LMScast with Joshua Millage and Chris Badgett

Chris Badgett outlines a comprehensive, useful process for utilizing ChatGPT to create an online course that centers around your special skill. He emphasizes that while depending exclusively on AI results in generic. Low-value course content. ChatGPT should enhance your creativity rather than replace it. In order to determine the course’s path. He starts by selecting a targeted, outcome-driven topic and creating a distinct student avatar. The “Human Knowledge Dump,” a 20–100 page compilation of your thoughts, frameworks, notes, examples, and any pertinent research, is the foundation of his system. It provides ChatGPT with rich context, enabling it to produce material that genuinely sounds like you. Using this framework, ChatGPT assists in creating a solid course overview, well-structured lesson material. Scripts, slides, and talking points appropriate for various teaching modalities, including teleprompter delivery. Informal talking-head videos, and slide-based lessons. For accessibility and clarity, Chris advises creating written courses first, then turning them into video material. Following the creation of the course material, ChatGPT may assist in creating the course name. Sales page text, short and long descriptions, and even a launch marketing strategy. He ends by illustrating how to put everything together within LifterLMS, demonstrating how ChatGPT can greatly accelerate the construction of courses without compromising authenticity or quality when done correctly. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 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 Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, 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 Chris Badgett, and today we’re doing a solo episode about how to create an online course with ChatGPT, and to do it in an effective non cr cringey way so you can move faster without losing your voice and while actually creating a valuable, unique course. So the good news is. You’re listening to this or watching this right now in the podcast format. A lot of the things we’re gonna talk about here from an ideas and conceptual standpoint, we have created a full free course called Create an Online Course with ChatGPT that is available on the LifterLMS Academy. So you can head over to academy dot lifter lms.com. And sign up for the free course called Create an Online Course with ChatGPT. It has video walkthroughs, video demos, all the prompts, templates that you can use to create an online course with ChatGPT. But first, it’s important to note that ChatGPT is not going to do the whole course for you. If you try to do that it’s gonna come out generic. It won’t sound like you, you’ll lose your voice. But what ChatGPT is excellent at is being an assistant to you, a co-pilot to you. It will give you leverage, but you still have to create, and even just using all the templated prompts we use, you’re gonna create. A much better online course. Faster using ChatGPT now to go over some of the secret sauce of how to use ChatGPT correctly. ChatGPT is great at structure filling in gaps in research iteration, rewriting concepts, filling in the blanks, giving you a sounding board to bounce ideas off of or provide new insights. But it’s, if you don’t use it correctly, you’re just gonna end up with garbage in and then generic out. But the method that we teach in our free course called Create an Online Course with ChatGPT, we help you avoid all the mistakes of using ChatGPT in a suboptimal way. Basically what’s in the course is like seven kind of steps and ways of using ChatGPT. So the first is around selecting a topic and outcome. Next is creating your student avatar, your ideal learner profile. The next is to do a human knowledge dump, which is the secret sauce that makes working with ChatGPT effective, and I’m gonna go over that in detail in a little bit here. Then you can leverage ChatGPT to create an effective well-written course outline. Then you can actually use ChatGPT to create lesson, video scripts. Text content. Finally, you can optimize your course title and description or sales page content using ChatGPT. And then finally you can use ChatGPT to help you with your launch plan and marketing. So to get started. We actually have another course called the Perfect Offer Playbook. It’s not free, but offer construction is the foundation of any successful course. So instead of going to ChatGPT and saying make me an online course about how to get better at marketing that’s just. You could do that prompt and it will give you a course outline and stuff like that. That’s not really a strong offer. As an example you could do something more outcome focused how to get your first clients in seven days instead of marketing 1 0 1. But we’re starting to drill in on offer construction a little bit here. So part of the human work you have to do is to. Figure out your, who you’re helping, how you help them, which is their, your unique mechanism and the result that they want. Now that sounds simple. And you’ll hear copywriters use frameworks like how to get X and Z amount of time with without Y objection, something like that. These concepts sound simple, but to truly create a great offer, you really need to understand who you’re serving. What their hopes and dreams and pains are, and that’s all included in the free course we have on how to create an online course with ChatGPT. If you want to go deeper on offer construction, we have our perfect offer playbook because if you get the offer wrong, nothing else matters. And after that, after you get through some of these offer steps of understanding your student avatar. The result they’re seeking and how your unique mechanism, which is a course and a certain training concept, is gonna help. You have to do what’s called a human knowledge dump. So you have to fight the urge to ask ChatGPT to do all the just come up with all the content on its own. That’s not how it works. That’s where you get garbage in generic out. The human knowledge dump, think of it like a Google document. The great thing about ChatGPT is you don’t have to be super organized. You can just start copying and pasting some of your content into this document, and ultimately what we want to end up with a human knowledge dump. Somewhere around from 20 to a hundred pages of content. So in the human knowledge dump, this is about providing context for ChatGPT. So if whatever you’re teaching, I bet you have blog posts on the topic. Copy paste them into the Google document. If there’s like certain things that you really wanna cover in the course. Type it out okay, I’m going to teach about this thing and I really want to teach it in this way through these kind of three phases or milestones, the core concepts or big ideas that underlie my methodology, which is also your unique mechanism are X, Y, and Z. And then you can also pull in external resources, be like, Hey, I’m really influenced by. This influencer or this author, this subject matter expert, they have a core idea called X Here’s and then you copy like a piece of that content, put it into your human knowledge dump. If it’s a, it’s not like you’re stealing, it’s just like you’re doing research. ’cause you’re like, this is how research works. Like when you write a nonfiction book you get sources and you do research. You put it all together into a book, but in this case, we’re putting a course. And of course when you mention somebody else’s ideas or philosophies or things like that, you can always give them credit when you teach. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants and not just purely inventing from. A blank slate with no external influences. Put your external influences into the human knowledge dump. That’s the slowest part of creating an online course with ChatGPT. But it’s very important because what you’re doing is you’re asking ChatGPT to not just look at everything that it knows on what it’s been trained on, but you’re asking it to really focus in on. The human knowledge dump as like a very important part. If not the primary part of the source material for your training. Now what you’ve done is you’ve focused the AI onto. What’s most important, what’s unique. How you think about things. What your unique course is about. Who it’s for and what your kind of unique takes or mechanisms are. That’s the human knowledge dump. And once ChatGPT has that. By the way, in the free course on the Lifter Elements Academy. The prompts of you know how to do all these steps are there. Instead of just typing real quick, like this quick thing into ChatGPT, we have big prompts that you copy and paste in and replace the places with it with unique things about yours. For example, the next step is creating a course outline. And we have a special prompt for you that you copy and paste into ChatGPT and then that you include your human knowledge dump, either as a copy paste or as a PDF, that ChatGPT can then ingest and then it can create a course outline. If you skip the human knowledge dump and you just say, create a course about x. This episode of LMSCast is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my LifterLMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins. Card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. Chris Badgett: You’re gonna get something really generic, but when you do the human knowledge dump step, you’re gonna get a great looking course outline that’s unique to you, that’s exciting and fun and targeted and good. So do that. A couple of pro tips when we’re doing this work with ChatGPT. I like to keep it all in one thread. That way it has the context of everything you’ve discussed along the journey to creating the course. It has your human knowledge dump. Everything is in one thread, and when you’re doing something big with ChatGPT, like creating an entire online course, it’s important to stay organized and not end up on a million different threads and losing your place and doing things out of order and so on. That’s why our course on how to create an online course with ChatGPT, it gives you all that structure so that your course can flow out quickly and also in the correct order without. Skipping steps. So once we have the course outline, this is a pro move right here where a lot of course creators want to create videos and they want to create if they’re gonna use ChatGPT, they’re gonna create either teleprompter reads or talking bullet points or things to put on a slide deck. And you can do that. But I would encourage you, here’s my pro tip for you. To not skip the step of pretending that you’re doing a text only course, which can actually be fine. But one of the great things about ChatGPT is it’s awesome at text and humans are slow at writing text. So what I’m encourage you to do next, now that we have the course outline, all the context from the Human Knowledge dump clarity on our offer is that. We create a text only version of the course. So if someone were simply going to read the course without watching videos or listening to things the course text is there. Now this is also good because people have different consumption styles. Some people like to watch videos. Some people like to listen. Some people like to read. Some people like to get tactical and do worksheets and assignments and things like that, and you’re doing your students a great service by providing a text version of the course, even if you are most excited about making the videos and doing PowerPoint presentations or talking head or action motion videos. Put the text content in there. And that’s something that used to take a lot of time that you can do quickly with ChatGPT. So imagine a lesson ultimately is gonna have a video the text. So maybe somebody’s can’t play the video there at work or they’re