked them. They are actually using the language immediately, even if they’ve never spoken English before and it’s their first class. They’re immediately speaking in the first class with the teacher. That way they progress.

So many times people have said to me, “I’ve tried learning English so many times, but this is the first time I’ve actually felt that I’m actually progressing and I’m actually getting somewhere.” Because they’re using the language from day one and they’re breaking all those stigmas and barriers of, “Oh, I get embarrassed when I speak English, I’m going to get red, oh I’m going to make a mistake.” That doesn’t matter because you’re just continuously speaking in our classes.

So we’re focused on oral interaction really with the teacher, and reading and writing is like the least important thing on our agenda. Although it is included because they have to pass exams a lot of the time and things like that, but that’s a… 90% of our class is based on speaking and that’s much more enjoyable than reading or writing, and it’s more fun. With that way, the teacher can put his personality into the class as well. That makes it more fun for the students.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, two more questions for you. One, if somebody is listening and they’re thinking about choosing LifterLMS for the online course, part of their LMS, Learning Management System website, what advice do you have for them about that?

Marcus Carter: Well, I definitely recommend it, absolutely. My experience until now is very, very good. I’d especially like to give a shout out to your support team as well, they’re great as well. I keep getting messages really quickly back from them for all the things that I don’t understand and they always help me. Especially when you get a new plugin and things like that, you can have these weekly calls and things and it’s really good support. In that sense, for me, that’s really important.

And I imagine that a lot of the people who are putting LifterLMS plugins onto their websites, they’re not particularly tech savvy. I don’t think so, so it’s really important to have that support. That’s one thing that I would definitely say in your favor. One of the things that I would say maybe I haven’t done as well as I should have in my course is plan the course out from beginning to the end. I’m quite a spontaneous kind of person, so even my videos.

My son said to me… Because I now have a teleprompter, but I didn’t have one before. It was all off the cuff, talking into the… And my son was having a lot of trouble with the editing because I was talking about things and going off at tangents and things like that. Definitely, people talk about storyboards and things like that for your videos, and having a real good idea of how you’re going to lay your course out from the beginning to the end is a good idea.

I had an idea and I’m just… I do a lot of things off the cuff anyway when I’m live. Sometimes I don’t prepare the live sessions, I just go on and see what happens, and then I ended up doing all sorts of different things. But definitely a lot of planning and working out how you’re going to get your traffic to your website. That’s the big deal, that’s the big thing. If you know how to do that to get warm traffic to your website, well then you have the golden nugget basically. That’s the thing.

The only way that I’ve seen personally to do this, if you want to do it on a very low budget is through social media. And if you are an educator and you have the capability to make a course and you’ve got the knowledge that you think you can sell to people, then use that knowledge on social media. Not all of it obviously, because when they do the course, they’re going to get a lot more things and a lot more detail, but give a lot of value on social media of the contents of your course, snippets, bits and pieces, things people can take away indefinitely.

I talk about the big A, is it applicable? Whenever I publish something on social media, I think, “Can you apply what I just published to your life today and it will make a small difference in your life?” Maybe can and can’t, you’ll start understanding the difference because of that. That for me is the big difference between having success on social media or not having success on social media, is the value that you’re giving. A lot of people think, “Well, I don’t want to give away too much for free,” or, “How do I monetize this?”

But I haven’t found another way of doing it, so I think that’s what I would recommend, is to have a good fan base on social media and plan your course well so you don’t have to go over it four or five times like me, going back for the… If you’re going to use something like interactive videos, if you want to blow the learners away, start looking at something like that, because that makes a massive difference. And I’ll tell you, I’ve only just started scratching the surface, and my interactive videos, the students, they’ve already gotten the courses.

They obviously have the new interactive videos because I don’t charge more for that, it’s the same course. They love it and it’s something that they’ve never seen before. I had never seen an interactive video where I could click on things on the screen and sounds would come up, and I could change the state of an object when you click on it and it changes to something else. It opens up a massive world of creativity for educators online.

There’s just one little section that another thing that I’m stuck with, which is, in the interactive video, you can run a JavaScript. Well, then you just have a massive world of what you can do. You can imagine that when you click on the button, a JavaScript runs on the interactive video or an HTML, you can imagine what you can do there. The possibilities are endless.

The teachers who are in this world now on these online education and these digital courses, we are now entering a new realm as far as I’m concerned. Obviously, virtual reality, that’s going to be something to look into and with workspaces or whatever that Mark Zuckerberg is talking about. Those kind of things are interesting is that, of course, but for the time being, I would say, “My recommendation, look into interactive videos.”

Chris Badgett: That is super cool. Super cool. I like how you mentioned, “Don’t be shy of giving away things for free.” You mentioned earlier using the LifterLMS groups add on, and instead of doing this hard sell to accompany, you actually go ahead and set up the group. You invite the key person at the company and give them four seats to just try it out. Now, the sale is not so hard. It’s like, check it out. If you like it, let’s work out a deal and do a lot more seats. It’s pretty straight forward. I love that idea.

Marcus Carter: Yeah. In fact, I don’t even have… It’s not even a demo version of the course. It’s the course.

Chris Badgett: It’s the real thing.

Marcus Carter: It’s the real thing. They can flick through the lessons and things like that. Obviously I’ll be calling them back [crosstalk] two weeks and saying, “How are you doing?” They’ll say, “Oh, we haven’t had time yet.” Because obviously I can see when they’ve gone into the course through groups. I can see if they’re there and when they’ve been there. I will be calling them back and obviously, if they’re not interested, then I will just remove them from the plugin. But it’s an easy way to… We have to have some Vaseline nowadays to help the sales go a bit more smoothly, make it easy for people.

Chris Badgett: All right. Last question, what’s one tip you have for somebody who’s thinking of teaching English as a second language and they’re just getting started on this journey? What advice do you have for them on day one?

Marcus Carter: I would say, learn phonetics. For you to distinguish yourself from other teachers, learn phonetics and you will see English from a different perspective. You will be able to teach English from a different perspective. You will be able to surprise students with, and help people who have problems understanding and speaking the language, not because… People study English for their whole life, and then I level test them and ask them a few questions, and they don’t understand. But if I show them the questions I’m asking, they do understand.

So there’s a massive difference between understanding the written word and understanding the oral word. And you can help students through phonetics overcome that difference and balance it out. So it will be a massive asset to your toolbox if you learn phonetics. A lot of people shy away from it, most people do because it’s not easy, but YouTube is full of teachers.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s Marcus Carter. He’s at carterschoolofenglish.com. Go check it out. Marcus, thanks for coming on the show and thanks for being a shining example of what we call an education entrepreneur who’s helping improve the lives of others, really open up that opportunity using the vehicle of language. Thanks so much for coming on and sharing so much wisdom with the listener today. I appreciate it.

Marcus Carter: It’s my pleasure. Thank you, Chris, for inviting me.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post How to Build an Internet Company Teaching English to Spanish Speakers Online with Marcus Carter appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Learn how Josh Hall helps web designers create agencies and make digital products to accelerate freedom in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. This is our third LMScast featuring Josh Hall. He’s a Divi design expert and digital entrepreneur who teaches other website developers and designers how they can get more clients and grow their business from a freelance practice to an agency.

If you’ve been around the WordPress and Divi space, you may have seen Josh’s name or face around in Facebook groups or on his YouTube channel. But if you haven’t seen Josh before, he’s based in Columbus, Ohio, and he’s a dadpreneur who lives with his wife and two lovely girls.

Working from home is a big motivation for Josh in his work online. He worked as a web designer and built up his agency as a freelancer and solopreneur. He scaled it up and sold it to a larger web design agency in 2020. Then Josh went full time with his personal brand JoshHall.co.

Josh has a suite of courses at JoshHall.co, and he’s closing in on 900 students, which has been super cool to see him grow his online course website and community. In this episode, Josh shares how he created his student center and forum where he interacts with members who’ve purchased his programs.

Having interaction with the instructor is a big part of the buying decision in the online course space. So offering access to help and support as a key aspect of your membership offering is a great way to bolster the amount of students who will be interested in your programs. (Josh uses Circle.so for his member forum.)

Balancing work and life is something we see as a common theme for successful digital entrepreneurs who want to avoid the burnout that can sometimes come with working in the online course or WordPress space. Josh shares some insights on how he manages the balance and some takeaways you may be able to implement as you build your brand online.

If you’re a website designer or developer, be sure to head to JoshHall.co and check out Josh’s podcast, blog, and tutorial YouTube channel. He’s got great resources answering all kinds of questions in the WordPress space, and specifically the Divi space as well.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. Today I’m joined by a repeat guest. His name is Josh Hall. You can find him at joshhall.co. He’s a course creator. He’s a WordPress expert. He’s a membership site creator. He is just an all around awesome dude. Welcome back to the show, Josh.

Josh Hall: Thanks for having me again, Chris. I’m excited to have an extended chat with you. The last time we did this, we did it for an hour and it felt like 10 minutes. So it was Joe, we were both joking about, let’s have a Joe Rogan style extended call and see where it goes so we can really dive into some of this stuff. So I’m so excited to chat with you again, man. You’re one of my favorite people to talk about this kind of stuff with. So I’m excited.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And I’m excited too, just because I see there’s so much friction. It’s hard enough to build online business and to build a website, and then for the website to be the product itself and it has all these components. There’s so many areas where people get stuck, or just under optimize, or tunnel vision, or whatever. I’m just really excited to see where we go here today. If this is somebody who’s listening to this for the first time, give me your elevator pitch of who you are and what you do.

Josh Hall: Again, my name is Josh, I’m based in Columbus, Ohio. I am first and foremost a dadpreneur. I live here in Columbus, Ohio with my wife and we have two lovely little girls at the time of recording this, three years old and one and a half. So it’s a wild time and you’ll likely hear them at some point outside my door here during the call.

I love being a work from home dad and husband. And it’s been really cool because I’ve been able to do that for a long time. I was a web designer. I built my agency up as a freelancer and a solopreneur. I scaled it. And then I sold that web design agency in 2020. And I went full-time with my personal brand @joshhall.co. And that is where I create courses for web designers. So I have created at this point, a suite of nine web design courses that help people do two things, either learn how to build websites and then subsequently grow their own web design business.

So I’ve worked over the past couple years with building those courses up, supporting them. At the time of recording this, I’m closing in on 900 students, which has been super cool. Last year, I launched a membership, which is my premium web design club as an extension to bring a lot of my tribe together. And I’m sure one thing we’ll talk about now as well is I’ve created the student center, which is a support forum. I pulled all my Facebook groups or all my groups from Facebook.

Right now I’m supporting my students, building, and supporting, and maintaining these courses. However, I’m at an interesting crossroads with my journey because now I’m entering into new territory with what I like to dub, web entrepreneurs. I’m actually starting to create courses on what I’m doing now, which is, I just released a course on creating a course. I’ve got a lot of questions about podcasting. I want to start at creating a course about podcasting, about video marketing. So it’s kind of a whole new realm and that’s why I’m so excited to pick your brain Chris, because I don’t feel like I’m stuck. I’m not struggling, but what’s happening is there’s just so many different ways to go and I need to get my thoughts down, and get a bit of path that’s cleared out. That’s where I’m at right now.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Well, one thing just to frame this conversation, I did a previous LMScast podcast episode with a guy named Dane Maxwell and he talked about finding what he called the holy grail of business, which is to have a clear customer specific result and a mechanism. And I literally, if any of that is off, that’s where 99% of the friction comes. And Dane did a really good job with that. So it’s what I see in people like yourself, who I call education entrepreneurs, they’re super smart, super motivated, super driven, super adaptable, super learn on the fly. And you can change things around the audience and serve multiple groups and stuff, but I’ve seen things where it works well and where it doesn’t. So let’s go into there. Tell us more about how you’re transitioning to, from people who build websites and then teaching them how to run an agency. And now you’ve got this market of web entrepreneurs or what I would call an online business person. But tell me more about the web entrepreneur.

Josh Hall: Well, the web entrepreneur is interesting and I don’t know if this is a market that’s tapped into at all. And that’s one reason I wanted to talk with you about this Chris, is to see if you’ve seen anything similar. I could absolutely completely change trajectories at some point, whether it’s in the near future or maybe a few years down the road to just go online entrepreneur, but I don’t want to be like one of my good mentors is Pat Flynn, I love Pat Flynn. I’ve been through a lot of his courses. I’ve had him on a podcast, incredible mentor, big name as an entrepreneur.

His type of customer though, is all over the place with where they’re at in their journey, what type of entrepreneur they are. Well, one thing that I’ve found that’s been really interesting and I think that could potentially separate me from a lot of the other people like Pat Flynn, who deal with all sorts of entrepreneurs is I have really struck a chord with people who come from the WordPress and web design world and are doing more than just websites. They are now adding courses to their mix, whether it’s for clients or whether they have their own video show. One of my web design students created a podcast based off of his background, which was in law enforcement. He used to be in law enforcement and then he became a web designer. Now he’s doing web design and marketing for law enforcement. It’s really interesting.

So there’s all these different types of people who I’ve just kept a pulse on a lot of my audience and a lot of them are becoming web entrepreneurs. So they’re good with web design. They’re good with WordPress, but they’re adding a lot more to their business. Some people might gravitate towards copywriting, or SEO, or branding, and a web design is a part of what they’re doing. So that’s what has led me to realize that I’ve tapping into a new market and I don’t know if somebody else is already doing that.

Most people are just tapping into the general entrepreneur who may not know anything about web design. And then there are people who are just catering to web designers, which I’ve been doing. But I realized through keeping an eye on my students, having my membership, and then also just listening to questions, a lot of people were asking me questions about creating a course, wanting to know my process. A lot of people have been asking me about podcasting. So I end up repeating the same thing over and over again. And I think I’ve told this to you before Chris, it’s something I preach. If you do something over and over again, make it a template or make it a guide or make it a course that you can just sell over and over and save your time. So that’s the genesis of this idea and where I’m putting my foot into this new pool, if you will.

Chris Badgett: Well, I’ll share some thoughts on why I think this is good and why I’m not scared. I’m almost listening to you looking for any red flags or anything like that.

Josh Hall: That’s what I was hoping for because I didn’t want you to be like, “Josh, I’m worried you’re going to do this.” And we’re going to [inaudible] your audience.

Chris Badgett: The reason I’m not scared is because, well, there’s a couple of things that I see humans having a hard time with, which is exponential growth. Like really understanding that, the law of compounding, but also fourth dimensional planning, really thinking through time. And you’re probably not like this. It’s one of the things that makes you a good marketer, a good community builder. Just you’re thinking about these people and you’re watching them evolve through time.

So two quick, I’m thinking about your avatar, it’s becoming clear in me because we have a lot of overlap here. So like Shawn Hesketh, who has the WordPress101 site, WP101.com happens to be powered by Lifter. But before that he was an agency and he builds sites for clients. And as time goes on, I mean, I don’t know his original origin story of WordPress, but something happened back there.

He was actually a designer, a non web designer. And then he got into the internet and he needed to learn WordPress. And then he ended up wanting to teach WordPress, which is what you’re talking about, somebody who learns how to build a website, then they build an agency, and then they teach. So because this is the same person, we’re just looking at a path, forged dimensionally through time of this type of person. So I really like it.

Melissa Love and Your Community as a Divi person, same story. Offline graphic designer turns to the internet, becomes an agency owner for photographers, and then now she teaches stuff to other marketers and she has something, a platform called The Marketing Fix. And then inside there, her students kept asking her about building courses and stuff. So she’s got a thing about building courses now.

This, because I can see this pattern and I in my mind I can think of 10 more people just like this, you got a niche here. This is a person that we’re looking at. They’re in the cocoon here, or they’re the caterpillar, then they’re in the cocoon, and then they’re the butterfly. It’s just, it may look different, but it’s the same creature moving through time.

Josh Hall: I love that. Melissa is a great example. I can’t believe I didn’t really think. I guess I did not realize that she was doing courses and stuff for people who wanted to learn more courses and entrepreneurial kind of stuff, which is great to hear. I didn’t realize she was too far into that because I view Melissa almost like the girl version of me.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. She’s amazing. She’s awesome.

Josh Hall: Yeah, she’s awesome. I love Melissa. What’s interesting too, what I’ve found to be best is I teach basically, myself from three years ago, like my ideal students are in a place where I was either five years ago to three years ago. And that’s where this idea came from with these different courses that are outside of my “web design courses”. And what’s cool is I love teaching while I’m in it. And while I get I have a great course process now that I’ve done 10 courses and I like sharing that. And I’m kind of needy even to it, I’m excited to dive into my podcasting course, which I plan to do next because it’s been a game changer for me and my business. It’s where a large percentage of my best students come from. So I’m really excited to share that while I’m in it.

And I love doing that for my web design courses. What’s interesting is, I still, I don’t know how much you know about the sale of my business, Chris, but I sold my agency. One of my students actually took it over. And so we worked out a deal. It was not a sexy sell. I didn’t get a yacht after I sold the business. It wasn’t something like that. It was a long-term sale because he didn’t have much capital to work with. My courses were growing. I was making way more with online courses than I was with agency work, and I just… There are a lot of reasons I wanted to sell my business, but he took it over and we worked out a longterm deal.

Now I still have direct contact with him and I oversee him and the team. And he just keeps me up to date with what’s going on, how they’re managing everything. So it helps me stay fresh with web design because I’m already to be honest, feeling a little out of touch with some web design stuff when it comes to code. And I’ll be honest. I don’t know if you know this, the last full website I built was in the spring of 2018.

Chris Badgett: Okay.

Josh Hall: At the time of recording this, this is three years later. I am already feeling a little like, I remember everything and I still tweak around with CSS and I can still build a site from ground up, but there’s stuff that’s new coming out that I just, I either frankly have lost the drive for, or I just, I’ve got bigger fish to fry with what I’m doing. Like I’m much more interested in all of these web entrepreneur based type of stuff, rather than getting into the weeds and the technical aspects of web design. Now basically, I’m at the point now where I’m hiring people to do that.

So all that to say, I think I can still service the people who want to learn Divi, which is the theme that I use and want to learn the processes that I use. And I can still keep up to date on that, but I love having this third option for people to get into if they do want to become more of a web entrepreneur and not just an agency owner.

Chris Badgett: Well, I think you have a choice between two options. And this is very common for entrepreneurial type people where they evolve and they… Basically the way it works is you are going to tire out about a certain subject matter way before your market ever does. So you have a decision. And if you’re an entrepreneur that likes to be building the new, and you’re always evolving and improving yourself, and maybe you’re the you you were three years ago that you were trying to help has now changed so you need to help a slightly different type of person. That’s where you’re in your sweet spot.

So I think the choice that you have is, and there’s not a right or wrong answer here, but are you going to be like a comet where as you move forward, your programs they just evolve and they head in certain directions and the avatar shifting, but the old back catalog? Like for me as an example, I put a WordPress course on Udemy a long time ago for free, mostly for lead gen for our client business.

At one point there was like 30,000 students in there or something like, and finally they kicked me off the platform because it was so outdated. So [crosstalk] I was like the comet, like I became an agency guy and then a software guy, and then I just kept going, but I didn’t pay attention to my back catalog. So the choice you have, I think is, do you want to, in your business, bring in outside resources to update the back catalog? Or are you okay with a slow burn in the comet tail?

Josh Hall: My plan was to keep my courses, my technical courses up to date for the next couple of years at least. I thought that’s very feasible on my end. Luckily, my Divi beginner’s course, I can update that pretty easily. That’s not a huge course. I’m still very well versed in Divi. I still use it. I edit my own site. Even with the people I have working with me, I still will get in and tweak stuff and play around with it. So I would foresee me being able to keep all those update for the next couple of years. After that, I don’t know. I would be very willing now that I have this incredible network to bring people in to support that kind of stuff. But my problem with that is it’s under my brand. It’s Josh hall.co, it’s not webentrepreneur.co or something like that, which I’m not opposed to potentially having a rebrand eventually as well.

Chris Badgett: Well, a couple of thoughts there. If you look at Melissa Love’s Marketing Fix, she brings in guest experts. So it’s not… Melissa Love has a strong personal brand, but her coach and her membership community are like KPC comes in to teach about active campaign. And there’s all these niche experts that come in. So it’s bigger than her.

I’m in a software coaching business or a program with a guy named Dan Martell. He’s got all kinds of other experts involved in the backend helping make the magic happen. But I do think that’s another choice. It’s some people are just like, I want the simplicity of a solo. I don’t want to manage a bunch of other personalities. But then some people are like, “I’m going to make this thing, turn it more into a product brand than a personal brand, but it’s not like a switch you flip it’s a process.

Josh Hall: Well, and what’s interesting is I’ve already gotten to that realm because with my web design club, which is very new at this point, again, that’s like my mastermind style premium community that you are a part of Chris and I know you’re keeping an eye on some stuff. I do that now there, I have monthly trainings for all my members and every month I either give a presentation or more recently I’ve had other people come in and teach about stuff. For example, at the time of recording this, the last presentation was on advanced custom fields. The WordPress plugin. I’ve never used that before. I don’t know anything about it, but I brought somebody in to teach on that.

The next one is about email deliverability and DNS, which my expert guy, Ammar, who you know, he’s the expert on that stuff. He’s doing a presentation on that. And I love it because I can host the call and I can feed him questions and he can share his knowledge and we’re all learning. So I’ve definitely dipped my toe in that end of the pool, just because I figured that’s where I would be heading.

I still think for the foreseeable future I will keep my courses up to date myself, but the way that things have changed, even in the past couple of years for me I would not be surprised if within a couple of years it’s something where I might not be the Divi guy anymore. A lot of people knew me as the Yoda of Divi is what they called me. But again, I haven’t built a site from the ground up myself in three years. So I almost feel like I’m a bit out of touch.