on a plane and they don’t have their earbuds or whatever, and they’re excited and they want to, keep going. They can just read. So it’s good to have and a lesson when you build your course with Lifter L Mask and have multimedia content inside of lessons. It’s also good, by the way, for accessibility. So some one of your students may be hearing impaired, and by having the readable version, it’s great. The other great thing is. Once you’ve created the text content, and again, we have the prompt that you just copy and paste to do that in the flow in ChatGPT in the free course on the Lifter Elements Academy. You just need to follow the steps in the course. But once we have the lesson text content, if we’re gonna do video now we’re in a better position to do video production. So video production you have a ton of options here and it depends on your style. So now that the lesson, you have the text content, you can also ask ChatGPT to create. My personal style that I like to do is now that we know what this lesson’s about, create me a bullet list outline. To just jog my memory, so when I’m talking direct to camera, I can reference my outline and then it comes out in a casual, naturally delivered way. So ChatGPT will spit out that lesson’s outline for a talking head video so that I could record a video like I’m doing here, but have my notes to reference to keep me on pace. Another option you have is to actually create. Teleprompter read like some people really want the words perfect. And ChatGPT can easily take the concept from the lesson that’s written more like for reading and give you a script that you can teach the, on top of that content. And you can do that with a teleprompter or, read it on the screen as you’re delivering the video. It can also help you with creating slides if you wanna do a slideshow presentation. And in the course I also put a bonus lesson, and this isn’t I don’t really recommend this, but I just played around with this because I am just curious about ai. I actually cloned myself and made an AI version of myself that is not me, that can speak and deliver. In the course, I actually created a real course about course pricing, which you can take, and the lesson videos. In that one, I actually used my AI clone to deliver the content. So the way that worked is I clone myself using a tool called 11 Labs. And then, when I was at the step in, in the, how to create an online course with ChatGPT where we’re making video content. I had it create a script. Then I had my AI clone actually deliver the content for that lesson. Doing that, I didn’t just co. I didn’t do a bunch of copy pasting. And I would modify the scripts, make sure it was perfect. Add some nuance, cover some things that ChatGPT didn’t come up with. I’m constantly interjecting myself as a human in the loop with that pro project. So I don’t recommend making an AI clone of yourself. I was just doing it experimentally. But it is an option that you can do, which can speed up the process. But I personally like to have the, raw human element present. So that’s how you get to video. So the slowest parts of all this are creating the human know human knowledge dump. Then actually creating your lesson videos if you’re gonna do that, because that does take time. But if you use ChatGPT to create an online course, you can you can get through this whole flow 10 times faster than the world, the way it used to exist in the world before ai. So that’s the video production part. Next. I personally like to name a course at the end because. After all this work and all this insight, I often will come up with a better name for the course than in my initial planning stage. So we have a prompt in our free course to help you where you kind, you’re at the bottom of a long thread. You’ve been creating your course and it has all that context and you can ask it for name suggestions. And we have a specific prompt for that. As well as the course description, which a simple version is there’s two kinds of course descriptions. There’s like a quick description ChatGPT can help with that. We have prompt for that, but it can also create an entire sales page for the course that’s designed to encourage people to purchase or if it’s free, enroll in the course and ChatGPT is excellent at that. Again, there’s some, you want to be a human in the loop and like constantly, interject and modify and edit, because remember, writing is equal parts, research, writing and editing. So when you have ChatGPT as a course creator, assistant, you need to have that back and forth in the research. You need to have that back and forth in the writing. You need to have that back and forth in the editing where you’re interjecting yourself as a human in the loop. Then finally at this point, you’re done. You created an online course with ChatGPT. When I did this, I created an entire course focused on course and co coaching program pricing how to create optimal pricing. But I was able to go through that whole process of creating the entire online course, which is really valuable in a single day. And you can see that also over on academy dot lifter lms.com. That’s course is called the Course Pricing Focuser. So check that out. Then finally, once you’ve created all the raw materials. You have the text for these are the lesson names. And this is the syllabus, this is the course name. I have the words I want from my course description. The next step is to simply put it on your website. Put it on your LMS website. Now, obviously LifterLMS is a great option for actually publishing your course. And having your learning management system and processing the payments and all that. We have tutorials on how to set all that up really quickly, which we actually showed step by step with no Step skipped in the how to create an online course with ChatGPT course. So you can see how I moved everything from ChatGPT into my learning management system website powered by. LifterLMS. And then the next thing you need is to make sales, to generate revenue. We have a bonus lesson in how to do course marketing with ChatGPT and generate your first initial sales. I’m not gonna go over that in this podcast episode. But you just need to find that one in the bonus lessons that are included in the course. How to create an online course with ChatGPT that’s at academy dot lifter lms.com. AI is great, but it’s not going to replace you. You wanna be careful to continuously remain involved, to be the driver, to not try to delegate too much to ChatGPT. The wild thing about it is if you take our free course and you learn how to prompt correctly in the right order and do the human knowledge dump step, which really personalize it to you and how you think and stuff like that, you’re gonna end up with an amazing course in a very short amount of time. Compared to how long it used to take. So use ChatGPT as an assistant not to do the job for you. Follow our process, and you are going to create an awesome online course using ChatGPT. I’m Chris. I hope to see you in the course. If you have any questions about any of that, just reach out to us and build your course site with WordPress and LifterLMS and leverage ChatGPT to be your co-pilot on the journey. 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How To Create An Online Course With ChatGPT appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett shares the growth of creator burnout poses a danger to the prosperity of companies that rely on human ingenuity. Content development, editing, uploading, marketing, analytics, audience interaction, and customer service are all tasks that many producers attempt to manage on their own, which results in mental and physical strain. In addition to decreasing productivity, creativity, and consistency, this unrelenting pace can eventually cause artists to lose touch with the love that first motivated their work. Not only does burnout damage the individual, but it also negatively impacts the company, resulting in decreased quality, lost opportunities, and slower growth. In order to thrive, artists must create sustainable processes that prioritize high-impact work, assign or automate repetitive activities, and produce material in batches rather than continuously. To preserve energy and mental health, it’s critical to set boundaries between work and personal life. Take deliberate pauses, and practice self-care. Reestablishing a connection with the original intent of the work and reframing success in terms of sustainability and quality helps artists stay motivated, create better work, and make sure their business and themselves can prosper in the long run. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 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 Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, 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 Chris Badgett. Today we are doing a solo episode, and it’s just gonna be me. We’re gonna dive a little bit into some pain and help you find some solutions around what I call creator entrepreneur burnout. So if you’re listening to this, if you like this show, you are probably a creator. Whether that’s a course creator, a content creator, a media creator, an entrepreneur, you may be doing it full time. It might be a side hustle, what comes hand in hand with these activities? Burnout. And I see burnout everywhere in our industry. I’m constantly seeing entrepreneurs burnout, businesses fail that don’t need to. And I want to unpack some different ways that you can. Work through burnout, recognize burnout, and eventually, or ultimately overcome it. The main thing here is when you’re a creator or you’re building a business as an entrepreneur, there’s this invisible emotional la labor of always having to be the expert, to be the, if you’re leading the company or you’re leading the business. You have to have all the answers. You gotta come up with a strategy, you gotta do the execution. If you’re managing a team, you gotta guide the ship, if you will, and always being the expert can really burn you out. And one way to get past that is first in mindset of I don’t necessarily have all the answers. I may not have all the resources, but I can be extremely resourceful. So learning when to. Say, I don’t know, but I’m gonna go find that and be okay with taking the time to go find the answer, to not be the expert, and do some research, some reading, some podcast listening, reaching out to a friend or mentor for guidance and help that can help reduce the emotional labor of having to always be the expert. It’s also an indication when you feel that emotional labor. That it might be time to hire. Maybe you need a somebody who’s better than you at something, right? So I’ve done that a lot, like as a software company where I can’t write code. So I work with developers who know how to write code, and by definition, because I can’t write code. They’re all better than me, but that’s okay. We’re all on the train together, and I love this quote I heard from someone once, which is just because you’re on the train, it doesn’t mean you have to carry the luggage. So you can put some of that emotional weight down of always having to be, the expert or the top, and manage absolutely everything. Another thing that contributes to this pain, that kind of seeds, burnout. Is when passion turns into pressure. If you’re really driven like me, if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably a lifelong learner and you put a lot of pressure on yourself to continuously improve, to grow your business, to be a creator, create content, courses, businesses, webpage, all this stuff around your passion. So hopefully there is some element of passion to what you do. Making money is great and building a business is awesome, but if you have some passion about what you do that can definitely