And I wanted to share this with you too. I figured this would come up because this is one red flag for me that made it really interesting. There’s a podcast called Divi Chat where they meet every week. It was one of the ways that I built up my authority in that space. And we were on that chat for the 200th episode of Divi Chat with Nick Roach, the owner of Elegant Themes. And as they were all talking about some technical stuff for Divi, I felt like a little bit of an outsider, because number one, I’m not building the sites out as much with Divi. So I was kind of like, I forgot Divi did that. I didn’t even realize they made that update.

The other aspect of me was like, I’m just not as interested in the tech stuff of the theme now. I just, I think now that I’m in such a different zone with my business, and it’s not that I’m better than anything, but I’m just, I don’t have as much interest in that as I do podcasting and marketing and email marketing and course building. So that’s what’s interesting for me, is I feel like I’m being almost pulled into a little bit of a different niche.

And again, one thing I realized is as I kept an eye on particularly my members who are in my web design club, a vast majority of them are web entrepreneurs. I just launched my new course at the time of recording this about building an online course. And over half of the people who signed up are in my web design club, which tells me they are all really interested in building their own courses for their clients or for their own little web entrepreneur type of businesses. So I found that to be really interesting, because I didn’t know how that was going to go. I didn’t know if three people were going to sign up or 300 people were going to sign up. Right now I think I’m closing on 60 people who signed up for it and over half of them are members. So I thought that was really interesting.

Chris Badgett: A couple of points, one thing I’ve seen some people do with these training sites, it’s really hard to do for a tutorial based training, but there’s a strategy I use just in management delegation where you don’t full delegate, but you do what I call 10/80/10. Where like, let’s say you were going to do a Divi course. You still do the first 10% of it, maybe the front, the intro and the outro, but then you bring in somebody in the middle to do the main thing and they’re up to speed on the latest Divi. And you don’t just get rid of it, but there’s this delegation technique there. You might also be able to license a course from somebody.

And then another strategy I’ve seen people do is pivot from like click-by-click tutorials and try to teach the content without going into specific tools. That can be hard to do with websites though.

Josh Hall: That’s right.

Chris Badgett: But that’s the challenge here. Yeah.

Josh Hall: Well, that’s worthwhile bringing up too. That’s another thing that I’ve realized. And again, it just, I think one benefit of me being so customer minded and high touch with people is that I’m really getting a read on where they’re at. And a few years ago, all of my audience were just Divi users. Right now I would say about 40% are Divi users, maybe half are Divi. The rest of them are also using Elementor, or Oxygen or other builders, or a combination of all three. So a lot of my courses, actually the only course that I’ve created that is strictly Divi is my Divi beginner’s course.

I have some other courses that have Divi in the title, but it’s just because that’s what I use in the course. But when I teach CSS, you could apply that CSS knowledge to any other theme. My web design process course, you can apply that to any theme. So it’s kind of interesting. Whether I intentionally did this or not, the reality is a lot of my students are not just using Divi now. So I feel like it would be stupid of me not to appeal to them as well, because it is what it is. A lot of people aren’t just using Divi for me.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. So maybe there’s a way to repackage it without getting specific into the tools. And this is one when I made that comment earlier about something that people don’t get is exponential change or compounding. Technology is changing and evolving on an exponential curve. Like in WordPress and just watching the page builders come and Gutenberg and Blocks, and then there’s headless, all this stuff is just like, it’s just going fast. So to attach to one brand while in the past it was easier to go with something like Genesis or Divi or whatever just for a long time, the rate of change now in the competition and the thin slicing of all the different options is just accelerating exponentially, which is a challenge for a technology tutorial driven educational product.

Josh Hall: That’s a good point. And I’ve seen that with some of my coopetition colleagues. Like Darryl Wilson, who has a great YouTube channel, he’s dealing with a lot of builders. I thought about going that route. I thought about being a more, just YouTube driven type of tutorial bay. Because that is a strong suit of mine. I love teaching and people love my tutorials, but I then realized I don’t necessarily have a drive to even have hundreds of thousands of subscribers and just have to release a new video every time there’s an update.

I just, it doesn’t suit my personality. It doesn’t interest me. I would much rather build a tribe of people, which is what I’m doing now and know them, and be able to engage with them constantly and know and see their businesses grow and see them create stuff for their family. That’s much more what I build and what I’m excited to build. And that’s where I agree I don’t want the technical aspects to necessarily stand in the way. I want to cover that enough to help people and show what I use and what I know. But I am not the guy to come to for answers about all theme builders. That’s not my brand, not my style.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Well, let’s dig more into the avatar a little bit here. When you say web entrepreneur, how is a web agency owner and a web entrepreneur different in your mind? Isn’t a web agency owner already a type or? Tell me more about this distinction.

Josh Hall: That’s a good point. They’re close. I guess they’re, I mean, you could absolutely be a web agency owner and be more of an entrepreneur, but I would foresee the difference being a web agency owner is strictly working with clients and it’s for-

Chris Badgett: Services.

Josh Hall: Service. Yeah. Service-based. Web entrepreneurs are entering to a realm where they might be teaching like myself or they might be sharing more courses about what they know that also help other web people. For example, my SEO girl, Michelle, she is just a top notch, SEO keyword research website, editor. She’s great at editing content and stuff like that. Well, for her, what’s been really interesting is because she works with me and my web design agency, she’s become our girl for keyword research and all that stuff. And she’s now working with a lot of people in my web design club and in my network.

And one thing I’ve realized with her is that more and more people are not only hiring her for direct SEO work, but they’re also hiring her as an extension of their businesses. And she is in a prime spot to where she could make a course about how to do keyword research or editing that she could sell to other web entrepreneurs and web design agencies. But she could also do service work too. Like she could really do the best of the both worlds. She’s a perfect example of somebody who could use my kind of stuff with creating a podcast or creating a course that she could add to her services. So it’s really interesting.

And I will say, Chris, I love this. I think this is a very cool, like, you can do whatever the heck you want to do. If you want to do service work and you’re done with that, and you want to move into this realm, you could do that. Or you could do service work and just raise your rates where you’re taking on less and less service work and you’re doing more passive income style work like this with more authority building. There’s so many different ways you could go nowadays, which is really, really cool.

And I think the value of selling what you know, because you’ve got some expertise in it and you’ve paid your heart dues with learning that I think that’s just so cool. I think there’s more opportunity now than ever for people to feel comfortable diving into a course, even if it’s their first course, or like Michelle, my example, she could a hundred percent do a course on keyword research and a lot of people would be all about it because that’s what she does. That’s her thing. So I say all that to say, there’s a lot of examples like that over and over in my circle where I’m seeing this web entrepreneur that is a little bit different than your typical web agency owner that’s just dealing with service style work.

Chris Badgett: So we’re productizing here and there’s the concept of information products. There’s a lot of words here which I’m going to unpack. So some people build training based membership sites. Some people call it a coaching program. Some people call it an online course. Some people call it a membership, some people call it something else, but how tied are you to like, I help people, I help digital agencies, service owners launch scalable online courses? Or is it bigger than just online courses? Or do you want to say focus on online courses?

Josh Hall: That would just be one type of course along with my other suite of… Right now, my plan is to create a whole new section on my website that’s geared around web entrepreneurs. And I want to coin that term because I do think it’s something real and something that, well, I know it’s something real because all the people in my club are signing examples of that.

Chris Badgett: So you help web agency owners productize more broadly?

Josh Hall: There’s essentially three. So last time we talked, I had two main customers, people just learning web design and they wanted to learn Divi and the process, and want to learn WooCommerce and all the tools that at least I know and have shared about. And then the second was people who wanted to start or really grow their own web design agen…

PART 1 OF 5 ENDS [00:29:04]

Josh Hall: As people who wanted to start or really grow their own web design agency. And I have a business course that helps them do that. I’ve got a maintenance plan course to teach them how to build recurring income. Now, there’s this third set of people with my newest course and eventually I’ll continue to build more courses out for me, about two or three years ago, which is the people who have their web design business, they want to add more, they have a drive to either productize their knowledge or; again, like Michelle, perfect example; have something they’re really good at and they want to do that at scale. Or maybe they want to have something that is… It’s almost like a lead-in, like somebody could buy a course and decide, “This is the girl. I want to hire her for our SEO stuff.” So, that’s kind of the new realm. That’s my third kind of customer avatar, I guess if, if that’s [crosstalk] question.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. There’s a part with this too, where I’m just thinking my own journey as a digital agency owner, I didn’t just… There wasn’t a day where I became a product guy, like a software product guy. There’s all this overlap, and I built some productized services and then built digital product. Sometimes people focus on, for the avatar, the pain. Like they really want to stop being a time-for-money or working with clients or whatever. But I think the reality is some people like it, they’re just trying to augment. Or some people do want to make a full transition and some people just want to explore and see what happens. I think your market is… You’re probably open to all of the above, is that right?

Josh Hall: Yes, definitely, because it’s the way I was. I was not burned out from client work or service work. I just simply love teaching. I will say, it is way harder to do what I’m doing now than to build a web design agency. It’s much harder. Now, I have more freedom than I’ve ever had in my life. A lot of times I’ll work… Like this week, I’ll probably work 25 hours maybe, maybe 30. I have those kinds of freedoms, but I’ve worked my ass off to get to this point. And I’ve worked really hard at building my name and my authority in this space. And it’s been a very slow burn. I didn’t make any money doing this for the first year. Thank goodness I had my web design agency, although I really didn’t have any products I sold, so that didn’t help, but it worked in combination.

So I’m definitely open to everybody. And I think there’s a great… I think there’s a great opportunity for people who want to do both, who might want to launch their own online course, just to have something on the side to have an additional income stream, could open some new doors, see if they like it. And that may open them up to doing something else. Maybe they want to build their own community or maybe have their own video channel or their own podcasts. There’s all sorts of options by adding this kind of stuff. Just like I did. So yeah, I think a hundred percent, it’s really dealing with people who are across the entire spectrum.

Chris Badgett: So how is a web entrepreneur different from a smart, passive income audience member?

Josh Hall: Great question. We were talking about Pat Flynn with his audience, which is huge. They get entrepreneurs from all over the place. I think the difference would be a web entrepreneur is going to have a pretty good idea of how to build a website, and they’re going to have a good idea about, potentially, some email marketing or at least [crosstalk]-

Chris Badgett: Your techie.

Josh Hall: Set up… Their techie. Yeah, that’s it, their techie. The last time we talked, you had a great example where a good web designer or freelancers going to be part hipster, part hacker, part hustler. This would be the hacker. They know they can figure that stuff out, for the most part. They don’t need to be an expert on email or whatever, but they have a good well-rounded knowledge of all that.

Most of them will be web designers. And this is where I think I have an extra opportunity with these folks, because since I was a web designer for so long, there are so many people who are web designers. And then, a vast majority of web designers get to a point in their journey where they want more. They don’t want to spend their… They don’t want to trade their time for money. They don’t want to just work for an agency. They want to do more. And inevitably, web designers are asked to do more, because a company generally doesn’t hire a web designer and just say, “Build our website. Thanks so much.” They always ask them, “Do you do social media? Do you do email marketing? Can you help us set this up? Can you help set up our Calendly invites?”

Then you get into like a web strategy, so web designers are used to having a lot more to do around with just websites. So I think that’s where this is kind of the step up from that. They can really become a web entrepreneur. Web design can still be a part of what somebody does, but it doesn’t have to be the only type of service. That’s where, I think, this separates this market from the smart passive incomes, the super fast business with James Schramko; who is still my business coach, who I know you’ve talked about before. He’s dealing with people who are mainly just entrepreneurs at heart. They don’t know anything about web stuff.

Chris Badgett: Online business owners.

Josh Hall: Online business owners. Yeah. So that’s the big difference.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. See, this is the thing. There’s a lot of nuance to the niche. I think it was Pam slim, Escape from Cubicle Nation is like a certain kind of crowd. Chris Guilbeau’s Art of Non Conformity crew. Jeff Walker, Product Launch Formula crew. James Schramko, SuperFastBusiness. Pat Flynn and his stuff. Even though they’re similar, they’re different. And in terms of audience building and targeting, if we know the tools… They’re already techies, so they already know WordPress, that’s a great qualifier. 40% of the internet built with WordPress. And you know where to go to market. There’s plenty of WordPress groups and content creators and stuff like that. What’s the biggest challenge around this avatar? Is it a fear of abandoning the base or is it…

Josh Hall: Yes.

Chris Badgett: [crosstalk] Is that what it is?

Josh Hall: It’s like, am I… And that’s why I had planned on supporting my Divi beginner’s course, and potentially adding some more resources. I still might do a How to Build a Divi Website 2022, and have that be a funnel into that course. And once people go into that course, they want to build their business. Once they build their business, they realize, “Maybe I can add online courses.” I could take them through the entire journey with me as well. So I do think that’s something I… Again, for the foreseeable future, I don’t plan to mess with, because like you said, the WordPress ecosystem is so big and so valuable, and there are so many… This is a big thing too, Chris. There are great people in WordPress. And I think there are…

I’d venture to say, and I’m a part of Pat Flynn’s SPI Pro, the pro community. There’s a lot of great people in there as well, but there’s an interesting problem that one of my colleagues who was in a mastermind group in there told me recently. And that was, he joined this mastermind with a lot of people in there, but they were all so different. They were in completely different phases of their business. Some people didn’t even know what WordPress was. Some people were really good with… So that can be really hard to gel with people when you’ve got people just in all different situations.

By focusing on people who are in the WordPress realm and are web designers, even if they use Elementor or different builders, there’s still a lot of commonality there. And my content can really help people that have that base, that foundational base. And like I said, they’re just such great people. Some of the best people I know are folks like yourself and people in and around Divi and WordPress and the different tools. So that’s something I definitely am very careful of protecting. Regardless, I’ve kind of moved on from the Yoda of Divi; I never used that title; so I’m past that, but it is tricky. I don’t want to necessarily get too far from that right now, but I also don’t want to limit myself and I don’t want to neglect the need for this web entrepreneur side of things.

Chris Badgett: Well, I think that whole, the guy thing, of being known for something in a category; like the Divi guy or the web entrepreneur guy; I think it’s okay for your guy thing to change. Like if you had to say this new the guy that you’re becoming, you’re not the Divi Yoda guy, you’re kind of transitioning into a new guy. How would you describe that?

Josh Hall: I think the web entrepreneur guy is [crosstalk] what I had in mind. It’s funny you said that, because that was literally what I was thinking about. If I were to kind of rename, revitalize my brand, it would be potentially The Web Entrepreneur Guy. And maybe I would keep joshhall.co, maybe. I mean, there’s a… To redo a website and do a whole new branding chain, that’s a big deal. I’ve got hundreds of posts that have joshhall.co and podcasts links.

So that’s a whole ‘nother ball game of our, to completely rebrand that. And I guess the positive of having a personal brand is it doesn’t really matter what type of tools or persona I have within my personal brand; it’s me. So I think that’s a benefit potentially. Now I could always rename my podcast. It’s currently the Josh Hall Web Design Show. But if I were to rebrand that to the Web Entrepreneur with Host Josh Hall, or something, that’s something I’m definitely open to.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. My business coach guy, Dan Martell, he was on this podcast before and he was telling his story. He started with a program called the Elite Entrepreneur and he had built a lot of software companies. And one of his friends was like, “Why don’t you focus on SAS entrepreneurs and not just general entrepreneurs? And it really took off for him, he got the focus. You’re like a hardcore problem solver, so you can help a lot of people, but you’re 100% right that if community is an aspect of the product, people want to feel found, they want to have that sense, that feeling of finding the others. So just to put a little color on that, I was building websites by myself in Montana, and I just randomly saw a blog post by Chris [Lama] about this little mastermind retreat he was doing in Cabo, Mexico.

And I went down there with my business partner and that was literally the first time I ever actually stepped out from behind my computer and rubbed shoulders with some WordPress people. And I was like, “Oh, I found the other.” So that sense of belonging of like, “Okay, let’s nerd out,” about E-commerce or marketing or working with clients, and we all have these problems and work-life balance. And it’s like we’re all the same. I mean, we’re different, but we had a common culture that could help us. So it’s super important. That’s why I… Yeah, go ahead.

Josh Hall: That is huge. And that’s what I found with the Divi community. As you know, the Divi community is just one of the top in the online space. What is interesting though, what I found to be fascinating was there’s really… The three levels of my avatar, my customer base right now, are really echoed online with these groups because typically Divi website designers are going to join three Facebook groups, which I do run, a free Facebook group for Divi web designers. It’s called the Divi Web Designers Facebook Group. That’s at 23,000 people now. Now I’m not barely active in there at all anymore, and I have my VA and some other colleagues who do the member approvals and stuff now, so I’m really not… I’m not doing it much in there at all anymore. I don’t know what I’m going to do with that, but that’s kind of the first level for people who want to get support with just Divi.

And then the next step from that is my student center. So this new news, since I talked with you last, Chris, is I’m using Circle, which is the platform that I built my membership through. I had such a good experience with my premium membership that I decided to open up a student center, which is a support center for all my students. So it kind of encapsulates the first two group of people. It’s web designers who are learning Divi and web design and get some support there, but it’s also the agency owners and the business people who are building their businesses. And then that lead them perfectly into the web entrepreneur space, which is where most of my web design club, my members, my premium group, most of the people in there are, again, the web entrepreneur base. And I did not intentionally set that up for those people, it just happened.

It just naturally, the people who are serious about their business and are investing, that’s a premium club, it’s 99 bucks a month. It was 79 for founding members before that ended. They’re paying to be there. And that’s 79 bucks a month, even with the discount rate. That’s a lot for a monthly membership that people who might be making anywhere between 25 to 50 to six figures are paying. So I’ve really collected this incredible group of web entrepreneurs. And I feel like this is an untapped market, and these are the people who come from my podcast and people who are willing to invest in their future.

And they’re like the most cool, helpful, savvy, fun people to be around. It’s great because to be honest, some of the other entrepreneur groups, you get the people who are like, “How do I… What kind of computer should I buy?” That’s not generally a question you’re going to get in a web design group. It’s much more about… They’re savvy enough to be past that entry level point of tech. So, that’s where I think this is an interesting market to tap into.

Chris Badgett: Well, another framework that might help you, there’s this thing called the rule of thirds where the human brain can see three levels, and then beyond that it starts getting a little confusing. If you’re teaching business as an example, the common breakdown is like we’ve got the beginner in whatever this niche is, and then we’ve got the person that’s established and trying to scale. And then we have this top performer inner circle kind of thing. So when I hear you talk about all this, the building the website thing is kind of like the beginner track. The turning your website skills into an agency is kind of another track. And then, the inner circle or the people who evolve past that, or add that to what they’re doing, are building these… They’re productizing, and people don’t always [crosstalk] Yeah.

Josh Hall: It really is beginner business owner/freelancer maybe. I would actually say the middle tier is business owner because they grow in their business. And then it’s entrepreneur. So beginner, owner, entrepreneur. That’s probably the easiest way I could visualize this.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, this is really good. And then it’s a question of… well, people don’t always follow the funnel. Like you may build this path, but somebody may drop in as a burnout owner, who’s like, “Dude, just can you help me like productize or whatever?” Or somebody might stay and, “I just love building websites. That’s all I’m going to do.” And that’s fine.

Josh Hall: [crosstalk] point as well, and one thing… I’m so glad you mentioned that, because one thing I did think is that some people are more entrepreneurial, but they still want to learn web design, so they might be interested in online courses and stuff. Or they might be an agency owner, and maybe they’re not going to personally build websites, but I do have more and more agencies right now, which is really interesting, buying courses for their team. And that’s been fascinating to me. I kind of wonder maybe instead of beginner, if I would just call it web design… web designer, business owner, entrepreneur. Those are really kind of the three.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Josh Hall: The three levels. Because I do have advanced people going through my process course, and they’re really good at web design. They just don’t have the best process in place. So that’s where they go through my process course and it helps them cut their builds in half. So that’s an interesting take too. It’s also of cool, Chris, because I think I could have all these courses in these three realms and direct people to where they want to go. If somebody wants to start out from the ground up, they can follow the entire path and journey, they can stop wherever they want, they could dive into whatever they want. Or if somebody is more advanced and they just want to buy the beginner’s course just to teach their team, that’s an option as well.

Chris Badgett: I think we can draw some inspiration from other people who’ve done this as kind of experts. I was just pulling up Guy Kiyosaki’s… Or no, Richard, what is it? The Cashflow… Robert Kiyosaki. You know who I’m talking about?

Josh Hall: Yeah. Yeah. Robert Kiyosaki.

Chris Badgett: So he’s basically… helps people get rich, helps people get wealthy, helps them upgrade their financial mindset. And his strong opinion one way in some things, you may agree with him, you may not. But I always loved his cashflow quadrant. So, this is where we-

Josh Hall: So that’s what… Actually, when I had the idea of the three people, where they are, that was where that idea stem from, is I could… Because the cashflow quadrant is… What is it? You’re an employee, a [crosstalk] self-employed, owner and investor, right?

Chris Badgett: Investor. Yes. So he’s kind of got four buckets there. And I mean, maybe you’re not really doing the employee. I mean, maybe they’re learning web design as an employee, but a model, like a simple model that has four areas or three or whatever, and maybe somebody just wants to stay self-employed and they’re good. Some people want to become the agency owner and then some people want to become an investor, even a passive investor where you’re not even doing any of the work.

You’re just more deploying capital in strategic ways. It’s helpful, just that simple four box formula, kind of shows it’s such a powerful tool. He has one website. So, my question to you is… and I know you’re using different tools, like Circle to provide the community and stuff like that, but are you envisioning these things becoming different brands, or you want it to stay as this web entrepreneur thing?