help. But then it’s a double-edged sword because we’ve all heard that quote that, don’t build a business around your passion or whatever you love, because you’re gonna end up hating it. There’s some truth to that. There’s truth to both sides. One side is be sure to build a business and be a creator around something that you’re truly passionate about. But the other side is you don’t have to take everything you’re passionate about and turn it into a business. ’cause that can be very exhausting. So I am, as an example, I’m really into learning. Just learning, becoming better, like self-guided learning. That’s why I love empowering course creators to send out these positive ripples of learning out into the world. It really lights me up. It’s how I live my life. It’s how I raise my kids. It’s how I approach everything of just enjoying the learning that makes us hu human and empowering others to have great learning experiences and design great learning experiences. I’m super passionate about that. I’m also passionate about some other things like travel or being outside in nature or some fitness and health stuff that I get into. If I were to take, let’s say, my ultra running passion, I’m a long distance runner. I recently completed a hundred mile run. If the thought crossed my mind is, oh, should I create a course about that too? I could and it might be a good idea, but I don’t need to put myself under the stress of always having to turn every passion into a business. And the other thing that’s really important to know about burnout is it’s really easy to confuse fatigue with failure. You might just be tired and need a break. All of us. Creator types and entrepreneur types. I know you can relate of going on vacation and all you’re doing is like thinking about work or, popping the laptop open and doing stuff while you’re supposed to be relaxing. So developing the skill of vacation and breaks and, time away and downtime and empty space is very powerful and it’s counterintuitive. It almost doesn’t make sense in society. Because there’s this mass message and also mass challenge where, you know, for many the, they have the opposite problem. It’s about, getting to work and getting things done. But if you’re here on this show, I bet you have the opposite problem, which is you are trying to do too much and you need to chill a little bit. I, this is a skill that I’m still trying to get better at. The older I got, the better I got at it. It’s been about 16 years as an entrepreneur and I’m way better at chilling or taking a break than I ever have been before. One major way I’ve done that is actually taking a six week sabbatical, which I’ve done a couple times, and that’s hugely beneficial. There’s that saying that it really takes two weeks on vacation to actually start to settle down and unplug. So by giving yourself this massive six weeks or even longer gap, you can really give yourself a chance to overcome the fatigue that has built up the chronic fatigue that you have just gotten used to and normalized. And you don’t always have to take a sabbatical. You can do, many things during the day. Like sometimes I’ll cut out for a run or go do something with my kids. Just learn how to take breaks. That’s just because you’re tired doesn’t mean your business is failing. You might need to take a break, even if things are tight. Like financially or you have deadlines, taking a break, getting good night’s sleep getting your mind off work can actually accelerate you and make you more productive. So in terms of time and capacity like that. Time is a weird thing. I personally love productivity and, being on, I set up my office to be super productive. But this constant pressure you put on yourself to produce, can lead to burnout. And one of the biggest insights I wanna leave with you on this note, which can really help with burnout. Is to value the time that you’re not really taking a break, but you’re not actively doing something. So if you sit down, like I’ll sit down in a chair over there and I actually have a 30 minute time block on my calendar where I call it strategy time to think strategically about the business with no specific focus beyond the prompt. How do I create more value than anybody else in the world for my audience or my customers? So I’ll just sit with that question, be quiet and listen to what comes up. And that’s hugely relieving from a burnout perspective. ’cause when you’re in the weeds as an entrepreneur, as a creator particularly if you’re a solopreneur or you have a small team you’re constantly zooming in and zooming out. By zooming out, you’re in the big picture, you’re thinking strategically, doing some high level project ideas, and then there’s this kind of medium layer where you’re doing more like project management and setting things up for yourself or for others. And then down in the weeds there’s like actually doing the work, right? So actually executing. And as you burn out, what happens is the first thing to go, in my experience. Is the strategy gets weak, and then in the middle layer then the project management gets weak. And then as you go down and you get more burned out, your execution of the details gets weak. So if you see yourself, if burning out at the detail level that’s definitely you’re getting close to the red line of burnout. So when you feel yourself start to be able to do better project management, to think strategically without pressure, you’re on an upward spiral out of burnout. And the thing about burnout is it’s a downward spiral. It doesn’t happen from one trauma. One trauma can cause a serious impact in your life. But for the most part, the kind of burnout I’m talking about is a, it’s a downward spiral that’s slow. It’s methodical. You start normalizing how you feel every day and your energy levels and your focus levels and your productivity, and it just feels normal, but you’re actually spiraling down and the goal is to get on the upward spiral and we’ll talk about some more tools to get on the upward spiral, but in terms of productivity. I like to unload my brain, so if you haven’t read the book, getting Things Done by David Allen, you gotta read it. It’s super old. The book changed my life. Some of the tools and filing systems and things mentioned in the book are outdated from a technology standpoint, but all the principles are rock solid. So I’m constantly trying to remove parallel processing outta my brain. And what I mean by that is. I don’t want to have to like, have a subconscious routine running, trying to remember when my next meeting is, or I gotta schedule this thing, or I gotta be here at this time, or I have a good idea, I need to put that somewhere. Or all kinds of things come up. So I’m constantly unloading my brain into a Google calendar, into Google documents that serve different functions on a notepad, on a piece of paper. Anytime something’s getting in my brain, that’s not what my main focus is for this time. I capture that in a digital or even paper brain, and that really helps reduce burnout because what happens is your head is like a cup and once you get too much water in there and it’s overflowing, you’re just very unproductive and on the downward spiral of burnout. The other thing. Just a pro tip with calendaring that I recommend is a lot of people think of the calendar as just commitments to other people. You could even say the same thing about an email inbox, and I’ll give you a tip about that too. But make meetings with yourself, with time blocks on your calendar, ideally on a recurring basis to prioritize certain things, like I mentioned that 30 minutes of strategic thinking time on Friday. I also have a block for like HR related tasks in my company on Fridays. And that way if an HR idea pops up. I put it where I capture that. Then when I get to my HR block on my calendar. It’s already waiting for me and I know what I need to work on. Or I respect that calendar invite, the same way I respect a meeting with somebody else who’s showing up on a Zoom call or in person at an event or something like that. So use your counter for yourself. I also email myself, so if I’m out running just like the whole thing where you have good business ideas in the shower and all that, it happens to me when I’m running or walking or out in nature. And I’ll pop open my phone when I have that idea. Do a voiced text memo to my inbox and just capture that. Just get outta my head and then my brain can relax so I can get back to. Running or hiking or whatever I’m doing. But when you just let that stuff swirl around and you never capture it it feels like you’re being productive. But productivity is not so much something that happens in your brain, it’s something that happens through systems. So I’m trying to give you a few systems here. And the most important thing is to unload your brain, reduce the amount of water carried in the cup. If you’re fortunate. I am to have the ability to be big picture, but also really down in the details. You gotta know which space you’re in and make time for those things. So like for example, when I’m going deep on a project and I’m in execution mode, most of Wednesday is dedicated for just that and I push everything out outside of that. So my Wednesday workday from the outside, if you look at me like. Somebody who does work. I’m a founder of a company, but I also do a ton of work. This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my LifterLMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. And when I’m working on it, like a specific hard detailed, deep project, the best work I do on those is on Wednesdays. ’cause I make the space for that and I keep that commitment to myself. So the other thing is really just thinking about time in a different way. So like the big picture and the detailed work. You can think about time in these different layers, right? There’s what, there’s, the moment you’re in right now, there’s like your day, there’s your week, there’s your month, there’s a quarter, there’s the year, there’s your three year and five year or even 10 year vision. These are all very different. Zoom in, zoom out levels on time. And the key is. If you’re a creator, entrepreneur, you’re highly creative, you’re highly innovative, problems and opportunity everywhere, and what happens is you may be zoomed out thinking, seeing all these problems and opportunities and all these strategies and all these things you want to do, and you try to jam it all into your day or into your week or into your month, and you just overfill it. So I’ve been through lots of iterations on this in terms of, annual planning systems, quarterly planning setting up the week on Sunday with priorities, doing my three most important things I need to get done today. I’ve tried a lot of these things and I still do a lot of those things, but the key is to have a system for each layer of time and know when. Schedule time to be in those different layers of time. So that’s just a really powerful way to just change a relationship with time and not overfill yourself. And the cool thing with capturing an idea for later is once you, I also, we also do a process at LifterLMS called Shape Up. There’s a book about it that the folks at 37 Signals wrote, which I highly recommend from a business planning and focus and prioritization and strategizing down to a plan system. I highly recommend Shape Up. It’s life changing, but whether you do shape up or something like quarterly planning or annual planning, the key to avoiding burnout. Is to not plan what you want to get done in a year and then work on all those things simultaneously. You have to give yourself permission to put something important on the back burner and you can always front load and prioritize whatever you think is the most important, but give yourself permission to have things