Josh Hall: That’s [crosstalk] more what I’m leaning towards. This suits my personality too. I am not the typical web person who wants to have a bazillion businesses. Like I said, I have a young family, I love working really hard, but I don’t want to work that much. So that life balance is huge for me and my brain focuses much better if I have a fairly… Even when I look at my call schedule, and I have a ton of calls, I generally, as much as I love interacting with people, I’m extrovert, I tend to get a little overwhelmed. So I don’t want to have too much going on. And all that to say I don’t necessarily want to have a bunch of different brands because I thought about, man, I thought about launching… And I own diviwebdesigners.com.

I thought about being the owner of a tutorial education-based Divi web designers, and have other people do tutorials about Divi and web design. And I just, it never went anywhere because I just didn’t really have a heart for doing that exactly. I didn’t want to… It was just, wasn’t something I was terribly interested in, something topical like that. So that’s where this idea of having more of a personal brand… And again, the web entrepreneur, is that a micro brand under my main just personal brand? Potentially. It could absolutely. Maybe eventually the web entrepreneur is its own podcast, I don’t know, but I would much rather just kind of do one thing and have everyone find me on that one thing. That’s kind of what I’m leaning towards. And maybe even if I just do the Josh Hall Web Entrepreneur Show, maybe it’s different than web design. That’s potentially something I’m looking into.

Chris Badgett: I’ve done a lot of work with like pricing strategy, especially in the past two years. And one of the most common frameworks is like good, better, best pricing where you have three boxes. And I mean, pricing is a huge topic, but if you can set it so that each box is associated with one of these three avatars, it helps the… And if the higher you go, it includes everything before. Also in pricing, there’s a concept of ad-ons too, which are separate, like your community’s kind of separate. But sometimes using that pricing framework; good, better, best; can help clarify like, “Okay, well what do they get here? What do they get here? What do they get here?”

And it gets more expensive. Ideally, just the way the brain works with… They call it the Goldilocks effect with the three beds or whatever. It would flow through this. So the web designer is more price sensitive than the business owner who is even… And then the top, the entrepreneur, is even the less price sensitive. So they get the most value up there. But I don’t know if… What are you thinking from pricing? Because sometimes if you figure out your pricing down to a spreadsheet, just creating the columns and filling in the boxes of the benefit where you can’t… you have to put something in the box, it can clarify that. So what are you thinking?

Josh Hall: That’s a great point. So as of right now, it’s really worthwhile listing out what products I have and how people pay me for this stuff. Because as you know, I have a YouTube channel and a podcast. A lot of my content is free, but does all this stuff that gets the people in the door and gets them excited, and a lot of people who subsequently come from my podcasts go to my bundle, which has all my web design courses for 12,99, which I just looked at the stats on that recently, Chris, I did not realize this, but over half of my income comes from my bundle.

So I know that’s my biggie. That encapsulates the first two segment of customers together, is the bundle. It’s all my web design courses. Now, I would love to build out my additional suite of entrepreneur based courses like a podcasting course, a video marketing course, maybe email marketing. I could absolutely foresee maybe another half dozen courses. And then eventually I’ll have maybe 15 or 18 courses that I could continue to upgrade and support and have like a master bundle for like 3,000 bucks or something like that.

I think that’s definitely foreseeable, but it’s going to take some time to get there. So pricing wise right now, and actually it’s funny you mentioned this, because I had planned on here pretty soon writing out kind of like a guide, a funnel, on my website, that is just like, “Let me help you find what you’re looking for. If you’re just only web design, start here. Here are some free resources. I would start with my beginner’s course to help you learn Divvy,” and blah, blah, blah. If you’re wanting to grow your business, here are some other free resources. And I would go with my business course, which will teach you this and blah, blah, blah.

And then as I build my entrepreneur courses out, that’s where I would say, “If you’re really… if you’re taking the next step that you want to add online courses and other marketing to what you do, check out my entrepreneur suite, and then here’s free resources. And here’s a course that I would recommend for that.” So, that’s kind of what I envision. Price point wise, yeah, the first customer set, the web designers are going to have little to no budget. 97 bucks for a beginner’s course is going to be a big investment.

Business owners, they are much more cool with spending several hundred or maybe a thousand or two annually to invest in their self and grow their team. And then the entrepreneurs who are building six-figure businesses and implementing all this stuff, they’re going to be much more in tune to realizing that an online course about a course or podcasting course is going to add potentially tens of thousands to their business.

So, that’s kind of price bucket wise. It kind of depends on what they would want and where they are in their journey and what they would add. But I’d feel safe to say if I could break this down in the simplest terms, beginning web designers are going to be 250 under per year. The middle tier business owners are going to be in between 500 and maybe 1,500. And then a web entrepreneurs are going to be 1,500 to 5k. Something like that. If they’re really focused on mastermind groups and stuff like that.

Chris Badgett: And let’s talk about community from here, is the… Like the Circle site, is this for everybody as an add-on, or maybe there’s certain parts of it for these different avatars, or?

Josh Hall: Everybody could join it, as of right now. I don’t really promote it much because it’s still so new. I mean, we’ve really developed an incredible online community that is tight knit, but not cliquey. We’re building that out. And that’s where ,again, I realize it’s kind of more for the business owner and entrepreneur. So, I’ve really only been marketing that as more like a personal invite or something that’s on top of my business course or my bundle to where… If somebody goes to the My Beginner’s Course, they’re probably not going to be ready to join my web design club.

And that’s fine. They’re just not… It’s 99 bucks a month or a thousand a year. They’re not at that point yet, but if they’re designing, if they’re building their agency and they’re making more and they want to have an incredible network and access to me and all the benefits that come with the web design club, that’s going to be the perfect next step for them. So the web design club right now is really for the ladder to the owners and the entrepreneurs. And for right now, just for the sake of this conversation, Chris, I think I’ll just call it web designers, owners, business owners, and entrepreneurs, just to keep it simple.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. And I think it’s actually completely fine to not really put an application gate, but just to maintain the kind of group you want to maintain, that you have to be a business owner or entrepreneur to even buy that product. It’s like a qualification step.

Josh Hall: Yeah. And I think the price point as of right now, weeds the people out who are just not even going to think like, “Whoa, a hundred bucks a month, what? That’s insane.” I mean, I would have thought that. Maybe five or six years ago I’d have been like, “Whoa, a hundred bucks a month. Are you kidding me? No way.” So yeah, the price point itself kind of weeds people out.

And I think… I’m interested to see how I’m going to market that over the next year or so, because of course I’d love to have 500 members paying 99 bucks a month, but that’s a whole different ball game than having… Right now we’ve got 87. So that’s a whole… It’s very manageable right now. Once we get a hundred plus, I’m going to need to really have my systems in place to where I need to make sure I free myself up. And because there’s a coaching aspect in there with people being able to message me, that’s something I have to make sure I can manage as well too.

Chris Badgett: Just a quick question. What percentage of your week, or how many hours a week do you spend on the community yourself?

Josh Hall: It’s down now much better than it was in the first few months, which I knew it was going to be like that. I’ve been an entrepreneur long enough to know when you start something it’s going to be a lot of work and a lot of hours, particularly with any sort of subscription type model. So I knew it was going to be a lot. Now I have my VA who does all of the email blasts and she does a lot of the ongoing stuff, admin type stuff. That’s been a big help. Most of it’s automated through Zapier and how I sell through my website. So generally what I do, I’m spending probably less than 25% of my time right now on the club. So it’s about a fourth of my week, which is nice because now I’m able to free myself up to work on courses.

This week is kind of a light week. We’re doing an extended call. I’m not working on any core stuff. I might jump in, and I just actually am finishing up the launch for this new course. So, that’s going to be the other big thing I’ll do this week. And I’ll tweak my website, maybe do a few other things like that and some content creation, but it’s kind of a mix between all that stuff. So the club’s about a fourth of my time and that’s where I’d like to keep it.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool.

Josh Hall: It depends on…

PART 2 OF 5 ENDS [00:58:04]

Josh Hall: It depends on how many questions I’m getting and what I’m doing, but now it’s pretty cool. On average, unless we’re creating something new for the club, we are about to roll out member led calls, which I have some questions about just to engage people from all different time zones better. So I am spending a little more time on that now, but once that’s set up, that’ll be time that’s off my plate. So, yeah.

Chris Badgett: I’ve always admired your business coach, James Schramko. I’ve just heard him talk about how he’s interactive with his community. He owns a race course, he’s not putting it on Facebook and I think he’s really led well in that space of how to build a great community and also participate with the people through that format. And he seems to really enjoy it too.

Josh Hall: He does, and he shows up, I’ve been in his membership for two and a half years at this point, closing in on three. And he does show up, there’s never been a time where I’ve reached out in our, because I have a private coaching thread with him. Now we don’t talk on video but I do have just a text thread with him. And sometimes he’s short in his answers. I tend to be a lot more long-winded but he does show up and I’ve found that I use him typically, we don’t talk every week and this is the same thing with my club. Not everyone hits me up every week. They tend to hit me up when they’re really going through something or they want my personal advice.

But what’s really cool now because I did worry about this Chris. I was like, am I going to put myself out there to 87 people who can pick my brain all the time? That’s a lot to keep up with. The reality is I tend to get two to four messages a day and it’d be like being in a Facebook group and hopping on or just getting random emails. Well now they’re much more concise. Some people feel like they’re bothering me and I’m like, don’t feel like you’re bothering me. You’re paying 79 or 99 bucks a month to be here now, text or shoot me a message if you have a question.

Chris Badgett: It’s kind of like a red phone, right? Somebody’s got an issue…

Josh Hall: It’s like an emergency line, or if there’s just something that maybe they saw one of my stuff or they’re like, I know you had a tutorial on manually migrating a WordPress website. Did you have something like that? It’s that kind of thing. Or it’s more high level. A lot of stuff I’m getting now is high level strategy stuff and the tech questions and stuff like that, they’re generally posting in the group. So I can pop into the public threads if I want, but a lot of that stuff is self maintaining.

Now I’m getting the more high level stuff, what’s really cool about that is the club is really the basis for all of my content now. So I’m getting a lot of guests on my podcasts who are in the club because they have amazing stories and they’re building six figure businesses. And so that’s been really cool. And then if I see a recurring question, one question we have a lot right now that’s going on is about hosting. Because SiteGround had some changes with their hosting accounts, which is what I use and recommend. So that’s a perfect opportunity to keep up to date with the top of mind questions that I can then make contact or content based off of.

Chris Badgett: I think I’ve seen this over and over again. The people like yourself who are doing community led growth basically. And it’s actually not that complicated. It’s what you’re talking about, somebody picks up a red phone which means they have a burning problem, pressing issue or opportunity they want to capture. And they’re just telling you exactly what course to make and you hear it more than twice. Yeah, there’s something there. We need to make some content we need to make…

Josh Hall: Half of it is just pointing people to something that’s already out there whether it’s online resources.

Chris Badgett: Traffic control.

Josh Hall: Yeah. Or I was like actually we just talked about this in the group. And of course they’re not going to see everything in the group so I can just search it, find that post, be like here you go it talks about it there. So yeah that’s been really cool. That’s exceeded my expectations because I really was worried about that getting out of control, but there’s been so many pros and benefits to that and it’s my base of recurrent income now, now it’s really helping my bottom line. So when I do launches and webinars and other content to build around all these different courses, I’ve got a nice bottom line that is continuing to grow with these members, which is really cool.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I don’t know if you’ve read all the Donald Miller stuff about the StoryBrand and being a guide, not a guru or whatever, the guiding thing. I see this a lot in large catalog membership sites where there’s just a lot of stuff. Maybe it’s been around for a while. A lot of what people are doing is they just need help finding the right thing and they need help putting the right sequence together of not just find it, but do it in this order. And one of the things I’m seeing people do really successfully is you may not want to get into ongoing one-on-one virtual coaching, but just by adding a one call at the very beginning of their membership, and then do it again in 12 months to have this strategic growth session where you, and then later you can train a team member to do it, to basically assess the situation and then help them find what the key areas are and then give them a customized plan all in 30 minutes or an hour, that is supremely valuable and helps with onboarding and activation so that they can do that.

Josh Hall: I am coaching one member right now. I don’t advertise this. He just requested it, he already had a six-figure business and he just asks, do you do any type of more intensive one-on-one coaching? We do a call every two weeks I’m just testing it out. And I enjoy my time with him, we’re really in the weeds with strategies, but I definitely have realized it’s just not something I’m interested in putting out there publicly. It can’t scale that, now he’s been a great case study and I’ve love, I’ve seen his business grow dramatically as this particular example. He went from print design to web design. So I shared a lot of what I learned with him, but I can’t really do that at scale, which has led me to be really glad that I did not offer one-on-one coaching via calls, because what I realized is a lot of this stuff we generally can talk about in a smaller group.

So what I am doing additionally with the club is every week I do office hours or I don’t call them office hours, but I do a live Q and A, actually technically I only do three Q and A’s. And then the other week is a member training, which like I said, now I’m bringing in colleagues who are putting the presentation together. They’re actually doing the presentation, I’m just hosting it. So it’s actually only about three hours of my time a month. If I don’t do a member training doing that, aside from lining that up and all the calls and everything. But those have been really great opportunities for me to answer questions directly.

And one thing I found, I’d be curious to see what you see about this with office hours. A lot of times in a group like mine, if I just say, what questions do you guys have? I tend to not get that many questions via text. So what I’ve been doing is throughout the week, as I’m talking with people and I see stuff, I’ll just say, hey, this is a great question. I think a lot of other people would be interested in hearing. Do you want to come on live on the Q and A, we’ll talk about it. It’s almost like a mini coaching session in front of everybody. And I might do one or two of those on a call or I’ll do a website review or something that’s a little more strategy based. So that’s been really, really cool. And the next phase of this, which is one thing I was really excited to talk with you about Chris was because I have a global community in this mastermind. And because I’ve got people as agency owners and well, there’s not really just designers in there.

They’re all business owners and entrepreneurs, but I’ve got people in all different time zones. It’s really hard for people in Australia to make any of my calls because it’s three in the morning for them or whatever. So one thing that became glaringly apparent is when we did a couple member hangouts, they went over so well. They were so highly received. We made it a big deal, come to hang out, everyone can join, we’re all going to interact. The problem is the last hang on I did was 28 people. So 28 people on a Zoom call was very tricky to manage. I had to be very clear about alright take 30 seconds, introduce yourself. It had to be very structured. So it became very apparent that there was all these micro meetings happening between members where they would set up one-on-ones and stuff.

And there’s such a need for like a deeper sense of community and calls. So what we’re just about to open up, are member led calls to where I’m not personally setting up the call and being a part of it. Now I’ve been worrying about all the pros and cons over this for several weeks now, but we’re close to launching this. What we’re working out right now is just the specifics of the tool we’re going to use to do that, which I’m still trying to work out how I can do that through Zoom, Circle is eventually going to add native events and live calls, but I don’t know when that’s going to be. So I can’t really bank on that. So for now we’re sticking with Zoom, but what we decided to do, and maybe this will be beneficial for anyone listening. If you’re still listening to this point is to do Tuesdays as official club calls. So those are going to include Q and A’s, monthly trainings, any website reviews, any weekly call that I do with Josh. Thursdays are going to be member led calls, and we’re going to do four calls that are going to be open at 2:00 PM on different time zones. So 2:00 PM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern 2:00 PM London, and then 2:00 PM, I think Melbourne will probably do. So that

Chris Badgett: Every week? Is that every week?

Josh Hall: Every week. And what I’m going to do is I’ve got a handful of members, actually a dozen who have volunteered to host a call once a month or a couple of times a month. So we’re going to schedule them all out to basically host one of those calls. And those will be the perfect opportunity for members to engage with each other and maybe have smaller groups. Some of those calls might have five people or just two or three people. And it can be a really good chance to get to know people better and do it where it’s not a one-on-one, but it’s not a big 28 person call where you can’t talk. So that’s what we’re working on right now, which I’m really excited about. We’re just getting all the specifics together. And what we’re debating on doing is with those calls is having some of those be perhaps talk topical or what a perfect follow up if we have a training.

The next training we’re doing is on email deliverability. What a perfect opportunity to have that Thursday to talk about that in a little more detail with other people sharing about what they’ve learned and following up with that. So that’s the next thing we’re working on just in the web design club itself, which I’m really excited about. Now, there’s guidelines I’m putting in place. I’m writing a handbook. There’s obviously some liability with that with trusting people to represent me and the brand and not have people outside the club join these calls. So we’re working through all that, but we have such a good core group. People who are going to host the calls, I feel confident we’ll do a great job with that.

Chris Badgett: Well I got a bunch of thoughts. I was taking notes as you were talking there. On the office hours deal, one of the things I did, which might not work for you is I instituted a we’re not recording it policy. And what that did is that people open up way more, or they’re less scared about competitions or whatever. Just when people know that it’s not being recorded, it creates a more intimate environment. I’m not saying do that for every call, but it was just interesting that, and I surveyed my people like, hey, if I record these, would you still show up? Or? And I got a bunch of resistance. So that’s just where I ended up, just sharing that idea.

Josh Hall: That is interesting. I do record them and post the replay. We get quite a bit of feedback on the replays. So yeah, I’d be hesitant to that, but that definitely makes sense particularly if we’re doing a bit more of a coaching session.

Chris Badgett: Yeah because if somebody is going to be vulnerable, or it could be certain topics that are maybe a little more taboo, about, I don’t know something like work-life balance or something to just get more into people’s details, it’s just an idea. I started doing them in a webinar format, but then ultimately I ended up flipping it to just a regular Zoom meeting and it was okay. It didn’t fall apart. I can manage it even when the group size gets big, but people do need to be trained up around muting themselves and stuff like that. And at a certain size, my assistant will help and she’ll just manage the crew and also can manage the door, with Zoom with a waiting room they can cross check like yeah that person’s supposed to be in here or whatever. But.

Josh Hall: Yeah I may eventually do that. I think one thing I’ve found for sure is that as web designers on their calls, they’re often working on a project while they’re watching. So…

Chris Badgett: There’s a couple of different learning styles there. I see that too, I got people that are just working and they’re just hanging out, listening to the background and then people that are fully engaged and then people in the middle and that’s just natural. And I think that’s okay. Some people with their camera on some people off, it’s all good.

Josh Hall: And that’s where these member hangouts every Thursday are going to be crucial because that’s their time to be engaged and really network. And it’ll just give so much more ownership for people in the group. Anytime we’ve had people come on camera and do a little session with me or do a training, they’re always so much more engaged rather than just showing up and hanging out in the chat. So I’m really excited about that and to be able to include people from across the world since it is a global community, that’s been very tricky and I feel bad. I feel bad for the people in Australia. I’ve got a handful of members from Australia who have never, I think one has made a couple, one guy got up at 5:00 AM to join a call.

Chris Badgett: Well that says a lot about the quality that somebody does that.

Josh Hall: Yeah, it Does. I feel that because I’m a member of James Schramko’s membership, I’ve never made a live call because they’re all at 3:00 or 4:00 AM. So I just basically use that to occasionally get into the forum and then mainly just to have a direct line of access to James that’s why I’m a member there. So I am excited about that. I’ll definitely keep you posted as far as what we learn with the member calls, but I’m excited that [inaudible] some ownership on that. And Michelle, who I mentioned earlier, the SCO gal, we were having to talk about this because I do have some members in the club who I really just appreciate their insight. Just like we’re doing now. I love hearing your thoughts on this, is she was like, do you realize that people are paying you 79 or 99 bucks a month just to hang out with other people, they could be doing their separate Zoom calls, but they are willing to do this under your brand and umbrella and pay to be there, which is so cool.

And one thing, it was a really cool thought as well is I think that’s going to help people want to stay in the club because if they’re used to their Thursday hangout that they make maybe every week or every couple of weeks, there’ll be such an incentive to stay there because if they want to leave the club eventually it’s going to be like, oh, I don’t want to miss my crew every Thursday. You know? So that’s something I’m excited, it’s going to be a real nice value add for everyone in the club. And it’s going to be great for me as the community builder as well.

Chris Badgett: This is one of the things I talk about with the five hats, the education entrepreneurs, where teaching as one, technologies one, entrepreneurs one, community building is one and community building, part of what you’re doing is you’re literally creating an environment. You’re creating space that has value, its own value in addition to your teaching and your content and stuff like that. So it’s a super important, one of the things I’ve seen too is if you want to jumpstart the call, I see a lot of people doing these 10 minute tactics. So it starts with this 10 minute strategy around some key problem that you’ve been hearing people talk about in the group. And then there’s a solution. And then it moves into the Q and A which primes the pump where if people are like, hey so what questions do you have when you front load the call with a little mini training, it can get people engaged. So.

Josh Hall: That’s a great point. I appreciate you bringing that up because I have implemented that in a roundabout way. I generally do that if no one has any questions that they post, I’ll just have a few posts that were in the club just as backups because I know I’ll dive into them. So I think maybe I’ll plan on doing that the next couple, unless I’m doing a website review or bringing somebody on I’ll plan on, I actually have a Q and A here in a couple of days, I’ll plan on doing that to where I’ll take a few of the questions from the club and then do that mini thoughts training session, and then open it up to questions. I like that idea for sure.

Chris Badgett: I also have just in back pocket, I call them controversial issues even though they’re not really that controversial, but if I’m talking to web people, if we start getting into hosting or email marketing or page builders or whatever, if I need to spur some conversation [inaudible], I’ve got my topics that I can go to as well.

Josh Hall: Yeah. Well the cool thing is too on my Q and A’s, it’s generally anywhere between a dozen and 20 people. So if I wanted to, I have a couple of times just invited people on the spur of the moment and that’s something too where I could say, does anyone want to come on? And let’s just have a little mini hangout here and to see who wants to come on, some people might just want to keep the camera off and just listen. But some people are into that too. So it’s been interesting, those Q and A’s to have that touch point every week. And to just figure that out because it’s definitely, I think it’s different for somebody like Pat Flynn, who has a weekly office hours, but he’s got probably hundred…

Chris Badgett: A million.