wait and not work on too many things simultaneously. ’cause when you work on too many things simultaneously. That’s where the burnout, downward spiral just starts kicking up a notch. The other thing is to think about as a creator and as an entrepreneur, the dance and the balance between quality and consistency. So they’re both important, but if I had to choose one, I would choose consistency in terms of preventing burnout. Of course, we always wanna increase the quality. The work we do, the courses we make. The videos, we make the podcasts. And we make, the blogs, we write, all the our website. We just want to constantly improve quality. But what’s more important is showing up, every day, week, month, year, on a mission with vision, with values, and just consistently moving ahead. And being okay with not everything being a hundred percent perfect. The other thing that I find really helpful to avoid burnout is to. When it comes to being a creator, whether you’re creating a course or creating content. Podcast episodes. YouTube videos, blog articles, website, landing pages, marketing emails. The way I like to teach this or describe this, is to look at the act of writing as, excuse me, as three parts, three equal parts. So the first part is research. The second part is writing. The third part is editing. All right? And we’re not even talking about publishing and promotion. That’s a whole other thing. But what happens as a creator if we look through the lens of writing, is if there’s a problem, I can almost guarantee that one of those three areas is getting missed entirely. Or you are way over index on one part and not the other two. So if you’re going to, let’s say, just to use a really specific example, if I was gonna write what I believe would be a pillar, SEO piece of content for my website, I might give myself three days to do that. Three days of deep work. So instead of just jumping in and looking at the blank screen and being like, all right, let’s go, let’s see what I can get done in three days. I’m not gonna touch that. The writing part. On the first day, it’s all gonna be like research outlining just thinking and really structuring and looking at other similar pieces of content and doing research into the ideas I want to talk about and that sort of thing. So I would put a day in the research, I would put a day into actually writing it, and then I would put another full day into rewriting, editing. Ideally making it shorter ’cause we tend to put too much in. So good editing often comes up with something that’s shorter and really spend equal times in the research, the writing and the editing. And if you adopt that system, your quality’s gonna go up and your consistency will go up. If you value writing and you want to, if you were just writing as an example. I would have three days, or at least three solid blocks of time every week on a repeating recurring calendar reminder to gimme the system and the space to commit to what I wanted to do with my content creation. So that’s how to think about it. If you spend too much time, like in research, you might build this giant list of keywords and all this content you want to create. And that’s good to do. But if you never actually write anything. That’s a problem. Or if you write a lot of stuff and never edit it and you just ship it and move on to the next thing, you’re leaving opportunity on the table. So those are just some pro tips and it’ll feel you will start to burn out if all you’re doing is just one of those things. Like constantly just editing. Or constantly just researching or constantly writing without research or editing this, these, that’s the downward spiral to burnout. And in terms of just one more pro tip there, when it comes to content, whether that’s courses or videos or blogs, sometimes you don’t always need to create a new piece of content. You just need to go back to one of your greatest hits. And either make it better or burn it down and start over knowing what you know now and just replace that content or that lesson video. So you, this idea that you’re on this infinite treadmill where you have to create content and it’s always gotta be new and it’s always gotta, you gotta do all this content creation across 15 different platforms. That’s a recipe for burnout. So it’s more about focus systems and priorities. The other thing that really helps with burnout for entrepreneur creators is to work on the isolation issue. It’s funny because entrepreneurs are often perceived as, these extroverted people that are, famous or famous in their niche. Or just hard chargers. Maybe they’re, you’re leading a team and you’re just out there, right? But the goal is to not be isolating. Even being in a leadership role can be isolating because as a leader you are oftentimes, you have your business relationship with your colleagues and your coworkers and your industry partners and stuff. But, and some of those people you’ll be friends with, and that’s awesome. But also you need to take a break. Get out of the driver’s seat, maybe hang out with an entrepreneur buddy. Share a problem, share a win, ask for some advice, and just get outside of the go go. Always leading all, always. Just cranking out work product and take a little break. And just, you don’t have to do it alone. The weird like dichotomy of it all is that entrepreneur creators are some of the most productive people there. There are, but there they can be that act. And if you’re like me, you might. I’ve had this thought before. I basically once I got into my entrepreneur creator flow, there is no end to what I could do. I will, I’m not bored. I will not. There’s all kinds of fun, interesting things to do, and that’s infinite. Taking a break is important, but also not being alone. Just as like a hyper-productive person is if you’re alone like that all the time. It’s a recipe for burnout. And that includes things like, even if you’re not great at it, trying to turn off and spend time with your family, without your phone getting out outside, moving your body instead of your mind or your, fingers on the keyboard or whatever. Ideally, see some people in your town, even just going to the coffee shop or the grocery store could be a cathartic experience. And also just realize that particularly among entrepreneur and creator communities, people help other people. But sometimes you have to be vulnerable and ask for help and reach out to somebody even if it’s a stranger and. Look for an opportunity to connect, and not everybody will say yes, and you can always reach out to people you already know or rekindle old friendships, old colleague relationships and things like that. But that’s an important thing. That takes time, that really deserves a block on your calendar. If you have the resources to add people to your team. If you’re that solopreneur stage, there’s nothing more. Exciting and burnout reducing than getting help, whether that’s a virtual assistant, a designer, somebody to help with a piece or even take over more of a leadership role of a key aspect of the business. So those are some pro tips on dealing with creator entrepreneur Burnout is really unfortunate. Because I see it everywhere. It’s happened to me many times. I’ve been through the fire. I get better at it, but I still struggle with it. And I want you to know that you’re not alone and you’re not broken. And if you’re struggling with burnout, it really needs to be addressed. And this episode is not, medical or healthcare advice. Sometimes it makes sense to talk with a professional and just get, professional set of eyes on your situation to help you basically get out of your own way and get out of the mindset and the, thought patterns and behavior patterns that you have that can be really helpful. So recommend doing that. But if you’re on burnout, be careful and just don’t mistake your fatigue for failure. You might just need to. Reset or just at least get back on the upward spiral instead of the downward spiral. ’cause it really does happen to everybody. And in the world that we live in with infinite content information and demands and all the world issues and everything, it can be very overwhelming. All that stuff contributes to burnout. So keep going, but take a break. Work on your burnout. Build systems. If there’s anything I can ever do to help you. Please reach out and I hope you have a rest, great rest of your day and keep being a creator. Keep being an entrepreneur. These are very important parts of what we do in the world and what we’re called to do. It can be very fulfilling. So just be ke, be careful with that fatigue. Don’t normalize it. ’cause there’s a better way to work on it. And it’s not like there’s a magic bullet. It’s more of a commitment you make to yourself to be open about burnout and getting on the upward spiral and surrounding yourself with people, tools, systems, and ideas that will help with that. Have a great rest of your day. 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@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Creator Burnout Is Killing Businesses Here’s How to Survive appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In this LMScast, Alex Standiford from Siren Affiliates shared, developing incentive affiliate systems that compensate affiliates, instructors, and content producers according on performance, engagement, and conversions is the secret to increasing the number of courses and memberships sold. Instead of using a single one-size-fits-all approach, course authors may build up many tailored programs by using Siren Affiliates in conjunction with LifterLMS. In addition to offering beginner-friendly programs for new promoters, this enables you to provide bigger commissions to professional affiliates. With the help of the platform’s multi-instructor revenue sharing feature, instructors can earn royalties automatically based on lesson completion, course engagement, or subscription performance. They can also choose to promote their courses as affiliates and receive additional commissions. In order for numerous contributors affiliates, content producers, or instructors to concurrently get rewards for increasing traffic, generating leads, or closing deals, Alex highlights the need of stacking incentives. You may create incentive programs that drive frequent launches, transform cooperation into growth, and take advantage of seasonal events like Black Friday to increase sales by utilizing coupon-based monitoring, event-based triggers, and customizable payout criteria. Additionally, Alex points out that this strategy is quite flexible for different business models. Like partnership income sharing, content platforms, and e-commerce royalties, making it an automatic and scalable method to expand your online business without depending only on advertisements. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 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 Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, 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. Today I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Alex Standford. He’s from Siren Affiliates. You can find that@sirenaffiliates.com. By the way, if you’re watching this live there is a special Black Friday discount that Siren is doing. It is 70% off. The coupon code is Lifter 25, so L-I-F-T-E-R two five. And you can get started with an incredible affiliate platform. But the great thing about Siren is it’s not just an affiliate platform. Alex has developed something that. Allows you to really create any kind of incentive program you can think of. The more I learn about it and understand it, my mind is blown. It happens whenever somebody gets into siren. We’re gonna get into that today, but first, welcome back on the show, Alex.  