Josh Hall: Signed onto that. I’ve tuned into a couple, but the thing with that is he can’t really get too in depth with his answers or because he’s got to move on and try to get to a lot of people. And the chances of you getting your answer or a question answered is pretty slim at this point.

Chris Badgett: So I got another tip there. So I run a call like this for my top customers at Lifter LMS, I call it the Lifter LMS office hours mastermind. And I run that as a meeting with, so not in webinar mode. So when people they’re digging into the call, I’ll always start it on time and I’ll just do my little spiel, how I opened the call. Because if I go in there and let people in, people started talking that they love it. I’ve had some people coming to that call every week for four years. It’s cool, but this is how I open it. I’m just like, especially if I see a new face, I do the full routine, which is, welcome to today’s Lifter LMS office hours mastermind. This is a place to ask strategic questions, could be technical support or strategy related.

Maybe you have a question about some other tool outside of the scope of what we’re trying to do here. I’m going to answer a bunch of questions here, but also I’m not the keeper of all the knowledge. There’s a lot of smart people around here, similar to you, similar experiences that can weigh in on the issues here. So I’m going to take a list and whoever wants to add something to the list, just speak up and basically I’ll write the name like, okay, Dale, he’s looking for email marketing and I don’t linger on it. I’m like, got it who’s else has got something. And sometimes I have a list with three things on it. Sometimes I have a list with 15 things on it and that way I can manage the hour effectively and everybody gets gotten to, and that’s basically how I run it and I always end on time so.

Josh Hall: Okay, that’s cool I like that.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Another thing actually that I learned from Melissa Love for her deal is she actually recently, I just interviewed her on this podcast about this. She mentioned she was bringing in a lot of guest experts into her community and she started running these coworking sessions, which were more free form and she would use Zoom and breakout rooms to help people. But people literally just wanted to pop open the Zoom, be around their peers, be able to chat, ask Melissa questions, maybe pull into a breakout room, but there was literally no content or anything but just an opportunity to go to a virtual coffee shop and work together.

Josh Hall: I think that’s where our Thursday hangs are going to be really cool. They’re not going to be structured necessarily. Those are just going to be your virtual coffee shop lounge type of thing.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I mean people sometimes they just want to connect and the virtual connection is very important. The other thing I’ve just found too, just FYI is if I ever, my thing is on Thursdays at 4:00 PM Eastern. If I ever move that on the calendar, for whatever reason like attendance drops, emails come in or whatever. So once you lock it in, try and keep it where it is because people get really used to it, especially if it’s on a weekly rhythm. So.

Josh Hall: Okay. Perfect question, so the member calls are going to be pretty easy to keep those two o’clock, those four time zones, that’ll be pretty easy. And then somebody can’t make it, then you can join another one. One of my members from the UK said that she actually prefers to do those things in the evening for her. So she’ll probably join more often on the 2:00 PM Eastern because it’s 7:00 PM for her in London. So that should be pretty cool. I do have a question from you about the Tuesday calls, which I’m going to be doing monthly trainings, all that stuff. My thinking and my question to you is do you think 11:00 AM Eastern is a better time for those? Or do you think like 2:30 Eastern is better for a Tuesday call? I was thinking 2:30.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. So I’ve tested this a lot. And for me I found 3:00 or 4:00 PM Eastern time is the best. And there are some people that it excludes, it is hard for certain times zones to come, but I got the most, and we’re pretty global, I get the most action and some people are up late and some people are up early and whatever, it’s the afternoon I’ve always gotten the highest show up rate by a double at least.

Josh Hall: That’s great to know. It’s interesting because my group there’s a lot of folks from the UK. So I had thought about doing it at 11:00, but at 11:00 you’re getting into dinner hour for those folks. If it’s like 4:00 or 5:00 and people with family that’s tough. The 2:30 does seem to be a pretty good time. I think either way I’m excluding the Australians when I do that, which is why I think having the member backup calls will be really cool. But I was thinking as well, because even at 11:00 AM Eastern, that means the folks in, on the west side or in the west time zone that’s beginning of the day, a lot of them might not even be working yet at 8:00 AM. So I could see that being tricky. So, yeah. That’s good to know. I think I’m going to roll with Tuesdays at 2:30 and I’ll try to always stick to that.

The only time it is tricky for me right now, I can manage my schedule pretty easily and keep that time slot open. But there are occasionally times where with a young family, we have an appointment or something, I’ve got to move it. So I’m going to try not to do that, but do you find it’s best to move?

Chris Badgett: Oh, I double up. I’ve had this happen a lot and I’ll just do a double session. If I’m out one week, I’ll try to let them know a week in advance and not be all last minute. And then the next one I’ll just run an hour longer or start an hour earlier. And that’s how it works for me. And it’s yeah.

Josh Hall: Okay. I like that. That’s a good point. I really liked that. That’d be a lot easier than saying actually we’re going to do it at 12:00 PM this week. Instead of two, I could see that being confusing.

Chris Badgett: And I’ve done the other strategy, which is like, okay, well, we’re going to miss this week, but I’m going to do two next week at different times and take an opportunity to hit another time zone. Just the show up, people just get really used to the time. So the off time that’s out of the blue is a little really low show up rate. Just simply because of the rhythm.

Josh Hall: I had one of my members said recently, I thought it was genius. They were like, you know what, if somebody really wants to make it, they’re going to make it so.

Chris Badgett: I got another tip for you here. My assistant actually sends an email right as it’s starting, you know you’re a busy entrepreneur, kids like me. You kind of schedule your week I’m sure. But I’m amazed how many people just fly in through the email, pop in 10 minutes late. Like, oh, I just got the email here I am. So starting…

Josh Hall: I’ve been doing it 24 hours in advance.

Chris Badgett: I do that too.

Josh Hall: Oh, okay.

Chris Badgett: So I have a 24 hours heads up and then a starting now, like right now, click the link to join. The other ninja move, which I haven’t done, which I’ve seen a lot of other people do though. And it works for me as a member of a community is to do the brute force Google calendar invite. So I’m in some communities where once it’s on my calendar I’m going, if I accept it. So…

Josh Hall: That’s been the other big reque st from people is to have some sort of calendar, which you can do it through Zoom right? Can you just do the Google invite or do you have to do a special, separate Google calendar invite?

Chris Badgett: Usually the ones I see work, somebody at the education company will just use their Google calendar and go add whatever it is, 30, 50, 500 names to it. It’s a huge effort, but yeah. But it works and the other thing too, that I know you have your own Circle app, but I’ve also seen a lot higher show up rate if we create a Facebook event, I mean you have a Facebook group but you don’t have a Facebook group for your community, but it’s kind of meeting people where they already are. Another thing I would try, I just haven’t done personally is, well, I don’t know, it would be hard since you’re so global, as well is the text message reminder, like, Hey, starting now click here. People come to calls all the time while they’re driving or grocery shopping and stuff, it’s…

Josh Hall: Yeah that’s true. Oh we have that, quite a few people doing that yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. So and then my tip for you on the member led calls, you said you were putting together a checklist or some kind of framework, is to definitely do that. So some of the best ones I’ve seen especially in large catalog sites is they have a teaching framework so that people just get really used to the format and it feels really familiar. And I’ve seen it where people, if you weren’t there your assistant would still be there and kind of help orchestrate the call. Because when it feels like somebody else, they just show up to a webinar or something and it doesn’t feel familiar like the Josh Hall experience, even though it’s Josh’s tech or whatever, there’s just a little bit of a disconnect. But if they know okay this is a part where this happens, here’s the content, here’s I know if I ask a question I’m probably going to get about a seven minute answer or whatever, when people know what to expect, it feels really familiar, comfortable, and you’ll get the most engagement.

Josh Hall: That’s cool, yeah basically putting a handbook together with just the mission of it, what I expect is if you’re going to be a host you are representing me in this brand and this is what I expect. Going to give some starter questions. And then as it evolves, we’ll probably really decide on whether certain calls are going to be topical or just open-ended or just a chance to share struggles and stuff.

PART 3 OF 5 ENDS [01:27:04]

Josh Hall: Just open-ended or just a chance to share struggles and stuff like that. Luckily with my club, everyone who are super active are the founding members and they’re such good people. I’m more so wanting to set the precedent, so when new people join, we have that in place to help people. And I want new people to feel comfortable to really dive into those as well. I think again, that’s going to be a great chance for people to really get engaged. I think that’s going to be awesome.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s a couple of challenges I’ve had is with new people feeling like it’s a little overwhelming. Maybe we’re talking about some tech issues that make them feel like, “Oh wow, this is a little advanced, am I in the right place?” So I always try really hard to make people feel comfortable and especially on their first call.

Josh Hall: Oh yeah.

Chris Badgett: And go ahead.

Josh Hall: I was going to say, I do think that’s where I’m so glad I did not make my web design club my courses, because I would just think, if I had all my courses in this club, Because I had debated on doing that. We talked about that last time about like, “Should we roll everything into a $97 monthly plan?” It would just be so much. I’ve got hundreds of videos between all my courses. It would be way too daunting to figure all that out. So I love the idea of having this as, these are the top folks who now they’re my best friends. They’re my tribe of people.

So yeah, we’re off to a really good start with that. It’s already profitable at this point. I’m spending less and less time now that the systems are in place. So now I’m really ready to continue to tweak it and evolve that because it’s really… And again, it’s the content. It’s not only the people who I love connecting with and helping out directly, but it’s the content that I’m now able to pull from for my podcast and YouTube. And now as I enter into this web design entrepreneur realm, that’s what I’m really excited about.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. Well, one more tool for your toolbox that I’ve done and seen other people do is the three-day bootcamp, which is a little intense. You can only do it two or four times a year if you want to do it. But it’s basically an extended version that’s not just like a virtual summit, but it’s a really in-depth training where people participate. It’s not just like, “I’m at a conference and I’m watching stuff.” It’s like we’re interactive.

I’ve done stuff with interactive whiteboards, what was it called? Miro or something like that. But teaching instructional design processes and things. And doing these for six hours a day with scheduled breaks and stuff like that. And I was blown away how much engagement and show up and people coming and staying all the way through for that, it’s very intense to pull off. But for example, I brought in a instructional designer friend from Europe who is one of my customers. He actually was the expert on instructional design. We created the container for it, and we ran people through the process. And I’ve done that both during the week and over the weekend, depending upon the market. Sometimes I’ve tried both and they both work.

Josh Hall: I had thought about doing a summit at some point. So maybe it would be something like that. That would be a really immersive type of experience with a lot of different colleagues and stuff.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Summits are good too.

Josh Hall: Yeah. That’s great. That gives me a lot of clarity with the club. I feel like I’m on the right track with that. It’s a lot of work. Community building is definitely a lot of work but it suits me. I would so much rather have a hundred people that I talk with on an ongoing basis and know, rather than 100,000 subscribers that I don’t know at all. And I think it’s a deeper, more fulfilling path that way.

Chris Badgett: We also have the upsell that you haven’t done yet, which is the mastermind retreat. Did we ever talk about this?

Josh Hall: You mentioned it. Yeah, I know it’s super pop. But I know it’s different with COVID, but I actually do. The last call we had, I heard quite a few people saying they would love to fly somewhere and do a meet up. My goal was to tack on a web design club hangout onto a Word Camp.

Chris Badgett: Oh yeah. That’s smart.

Josh Hall: So I don’t know what that’s looking like, because I don’t want people to have to fly from like Ireland just to meet up at a coffee shop for two hours and then go back. I wanted to make it… they can spend a weekend somewhere to make it really worth their time. So I’m holding out to see what happens there with the Word Camps. I don’t know if there’s any plans for those to be in person.

Chris Badgett: [inaudible] They were canceled for 2021, but the last Word Camp Europe, which I had tickets and plane tickets and Airbnb for was in Portugal. And I was bringing some of my team members in. I was organizing this big party, and unfortunately that all got canceled, but doing some kind of… I think it is smart to tack on. That’s the cool thing about knowing your audience. If people in your audience are WordPress professionals, not just like any agency or whatever, which you’re a WordPress guy, DV guy, that gives you the focus of like, “Okay, well what events can I tack onto?”

Josh Hall: Yeah. And I know there is a difference between just having a casual hangout and meet up versus a get away, mastermind tight group. You’re paying to be there type of thing. I know that’s quite different. So I’m definitely open to that as well one day which would be awesome.

Chris Badgett: Cool. Well what else? Where’s the friction? Your story is so impressive because you just keep iterating and iterating and productizing, and adding value, and building community. So you have the… I see it with the people where it works is you have this passion, this iterative approach, being okay with imperfection. You have to get over that if you’re going to make progress.

Josh Hall: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So where-

Josh Hall: It’s true. So one of the biggest I think challenges that I’m facing now is just content.

Chris Badgett: … Marketing content?

Josh Hall: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Or the product?

Josh Hall: I grew my big breakthrough, I guess if you could say was my YouTube channel because I did DV tutorials. I became known as the DV guy. I really built up a great YouTube channel with DV tutorials and web design stuff. That has since really morphed into basically the video show of my podcast. I haven’t really kept track of the numbers. I just crossed 2 million views, which is really cool. But most of that is coming from previous YouTube videos. And because my brand has changed, again, like we talked about earlier.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Josh Hall: I’m not the DV guy anymore. So I’m not really interested in making it a DV tutorial channel. So now I’m like, it’s a little different. My podcast just suits me so well. And that’s where most of my attention has been, is just to my podcast and interviews with folks like you and other people who we’ve talked about. But that’s much more of the agency owner and the entrepreneur. I’m not really doing too much tactile web design type of stuff.

Now, if I do an episode on tactile stuff, it goes over really well, but it’s not necessarily a technical web design podcast. So when it comes to content and thinking about all the content I’m going to create around all my courses and stuff moving forward, I find myself in a bit of a tricky spot because now I’m like, “Okay, what the heck do I do with my YouTube channel? Do I…”

Chris Badgett: I got some ideas for you.

Josh Hall: Okay. I’m open. Where the podcast is headed, I’m really secure with that. I guess one of the biggest pain points is my YouTube channel and my social media. Facebook’s weird now. There’s all sorts of crap that’s going on with boosting. My account is actually unavailable to boost right now. Somehow I got flagged and something I don’t know.

Chris Badgett: Other race course I guess.

Josh Hall: Yeah. And so I don’t even care. I get so much good response from my podcasts and my other channels now that I don’t really care about Facebook anymore. So yeah, content marketing, particularly Facebook and YouTube, YouTube is a biggie. That’s where probably my biggest challenge is to think through.

Chris Badgett: All right. I think I got you here. So we’re focusing on the web entrepreneur, right?

Josh Hall: Well, that’s the thing. I still, my YouTube channel was largely the web designer, in agency owner. So that’s where-

Chris Badgett: But they’re evolving, right? So we’re going to have three YouTube channels? Or we going to have three playlists on one YouTube channel?

Josh Hall: … That’s what I have now essentially is playlists. So I could absolutely have… Well, yeah the playlist thing is great. Now, what’s interesting though is, YouTube typically brings much more of the web designer because they’re looking up tutorials. They’re like, “How do I build a website and DV? How do I edit CSS on this part of DV?” That’s where I’m… I always get much more traffic and way more views on technical stuff on YouTube. If it’s about Google Analytics or migrating WordPress, the technical stuff. If I post how to get clients, that’ll get quite a bit. If I post about entrepreneurial type stuff, it’s not going to get near as much traffic. So that’s where… What I’ve realized is, YouTube is great for web design tutorials design stuff and business owner type stuff. Entrepreneurial-based stuff is better on podcast.

Chris Badgett: Nice.

Josh Hall: That’s what I’ve known.

Chris Badgett: Well, let’s look at a podcast funnel here. If for the web entrepreneurs, what are three of their most burning pain points that you’re going to help them with? With your products that you’ve created or not created yet.

Josh Hall: Content marketing for sure. They want to know like, “How do I create traffic?”

Chris Badgett: They want leads.

Josh Hall: Yeah. They won’t lead. How do I get leads that are different than just like a person in a business to business group meeting website? That’s [crosstalk] one. The actual content creation like their services, how do they create their own course? That’s a biggie. Even the other stuff. I get so many questions about people wanting… They’re curious about my podcast. How did I set up my podcast? What do I use? That’s a big one. The tools and tech behind some of this other stuff that’s outside of web design.

So I would say creating the content, getting those leads, and then I think how to integrate it because it’s so open-ended. Just like I struggle right now with figuring out where do I want to go with this? That’s what they’re facing as well. To be honest, it’s way easier to learn web design, learn DV and go to networking groups and start getting web design clients and build your agency. It’s way easier to do that than to have a much more open-ended path of entrepreneurial ship, where it really is up to you to what you want to focus on.

Chris Badgett: All right. So we’ve got our five pain points are creating a podcast, becoming a podcast, getting organic leads, overwhelm just with the whole system of it all, how to actually productize into a training product like a course. And then if you go into a smaller chunk, how to create meaningful educational, valuable content.

Josh Hall: Yeah. And I would say, maybe this links into the overwhelm, but strategy. Just web strategy in general, where do you want to position yourself? That’s a biggie. If maybe a couple of those would be summed up until web strategy? That is definitely a biggie.

Chris Badgett: So I’ve seen this before. You’re like me, so you’re a positive person. So organic leads, if someone’s experiencing pain around that, what does it feel like? It’s like they’re money stressed, right? Is that the pain point?

Josh Hall: Yeah. That’s probably the overarching stress of every entrepreneur and web designer.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Overwhelm as the pain point on the other side of lacking a coherent strategy just-

Josh Hall: By the way Chris-

Chris Badgett: … Yeah.

Josh Hall: When I sold my agency last year, I thought for sure I would wake up the next day and feel like the world is my oyster. I thought I would feel free and just like, “Oh my gosh, I can do whatever I want, whenever I want.” The complete opposite happened.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Josh Hall: I felt completely overwhelmed because now this thing that I created is my full-time deal. And there’s so many different ways to go. And at that point I’d already shifted into doing more high-end type stuff. I wasn’t necessarily just doing DV tutorial. It was a lot easier when I was running my web design agency and I was just creating content for web designers. So it was like the polar opposite happened. And I think that’s probably what a lot of my web entrepreneurs students are facing is, they’re probably used to doing their services. And then once you break into something new, it can be daunting because of the unclear path it’s also new. What we’re doing is brand new. There’s no go to college to become a online entrepreneur. It’s the school or knocks boots on the ground, figure stuff out type of stuff. So I think that’s a big challenge and a pain point as well as the strategy aspect of things.

Chris Badgett: A hundred percent, and then on the other side of productizing, I often see that as a… The course creation, the pain point is imposter syndrome because people are like, “I can’t.” They just can’t see it. They don’t know what to do. It’s overwhelming, but it also feels like there’s all this self-doubt and imposter syndrome stuff. Content chaos, the actual making of the content feels like, I would just call it in general, a creator block. Whether you’re trying to make a podcast or make a lesson or make a YouTube video, that’s there. And then the podcasting, without having a podcast, you feel like… I know nobody’s a strong word. It’s like you just don’t have a platform. You’re invisible is what that feels like.

Josh Hall: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So we’ve identified five red, hot pain points in your audience and also what the solution is. Each one of those solutions to get organic leads, to have a web strategy, to have a plan for a course, to be able to create the content and to have a viable podcast. Each one of those could hold some lead magnet that you send people to. Outside of that, each one of those pain points could have 10 related podcast episodes. So I’m giving you a year’s worth of content if you had a weekly podcast here. So if we look at web strategy, let’s say we had you created an opt in for a one pager…. Have ever seen like the lean canvas where you draw a business plan on one page?

Josh Hall: I’ve never heard of it that term but I’ve seen similar type of setups to where yeah, there’s some sort of opt in or some sort of following that. That is what I’m doing now is, my original goal this year was to build a bunch of different funnels for design courses, but then I decided to really cater to these web entrepreneurs with some new courses. So my goal is to continue to build out these web entrepreneur courses, addressing those pain points that you just mentioned. And then have and create more of these lead gens and funnels that are going to take people into free resources and webinars and then into those courses.

Chris Badgett: So if we look at the web strategy one, what’s an example? Just more micro problem within web strategy that your people have?

Josh Hall: One of my close colleagues who has a podcast, we actually… He’s in my web design club. And I specifically… This is when I realized most of what I do as far as coaching in the club with just chatting with people left and right is strategy.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Josh Hall: I’m helping people look at, “Okay.” And a lot of this, a couple of examples, one, a new member who’s super engaged, he started his own business, join a networking group and stuff like that. But he’s also an extremely talented developer.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Josh Hall: And just by being in the club, he started working with a lot of different people in the club. And I told him, you’re really dealing with two different customers. You’re a white label partner, you’re working with other web designers, helping them out with development and back end stuff, it’s super complex. And you’re customer facing with just helping the average business owner build a website. So that’s an example of a typical strategy type situation. Another one similarly is my colleague Keegan. I don’t know if you’ve ever connected with him.

Chris Badgett: [Keegan Lanier]?

Josh Hall: Yep.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Josh Hall: So he’s the host of DV addicts. Well, it was the DV addicts podcast, but what I’ve helped him create is, he’s actually completely rebranded and he’s doing a podcast that is based off his experience with getting ready to go full time, because he’s not a full-time web designer yet. He’s actually still working for a restaurant full time. He does web design on the side. He has a heart for teaching. He loves sharing what he knows, and he’s also working with clients. But I told him like, “Keegan, you’re only able to give 20% of your time to any of this stuff because you’re working full time.” And he’s ready to make that leap. So I helped him put a strategy in place to where he is going to share every step of his journey going full time and eventually quitting his job and getting his processes in place working with clients. And then he’s going to become a web entrepreneur where he builds his business up and then shares what he knows through online courses just like I’ve done. So a couple of examples of how we look at the strategy.

Chris Badgett: Those are podcasts episodes right there. The first one is how to pick your core customer. And there’s a whole conversation that can ensue around that. And you could even do it with the person you helped, or do a solo show, or you jam on it, or find an expert at positioning that you interview, do a case study with Keegan about how you helped him, how to transition from part-time to full-time web design with an eye for the future around productizing the journey along the way. The way I look at it, we find the five hot buttons and go to the one that you’re the most excited and passionate and prolific about, which sounds like is web strategy.

Josh Hall: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And then you can build 10 podcast episodes around that that are very niche problem-focused.

Josh Hall: And that is what I’m doing. All those examples, I fully intended on making those episodes. Both those cases, I wanted to wait till they were a little farther along. And then in the case of the first one, Jacob, who is essentially a service customer-facing, and then also a white label partner, I wanted to bring him on eventually and say, “We talked about this initially, how you began to serve web design customer or web design colleagues as well as different customers.” So that’s definitely where I use my coaching in the club as content. My question here though is, do I keep that all under the Josh Hall Web Design show, or is it worthwhile having a very clear distinction between web entrepreneur and web designer? Or a business owner? Or do I continue to have these three different people, these three different customer types all under my brand @joshhall.co?

Chris Badgett: I think the biggest opportunity here is to figure out how to think about this as one person at different stages.

Josh Hall: Okay, because just like, I’m putting myself in the shoes of somebody wanting to learn DV and web design, and they really like the podcast. They want to learn about pricing and contracts. If they hear an episode about Keegan, who I am teaching strategy on going full time. Well, that would be very applicable, but the more strategy stuff, I wonder if they would just tune that out, or if that maybe would inspire them to say like, “Okay, maybe I need to think deeper about this. Maybe there’s more than just building websites.” I guess that’s something I could think about as well.

Chris Badgett: Some people like to dream too. They like to think about the future and where they might end up and they might aspire, be interested in learning about what Keegan’s do. So they’re looking into the future, because it’s the same person where they could end up. I mean, that’s part of the challenge too. With somebody who evolves and doesn’t go through one transformation, but goes through these three transformations is that they need to see the target. I remember when I was first moving online, I first just wanted to learn how to drive the internet and was fascinated with WordPress. And that’s cool, but I would still listen to podcast episodes with software entrepreneurs on Mixergy, even though they were way… They’ve exited and made all this money and whatever blah, blah, blah. But I would still learn valuable marketing lessons and product lessons and stuff like that.

Josh Hall: Yeah. That’s a good point. And I guess the other aspect of that is, if I were to do three different podcasts, I’m not going to be interested in the technical web design podcast. That just doesn’t interest me. I can hit on that now, but yeah, that reaffirms what I’m doing now with keeping it under this brand and just having these three different subsets of customers, because they really do blend together very interestingly.

Chris Badgett: There’s something called the bowling pin strategy too, which might give you permission to not have to always serve three at the same time, which is that maybe you went to market with the DV and the web designer, and you got this bowling pin and you knock that one down. And then you’re looking at like, “Okay, we need to run web agencies.” And you start to get into the strategy stuff and the entrepreneur and the business building stuff. Then you knock that one down and maybe now we’re going to another bowling pin, but it’s still in the same… We’re still focusing on the same person. And there may be a whole other row of pains you haven’t thought about yet.

Josh Hall: That’s true. That’s a good [inaudible].

Chris Badgett: But it’s okay to transition. I was talking to you before we started recording, I’m like, “I have similar challenges. I’m looking at all these different avatars that use my product.” And for a long time I focused on the WordPress professional. But some of my content is more for the expert industry, like somebody who wants to teach online but isn’t necessarily a WordPress person. But they’re all… Like when I look at my board here, there’s 12 different bowling pins out here. They all need my product. They may not use all the exact same parts of it, but they still need it. And it’s okay if I switch from some expert stuff over to somebody, a business owner, who’s trying to train their employees and they’re trying to think through that and they need an LMS for that.

Josh Hall: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: So it’s-

Josh Hall: Well, that’s great. Yeah, and this conversation has given me so much clarity about these three subsets because I am branching into this third customer base now. And I definitely think either way, I’ll probably tweak my podcast intro at some point, because I’m really just focusing on the first two people. But in the intro it says, “Learn how to build awesome websites and build a web design business that gives you freedom and lifestyle love.” Although I guess that could encapsulate web entrepreneurs well, but I may even simplify that just to have something a little more generic that I have room and it opens the door to talk about technical web design stuff, but then also business and also more entrepreneurial base stuff.

Chris Badgett: If you could fill in this blank, I think it would help you a lot which is, I help blank start, grow and productize something. I don’t know, I got to think about it more. But this statement can help with that. A lot of experts have three pillars. So maybe for you, it’s design, the business, what’s the… I’m looking for verbs.

Josh Hall: Yeah. Well, so far it’s designer, owner and entrepreneur. That’s really the three. So as of right now, my homepage says, “Learn how to build awesome websites and create a web design business that gives you freedom and a lifestyle you love.” Freedom and a lifestyle you love is very intentional. That’s brought a lot of people who are work from homers and people who your vibe attracts your tribe motto.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Josh Hall: So I’ve got the first two. Now I need to figure out how to link in web entrepreneurs. And what I might do is continue to build out my entrepreneur base courses and then really start to market that when I have more courses to funnel them to. Because as of right now, the only stuff I’m doing in the entrepreneur side of things is my brand new course on building a course. And then we can talk about that in my club. I don’t have anything on podcasting yet. I don’t have anything on video market. Well, a couple things on video marketing, but that’s a big one, nothing on email marketing. So I think that’s where I’ll probably want to build those courses out and then start to create more content around that. That’s my foreseeable future, but I love that idea Chris, of being really intentional about encompassing all three. So maybe it’s something like learning how to create web designs, a web design business. And I don’t know, trying to think of-

Chris Badgett: These simple exercises around a value proposition and an elevator pitch and all of this positioning statement are hard. They’re hard. And they’re-

Josh Hall: … Oh it took me forever to come up with that little… That what I just read to you is what I have in my podcast as well. That was-

Chris Badgett: … I can tell that was good, because it just rolls. And I’m like, “Yeah, I get that. I hear the resonance.” Sometimes people try to pack too much in too, which is a challenge.

Josh Hall: … It was so tricky. Let me read that again, just because I think it’s worthwhile thinking about a headline like this, because this is the answer of my podcasts. It’s what’s on my website. So learn how to build awesome websites and create a web design business. That encapsulates what you will learn when you go to my site. With those first two groups, those are the challenges and the results. And on top of that, the benefits of doing both of those are so that you can have freedom and a lifestyle you love, which is huge. It also… I’m not saying learn web design so you can be a work from home parent or something specific. It’s whatever you want. If you want to travel and you want to have the freedom to do that, or if you want to have the freedom to be financially free with your family, whatever it is, I try to really encapsulate all those folks. So I think that’s a good base now, as I build my entrepreneur stuff, I’m going to try to integrate that into this brand.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I was just writing as you’re talking and just playing with it. I help people build awesome websites, agency businesses, and digital products so they can have their freedom and lifestyle that they love.

Josh Hall: That’s good. Yeah, that’s a good call, because to say a web entrepreneur, it doesn’t really roll off the tongue and that kind of thing. So yeah, digital products, because I guess that would be what the ultimate goal is. As a web entrepreneur, you want to sell a digital product. That is what you’re… As I think about a web entrepreneur, that’s a good point Chris, the ultimate goal. It’s easier for me to point out the first group and say, “I’m going to teach you how to build an awesome website. You’re going to learn how to build awesome websites you can sell.” The other aspect for the second level is people who want to have a web design business that they can build and grow. And then the third, I could teach them out of what being a web design entrepreneur, but what is all that….

PART 4 OF 5 ENDS [01:56:04]

Josh Hall: The third, I could teach them how to be a web design entrepreneur, but what is all that leading to? Digital products, right? I mean, that’s what a web entrepreneur would sell. Is a digital product, whether it’s information or consulting services or coaching, something like that.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I re-read it again as, “I help online creators start build a service business and ultimately offer digital products so they can lifestyle and freedom.” So…

Josh Hall: That’s great.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I’m kind of looking at it for those three verbs, I’m hung up actually on your business owner, because the website is you’re helping this avatar start. The digital products helps them scale, but what’s the verb in the middle?

Josh Hall: That is building that, that would be, I would say, probably build.

Chris Badgett: Or grow. Yeah.

Josh Hall: Probably grow because most of them are not going to be big agency owners that have 30 people working for them and they have an office downtown somewhere. It’s going to be freelance solopreneur businesses, primarily, maybe with a small team. That is really, start, grow-

Chris Badgett: Scale.

Josh Hall: Scale, I guess. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Josh Hall: Yeah. Scale through the digital products, but scale can scare a lot of solopreneurs too. I’m afraid of the term scale.

Chris Badgett: What about product ties? Does that sound sexier?

Josh Hall: A little bit. I think that would probably sound better than scale because scale could also be entwined in with an owner it’s like, “Well, do I want to scale my agency?” A lot of people ask me about scaling their agency, which means they want to hire a team and grow, but this is scale on a whole different type of like entrepreneurial level. So I do think sell digital products or productizing, I think productizing is probably the better term there.

Chris Badgett: Well, let me tell you what from your buddy, James’ buddy, Taki Moore, I think he did this, something called the ACES Growth Engine. So ACES stands for attract, convert, expand, scale. So talky more helps people become million dollar coaches. That’s his pitch, that’s his name of his book. And by having those verbs, now we have our buckets of content and products, like attract. That’s the one you were talking about, about get leads, marketing, convert, the sales, expand is what we’re doing here. We’re expanding what this person can do and increase their revenue. And then scale is just taking it to another level. So I’m looking for that model. It’s a growth engine for a particular avatar.

Josh Hall: Yeah. I liked that idea for sure. Because it fits into all those buckets, for sure. I think what’s going to be difficult for me to differentiate here is I think a lot of people who are running their businesses are going to be akin to doing more and selling a digital product. A lot of people who are learning web design are going to be all about growing their own business, where the biggest difference with my audience will be the people who are starting to learn web design and then people who are becoming entrepreneurs. That’s what’s going to be, I think, tricky for me. I don’t want people who are full-blown entrepreneurs to get bogged down with technical content I produce, which they could always just not listen. They don’t need to listen to every podcast episode. And then I also don’t want people who are just wanting to learn web design, be overwhelmed with entrepreneurial stuff, if that’s not even in their frame of vision right now. So I think that would be the biggest trick.

Chris Badgett: Well, maybe you’ll have a hurdle here. Because I think your guy James, at one point I heard him on his podcast talk about, he stopped with beginners and he went to people who are scaling, who were making at least a hundred thousand dollars or something. So he drew a line in the sand and he’s like, “I start here.” And he just let go of the beginners and maybe they still get good free content on the podcast or whatever. But his premium offering is for people, he has that qualifier.

Josh Hall: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: The thing about that might be helpful for you, how do you want to qualify? Do you maybe want to move the line past? Because that’s okay, to change your starting line and do that.

Josh Hall: That’s a great point, Chris. I can’t believe it’s taken us over two hours to get to this point, but I think you’re right. I think potentially where I’m at right now is I do need to limit, or maybe just bump up that starting line, which I kind of already have with the way I formatted my podcast and my website right now, it’s learn how to build awesome websites. It’s not necessarily learn web design. I guess if I were to read that and most of my courses are attracting students who, they know the basics of web design, but they want to know more.

They want to know how to create sites that convert. They want to know the process. They want to know SEO, all that kind of stuff, which I have all my courses around. So maybe I revamp my beginner’s course and Divi starter course, or maybe I lose the term beginner in anything I’m doing to make it more. So if you’re like just getting into web design, you don’t know anything about anything, here are some and that’s where I can have a resources tab, here are some amazing colleagues of mine producing stuff that can help you once you’re ready to start really building websites and make this a business. This is the starting point. That’s something I could look into.

Chris Badgett: Here’s a scary idea for you. What if you cut all the beginner stuff and put that out for free, move that out into not from behind the paywall. And then that’s just generating pipeline for the business owners and the web entrepreneurs

Josh Hall: I’m open to it. I’m definitely open to it. What I would probably do in that case is just maybe have something different. Because all the people who have paid for my beginner’s course, I don’t necessarily want to make that free after they’ve paid for it. So maybe I would just create something different that maybe it could even be something that would be before that, even my Divi beginner’s course, it really is a crash course on Divi and WordPress. So maybe I’ll create a free course or a free something that is, here’s how to get started in web design, an overview of hosting, an overview of my preferred theme, Divi and what WordPress is. Here’s some basics on how to get started. Here’s the next step. And that’s where it could lead into, maybe that first beginner’s course that would set the tone, that’s something. I had planned on doing that anyway, but I think the idea of moving that needle a little further is really interesting for sure.

Chris Badgett: If you were to have a funnel filter in front of your paid stuff and you could only ask three questions.

Josh Hall: Sorry, hold on, Chris. Can you hold on? I was just thinking, this is great. What if I made my Divi course, if I changed the title to not a Divi beginner’s course, but what if I really took Divi to the next level even potentially brought in another expert, like you said, to partner up with that. What if I kept that as more of a Divi advanced course, but then I did a free Divi beginner’s course. That is just, here’s the basics of Divi. Here’s how you build a site, blah, blah, blah. Maybe it’s a couple hours, few hours. And then if you really want to take it to the next level of Divi, here’s the advanced stuff. Here’s where we can really. And that’s the pay, that’s the $97. And maybe that would really bring them to that next tier of designing websites and becoming a business owner.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And if you’re concerned about your past customers, you can always give them-

Josh Hall: I would just-

Chris Badgett: Just give free access to the new thing.

Josh Hall: Yes, I would essentially make that course, right now I would rename it and I would probably do like a version 2.0 and make it a Divi advanced course. That way everyone who’s been through it, I’m like, “Hey surprise. I came out with this new course since you were enrolled in the beginner’s course, this is the revamped version of it. Here you go. It’s basically a new free course for you.” And then I may have a free one. Yeah. I like that. I like that idea. Yeah. I like that a lot. I’m going to make a note of that real quick. Sorry. I didn’t mean to cut you off. I just wanted to get that-

Chris Badgett: Oh, I’m the same way when I have a good idea. Sometimes I’m like, “Wait, I have too many good ideas. I need to stop-“

Josh Hall: Putting out in the world.

Chris Badgett: So my other question for you is just as we’re zeroing in on the avatar is, if we have a funnel filter, people that have too many leads, sometimes we’ll create a funnel filter, a check box or two that qualifies the lead and the sales process. So if the obvious, well it’s not necessarily the obvious one, but one that people ask all the time is, what’s your budget? Or how big is your team?

I mean, there’s a lot of ways that companies do this to us all the time and we’re not even aware of what they’re doing, but for your perfect fit web entrepreneur customer, if you could ask three things, what would they be? A couple ideas that kind of mind are, and remember we’re disqualifying too, how much experience do you have with WordPress? Zero, one to two, a two plus or whatever. And maybe the zeros are not a good fit. I don’t know. Maybe this goes back. Yeah.

Josh Hall: And I think that’s where having an initial filter on my site right under my title and what this is all about, start here, like what James Schramko has on Super Fast Business. There’s four paths you can go down. So one would be the three. Where are you? How can I help you? Do you want to learn web design, build your web design business or take your online business to a whole nother level? Kind of thing.

Chris Badgett: That’s great.

Josh Hall: So I think that’s where I would tweak that. And then I would probably have a set of challenges or pain points for each one of those. So maybe the entrepreneur would be like, “Are you sick of doing client work, service work?Do you want to productize? Do you want to build something you can sell over and over? Or do you want to build a new audience?” That’s going back to those five things you had earlier that addresses those. So I think that’s a good idea of what to strive for with that.

Chris Badgett: I like it.

Josh Hall: And then all the content, I’ll just continue to, I think right now to put a cap on this, my plan is to first off, build out my entrepreneur suite of courses, continuing to do my podcast, that’s really addressing all three. But maybe I’ll just start sprinkling in some more entrepreneurial stuff. My last podcast episode was about a course landing page that converts. So it’s a little bit different than an average web design page.

So I think I’ll start adding some more entrepreneurial type content and then continue to really service the two and then really build out that funnel. And then I’ll just, as I get more courses out, I’ll have so many options to build content around all of those three. And I really got a good roadmap for the next, probably couple of years, because I would foresee building out the web entrepreneur stuff and that should set me up to have a lot of courses to sell and include and continue to build up my membership. That’s a pretty good vision. This has really helped me put a vision and some tactile stuff to all of this.

Chris Badgett: Can you put a face on each one? For example, you mentioned Keegan as an aspiring web entrepreneur and he’s already moving, but if you can clearly see those-

Josh Hall: I’ve got members of my club, most of all of them, again are the owner. I’ve got a lot of examples of people being web designers, becoming business owners. Now there’s a difference between there too. There’s a lot of my members who maybe I would consider the first tier, which are designers, who just want to do their own thing. They don’t want to grow an agency. They just want to build websites and have sustainable income. And then there’s the people who are like that, but they’re scaling. They want to build a team. They want to free themselves up to work on the business. And that’s what leads them generally to the entrepreneur. So yeah, I definitely have people in all three of those. Because if you’re if you’re going to learn web design, this is a good differentiation too.

If you’re going to learn web design from me, you’re not going to learn web design to go work for an agency. You’re going to learn web design to become a freelancer for yourself. You’re going to work for yourself. So that first bucket, that definitely capsulates that too, which then we get into separating the middle tier out because now I’ve got solopreneurs versus business owners. But I think either way, if I phrase it as, you want to build websites and start your… And maybe my three tiers are this, Chris, maybe you want to start your web design business, maybe you want to grow your web design business and then maybe you want to boom entrepreneur…

Chris Badgett: Productize.

Josh Hall: Productize. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And I totally get what you’re saying. I could see it on the board behind me, this expert you’re talking about, the web entrepreneur. I have the course creator, the coach and the course marketplace. So even once I pick one, boom, now there’s three more segments under that. And that’s okay. It might be worth doing, like you said, “Oh, well, there’s these different types of agency people.” There might be a freelancer. Well, I mean, the way you divide it up is a little different. But yeah, that’s why I was asking earlier about, are we just doing courses? Or are we doing more broadly digital products? Because if we do more broadly digital products, which is fine, there’s going to be some sub avatars in there. There’s going to be the outgoing coach, there’s going to be the introverted passive income guy. And then there’s-

Josh Hall: I think that’s where I will probably discover what I’m attracting over the year with the entrepreneur. I don’t know too much about affiliate income right now, I have a little bit, I’ve got some affiliate sales and stuff, but that’s not an area that I would feel comfortable with teaching on anytime soon, email marketing similarly, I would feel probably enough at the end of 2021 to feel comfortable doing an email marketing course, but I’m still learning so much right now. I don’t feel in my heart that, I mean I could do like a beginners course, maybe a crash course on email marketing, but if I want to do a course, I want to do a good course. So that’s why I got to this point where I’m like, “I feel great about my course creation process and I feel really good about sharing what I’ve learned.” Because I took core sales to six figures in one year. I feel good about sharing that,

Now, affiliate income, a little bit different, email marketing. So I think I’ll see, to answer the question, to see what type of people I’m attracting. I think it’s going to be a lot of selling knowledge. I think that’ll be a big one. Affiliate income for sure, could be in there. But I think selling knowledge. I’m about to start Pat Flynn’s webinar course. That’s actually something I might pull from and I could potentially teach on hosting a workshop or a webinar and that kind of thing. So yeah, I’m excited. That’s where I think I could very well see that end of the business being built out over the next couple years, because I know how long this stuff takes and it’ll probably take that long for that to really be super clear.

Chris Badgett: What’s your course, you said you’ve got your course creation process down. What does it take you from end to end time-wise to do it?

Josh Hall: It all depends on the length of the course. How many course videos-

Chris Badgett: And are you trying to transition away from any tutorial to all talking head or not necessarily?

Josh Hall: I do all three. So I do talking head just myself. I do talking head with graphics, the main points I cover will start right when I’m talking about. I’ll do more tutorial based. So this last course I created, which is my entire course creation process. Now I do use LearnDash, we talked about before we went live, had I discovered Lifter before LearnDash, I probably would be with that, but I already built my customer base on LearnDash. It’s what I feel comfortable with using. So this course is a LearnDash course, but it’s more than just a technical LearnDash. That’s only one module. There’s three main modules. The first module is creating the content and creating the actual course. Second is building it in LearnDash. So there’s some technical stuff.

I don’t have any talking head in that module. It’s all just screen recording. And then the third is marketing, building the sales page, launching, selling consistently. So it encapsulates my business right now.

Chris Badgett: How long did that take?

Josh Hall: That took, it was interesting because I started the process and then I stopped because I launched my student center, which was a lot of work. So there was a couple of weeks where I got the outline in place and then I’d stop and then came back to it. It was probably fair to say it was a good month of doing that along with running my business here with content creation and everything else, the course is seven hours total, three modules, 24 lessons total. It generally takes me anywhere between 40 to 50 hours on a smaller course to maybe 50 to even a hundred hours on a bigger course. This is a mid range course. My business course was over 30 lessons, that was a big one. That took a long time. That’s like a mastery style course. So that was a whole different ball game. So yeah, I would say a mid range course takes me about a month to a month and a half, depending on how often I’m working on it throughout my weeks and days.

Chris Badgett: That’s cool. Do you have a YouTube? I was just thinking of the idea, you said it, I forget the words you said, something about attracting the vibe of the people or whatever.

Josh Hall: Vibe attracts your tribe.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s really cool. I mean, it’s one thing to run a podcast or do a tutorial, but do you have… Have you ever thought about doing like a documentary style? That’s not just talking head. Yeah.