Alex Standiford: Hey Chris. Thanks for having me. I’m glad to be here and it’s great to see you again.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s I love talking to you as a friend, but also the way that you think about incentive programs. It is just fascinating and not only think about it, but you’ve literally solved it for learning management systems, sites, e-commerce, content creators. There’s all this stuff you can do. I know we talk about affiliates because that’s something that’s pretty well under. Understood. And we’re recording this in the middle of November, so this is Black Friday season. Let’s just start with talking about. What people can do to set up an affiliate program and why Black Friday matters. Why event based sales like Black Friday. It’s not the only time of year you can run a sale. But how to work with affiliates to just get more traffic, sell more courses and memberships. Alex Standiford: Yeah. Okay. I’m a big fan of Launch, launching frequently, launching often, launching early and I don’t necessarily mean just, your initial product launch. An initial launch, launching this podcast episode with you, or launching a cross promotion with other people doing an integration with another company or another plugin in my con in my case with Siren. Obviously I’m using Siren myself, so obviously I’m thinking about it in that context. But the point is I’m very big on launching. And whenever I launch things, I love to launch them with somebody else so that I can borrow their microphone, I can borrow their email list, I can leverage the audience that they have worked hard to attract, to be able to grow my own business, and then also incentivize them to do so and give them something in return. And that’s basically the fundamental. Value behind creating a really well thought out, really well designed, intentionally designed affiliate program. Because it lets you, not only are you able to grow your own business, but you’re able to also pay people who you like and trust and personally work with. It makes me so happy to know whenever I’m working with you, for example, on affiliate program, doing affiliate links and things like that it makes me so happy to know. That whenever I get customers and I turn around and I’m paying for the traffic and the benefits that I received from these conversations that I’m paying you, I’m directly enriching your life instead of just paying Google for an ad or paying some faceless corporation. So for me, affiliate marketing and creating affiliate programs and things like that. Yes, of course. It’s a great marketing strategy and there’s a lot of benefits to it, but for me it’s very much a personal thing too. It’s just awesome to me to think that I’m able to like help and enrich the lives of people around me at the same time. Chris Badgett: You use Siren affiliates yourself. So at the beginning of this show, we mentioned the 70% off coupon code Lifter 25. Which you can use@sirenaffiliates.com. And. How does that work in the background? If somebody uses that coupon, and I know you also have like URLs that you can do that automatically apply that. So if you’re watching or listening to this, if you go to the LMScast website, you’ll see a link and mention of the coupon code and stuff like that. But how does the affiliate system actually work?  Alex Standiford: Yeah. An affiliate, a typical affiliate program, works using a special link. Basically you have you, Chris, as an affiliate for Siren affiliates.com gets your own, get your own special affiliate link with a tag at the end of it. And whenever somebody clicks on that link. I’m able to say, oh, hey, I know that came from Chris because it’s his special link. And then siren behind the scenes tracks, all of that, keeps track of that. And then if that person makes a purchase you then get credit for that sale. Now the coupon code works in very much the same way, whereas if somebody visits the site, even if they didn’t use your special link, if they just visit the site and they use the Lifter 25 coupon code. It then knows, oh, hey, that’s Chris’s coupon, that’s lifter lm s’s coupon code. Let’s make sure that whenever this transaction’s complete that we give Chris credit for that. Or LifterLMS credit for that for that purchase.  Chris Badgett: Nice. What there’s I wanted to help people with a challenge I’ve had as somebody who does affiliate marketing. I gladly pay affiliates for. Sending traffic that converts and all that stuff. There’s this challenge of, there’s, I see it as two types of affiliates. The first type is what I would call a professional affiliate marketer. They’ve been doing it, they for a long time, they know how it works. They’re probably, promoting many different brands and things. But then there’s also a big opportunity to just get regular people that aren’t classically trained as affiliate marketers. To join your program. But they can’t, they don’t, they’re not going to do well with a lot of friction because they’re new to affiliate marketing. They just wanna sign up and go. How do you, how does Siren serve the first time affiliate from their user experience standpoint?  Alex Standiford: Yeah the big thing about Siren is the, and one of the biggest reasons why I created Siren in the first place was because I recognized that, I was frustrated with one size fits all affiliate program solutions out there. So basically the way they work is you create a single affiliate program and it just assumes that every program is gonna work in exactly the same way. And you end up with all these special cases where different people have different rates and they have different needs and stuff like that. Siren uses a multi-program approach. So instead of having just one program, you can create as many incentive programs as you need. And I say incentive program, not just affiliate program, because there’s all kinds of different programs you can create with the system that goes way beyond just affiliate programs. But with with that, it allows you to create a program, different programs for different types of affiliates. So maybe you have an affiliate program that is targeting those. Professionals. You could, it could be like a super affiliate program. I like to call ’em where, maybe they get a slightly higher commission rate or maybe their terms are a little bit different in some way. Then maybe you have a more basic affiliate program that most people go to that’s like public facing that you give to the people that aren’t professional affiliate marketers, but are people who would like to refer your business and hey, they would like to get a kickback whenever that opportunity comes. So you can, it allows you to create multiple programs like that. And the thing that I love about that is it actually. Turns, it makes it a lot easier to treat your affiliate programs or any of your programs in general as a product in itself. So now all of a sudden you can create this program with its own rules, its own sets, settings, and have it as an offer that you then are able to offer as a product that you’re able to push out and sell and promote to affiliate marketers in a different way than you would promote it to the basic affiliate program to other people. Chris Badgett: Let’s blow people’s minds a little bit with there’s the idea of the affiliate program, which is a, incentivized sales and tracking and system for that. But in the learning management system space, you solved a key problem, which is multi instructor platforms. And so if you’ve heard of a website like Udemy. Where a course creator gets a cut of the revenue and there’s all these nuances of what if there’s one membership like masterclass? How do you, does everybody get paid the same or do they get paid based on course completion or popularity? Tell us about how you can use Siren to build a multi instructor rev share platform. Alex Standiford: This is, this was actually one of the biggest reasons, one of the other biggest reasons why I created Siren in the way I did. Like I said, it’s an incentive program builder, not just affiliate program builder. It allows you to create these revenue shares like what you’re talking about. So for just to give you an example, Udemy the way that, that. Company has historically ran. I’m not exactly sure how it runs today, but I know last time I checked about a year ago the way it basically worked was it has, you can sign up for a, as a customer, you can sign up as a, on a subscription model, so you can pay a monthly fee and have access to a large library of the courses that are available on Udemy. And actually Kindle does this as well with their direct KDP publishing platforms. So you can opt into that and basically you get paid a share based on based on how many pages people read of your books compared to other people in the platform. And the same thing applies with Udemy, where they track based on the amount of time people spend consuming your content, consuming your courses. With LifterLMS for example, you’re able to actually track things like whenever a lesson is completed or a course is completed. So because of that, we’re able to actually leverage that information to create our own revenue sharing platform with Siren that allows you to pay all of the multiple course creators on your platform based on how much traffic and how much. How much the members of that program that site are consuming their content compared to each other. To put it in plain terms, let’s say you have a membership on your site for a hundred dollars a month, right? And you have all these different course creators on your site, and they all have. Access and the people are consuming all these course creators content for free for the membership, you can set it up to where whoever had the most people complete courses and complete lessons in that last month will get the biggest share of the revenue. And then the person with the least gets the least amount. So if you had a hundred dollars a month, maybe you’re creating a pool of 25%. So $25 per customer is available and it’s gonna be distributed among all of your course creators, right? And the top performer did the majority of the work. So maybe they get, of that 25%, they’re gonna get 10%, and then the rest of them get, 5%, 3%, 2%, 1%, whatever, based on how well they perform. Chris Badgett: And this is where it becomes mind blowing is Alex has also figured out with Siren affiliates how to stack all these things on top of each other. So you can have rev share with your course creators. You could also have affiliate marketers sending traffic. You can even have content creators on your site. Get like writing blog posts that if they click the link from their blog post or whatever, like all these people can be incentivized in different way. Yep. So it’s a, the ultimate pay for performance system. And there’s a lot of great content that Alex has created on how to actually set all this up and do all this, but he’s thought through everything. For example, you don’t wanna. Accidentally give away set up a program that 150% of their revenue is owed to other people. But he’s thought through all this and teaches you how to do it. Yeah. Any pro tips there? ’cause like a beginner affiliate. Let’s just use a simple affiliate program. The first question you get is what percent commission should I pay? Like, how do you coach somebody in terms of designing incentives and percentages?  