Josh Hall: I did. It’s my behind the scenes creating a course.

Chris Badgett: Oh nice.

Josh Hall: Which I actually did two years ago. So that was interestingly enough, one of the first opportunities where I started getting people who are interested in doing courses. So again, it goes back to me just keeping in touch with my following and seeing what they’re interested in. So yeah, I did a documentary. Yeah. I filmed it while I built my Divi beginners course. It was my 10 day journey. I built that course in 10 days. So that one wasn’t too long, but I documented the whole thing and spiced it up to an hour and a half documentary. So that’s out there, you can just search Josh Hall Behind The Scenes Making A Course. And that was really cool. And I actually mentioned that in the new course I just launched.

I said, “If you want to see what it looks like when I create a course with balancing family and everything, that’s how I did it.” So now I think I’m getting into more and more of that type of content. Because again, I feel a little out of place when we talk about Divi specific stuff, because I’m not focused on that as much now. I’m hiring people to do a lot of that stuff now.

So I want to, I want to keep my authority there going for a little while longer, but I’m definitely much more, I think that’s going to become more of the entry point for people, particularly because a lot of my students, like I said, use other themes. So I don’t want to limit people. If somebody uses Elementor, I don’t want them to think my content isn’t going to apply to them. So the focus will be on the latter two, for sure. Just servicing the first group of people, learning web design enough and then really diving into the latters because there’s all sorts of resources for people to learn web design. There is less for running an agency at my level, where we’re at.

Chris Badgett: It’s just coming to me. So I’m just sharing it, in terms of a lead magnet or some kind of challenge funnel marketing piece to help with the question of, which product should I make out of my… Basically helping them figure out like the angle from their agency life, that if you had like a lead magnet or a free course or a video about that, help them go from… They have the-

Josh Hall: Owner to entrepreneur or?

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Because there’s a lot of overwhelm around. Yeah, that sounds cool. But I have no idea. I can’t read the label from inside the bottle and I have all these things and I use all these tools and I’m good, which products should I make as a web design business owner? There’s something there. And then they’re basically a perfect fit for the next phases of you.

Josh Hall: That’s true. Yeah. Because I can teach how to build a chorus, how to do a podcast, how to do video marketing. But those are all the tools to do something. The other two are very clear, learn how to build websites, learn how to grow your own web design business. The third one is a little more open-ended and I guess maybe it is the ultimate goal. Like we said a little bit ago, is selling a digital product, whatever that is, whether it’s coaching consulting, info-product, affiliate income, whatever that could be potentially.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Like-

Josh Hall: An online business, maybe create your own online business. I don’t know. Maybe it’s something like that.

Chris Badgett: And marketing, the big idea where the domino falls and the sale becomes easy. I think when the web design business owner realizes not only that they want to make a digital product, but which one they should make, they’re really ready to move forward and-

Josh Hall: And that’s where keeping an eye on my students who are in that fit right now is going to be super beneficial. That’s why I’m so glad I had my web design club. Because I’m getting a first row seat at what’s working. I can see what Keegan does. I can see what Jacob does. I’ve got a couple other students who are doing online courses and adding other stuff to their businesses. I can see what they do. And that can all be the framework for helping people with this third entrepreneurial tier.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s awesome. Well, I’m super-

Josh Hall: Maybe our next call we’ll have that all solidified.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s really good to catch up and I’m really excited to see where you’re going and I think it’s good and I would just encourage you to spend more time just around that positioning statement and just get those fundamentals dialed because everything’s easy when you have the fundamentals. And another Australian dude, have you ever heard of Simon Bowen? He teaches these models, how to draw visually to create frameworks that are super helpful for people who are pitching anything or creating a strategy. They’re super awesome. But like Kiyosaki’s four quadrants thing. These are models and once you have the model and the value prop, a positioning statement, it’s really cool, he has a particularly powerful one called the Genius Model. And if you were to create your genius model, that would just give you everything you need to know about the avatar and what content you need to make and build a framework. So check that out. He’s amazing.

Josh Hall: Cool man. Yeah. Yeah. I’m excited. This has been great. It’s venture into new territory, but it’s still in the realm of my people. So I’m really excited about this man, Chris. Thanks so much. This was a blast kind of doing an extended talk to really dive into this, this isn’t something we could have got through in an hour or so.

It was nice to be able to do this. I appreciate your time, man. And hopefully this has been beneficial to anyone who listens because it’s a long coaching style call, but I think this just shows the amount of strategy that goes into something like this, that is purely uncharted and is very tailored to whatever, because somebody could take what I’m doing and apply it to a different industry. So yeah, hopefully this was beneficial. I definitely have some more clarity. I was a little daunted going into this to figure out what to do, but now I honestly can say in full sincerity, talking with you, I feel more clear than ever and have a really good path to follow to where I know what I’m going to work towards here, which is really cool.

Chris Badgett: Cool. Awesome. Well, I’m super excited for you. I can’t wait to see what comes next and, and thank you for coming because it’s an inspiration, like I was saying, you embody the qualities of not being perfectionist, continuous improvement. These are some of the psychographic qualities of people that I see in my audience that work out well, is you got to have that and you just embody it and you’re passionate and you really care about your core customer. So those three things are present, which means you’re going to do great. And that helps you overcome the roadblocks. So I can’t wait to see the next evolution.

Josh Hall: That’s awesome, Chris. I appreciate it, man. This has been a blast. I really, really appreciate your input. So here’s to the next step and then I can’t wait for the next round, when we get to talk about this more detail, see what’s worked.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well thank you for breaking the record on the podcast length.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

PART 5 OF 5 ENDS [02:23:32]

The post Josh Hall Helps Web Designers Create Agencies and Make Digital Products to Accelerate Freedom appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Learn how to create a successful membership site with Melissa Love in this episode of LMScast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. Melissa has been using LifterLMS for many years, and she’s been featured on LMScast before. We have a case study with her and a webinar as well. So be sure to look those up after you listen to her episode here. She’s also featured on our latest Enroll Summit online course where you can learn about getting your first 10 enrollments on your course site.

When you’re first starting out in your business and you don’t have a lot of extra cash, it’s important to take accountability for your planning. You may not have the funds to spend $5,000 per month to invest in a coach to keep you accountable, but mapping out annual goals and quarterly planning in addition to your daily workflow will help keep you on track for where you want to go in your business.

One of the things Chris has noticed about people who are successful with LifterLMS is that they have a clear customer. That customer can change over time, but having a clear target market (photographers in Melissa’s case) enables you to create a specific premium offer for that market. Melissa has launched some other business ventures for people who offer website design services to others. But keeping your mindset in each business focused will really help amplify your ability to have success in the market.

Many course creators and membership site owners can struggle on their launch of a course, or even the launch of freebies and lead magnets. The main reason for that in most cases is that they don’t do market research and instead launch what they think the market needs. If you can ask five key questions of your market to determine what they need, it’s a lot easier to position offers in that market that they’ll find valuable and purchase.

Melissa has some helpful tools you can find here:

DIY Guide
Checklist

To learn more about Melissa Love be sure to head to TheDesignSpace.co where you can learn how to build stunning websites as a creative entrepreneur. Also be sure to check out our last LMScast featuring Melissa and her case study about how she found success in the online space here. We’ve done a webinar with Melissa, and if you’re using the Divi Theme alongside LifterLMS, the webinar Melissa did will give you some great advanced tips. We also have our Enroll Summit on getting your first 10 enrollments live now featuring Melissa Love – Get Access Now.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name is Chris Badgett. I’m joined by a special guest. Her name is Melissa Love. She’s been on the podcast before, so if you like what you hear, I want you to go check out her other episode. We’ve also done a webinar training with Melissa Love, that was really good, about design, about launching a membership, and all kinds of different stuff. We’re going to get into that. She’s also a theme creator. As a designer, she has an amazing theme for training-based membership sites and those types of businesses called Tribe. Welcome back, Melissa, to the show.

Melissa Love: Thank you. Lovely to be back. Always a pleasure.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. And her website, where to go find Melissa, is that thedesignspace.co? Geez, where are we going to start? Where are we going to start? One of the things that you embody before we get into some more tactical stuff and lessons learned that has always just impressed me about you as a course creator, but also as a designer and, more broadly, an entrepreneur, is you seem to be able to really have this right brain creativity. I mean, obviously, you’re a fantastic designer. But then you also have all these systems and you have these logical workflows and checklists. You seem like you flow between right and left brain just so easily and maybe that’s an old, outdated way of thinking. But how do you exist so well on both ends of this spectrum there?

Melissa Love: That’s such a good question. I didn’t use to be that kind of person. I was very much the creative who was a bit disorganized and a bit scatty and I kind of took a weird pride in that, like ooh, I’m so creative and I haven’t got time for all this practical stuff and I would totally wing it. Because my work was good, I was happy [inaudible] to work with me, but I wasn’t working with very smart. I was just wasting time. And when you don’t think tactically, you can’t scale your business. And it just got to the point where I was so burnt out and so ready to scale, I thought, “You have to sort this out. You can’t just go with a to-do list that gets me shorter and no strategy. You’re not outsourcing anything.” I just [inaudible], “Get over yourself.”

And then, actually, I fell in love with marketing my business and understanding my numbers. And actually, I prefer that to the creative in some respects so much so that I created a membership around marketing, which if you told me I was going to do that, I don’t know, 10 years ago, I would’ve laughed my head off because I was not that kind of person that had time for any of that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. It’s an emblematic of an open mind. I call it discovering a new area of the bookstore that you didn’t realize like, “Oh, wait a second, there’s a whole other thing here that I’m interested in and I can explore.” That’s awesome.

Melissa Love: But I think we also live up to the stereotypes that people give us or that we encounter, which is that creatives aren’t techy. I’ve worked with a lot of photographers, as you know, and I can’t believe the numbers [inaudible]. I’m just really not very techy. You operate a really complicated $5,000 piece of equipment, then you put all the photos on a computer and you edit them all, and export them. You’re very techy and you can apply those skills to other areas of your business.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah, I love that. Getting outside of the stereotype. A related question to that, I call it the five hats problem where to do these types of training-based websites, online learning platforms, coaching businesses, all this stuff online at scale through the internet, you have to be an entrepreneur, an instructional designer, a community builder, a techie, and an educator. I think I got that right. But anyways, the whole point is you have to wear a lot of hats and it’s really easy to get stressed out. So how do you know what to focus on and where to be strategic? How do you prioritize in this type of business where you have an online business, at the most broad level with the online business, how do you do that? Do you do quarterly planning and stuff? I know it’s really hard to say no to things. I mean, that’s a big part of it, but how do you focus?

Melissa Love: Well, the first thing is you have to learn to… I think what’s really hard is when you’re just starting out and you don’t have a lot of extra cash in your business. It’s all well and good for someone me to say, “Oh, you should just outsource or you need to invest in a coach to keep you accountable,” but that’s $5,000 and you might not have that thinking around your business. I think in those days, you have to take accountability for your planning. Not only do I do annual goals and quarterly planning, I have it all in my workflow and ClickUp, which is a tool I love. I make my whole community to do it with me.

So I do my planning during their sessions. We have a workflow we get out every quarter and I give them ClickUp template. I give them a Google Sheets if they don’t have that or they can just use a pen and paper. We all do it together. Then they submit their goals for the next quarter, then I check back with them about halfway through the course just to see how they’re getting on. Normally, they go on it or, “Oh my God, how embarrassing.”

So it’s vital because then that gives you a set… And then I think what a lot of people do is they do their planning and they just put it in a dusty drawer and they don’t have it as something that they check in with daily. So I have mine pinned to my homepage of ClickUp, my key goals, and I look at them and I think, “Even if I just do one tiny thing to move myself bigger to my goals, say, what’s it going to be?” And it might be pitching someone or a five-minute job for each of those big goals, it might be doing another page in a template, it might be sending a pitch email to someone to be on a podcast. It might be writing a piece of content that that needs to get done. But I always try and keep them at the front, otherwise all is lost if you do the planning, but don’t do the follow-through.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. One of the things I’ve noticed about people that are successful with our tool or just more broadly in the industry is they have a clear customer. Maybe that changes over time. Like I know you’ve done a lot with photographers and now you do a lot with marketing professionals and you have these clear customers, like this avatar. And then the other thing I see in people that are the most successful is that they surround that person with support. And it’s not always just one thing, just a video training or just some service or, in your case, it’s really cool because you have coaching opportunities, but you also have your themes. So when I see Tribe, that theme, I’m like, “Wow, this saves a lot of time for people to have great design, great site.” It helps a clear customer, a web designer trying to build this type of site have an extreme time advantage. Tell us about where Tribe came from and how that bubbled up as a project to invest in.

Melissa Love: Well, it’s interesting. Once I launched the membership, I had quite a few people reaching out and saying, “Oh, my god, your site’s amazing. How did you build it? Can you give us a tour? Oh, we’ve been on the fence. We didn’t know whether to choose a third-party platform, the like of [inaudible] or whatever people are using. We’re actually working this, but that seems really daunting.” So I ended up giving a lot tools and behind the scenes little tutorials to people. And then people started joining my membership just to get access to some coaching around that.

So I thought there’s clearly demand there and I know that, as you know, when I first started using Lifter, I’m in the group all the time asking a gazillion questions. How can you do that? How can I make this look better? Why doesn’t this work this? Just generally being annoying. So I just thought, “Well, actually, now I know how to do all of those things, I think it would be really good to share that knowledge and then to fast track it,” because I think there’s always a middle way. And this is the thing, there’s a lot of things you want to do in your business. You might want to hire a professional like me to build you your own all singing, all dancing [inaudible] site, but that is going to cost you $10,000 or you could try and do it yourself from scratch, but you’re probably not going to get the result you want.

But as a middle way, which I call the Ikea way, which is I could try and build a beautiful dining table and sure, it would be functional, you might be able to eat food off it, but it would look terrible. But I can go to Ikea and buy something that’s good design, I can put it together myself and it costs somewhere in the middle. So I just think whatever it is, whatever you want, whether it’s a really expensive coaching program, there’s probably going to be a stepping stone to what ultimately you might be able to afford in the long run for your business. I’m in a couple of memberships, have been for the last couple of years, which put me in the right environment. I’ve only, this year, just invested in a much more high-ticket coaching program for a whole year, which I’ve never done before, but it took me a few other steps to get there.

So I think that’s why for me, Tribe fills that middle gap for people who if you’re on your fifth membership and you’ve done a lot of launches, you can probably afford to hire the $10,000 designer. But if you haven’t, if this is your first one, you want it to look good, but you don’t want to risk everything, it’s a good solution.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. If you’re looking at a site for somebody who’s building a community or a tribe or coaching program, as a marketer yourself, what’s the simplest marketing funnel for somebody to think of without flying off the tracks of what needs to happen on the site? Let’s say they have some free YouTube content and they’re sending people traffic to the site. They’ve got some good content, which we’re going to talk about in a little bit, about how to make zero-waste content. But what is a marketing funnel for people? I guess I see a lot of people get in the weeds and overly complex. How do you see the website parts of the funnel operating?

Melissa Love: Good question. Just to take one [inaudible], I see in own peopleship and my membership, people actually agonize over that lead magnet content or their freebies. They’re like, “Is the marketing saturated? Has one of my competitors done this?” It doesn’t matter. Because people want to hear it from you, they need to know that you’re the expert. It doesn’t matter how many… I’ve just built a DIY website checklist. There’s going to be a gazillion checklist out there, but none of them are written by me. None of them have my authority behind it. My audience want to hear from me. They don’t want to hear from someone else. They want to have to Google it. They want me to say, “Do these things in this order. That all you need.”

So I think that’s where you have to get over yourself a bit. It’s always going to be a bit embarrassing to launch a freebie and maybe there’s crickets, no one wants it. But the thing is you don’t have to guess. I’m a massive proponent of doing a ton of research. I call it emotion-based research. I can give you a link to that blog post about it where I call them the five magic questions. They’re all emotion-based. They’re all if you could wave a magic wand and have your LifterLMS website built for you tomorrow, what would be the top three things you’d need? So they’re going to answer these questions and they’re going to basically tell you what their most pressing need is. And then you can create the piece of content around it that’s going to answer that. They’ve told you they want it. It’s a no-brainer.

So once you have your piece of content, what I like to do, we’ll come on to this shortly, is I actually create my piece of content in tiny chunks. We’ll talk about this in a second. So I gather a lot of organic feedback as we go along. I drip it out in paragraphs on Instagram and see what questions I get and in my Facebook group and I think, “That needs tweaking,” before I bundle it all together to become the piece of content that it’s ultimately going to be. So once you’ve got confidence in your piece of content, this is where I think a lot of people get a bit panicky and they think, “I need to buy lead pages or click funnels,” and they go off into another tech, $99 a month subscription, which they don’t need. If you’ve got WordPress, that’s literally all you need.

And again, I think the other thing you have to do is keep driving them back to your site. So it’s a little psychological flow, as I call it. So email sign up on your own website, not on any other thing like click funnels or lead pages. You redirect them to a thank you page. So you don’t just give them a thank you success message. Obviously, if you’re ever going to do paid traffic, you need a thank you page where you can measure how many people get to the thank you page. And I think a lot of people boost post, don’t have a thank you page, feel they’ve just burnt a $50 note when they do that. So that’s a real basic, which when you’re just starting out, it’s easy to not know about. Then on that thank you page is where you start to relationship build with the video, a thank you, drive them to your Facebook group, wherever you want them to go next, keep an eye on your inbox.

And then they’re going to get an email, an automated email. Hopefully, you’ve signed up to MailerLite or ActiveCampaign. And in that email, it has to, again… you don’t just give them the freebie in the email where they can download it straight. You want to get them to go back to the website to a delivery page. The reasons you want to know how many people click through to see how many people are consuming your content, but also, it’s a little psychological trick. They start to think, “Ooh, email from Melissa. There’ll be linked some good content on her website.” You’re building that little neurological firing of excitement that every time they get an email from you, it leads to something good.

And then you drive them back to that beautiful delivery page where you’ve embedded it so they can flick through it or they can download it. You’re giving them options. So if they’re on a phone and they don’t go, “Yeah, I don’t want to download a 16-gigabyte PDF onto my phone when I can just flick through it with my finger right here and consume the content.” There’s lots of good reasons to keep driving them back to your website.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s really, really good funnel wisdom there. That’s awesome. Before we go to a zero-waste content, I wanted to ask you, a thing I see people struggle with a lot of things you do well are the opposite of what I see people struggle with and one of those is perfectionism. And I’m sure perhaps you have some perfectionist qualities or whatever, but when you develop in public, like you’re getting feedback and you’re asking questions, you may want it to be perfect, but you’re okay with iterating as you go to make sure it’s good. And you’re even talking about setting up a funnel with feedback loops in it like how many people are clicking through, how well is this thing working? You’re open to it not being perfect.

It seems like with you that you and, just in general, the people I see that are the most successful, everything is a work in progress all the time. It’s never done. It’s never a perfect. Giddy up, let’s go. How did you get there? Did you ever have problems with perfectionism or is that just something you figured out early on?

Melissa Love: That’s such a good question. I used to definitely procrastinate more. As you do turn to the marketplace, I think once I started to sell things online, move into more… and I don’t like to get user passive income, but more subscription-based income or online sales. I had to get over myself because at first, you think, “God, I’ve got competitors. They’re all going to look at this,” and you can talk yourself out of doing it. But actually, what I found is brutal honesty works best. One of my first blog posts I ever wrote when I launched my community was Done is Better Than Perfect. And I said, “Look, we’re going to make mistakes on the way. But the great thing about the internet is you can edit it whenever you like.” I say, “So when I make mistakes, please let me know.” And people are like, “Hey, Melissa, I just wanted to let you know, this looks weird on mobile.” I’m like, “Thanks. Got it. Good spot.”

As long as you’re not going to be defensive about it… I mean, I do all the best of my checks, the best of my ability, and I’m not saying I rush things, but I don’t stall anymore because there’s always something else. I think this is the thing you think, back in the day, I thought, “Well, if I could just launch a range of templates, that’d be brilliant. I would have gotten to where I want to be.” But of course, then there’s another summit and you get to talk about that and there’s another thing that you’re excited about. So you just have to get on with it, chip it, and you might have to revise it. But then there’s always something for me, glimmering on the horizon. So that stops me from getting stuck in perfectionism.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Well, another one of those two-sided swords is, I mean, it goes by a lot of names, expertitest or whatever you like, especially if you’re really passionate about something or had a lot of life experience in it, you know a lot and sometimes it’s hard, there’s just so much there and you also have a drive to help people and whatnot to chunk things down into usable bits that are useful and whatnot.

So one of the things I’ve noticed with you also do well is you have a chunking process. One way I describe it is problem resolved and then there’s tools in the middle to help people… just like any piece of content or a training or something, the good stuff really starts with a core problem and then we solve it. So that being said, I just wanted to use that as a tie-in to how do you do zero-waste content? Do you start with a problem or how do you get efficient with content? Because course creators, coaches, website designers, marketing agencies, if they’re in the content game at all, there’s so much we could write or do or whatever. How do we do it and then also use it effectively, ideally for both marketing and inside their products, and communities, and stuff?

Melissa Love: This has taken me a while to get to this stage where I see this now with much more clarity. But for me, it really starts with doing your emotion-based research and from that, if you use the magic questions, which are all emotion-based, I just use a Google form or a type form, they both spit out a nice Google sheet with all of the answers in a big grid. So you can look down, it might take a little high-low to I’m like, “Right, that’s falling into that bucket. That’s falling into that bucket.” These are people’s real words like, “I feel overwhelmed and I don’t know how to approach this because of X, Y, and Z. I wish someone could do this for me.” This is the kind of answer you’re getting, which are absolute gold’.

So I Normally silo them into three or three key pillars and everyone should have their three key pillars. You’re going to talk about that in everything you do, from your sales page. These are the big problems that your course is going to solve, your content is going to solve. And if you find yourself, if you can’t relate what you’re working on back to these three pillars, you shouldn’t be writing it, basically.

Chris Badgett: Hey, just for example, real quick, what are the marketing fix three pillars>

Melissa Love: They are overwhelm and time management. They are imposter syndrome and they are tool confusion. When it comes to marketing, they didn’t want choose.

Chris Badgett: I love that. That’s awesome.

Melissa Love: Over the last year, overwhelm and time management weren’t a thing anymore because everybody had loads of time because a lot of people weren’t working. So suddenly, I had to park there and it was how to pivot your business and not rely on one income stream became a pillar for me over the last year. I can put that back on its shelf and people are going to get time poor and feel overwhelmed again. So they can change, but not very often. I would say it’s not very often, we have a global pandemic, so that was exceptional. But I thought, “Oh, things are changing. I need to tell people to stop how to manage their time.”

So once you’ve got your three pillars, that three key pillars, that unlocks a lot of structure. So you’re going to test your goals against them. You’re going to test your course content against them. I look at my big goals for the year and I think right, from that, I have to make sure those big goals relate to these things, otherwise it’s not going to have a resonance with my audience. But then when you’ve got your pillars, what I’ve got is I’ve got ideas list where I can then break those down into lots of different topic ideas. So I need to make sure they’re covered in my course, but also, that’s the kind of content I’m going to create.

The thing is, this is how I used to think anyway, I don’t know whether I’d say people go wrong, but I used to see them as three separate activities, blogging, social media, and creating paid for content. I’d think, “Well, I’ve got to create the paid content. It’s got to be amazing, obviously. But then I have to blog about it in a way that doesn’t give the game away. But then I also have to do some social media as well. It feels there’s so much to do.” Then I realized it’s all the same. It’s all the same content. So what I do now is it doesn’t matter whether it was a piece of paid content or a free lead magnet or social media content. I now spend 15 minutes every single day, chunking a topic down into five points. And at the end of the week, that’s rounded up into a blog post. And if it’s suitable for it to be or maybe I’ve done it deliberately to be a piece of paid content, I’ll make a tutorial video and then that’s a module in my course.

Now, in theory, I suppose, you could go through my blog, and my YouTube videos, and my free courses, and my Instagram and probably piece together everything that’s in my paid content, but it’d be a hell of a job to try and find it all in the right order. So I think my biggest piece of advice is don’t worry. It’s almost impossible to give the game away. Your paid content, people pay for your expertise, your coaching, your support to have the right things in the right order. Sometimes I hold some bits back, but often it’s nothing. I don’t. And I use this opportunity to organically test everything. So in the last few weeks, I’ve produced two new lead magnet pieces of content just by dripping out every day 15 minutes of writing a day, put it into a blog post, turn it into a PDF on the Friday, job done. It means I’ve been able to test all the content organically.

So I’m now about to embark on a massive redesign of some of my main flagship course, but I’ll be using it to update blog post, drip it out, get feedback on the content, see if I’ve missed anything, and then re-record the video at the end of that week. I also then, normally, on a Friday, talk through the points on Instagram Live, save it to Instagram TV. If I’ve got time, it gets those five chances, make five different pins to go on Pinterest. It’s just repurposing to the max and not being precious about your content because you are the only person that sees all of your contents.

There’s no way someone, unless they are obsessively following you and reading all your stuff, there’s no way they’re going to put it all together and think, “Well, yeah, I think I’ve read it. I think she’s taught me everything she could possibly have to teach me in Instagram captions.” No one’s ever going to say that. So I think it only helps and I’m someone who’s pretty generous with free content anyway. So for me, it really massively helped me to quickly develop a large amount of content and test it, validate it, and then it finds its place in my paid content.

Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s awesome. If you were to just back at the napkin guess, what percentage of your time is spent making content versus a repurposing/distribution or marketing of the content, if you will? So the actual content creation and then all that other stuff, what’s the split?

Melissa Love: That’s a good question. If I think about it, let’s say interacting in groups and managing the content, I probably spend a day a week, but that paid content, probably another day creating design, resources, themes, and other things. But I write, first of all, in a Google document and my team actually repurpose it into the social media posts and the Pinterest pins. So actually, this is a [inaudible] we were able to get here is in the last three months that we’ve got this workflow down, I relaxed enough to just give everyone the power to do it and me to take a step back. So all I’m really doing is creating a Google document and a video on a Friday and the rest now happens pretty seamlessly. All my emails get sent out. They’re written by my marketing manager.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

Melissa Love: Yeah. And even things that I used to do independently, if you’re on my list or in any of my groups, you’ll get an email every Monday called Motivational Mindset Monday, I think it is, and it’s normally a funny story that relates to a business principle or a design principle. I used to write that every week and now, that has become the intro to the blog post that introduces the whole week. It goes out to my whole list. I often deliver it in an Instagram story. So I’ve just suddenly wised up to the back page the same.

And then once you get your workflow down and you can outsource a little bit of your graphic and copywriting that goes in emails and socials to other, then suddenly, you really accelerate what you can achieve with the time you’ve got. When you’re not doing all the jobs like write the content, create the graphic, chunk it, get it in the right format for this platform and that one, that would probably be another day’s work for me if I wasn’t outsourcing that.

Chris Badgett: So you were saying that when you’re giving out all this content, you discovered that you weren’t fearful around giving all this stuff away because inside your paid areas, there’s so much other value that comes in getting the right thing at the right time with support and coaching or just that curation aspect.

Melissa Love: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: I just wanted you to know, I, a hundred percent, have seen, agree with. It works. In some coaching programs I’m in, the order is just as important as the volume of stuff and you don’t need everything instantly all at once. So just that guide through the content or through the methods to the right tool at the right time is super important. So in that light, what have you learned running a membership site on how to do onboarding and activate to avoid overwhelm in your members? It just helped. I know that’s a big question, but what are some tips there?

Melissa Love: Well, I don’t know if we’ve talked about this before, but when I launched the membership, and I still use it as a [inaudible], it was very much join the membership, we’ll help manage and not to be overwhelm. We’ll show you what to do and when.

Chris Badgett: That’s funny, that was literally in your messaging. I just now remembered that. That’s awesome. Yeah.

Melissa Love: In the past intake, 200 people joined and instantly, they’re overwhelmed. They were like, “We’re overwhelmed.” I’m like, “Oh, my god [crosstalk].” This is not why [crosstalk]. I don’t know where to start. So what I did was I placed a lot of the content at getting start to track the first three mini courses. I completely redid you the dashboard. We’ve got a 28-day onboarding series of emails and it was good. That killed it dead because I said, “Well, you have to watch this video,” and it lays out the first three to six months of what they should do in what order, what assets they should go to first on the dashboard. I then thought, “Do you know what? The onboarding is so crucial and it’s almost indistinguishable from retention.” So we worked out if they don’t join the Facebook group and they don’t meet one of us in a call within these 10 days, we’re probably not going to retain them, especially when we get people coming on a one-pound trial for their first month.

So we do two things. They get a Bonjoro or actually, I’ve changed that to VideoAsk when they first joined. It’s a personal thing for me and it just says hey, I saw you joined the membership. Just wanted to let you know-You know-

Chris Badgett: What’s a VideoAsk? Is that a strategy or a tool?

Melissa Love: It’s a tool. It’s from the team behind Typeform. So if you go onto the design space and you go… I don’t think it’s on the homepage, it’s certainly on the info page. There’s a little video and you press it and I say, “Hey, do you want to ask me a question?” And I get the notification on my phone. I just reply back with a video. So it’s asynchronous video messaging. [crosstalk] as well, but that’s going really well. But I’ve got a blast one that goes out to them when they first register and it’s just me literally in my yoga clothes. It’s really informal and it’s really fun and a lot of people reply and go, “Wow, that was a cool video message.”

Then the other thing is I’ve got an automation running in my email software that if people have joined in the last seven days, they get an email two days before the Wednesday, inviting them to a new member call with two reminders because I really want them on that call. In that call, they tell me about that business. We mock up their next first three months. We make connection. I get them to commit to coming to a coworking session on a Tuesday or whatever the next thing is. We do invite them to the social event personally.

We welcome them into the group on a Thursday. I can then check, if they don’t show up to the welcome meeting, I’ll email them and say, “Listen, I missed you. I really want to get in a call with you. This is one of the key parts of the membership that you get an onboarding call. If you’re serious about this, take advantage of it. I’m here whenever you need me.” That helps you make a connection and they get very excited to once they have a personal relationship with you. Then they’re much more likely to come along to…

The real needle movers in our membership are things like, and this is another good one that I found really good for managing my time and my stress levels as well because the other thing we introduced was a 15-minute SOS call. If it’s not something you can ask in a group because it’s too personal or you just need to speak to me about it, you can book a one-to-one 15-minute call at any time. So at first, I thought, “I’m going to get thousands of these and it’s going to be a disaster.” Actually. I probably only do one or two a month because at the same time, we introduced a three-hour coworking session every Tuesday from 1:00 ’til 4:00 PM. It covers both the UK and US time zones, which is good, and it’s a big, long chunk of time. I know I’m busy every week for three hours, but in that three hours, we’re here on Zoom, sound off, everyone’s head down working. I tell them to come and work and their marketing fixed stuff, but I’ve got assigned rooms. I can take them to a little room, get them unstuck.

So a lot of people now known to save up their questions and problems either for coworking or the monthly hot seat calls. So that has just been brilliant and the people who turned up regularly to that are the ones who are real action-takers, the ones who they’re week in, week out getting their value and turning it into coworking just on it. They’re always member of the month. It’s normally someone who I see a lot, who I see really performing.

So all those interactive sticky elements and we also have member of the month, they win a big hamper and it’s all very exciting. So all of those things that make people feel that they can get to you, even though you’re managing that process quite carefully so that it doesn’t take over your life, those are the things that you can tell people about if you onboard them properly. And they think, “Ah, okay. I know I can get help whenever I need it. I’ll stop panicking.” People panickly zone out and they don’t engage, then they’re like, “I’m not getting value. I haven’t had time to use this because it all seems too much.”

Chris Badgett: Wow. I think I’m going to turn that into eBook and give you credit for that. If you’re listening in your earbuds or you’re watching this on YouTube, I would encourage you to rewind, go back and just write down that list of what Melissa said because what I think a good coach does is they compress decades into days. So through lots of experience, trial and error, things that work, things that didn’t work, you just rattled off a list that took you like a long time and a lot of iterations to figure out and it’s still a work in progress, but that’s some really good tips there. It was so good, I want to go to the other side of the conversion point.

So I think of a funnel as two sides, the marketing funnel and then the onboarding, activation, advocacy funnel on the other side. But if we go back through the conversion point, what advice do you have for people to go from let’s say they’re an expert, they’re building their tribe and they want to put their flag in the ground. They’re super passionate. They’re like, “I’m going to be here for a long time,” but maybe they’re not great. Have a big business, marketing background. How do you go from zero to 10 enrollments? What’s some tips you have there. And I know that’s a broad question, but if you could give somebody some advice without overwhelming them, how do you get your first 10 people to enroll?

Melissa Love: Well, you do have to have an audience and if you’re very lucky, you’ll enroll 1% of your audience, of [inaudible] audience.

Chris Badgett: So would it be fair to say that you would not recommend even messing with the site, the membership site, and the e-commerce, and all that stuff until you’ve started building audience for free, follow your content, email, all that?

Melissa Love: Yeah. I mean, depends on how big a splash you wanted to do. I mean, the easiest thing to do is to build a very small audience, it can just be a hundred or so people, who are very loyal and very active and you can get some people on board for a cheap or free beta test to get into your program. If you bring 10 people through at half price, you’ll get takers for cheaper for you or near as. You’ve then got testimonials, and you’ve had your tires kicked, and you’ve worked out what works and what doesn’t, and you’ve got advocates, you can sign up as affiliates. So you can start really small, but you’ve got to find a way of at least getting your beta testers in and the way you’re going to do that is with some really good free content where they can trust that they’re not going to waste their time by giving you their time.

I’d say a fairly big marketing name saying lead magnets and list building is dead. This was one of his ads this week. And I thought, “Well, I’m pulling in 200 subscribers a week with my lead magnets, so I don’t think it’s dead. Sorry.” Not in my humble experience. So they work if it’s something that people want. So all free content that people might sign up for is 100% based on the emotion-based research that I do. So I know people are struggling with these things.

Chris Badgett: Can you sprinkle a little color on that from your personal story? Because it sounds like, if I understand your history correctly, there was a moment where you, and maybe that happened in parallel, but where you were really focused on photographers and then you started focusing on designers and agencies. So at some point, that designer agency group was small in the beginning. When did you like all right, there’s something here? Why did that pivot happen or what was the genesis of building that community?

Melissa Love: I think I was very lucky. I was a fairly early adopter of Divi and when it first… I don’t know, let’s say years ago, it was a smaller community. So from a sharing sites they’ve built and people go, “Wow, your site’s really different. I’ve not really seen anything like that before. That’s great. How did you do that? And how did you do that?” So I’d get a lot of… and then it would be a thing like, “What are you working on? I can’t wait ’til you post your next site. We love seeing what you do.”

And then I got featured by Divi and I was one of their featured designers. And so I started getting lots of traffic from their blog, on their site and lots of people started approaching me saying, “Do you do business mentoring?” Then I launched the Divi templates and I was the first person to ever sell a third-party Divi product. Now it’s a huge industry. So I think I just got a lot of interest in well, I’d like to do that. I’d like to sell. I’d like to have more passive income and I’d like to know how you got from one-to-one to more one-to-many.

So it was more like people ask me a lot and so I started a Facebook group, which I still run today, called Build Your Website Business with Melissa Love. We do regular training in there. I do have a program for web designers, which I took about 20 people through, beta tested it. Decided high-ticket coaching wasn’t for me. I enjoyed it, but it was intense. I did feel I wanted a more inclusive membership style. So when I built the membership, it was with a view to building those people in as well. So it did happen very organically. I didn’t set out to target the message.

Chris Badgett: But it sounds like you were sharing what you were doing. You were being… what’s the word for it? You were sharing what you were up to. In order to attract people, you have to be doing something, like you have to have some content out there. I’ve seen that work for a lot of people where they’re just sharing their journey and their community literally comes to them. It’s not like here, you’re convincing people. They just like what they’re seeing.

Melissa Love: I think something that’s happened over the last year, and I’ve certainly taken it on board, is it’s really good to share the absolute highs and lows of your story. I don’t know if I’ve told you this story, but my very first business wasn’t in design, I invested and so did my husband, kindly, we were doing organic food box deliveries and we lost a ton of money, and imagine that, I think it was like pound £25,000 in that first business. It failed terribly and one of the reasons it failed because I actually… we had to pay someone nearly £10,000 to build this e-commerce website. Obviously, I don’t know [crosstalk].

But it’s a great story that I’ve only just started telling me in the last few months and people say, “It’s so good to hear that you have failed massively and you carried on.” And I think what’s happened in the last year globally has been quite good for honesty and people really truth-telling and saying, “Actually, you can pivot your business. You can pick yourself up off the ground.” It is okay to share your stories and your ups and downs because it’s helpful to people who… if you’re saying join my community because I can give you a shortcut, you have to also say, “My journey was pretty rough at times and these are some of the places I stumbled, so you won’t have to, and you can only really get genuine buy-in if you’re genuinely honest about things that haven’t worked for you.” So I say, “Don’t worry about sharing your story. It’s all learning.”

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s great advice. You brushed over something real quick. I just want to go back and park on this. It sounds like you were debating between high-ticket coaching, which I think I would say is something like over $10,000 a year or something maybe 20, maybe even 30 and up, but you said you decided to do more of a membership style, which is more inclusive, meaning it wasn’t necessarily for rich people or something like that. It’s more approachable for everybody. I totally get that. So tell us more about that, just your head space when you were like, “Okay, I can put a course on Udemy and make 50 bucks. I can be a $30,000 a year coach per client or I can do something in the middle with a membership site.” What was your thinking around there?

Melissa Love: Well, it’s interesting. I’m not going to say it got swept away with it, but I was in a coaching program, it’s a very well-known one, which I think it costs around $11,000, the biggest investment I’ve ever made in coaching. It was pretty full on people and it was little like how many calls you’re doing. How much money he’s ever made today? People who had setters and closers. It didn’t sit well with me because I wasn’t prepared to outsource my sales calls, but I was doing lots of them, and I was closing them quite well, and they were coming on to my beta program. But I didn’t enjoy doing it. I wanted something to be so good that it sold itself. But nothing sells itself when it’s 10,000. I was selling mine for about $3,000, the beta price. Nothing sells itself at that price without a call.

And then in the call, you’re not meant to try and solve their problems. You’re just focused on the sale. I know how to structure a sales call. I [inaudible] enjoy it. I’m just going to help people. So actually, I took my first lot through my program, which was great because that repaid my investment. And then I thought, “I don’t want to do this. I know it. I don’t like this competitive, these high-ticket marketers. It’s not my jam at all.” I went to Mike and Kelly’s conference for the membership guides and I can’t remember what it was called now, Retain, that’s it, thinking, “Well, I’ve got a course already. I’ve tried the high-ticket, wasn’t for me. What I’m definitely not going to do is start a membership because that sounds like really hard work.” So by the end of the week, end of the conference, I was like, “I’m starting a membership.” I was like, ‘This is for me.”

It was just the most amazing thing because in the coffee breaks with Kaye, actually, and my friend, Lisa, here is also member of the group. I’m like, “Who did you meet at coffee break,” and I’m like I met a guy who helps people rescue frogs. He’s got 20,000 members. We were coming back at coffee break and these people are amazing. I met someone who coaches people how to win ultimate Frisbee. I mean, just brilliant things that people were doing and that all of them talked about I love running my community. I love the people in it. And I thought, “That’s what I want,” where someone might just join because £35, it’s not a life-or-death situation. You don’t need an hour sales call. I happily jump on with people all the time for 15 minutes just to talk through what it is, they tell me that problems. I don’t sell something. I say, “Yup, we’ve got resources that can meet those needs. I think you should jump in. Cool, let’s do it.”

That kind of thing I can do. If you’ve ever been on sales call for high-ticket coaching, you know what they’re doing, they’re closing you. I’ve never felt like I wanted to put anyone in a position where they say, “I don’t want people to say, “Oh, I have to ask my partner,” or all of those things. You don’t need to do that. Just get your credit card out now. It’s just not me. I’m like the anti-sales person. So for me, a membership is a really good blend of… it’s not even, like selling my previous course for $249, which was still a bargain, but it’s still not even that. Saying that, I’m now getting quite a few people joining at my full annual price, which is amazing without a sales call or anything and I really appreciate that. And most of those people will say, “Hey, I just joined. I’m so excited because I’ve been reading your blogs for ages,” or, “Following on Instagram,” or, “I’m in your group.”

So I know that the free content works. I know that I’ve proven myself again, and again, and again because I give away so much for free. But when they get to the point where it’s just like, is $35 too much? No way. It’s a no-brainer because they trust you already.

Chris Badgett: And as of this recording, you have a £1 trial as well too, right?

Melissa Love: I do.

Chris Badgett: Which is like the ultimate sales person.

Melissa Love: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Okay, well take a dollar, take it for a test drive. If you like it stay, if not, no hard feelings or whatever. I mean, it’s the most low-pressure sale there is. I love that. I love that.

Melissa Love: And they get everything for the pound as well. I send them a personal note in the post. I send them the video message. They get on a call. They get the strategy.

Chris Badgett: I love that you have an abundance mindset because it’s easy, with these types of sites, to have the scarcity mindset. Not that that’s bad, you need to protect your stuff, and protect your assets, and your content is valuable, but that’s cool to hear that you hook them up. You’re assuming they’re going to stay, so give them the good stuff. I love that.

Melissa Love: I think for me now, there’s enough that I’ve just hired, we’ve just taken on a community manager. And as we go along, she’s just been getting used to scheduling events and doing that stuff. I need to get hiring as well as do personal things, more personal check-ins. So it’s not just me taking some of the pressure off because I still think there’s another level of if we don’t get them there, we need to get them in and get them to see and feel how good it is to take action, to have people you can go to, to be in community. So there’s more work to do there in terms of retention for us, but you’re right, the abundance mindset is reading because people feel it. If they’re just a tribal member and they know it, t’s not like being part of the proper gang.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, yeah, that’s was true. That’s true. Well, in the spirit of giving, do you have some free resources? What are some free resources people listening to this want to go into your world? What do you recommend?

Melissa Love: Well, just as we’ve been talking about content creation, you might find it interesting to see how I’ve done these, but I’m really focusing at the moment on content upgrades on my blog because that’s what my coach has told me I have to do, so I’m doing it. I’m in a coaching program too and I always do what I’m told and breaking it through. The first one is the DIY Your Website eBook. If you’ve ever built your own website and you think it’s all right, but there’s something about it that’s not very polished-

Chris Badgett: Well, I can’t put my finger on it. I don’t know what it is.

Melissa Love: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Melissa Love: This book puts your finger on it. And the second one is DIY Your Website Launch and Build Checklist. So if you ever think, “Should I do this first in WordPress or should I do this in my hosting or should I do this first,” this will tell you exactly what to do so you don’t forget anything, in what order, right through to launching, and security, and SEO, and all that kind of stuff. So it’s my personal workflow when I’m building sites, but both of these I created over the course of a week, mostly on Instagram. So if you download them both, we’ll put links in the show notes, I’m sure. You can follow it back over my Instagram from a few weeks ago and seeing how I chunked it down into tiny micro bits of content and then gathered it all together at the end of the week and turn it into either a PDF or a blog post.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And tell us one more time about the Tribe theme and how people can get it.