Alex Standiford: Yeah, so the first thing that comes to mind for me with that is, of course you have to know your profit margin. You have to know, you have to know your business numbers fundamentally. And the commission tends to reveal itself from that. So that’s a factor. Another factor in that is also just looking at your competitors, seeing what they’re offering, seeing how much what, how much what percent they’re offering and things like that. And also considering the fact that. One of the great things about Siren, because you’re able to run multiple programs, you don’t have to give everybody one percentage rate. You could give the most important, the ones who are gonna be the most impactful to your business. You can, as I say, I like to say, roll out the red carpet for them, right? You can give them the highest rates, the best rates, you can give them the rates that are more competitive than your competitors. You can. Do whatever and then have a smaller rate for the general public or something like that, potentially. And that will make it to where your average, your average percentage rate goes down a little bit between the two of them. The way I think about it is usually, like I said, first off your profit margin, how much that you would be willing to let go in a worst case scenario. I also like to look at what my competitors are doing, and then I and then I think about, what kind of people I’m trying to attract and how I would want to divide up the different programs that I’m going to offer. And then, and that kind of helps me figure out a baseline for what that percentage needs to be. Then I take that number, I cut it in half, and I start there because you wanna have wiggle room. You don’t wanna start with your entire. The entire amount that you’re willing to give away if you stretch and reach out on your tiptoes. You wanna start smaller than that and work up from there. That way you have a little bit of wiggle room to work with and a little bit of opportunity to do that. Especially if you have a bigger, a bigger program that’s gonna hit on higher percents. ’cause the best affiliates are probably gonna be the ones that are gonna be hitting that percentage the most anyway. So you gotta be a little thoughtful about all of those things. Chris Badgett: This episode of LMScast is brought to you by Popup Maker. The most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my LifterLMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. So this is a podcast and not like a screen share situation, but, and you do have lots of great videos on getting sirens set up and how to design these programs, but just talk us through the. If somebody’s interested and they’re like, yeah, I’d like to make more money through a, an affiliate program and get more traffic to my courses and memberships. How simple is this to set up? What are the basic steps?  Alex Standiford: Yeah, so in Siren the process is literally going into the site in clicking on add new program, which then it gives you a field that basically a program creation screen. And inside of there’s a few different key things such as tracking events. Basically all programs are broken down into a few things. You’re defining what events you’re tracking to give somebody credit for, such as clicking on an affiliate link or using a coupon code or a lesson was completed or a course was completed, right? For whatever your program is. You then also have to figure out what the rules are, how, what, how you’re going to distribute. The earnings the reward, right? Even with a program. It can pay multiple affiliates. It can pay just one affiliate. It just depends on how you want, how do you determine which collaborators win whenever whenever the transaction is completed. Then the third piece of that is how much. How much are you going to give? Is it a fixed amount? Is it a percentage of the transaction? And it’s, I think it’s basically those two. And it’s also like how many items in the transaction. So maybe if maybe you have a program just an off the wall idea that I always think about whenever I think about this. We’re coming into winter, obviously, and if you were a clothing site. Store selling clothes, and you still have this batch of shorts that were in stock and you wanna get rid of them quickly before winter closes. You could obviously create a clearance sale on your site, but you could also create a program that’s temporary that you give to your affiliates that says, if you sell these shorts, I will give you a bonus of $5 for every pair you sell. So you could use a fixed rate reward for that, for example. So there’s a few different ways to determine, how much money you pay out whenever the reward happens. And then the last but not least is what parts of the transaction are actually eligible for this. So this allows you to filter programs so that they only apply to certain products. This allows you to. Exclude parts of a transaction. Maybe you don’t want to include fees, maybe you don’t want to account for discounts. Maybe you have some really weird thing that I can’t even consider, and you wanna include shipping costs into it. Who knows? You can break down and determine what those are as well. What’s really cool about that is you could then have, if you had those shorts for that program I was talking about earlier, you could have a program that only applies to those shorts, but then you could also have an affiliate program that applies to all products and they would be able to stack on top of each other, so you would be able to pay that. You know that. That one time flat fee because somebody was able to sell those shorts. And then you’re also able to pay the percentage to the affiliate who was actually able to do that transaction. And then even on top of all of that, one of the other things that comes to mind for me for this is you can actually associate ownership of a product or a course. With a specific affiliate. And what’s really cool about that is that it allows you to create royalty programs. With a multi-course instructor example that we were talking about earlier, you can set up a program so that whenever a course creator’s program. Product. Our course is sold. They always get a cut of the sales. I recently had a customer, I have a customer right now a client of mine actually, who I’m helping them build their website. They they’re using siren for a a really cool desk, this really awesome desk set up, and it has this custom mat that fits, is inlaid into the desk perfectly. And that mat can be printed with anything on it. So what they’re doing is they are working with a bunch of artists and they’re finding artists to create art for this mat. And then that mat they’re selling the mat with those different art pieces. And if that artist’s art is selected for that print, they receive a royalty. Then also, of course, they also get an affiliate link at the same time because they’re gonna be motivated to promote, Hey, go check out this awesome art for this desk. This is my art. You should go buy it and you should go buy this desk and here’s my link. You can support me through that. So it, it gives, it, it just allows you to create really interesting programs and things like that go way beyond just having. A basic affiliate program with a thousand affiliates and 995 of them are just in different people who, are never gonna actually do anything with it. Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s awesome. And Siren is a WordPress based solution, so all you have to do is install the plugin and start setting up your first program, which is a, which is amazing. It’s, we’re giving you some. Interesting use cases, but to actually get started it’s really not that complicated. And I like what you said too about the multi instructor platform. Not only can an instructor earn a royalty because their course is getting consumed. But they can, they are also incentivized to promote their course on your platform as an affiliate. So if they go above and beyond just creating the content and getting a royalty, but also helping promote it on your platform, they can earn even more money by. Basically joining the marketing team. Yeah. Which is awesome.  Alex Standiford: Yeah, it’s, yeah it’s great. And it’s, and that’s exactly what it was built for. So now it allows you to and the examples that we’ve done in the past, whenever, ’cause we actually did a video in the past about built literally built this exact Udemy coin that we’re talking about. And in that example, we had set it up to where the course creator. Like I said, with a royalty program, they always receive 50% anytime that course or whatever, you can set it to whatever you want, but in our example, we did 50, I think and they can get, 50% of the sale every time. That product is sold regardless of if they had an affiliate program or if they sold it or not. And then you can give them another, 40% and for the affiliate program on top of that. So now if they sell their own course, they earn 90% of that sale. And basically the platform gets a 10% commission or a 10% cut just for basically hosting it and maintaining it. But what’s really cool is then you can on top of that, create a typical affiliate program, right? That isn’t for course creators. It’s just a regular program and you can have it like a 20% or something like that. That’s a lower amount. And whenever they close and they sell anything. They’re able to get a 20% commission. And so at that point, 60% of the money is being consumed by the owner, but also the affiliate. But you still get a little bit more of that cut because they’re only getting 20% instead of 40%. So that’s what I mean about how, when you’re trying to figure out what your percentage is, it’s a little tricky. You have to design the other pieces of the puzzle to understand how they all stack up whenever you’re using Siren, because it’s, it usually ends up being a more dynamic system than just a simple, dead simple, we have an affiliate program and this is what everybody gets. Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s awesome. And the really, the most mind blowing part of all of this is you don’t have to do it alone, by developing, getting other people to help with sales and marketing, or creating course content. In this multi instructor example what Siren allows people to do is to work together and also be incentivized based on what, the performance of whatever effort it is, whether it’s content creation, course creation. Affiliate marketing, sending traffic, whatever. It’s really a beautiful thing. And it unlocks growth. Yeah. And with proper incentives that all that stuff is set up and automated. So it is, the genius is in designing whatever your unique incentive program’s gonna be. It’s Alex Standiford: yeah. Yeah, it is. And actually why, speaking of that, something else that comes to mind for me there that’s really interesting to me that I hadn’t actually fully considered when I originally built it, but this is, this has been what has come out of it. If you create, you could create two programs. One that’s focused on generating leads and one that’s focused on generating conversions. And what’s really cool about that is it could be the lead focus program is for podcasters, bloggers, long tail keyword, longer term people who are, who take a little, who are earlier in the buyer’s journey. And then you have somebody who’s focused on conversions. Maybe they’re focused on doing webinars and they’re doing the one-on-one things where there’s the, later in the journey and pushing people to actually make that purchase. You can create a program where it’s a split commission. So the person who was in earlier in the journey will get a commission, and then the person who actually did the conversion also gets a commission. So they both get it. And what’s really cool about that is whether they know it or not, they’re collaborating, they’re working together instead of against each other. And. If they happen to know each other or something like that, and they know that they’re both in the same system, the same program, they can actually create programs collaboratively together to create funnels together and build entire things in service of promoting your product. So there’s this entire idea where you’re able to create collaboration between your collaborators in a way that is really difficult to do. In a monolithic single affiliate program solution, usually in those cases, they’re competitors, right? They’re always only one person ever wins in those solutions. But with Siren, since there’s multiple programs, there can be multiple winners and you can set it up to where they they’re able to actually work together and collaborate. Actually, something that I’ve seen a lot of people do is they’re working with business partners. Who are owned a portion of the company and they’ll actually use Siren to track their revenue share with each other. So they’ll set it up to where they’ll say, I’m an owner this is the founder that it’s a 40, 60 or something like that, the revenue. And they literally just build an incentive program that is just those two people and they just make it to where it’s a 40, 60 split and they set it up in siren and then they don’t have to worry about tracking how much everybody gets or anything like that. It’s just built directly into the system. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And just one more pro tip before we go. It’s not necessarily just about making money, and this is why the incentive program is can be a lot more powerful than ads. For example if you wanna differentiate leads from sales, the simple way to think about that is you could have a free course on your site that you use to warm up your audience, introduce them to you, and stuff like that. And then you have your paid program, but those people in your free thing are, I would consider leads and you could, I would rather pay these affiliates or partners, $5 for every free signup than do ad do an ad based funnel with Google or Facebook or whatever that’s, where I’m just rolling the dice and crossing my fingers and hoping it’s profitable. So it’s, yeah it’s so cool what you’ve built.  Alex Standiford: Yeah. It’s awesome. Thank you. Yeah it’s been a lot of fun and there’s I’m honestly, and what’s crazy is I’m just, I feel like I’ve just like word vomited a lot of exciting, interesting things about siren here, but I feel like it just scratches the surface on a lot of the things that it can do. So there’s some pretty cool solutions that I’ve seen where people are, have, created. Things that are similar. They’ve created programs more similar to DoorDash, but instead of delivery drivers, it’s vendors working on, fixing bugs or working on code for a website. I’ve seen people, like you said, build Udemy clones. I’ve seen people build Netflix clones where there’s different, it doesn’t have to be educational content. It could also be it could just be video content, movies or special, some kind of niche entertainment. I’ve seen, obviously people create plenty of affiliate programs and things like that but the point is revenue share. And royalty programs come to mind too. I’ve seen people create Etsy clones where they have a whole bunch of artists. There’s actually one customer I know who’s using this for 3D printing. So they have a site where people who do 3D printed models. They can share it on that site and sell those models to people who have 3D printers. And when the product is sold, that 3D, the person who made that 3D model, gets a royalty. So there’s all kinds of different ways that this can be used. I see. I’ve seen local furniture shops use it for consignment deals to sell furniture in their. In their in their store. Because all they do is they associate those products with a specific collaborator, and then once that sells, they get com, they get their, their cut. I’ve seen. All kinds of, just, there’s just so many the list just goes on and on. There’s just so many different ways car dealerships are using it to, create bonus programs on top of just selling for the regular affiliate deals. I use it in my own web agency. I have a salesperson who sells things at my business at my web agency, and they, they’re using WooCommerce in that case to basically create quotes using an order. And if that order goes through, it just automatically gives, knows how much to give them for a commission. ’cause it’s just all handled directly through that system. So the sky’s the limit. If you can figure out what to, how to make it work with, WooCommerce or lifter LMS and the program exists, I bet you can build it in siren and if you can’t. You should talk to me ’cause I would like to see what you figured out that you would wanna do that can’t be done. ’cause I bet it can be done.  Chris Badgett: Just for context, Udemy raised a total of $274 million. Over nine rounds to build this platform. Yeah. With LifterLMS and Siren, for less than 1% of far less than 1% of that, you can build the same thing. And you don’t have to spend $274 million. And this is the best time of year where you can get the best tools at the best price. So head on over to siren affiliates.com. Use the coupon code Lifter 25. And that’s a great deal and get started. And if you want more leads and sales, start building your affiliate and partner programs. That’s it for this episode of LMS Cast. Alex, thanks so much for coming back on. Keep up the great work and at Siren and we’ll have to do this again sometime. And if you’re listening to this and fascinated, go to YouTube and search for. LifterLMS, siren Affiliates, build a Udemy Clone, something like that. And you’ll find the in-depth tutorial where we showed you how to build a site like Udemy with the revenue share and everything. Just using Siren LifterLMS and WordPress, and you’re ready to roll. But thanks for coming, Alex. We really appreciate it.  Alex Standiford: Yeah, thanks Chris. I’m glad to be here and I appreciate it. We will definitely do it again sometime soon. 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How To Sell More Courses With Incentivized Affiliates appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In this LMScast, Kimba Cooper, a gamification specialist from Kimba Digital, discuss how course designers can make learning more enjoyable and interesting in this podcast episode. In addition to discussing the drawbacks of “over-gamification,” which can put strain or stress on certain students, Kimba explores the psychology behind well-known platforms like Duolingo and explains why its leaderboards, buddy hunts, streaks, and badges function. She presents the concept of many player types achievers, socializers, explorers, and killers and explains why it’s crucial to comprehend these characteristics before introducing any game elements. Kimba also emphasizes the significance of ethical gamification, ensuring that users are aware of what they’re getting into and that the mechanics really help them achieve their objectives rather than controlling them. She goes on to describe how Kimba Digital, her firm, assists course and membership owners in determining the motivation types of their audience, enhancing completion rates, boosting engagement, and including well-considered gamified components. In order to increase attendance, keep viewers interested, and motivate them to do their assignments, Chris and Kimba conclude the session by going over real-world examples, such as utilizing badges in LifterLMS, including comedy or themes from your business, and utilizing Easter eggs or live challenges during Zoom trainings. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 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 Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, 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 from across the pond. Her name is Kimba Cooper Martin. You can find her@kimbadigital.com. While you’re over there, check out the freebies. You can find those on her menu of her oversight. But Kimba is an expert in gamification. We’re gonna get into how to make learning fun. Again, and like all kinds of cool things you may not have thought about that you can do to make your courses and training programs more fun, more engaging. But first, welcome to the show, Kimba.  Kimba Digital: Oh, thank you for having me, Chris. I’m really glad to be here. I’m excited to no doubt with you about gamification.  Chris Badgett: Awesome. We are definitely gonna do that. Let’s set the stage with an example instead of a high level, like what is gamification question. Let’s just provide an example that people would know. Potentially from Duolingo. I know that’s that’s really relatable. Language learning is a, a niche within online education and a lot of people have tried it or seen people doing it. What makes Duolingo fun, addictive, and, compelling to continue with.  Kimba Digital: Oh, okay. Ang is a great example, but it’s also controversial. So I’m very excited to talk about this one. And I love to use it as an example because they use lots of different game elements. They steal lots of things from the game world and put them into their learning platform. So things like streaks. Every day you log in, you keep a streak for a long time. I’m at 1050 days with my Spanish streak, which is I dunno if that just shows that I’ve addicted or whether they’re very good at what they do. They do things like friends quests, where you work towards small challenges with a friend, a small mission, which is very similar to the games world. They do lots and lots of different things, badges, rewards, leaderboards, all sorts of different things. The controversial part though is that I have known people to stop using Duolingo because it’s over gamified. Okay? They joined it because they wanted to learn a language, and what happens is they end up with this massive feeling of stress and I have to log in every day. I have to do X, Y, and Z. Or, I’m competing because I want to get up to the Pearl League, when actually what I want is to learn this language. And I know that for some people it is over gamified, but that’s something really important to discuss as well, because, adding gamification into whatever it is that you’re doing, whether it’s a course or a launch or a community whatever it is that you are gamifying, it’s really important to think what is it that my users are hoping to get out of this experience? Every time you’re gonna add something, because that will hopefully avoid you doing what some perceive GA Duolingo to have done, which is over gamifying. Now, this comes down to personality type as well. So for me, I just avoid the features that I’m not interested in. I don’t think about them, I don’t worry about them, but for some people, they can’t not think about those things. It’s part of their nature that they want to tick all the boxes, they wanna achieve all the things. Even if that is at the detriment of what they actually wanted to be there for in the first place. So they are a really good example if you wanna go and have a look and see some kinds of different mechanics being used, game mechanics, and just see how they get you to take more action than you might have wanted to Anyway, just play for that a little bit longer. Just do that one more lesson that you might not have done if you weren’t being gamified.  Chris Badgett: Let’s drop into the psychology a little bit because, gamification in many contexts is covered topically. It’s oh, you just want your people to have some dopamine and the therefore they’re gonna be addicted and they’ll keep coming back, or whatever. But all of these things like streaks or leaderboards, they play different. They play on different psychology or. Just human desires, like what’s in this mix of the human mind that gamification taps into. And of course you could use it in a maybe not so ethical way, but done well. It’s a beautiful thing. So there you always have to be ethical, but what are we triggering in people’s brains?  Kimba Digital: Oh my gosh. Okay. So that’s two very big separate topics. So let’s cover one, and if I don’t remember to come back to it, we’ll cover the other one. Start with personality and psychology, and then we’ll come back to ethics, if that’s okay. Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Kimba Digital: Personality and psychology, right? So gamification. I talk of it being a motivational tool and. It’s not one thing, it’s not as simple as, a mouse or a hammer or something where it’s one object and it does one thing. Gamification, steals things from learning and market learning, development, marketing management, and the idea is that it improves on existing systems and processes to get better results. It is a tool and it is a tool set more than one tool, and those tools are best used for different personality types now. The way that I work and the way that my business works when we gamify things is we use Richard Bartel’s player types as a gentle called Richard Bartel. He wrote some player types in the eighties, I can’t remember exactly which of the eighties, but in the eighties, and it was designed around video game player types. And he doesn’t really like the fact that we all use it for gamification, but we do so tough. So the four main player types that he talks about. Are achievers. They are people who like to achieve things. They are motivated by achieving things. So that could be the people who love to get a badge. They’re the people who love to get to the top of a leaderboard that I, I’m one of these, if you give me a sticker, I’m gonna do more, gonna do more because I wanna achieve that sticker. They like it when you get a title, when you achieve something or a certificate. Next up is your socializers. These people aren’t motivated by achieving. They don’t care about achieving. They’re there because they want to socialize with other human beings. They wanna help other human beings. In a game scenario, they’d be the ones who would help someone else to achieve what they wanna achieve because they’re more interested in socializing and networking. Next one is explorer. These are your kinds of people who will spend time going all around the game world, looking for hidden things. They want to know. They want the hidden experiences, the Easter eggs. They want the things that are. Not the most obvious. They’re the ones who are gonna be finding the cheat codes. They’re the ones who are finding their way around. They are what’s that phrase? They’re the grammar Nazis in your world. They’ll spot all of the little intricacies and they love that, and they’re motivated by that. And the final one doesn’t sound good, but it’s just a bad name. It’s, there’s nothing actually wrong with this player type. They’re called killers. So they are the people that if you are playing a game, they would. Be the ones that wanna get to the top of the leaderboard, not because they wanna achieve like the achievers, but because they don’t want anyone else to get to the top of the leaderboard in a game scenario. They might kill the other people on their team because they wanna get to the X, Y, and Z. And I’ve talked about this on podcasts before, and somebody said to me I’m not a killer because I’m, I don’t fit with any of the profiles, but I’m not a killer because I’m not killing. I’m not trying to achieve things in spite of all of the people. It’s just one of the person. So I just, this and I said to them, you are a killer. Like my, I know so many people like that where they’ll play a game and they’re normally a le achiever personality. They wanna achieve. But when a specific person is playing, they want, I have to win this game. So this other person doesn’t win. It’s the same thing. So when you are designing a, these are top like level player types. I think there’s 16 in total. Those are the kind of main ones. And like any personality framework, you’ll be a bit of all of them and you’ll be different ones in different scenarios, and you might feel like you don’t fit into any of them, and that’s okay. But generally speaking, if you can create, gamification that fits the kind of people in your particular audience and figure out, are they achievers? Are they socializers? Socializers are gonna hate it if you put them up in competition against each other. But killers and achievers love that. So you need to figure out, like in your course launch, if you’ve got a community as part of your course, what kinds of personalities are in there? And you need to design to motivate those kinds of people. Because if you put the wrong game elements in, you are gonna switch people off, which means they’re not gonna get. The most out of your course or whatever it is that you are doing, it’s the opposite of what you want. Now, built in with all of that is what everyone talks about, and I shouldn’t roll my eyes, but it’s the first thing people say is, I wanna make this more fun. I wanna add more dopamine. I wanna do X, Y, and Z. But fun is different for everybody. Motivation is different for everybody, and not everybody needs dopamine. Dopamine to get things done. It’s different. People want different things. So that’s the kind of personality side of it and the kind of psychological side of it. And there are lots of psychological different things depending on the. Game mechanic that you’re using, each one will have a different thing that it switches on in your brain. But anything with these things, a lot of it is test and learn and a lot of it is common sense as well. People have come to me and they’ve said, I don’t wanna add gamification into my membership or my course, or my. Free challenge, whatever it is, because I don’t want, I, because I don’t wanna add a challenge in, for example, I know my audience hate that, and I think that’s the only gamification there is with leaderboards and streaks. And so we redesigned their, their whatever project that was to work for socializing explorers, because we surveyed their audience. We found out that was the majority of the player types they had. You really need to think, actually, my gamification doesn’t need to look like Duolingo. My gamification. Needs to look right for the kinds of people that we’ve got. So that’s the personality, psychological kind of side of it. Ethical gamification. This is my absolute bag. This is my, I love this. A while back I did a live video and it’s probably gone from Facebook now ’cause they deleted them where we played a game of evil or not evil, where I talked about some of the big brands and how they’d use gamification. And I simply told the scenario information that’s freely available on the internet, and I asked the audience, do you think that’s evil or not evil? Fun game. The thing is that. In every scenario, it can be argued both ways. The big brand is doing what they think is right to motivate their staff. Or their team, or their students. And motivate themselves to achieve X, Y, and z. And you can’t guarantee when you put something into the world, how people are gonna react, how it’s gonna actually work in practice, and the length people will go to achieve X, Y, and Z. And so in some of these scenarios and some of these bigger scenarios, it was causing, actual physical problems for staff. It was causing sickness and all sorts of different things. Wasn’t the intention, whether or not. The brand’s got consent of the people taking part beforehand would be my biggest question as to whether or not it’s actually evil. I talk about gamification ethical, gamification all the time and I start with consent. Are people signing up to this, knowing what they’re getting into? And you don’t have to use the word gamification. Sometimes that puts people off. I have had people join my courses and my memberships and say, I’m not taking part in this gamification mark. It’s not for me. Absolutely fine. Does not bother me. I’d rather that you get what you need to get out of this scenario. But having that buy-in, making sure you really understand why they’re there, what they wanna achieve, and making sure that it’s boundaried and that people can opt out of different things. Is really crucial, especially if you’re gonna do things like putting people to compete against each other, if you’re gonna do those kinds of challenges, things where can people compete for prizes? Make sure that it’s opt in or give people a chance to opt out and that it won’t affect their final completion of their course or anything like that. It’s beneficial to them. It will keep everybody happy and help them to achieve what they wanna achieve at the end of the day. But the ethical gamification thing, it’s so easy. Nobody sets out to be evil, as far as I’m aware. But it’s so easy to think I’m gonna do this thing. It’s gonna be so fun. And then out of the end of it pops something that you weren’t anticipating and all of a sudden you look evil and you were just trying to help everybody out. So you’ve just gotta, I think the best way to avoid this really is always to do the minimum viable product thing. Trial things, test things, get people to have a go and be honest with people about the fact that you’re testing things, because if your intentions are good, that makes all the difference, I think a lot of the time. Chris Badgett: Much to dig into there. Before we go deeper though, tell us more about Kimba Digital. What do you do, what do you offer at Kimba Digital?  Kimba Digital: Okay. So yeah, gamification consultancy. We work with online course creators online membership owners, people who launch those kinds of things. So that might be someone who runs online summits or online affiliate launches. Online challenges and social media. We do social media, gamified, social media templates as well. But we work with those people one-to-one to. Improve what they’ve got in a way that makes sense for their audience. So people might say, as I’ve already discussed, Kimba, can you make my online course more fun? But fun isn’t a business objective, so we’d have to dig into what’s actually happening. Do you want. More people to complete the course. Do you want more people to engage with your online community? If you have a community as part of your course, do you want more people to si sign up or to convert from the end of it into upsells? Are you looking for more of them to give you testimonials without your input? What is the thing you’re trying to achieve? And then we’ll gamify that. But first we’ll send them a survey, figure out who the player types are. Then we’ll do the consultation part, and then they’ll go away and implement that. So that’s what we do. And we have, like I say, we have templates and things, and we have a free Facebook group, the big business game as well. But our main bread and butter is working with people. Hand in hand to get those marginal gains. Especially, if somebody’s been running a successful course for a while and they’re like, I’m at a point or an on, or an online membership. We’re at a point where we really need to do something, but we’re not sure what we think the gamification might be the answer more than likely would be able to help them.  Chris Badgett: That’s great. I wanna talk to the person listening that’s new to all this. So just to use a basic example, like in LifterLMS, there’s achievement badges that can be triggered. You can set ’em up to trigger off of certain things getting completed, like lessons or entire courses or passing a quiz and things like that. Nice. And I’ve always thought that achievement badging is underused. And. You can be serious. You can be extremely funny and playful with it. Like I remember in MailChimp, it’s not really a achievement badge, but right before you hit send on an email, there was like this nervous monkey thing that would happen. And I always just thought that was fun, but that’s silly. So you can be serious or silly. If somebody’s I don’t know if achievement badges are for me. What’s another way