Melissa Love: Right. So the Tribe theme is for Divi and it’s also for Elemental, which we’re just releasing at the moment. What it is, it’s got every page. You can conceivably need for a coaching website. It’s got about pages, information, testimonials, sales pages, email signup, email thank you, lead magnet integrate. Plus, I’ve done all the templates for the Lifter areas. So single lesson course, membership pages, and they were styled using all the different Lifter shortcodes. So if you’re using a page builder, it unlocks A, the magic of shortcodes, but B, it’s going to just save you a ton of time.

And as Chris knows, I like control, really like control over the design of how things look. So this takes advantage of some of the really cool things, which you might not notice like instead of using the course pages, your sales page, you can redirect it to any other page in your site and of course, that’s when you redirect it to your beautiful sales page. It also includes leave comments, so it’ll start out with the product area. So I know lots of people they might sell a mix of things like digital downloads or t-shirts, and courses, and events. So I wanted to leave comments with people who are going to potentially have a really varied basket fits in one transaction. SO that’s all done as well for you.

Chris Badgett: That’s really cool. I want to just send people out on one final question here. Since you’ve been at this in a while, I’m trying to mine all the value I can for the listener, who may be a coach of some kind or aspiring, expert in some niche or it could be a website building professional who maybe has a client like that or a marketer. So there’s lots of different kind of people, types of people that listen to this audience, but in all these cases, it’s possible for business and entrepreneurship to take over life. What would you advise for people so that the business doesn’t take over everything?

Melissa Love: That’s such a good question. I’ve got two pieces of advice here. The first one is just be yourself in your business, so then you don’t feel like it’s work like I need to switch in and out of different personalities. I really enjoy having really quite an informal presence online. So just having a bit of fun with it instead of feeling like you have to present some front [inaudible].

Secondly, I always think there’s three types of people you want in your life. I have a couple friends, [inaudible] and Lisa, you need people who are on the same journey as you so that you can test ideas. So you can say to me, “A quick sanity check, is this crazy? I’m thinking of doing this, what do you guys think?” You can just pour out the stresses of where you are. So I’ve found that yes, I’ve got great friends, very close friends. I switch off every Friday at 3:00 and I head to the beach for drinks. I’ve got close friends, but I also have those business friends who understand what it’s like to juggle a business. So have some people who are on that journey with you.

And the other thing I find really helps, obviously, I would say is the page widgets. Get into a membership or coaching program. It doesn’t have to cost you. I belong to just fairly low-cost ones, but I really value them for being able to get answers and help and just seeing there are friends on the same journey really relaxes me. Seeing that everyone has the same struggles because it can be a bit lonely. When you look around you think, “Gosh, that person is really successful. I’m falling behind.” That to me is a stressor. So I’ve engineered my business life to give me reassurance, obviously, as well as spending time with my family and friends.

Chris Badgett: Another round of words of wisdom from Melissa Love. You can find her at thedesignspace.co. Thank you so much for coming on another episode of LMScast. I really appreciate it.

Melissa Love: Love it. I’ll be back soon, I’m sure. I love it.

Chris Badgett: All right.

The post How to Create a Successful Membership Site with Melissa Love appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

View Details

Learn how to set up payment plans for your online business with PayFlexi in this episode of the LMScast podcast hosted by Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. Joining us are Tolu and Stanley from PayFlexi, which is a flexible payments infrastructure for your online business where customers can pay in installments for products you sell, making your products accessible to more people.

PayFlexi does integrate with WooCommerce and even LifterLMS directly, so if you’re a LifterLMS or WooCommerce user already, check out their solution at PayFlexi.co. PayFlexi can be used for education, e-commerce, invoicing, or any environment where you want customers to be able to split their payments.

About 2 years ago, Stanley and Tolu got together to work on infrastructure products for institutes to accept electronic payments, which is mostly just credit, and the idea for PayFlexi came about when they wanted to create a system that would work for people who may not qualify for traditional credit.

With PayFlexi alongside LifterLMS, there are all kinds of neat integrations. For example, you can require users to complete their payment installments before getting access to a specific course or membership.

The process for getting started with PayFlexi alongside LifterLMS is pretty seamless. You just need LifterLMS installed, PayFlexi installed, and an account with PayFlexi to get your API keys to connect to your website. Then the payment terms are set up, and PayFlexi automatically knows when to enroll that student in a course based on their payment schedule managed by PayFlexi, but paid through your payment gateway on your website.

PayFlexi is based in Lagos, Nigeria, which is quickly becoming a tech innovation center in Nigeria and for Africa. Many tech companies for WordPress have been coming out of Lagos recently, including Paystack, which has recently sold to Stripe.

There’s a specific LifterLMS – PayFlexi integration created by PayFlexi, so you can check that out if you’re interested in offering payments in installments to your customers in any way or seeing how their system works. Be sure to let them know you saw Tolu and Stanley on LMScast.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by two special guests. We’ve got Tolu and Stanley from PayFlexi. You can find that at PayFlexi.co, and if you’re picking up what we’re laying down here on this episode, head on over to the LMScast website, do a search for PayFlexi, and you’ll find links to everything we talk about. But first, Stanley and Tolu, welcome to the call.

Tolu: We’re glad to be here. Thank you, Chris.

Stanely: Thanks a lot, Chris, for having us here. Yeah, we appreciate this.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, absolutely. And I’m really excited to interview you guys. For the listener out there, when I look at what our users do with learning management system, one of the things that’s most important to them is e-commerce. So, when you go into the e-commerce part of selling training or selling access to a remote school, what is PayFlexi? How do you describe it to somebody who isn’t really aware of it yet?

Stanely: Okay. So, PayFlexi is in simple terms, it’s a payment plan solution that enable businesses to offer flexible payment option, or flexible payment plans to their customer. So we can use it across different categories, in terms of for education, for e-commerce, for invoicing. As long as you want to give your customer the option to split their payments, then you can use PayFlexi to do that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So how does it consider when they get access to the product, or whatever it is they’re buying, do they get it after they’re done paying or they get it at the beginning? How does that work?

Stanely: No. So for PayFlexi, actually you get access to the service or to the product after completing the entire payment. So that’s how PayFlexi works for now, makes it different from other payment plans.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, which is really cool. And you guys integrate with LifterLMS, WooCommerce, am I correct? And then Easy Digital Downloads?

Stanely: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: What are the major e-commerce integrations that you have?

Tolu: So currently we’re integrate with [inaudible], with WooCommerce, with LifterLMS and we should probably start from there, Easy Digital Downloads. And currently we have other tools in the pipeline that we’re currently rolling out. Other people pay for services or for products which will eventually be the… which is at the pipeline, and we’re starting to roll out the [inaudible].

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Well, what inspired you guys to make the PayFlexi product and come into this space? What is the origin story of PayFlexi?

Tolu: So it’s like 24 months ago, like two years ago, myself and Stanley, we got together to work on products. We set out to build infrastructure for institutes to accept electrical payment. And so largely on the internet, that’s… Yeah and that’s almost just credit. But we wanted to do it so it’s a little bit of a twist and one, because credit starts readily available, and also it’s based on what’s called a grading or a credit system, or [inaudible]. So we thought, why don’t we democratize the old scoring system, and do something that people who might not qualify to get traditional credit, who so want to pay for services, for goods for products or be it in a flexible way, and they would rather space the payments than not get the actual product itself. So we started working on it, and in a few months we add some early add-on tests. And what will interest you is we also found out that sub-tractional retail stores into these in-apps.

They just have an inside tracing services. So we thought if this is already available and people pay with this way and manner, we might credit mainstream and make other people’s bills get their hands on it. And so that for us, is the program’s doing. So we want to offer credit, but we know not everybody will get credit.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s really cool.

Tolu: And for those who get credit, we also don’t want them to democratize [inaudible], and we want them to still be able to be for goods and services. That’s the story.

Chris Badgett: I love that mission. I’ve never heard that. There’s a funny saying in WordPress, that everybody is trying to democratize something, like I’m trying to democratize education. I’ve never heard democratize credit, but that makes complete sense. It’s just kind of leveling the playing field. I got into WordPress in 2008, just as a regular user and a blogger. And I thought I was late to the party. We’re recording this in 2021, and there’s still so many businesses, like you mentioned, the mainstream businesses that have credit systems that have yet to go through the digital transformation. So I don’t think you’re late.

Stanely: We’re not at all.

Chris Badgett: There’s still a lot of time-

Tolu: We hope not.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s super cool. I love that story. That’s awesome. And as you’re talking, and as I’ve come to learn more and more about PayFlexi, there’s a lot of focus in the e-commerce world on recurring revenue, but not this kind of credit system like you’re talking about, which is like such a gap in the market. So I’m so glad you guys built that for-

Stanely: Thanks a lot Chris, yeah.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s a good find. That’s a big opportunity and you’re basically allowing anybody to be a bank, and offer financing, which is… Yeah.

Stanely: Exactly.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That is super cool. Well, what’s the user experience for just a regular user, somebody who’s not a developer, who they like this idea of having a credit system, where they want to sell access to, let’s say, LifterLMS powered course or membership, and they don’t want the person to get in until they finished their financing and building up to it. What do they do? What do they need to install? What’s the fastest, easiest way to get started?

Stanely: Yeah. So the process is quite seamless for us. So what we’ve done so far is to do more native integration, like a platform like LifterLMS. So thanks for LifterLMS for the support in getting that through. So the entire process involves a course instructor or course context owner, basically who have a license to LifterLMS. So they just install LifterLMS on their platform as their learning management system. And then they can then search for PayFlexi as an add-on on LifterLMS, then activate PayFlexi. Once they do that, they can then sign up. So basically the set up for the course owner, they sign up an account on PayFlexi, get their API keys, and then just add it to their set up on LifterLMS. And therefore a normal user who is coming to their course content or to the course platform for the first time, all they need to do is just to select PayFlexi as a payment plan option, and then they can then set up their payment plans.

So what they do is they can set up how much they want to pay, how long they want to pay, and then we just take over the entire process from there. Then for each, what we do is that we just track the payment automatically, and we make based on your credit payment method on file, we auto-debit them based on their schedule. And once the entire payment is complete, we auto-enroll them onto that particular course that they registered for, without even the course owner or the person paying for the course doing anything. So we automatically enroll them and then they get an email and say, “Oh, you’re now enrolled on this course,” immediately they finish their payment, and then they can go ahead and enjoy the course.

Chris Badgett: That is super cool. And how does it work with with the credit or the financing, where for the user, can they kind of build their own plan or they have to choose from like time and amounts, or how does that work?

Tolu: So what we’ve done, that is to give the product to the course creator, the content owner in this case. They accept their payment plan or leeway structure. They might say for this course, the maximum number of spread, or installments will allow just two or three. We have that power just from their PayFlexi [inaudible] dashboard. So they could set say, if the cost is lower than say maybe $200, you only allow two installments or three installments maximum. And so when that’s done, they own good score bearing. The costs they’ve done, would come and they’ll be presented with a check out that is quite user friendly. The preference is already set by the course creator would be available, and would be used to customize to check out that the course taker is presented with [inaudible].

So they will pay, they will make a commitment, an upfront, and subsequently the plan will kick in, and they won’t be charged as the plan goes. So if it’s the monthly plan, they will be charged monthly. If it’s a weekly plan, they will charge weekly, up until the last installment on the plan and then they can access the course in the system.

Chris Badgett: What happens when things don’t go well, like somebody doesn’t make a payment or the credit card fails or whatever, what is the experience for the user and what is the experience for the course?

Tolu: Okay. For the course creator, we would file them like it’s a failure if there is an instatement we couldn’t charge or we charged unsuccessfully. And so they know probably there’s just a delay, we will retry; normally two to three days we’ll retry, and then we’ll probably give up and loose five course rating. And failing attempts with person signing up for the payment plan for the course, we will file right away as a payment failure, and we will try perhaps you just need to [inaudible] their card, or from their bank accounts, where the card took this out. And it’s just so we would be able to track and report.

But in a case of total default, where they probably don’t want to take the course any longer, in that case, we will let probably the course creator undo that. And we’ll probably [inaudible] just report to them as how to proceed about money. But what we want is for them to be able to say, “You know what, there’s no way they’d pay all the money back,” because of for their pays will think probably they’re being surcharged. And we’re thinking around that at the moment. I’ll let Stanley probably chime in on that before we leave that topic.

Stanely: Yeah. So most of the time, what that does when a students or whoever is trying to take a course doesn’t complete a payment is that that also prolonge the duration in terms of when they get access to the course. So what that means is that if they have a payment figure at any time, they will not be able to have access to the course because they’ll not be able to enroll into that course until they complete that payment. So we notify them, and also depending on the payment method they have on file, and the country they are, we can also present them with other alternative payment methods and say, “You know what, if you’re having a challenge with…” So for example, if the person is here in Nigeria, we can say, “Okay, if you’re having a challenge with paying with card, then you can try mobile payments, or you can try bank transfer, you can try USSD.”

So these are payment options that are available here in Nigeria that people can try, so that they’ll be able to make payments. So those are some of the ways we try to help the course creator to get their money at the end of the day. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: That’s really cool. So they can switch the payment method in the middle if they need to.

Stanely: Exactly.

Tolu: That is the plan, yeah.

Stanely: Yeah.

Chris Badgett: You guys have thought of everything. The payments while they sound easy, there’s always all this detail, like when you really go through all these scenarios. And I’d love seeing a well thought out product, like PayFlexi, it’s super cool.

Tolu: Thank you.

Chris Badgett: For those of you out there listening, go to PayFlexi.co. Also check out the show notes, we have a link to a page they have about how to use it specifically with LifterLMS.

One of the interesting things about WordPress and for us at LifterLMS and for you at PayFlexi, is that WordPress is simultaneously built for the regular user, and the power user developer persons, which is a challenge, but also one of the coolest opportunities of WordPress. What do you have for developers who want to go further, what can they do with PayFlexi?

Tolu: Okay. So the [inaudible] is the way to go for not the power users, or even the power users, because it’s all able to encompassing it’s-

Chris Badgett: It’s feature complete.

Tolu: It’s feature complete, yes. That’s the word I was looking for. So if they want to do something more advance or just more customized, then they can go for a custom integration. And so we have [inaudible] that they can pull in, and just get going with PayFlexi, without maybe go through the [inaudible], as they were. So they can head over to developers at Payflexi.co, to get started on that. And that would allow the to do something like from today, to maybe a particular day to the future, give me a customized checkout, and I don’t want any installment. Just speed over that ending. So things like cost customizations and all the other [inaudible] that might not be readily exposed to the plugin ,they can access it. And we’re also working on exposing the rest of the APIs, that they can probably get going, probably they want to use something endless, we can power that as well. But if they have just any mean the feel they most probably might not be ready to cater to, that will be the way to [inaudible].

Chris Badgett: Very cool. And another just use case question for you, if somebody like a course creator has a site, and maybe some people just want to pay full price there, they don’t want or need financing, but others do, is it kind of something where they can go either way?

Tolu: Yes. So each checkouts with the payment plan customizations also included in this opportunity, the access to just make one payment. And so if you can afford the cost fee pay, and you don’t need to go on a payment plan, you might as well just make a one-payment for to cover the cost fees today. And so on the check out, so you can say, “I’m not making a payment plan, I want to make the complete payment today,” and that’s a relief.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s the thing with checkout these days, is people want options. Like I’ve always seen, in my own testing and seeing it in my experience, that if you offer like two options, let’s say like Stripe and PayPal, some people will go to PayPal, some people will go to Stripe. And now you guys having like a credit system is super smart, because basically, from my perspective, what’s happening in technology, is all the power is going to the user, which is a good thing. Like I want my package to arrive quickly, I want to do all my shopping on the phone, I want like an entire school on my website, I want to be my own bank, like it’s awesome. It’s just a great time to be in technology, and just empowering people and entrepreneurs and all that stuff. So that is super cool.

Tolu: It is, from [inaudible]. Something else probably to get it or that we should talk about right now is, we have something that we call Bring Your Own Payment Gateway.

Chris Badgett: Bring Your Own Payment Gateway. Well, I’m curious, what is this?

Tolu: Okay. So if you’re already set and accepted payment where you say Stripe, we want you to not do anything at all differently from what you already do. We want you to bring your Stripe account and use it on PayFlexi. So what that would do for businesses, is it would allow it to get started on day one. So as they sign on to use PayFlexi, they can already go live because they probably are already accepting payments via Stripe. And so we want to extend that to other payment gateways. Right now we have very many gateways supported. We have Stripe, because Stripe is available in like 44 countries, almost all of Europe, and you can use it from anywhere.

But for all gateways, they are not so maybe mainstream or widespread like Stripe. We have also Paystack. Paystack is heavily used in Africa and you can already get going with the existing Paystack accounts, Stripe accounts. We are working hard to have [inaudible 00:25:39] supported in a week. So with this, it makes one body, it makes getting started quite easy. We just put up a [inaudible 00:25:52] in their existing integrations or into vantages as they were, and they continue to process payments they way they’ve always done it. And we think, for us, we are quite excited about the possibilities, and be able to share that and not having drop anything, or maybe miss a payment, miss a payout because there’s this new product they want to try out, and it’s making them drop everything they’ve always used. No other for our customers or users. So we want it to be quite easy for them to me to get started with PayFlexi.

Chris Badgett: That is really cool. Bring Your Own Payment Gateway. And that’s going to help with people getting going and getting started. You just get to leverage… The future of the internet is like the network. So just by leveraging all those payment gateways is amazing. You mentioned Paystack. Did they come out of Lagos? Can you tell us about the Lagos tech community and innovation that’s happening?

Tolu: So Lagos is where it is up in this [inaudible]. When you’re talking about the tech community, when you’re talk about creative products coming out of Lagos is out of this world. And not only local businesses, even international businesses are from… They run a lot of power houses from Lagos. And it’s an exciting period. Yeah. So you have small businesses, like [inaudible], and then you have bigger businesses. You have businesses who have raised funding, who’ve received seed as a [inaudible]. Even with a serious [inaudible]. And so it’s an evolving ecosystem. It’s no longer the… what’s it called? The NASA of the growing… isn’t an environment that it used to be. And lastly, probably you already know, we’re just the tech hub of Africa, I’m able to say that, and we’re glad for what’s happening around this [inaudible].

Stanely: Yeah. So if I may chine in there, so for us, Legos we have a lot of talent here. So yeah there’s a lot of talent here, in bright minds. Was solving not only local problems, but continental problem and global problems like what were doing with PayFlexi. So it’s always lively here, so we have people who are willing to try new things, who are willing to commit to a new thing. So yeah so it is more like the innovation center for Nigeria and for Africa. So that’s why you see a lot of… Like Paystack, Paystack is from Lagos, but they went to YC. Gone through various stages of development, and now they’ve sold to Stripe. So Paystack is now a Stripe owned company. So you can see how amazing that is. That is to tell you how the ecosystem has improved over the years. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: How about what’s the WordPress scene like in Lagos? There’s different parts all over the world where there’s just a WordPress community stuff going on.

Tolu: Yeah. So WordPress is probably the platform on which was caught up [inaudible] right. Even myself, I certainly think of it with WordPress, they’re about certainly a [inaudible], certain things, there about. And this thing, like you’ve asked, at that time, Walter, the WordPress helper meets us. It’s really strong in Lagos. And it used to be this regular meetups. I, myself, I wouldn’t say I’m so article in that [inaudible] right now, but I know it. I know the [inaudible], I know they used to do it. I know the WordPress local community is resource strong here in Lagos and Nigeria generally.

Stanely: Yeah. So also the WordPress community, there’s a slack channel of over 1,000 currently active users on slack currently as of today. They’re active community on slack, and engaging and discussing various… also contributing to open source. So we have one of the contributors to WordPress here in Nigeria also. So he’s in Nigeria. So that tells you how the WordPress community is also growing in Nigeria.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s awesome. It’s always cool to see just, with the open source community, just all this innovation happening all over the world. It’s amazing. Well, awesome.

Well, Stanley and Tolu, I want to thank you for coming on the show. I want to encourage everybody that’s listening to go to PayFlexi.co. Also head on over to the LifterLMS podcast, and click on the links. We’ll have links to some info they have around PayFlexi for LifterLMS, their developer documentation, and other resources.

Stanley and Tolu, it’s been a pleasure hanging out with you. Do you have any final words for the people?

Tolu: So we want to see LifterLMS users, content creators, call on us on the [inaudible] PayFlexi, see how they like it. And we’ll always be on hand to call, any way we can. If they’re having any issue getting started, and you have questions, just reach out to us and we’ll be more than obliged to help.

Chris Badgett: Awesome.

Stanely: Yeah. So for me, I want to encourage all course content creator or creator in general not to leave money on the table. So one of the ways to do that… because when customers come to your platform, sometimes they don’t have the full money, and then they don’t have a payment option available, most of the time they’ll just leave without making a course purchase or making any commitment. So one of the ways for you to encourage your customers to jump into your course, or to register, is to give them the payment option. And that’s what PayFlexi basically does. So it give you that power to your customers to hop in to a plan that will make them committed to your course. So, I encourage everybody sign up to PayFlexi. And if you have any challenge, always reach out to us, and we are here to help you.

Thanks a lot, Chris, for this time.

Chris Badgett: Stanley, Tolu, it’s my pleasure. So head on over to PayFlexi.co and I can’t wait to do more collaboration with you folks. I love working with great companies and I highly recommend you check out PayFlexi. Have a great rest of your day.

Stanely: You, too. Yeah. Have a nice day. Bye.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post How to Set Up Payment Plans for Your Online Business with PayFlexi appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

LMScast – LifterLMS Podcast: Recent Episodes

By WordPress LMS Elearning Expert Chris Badgett and Entrepreneur & Online Marketing Business Strategy Expert Chris Badgett on Teaching, Education, WordPress Development & Online Business.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT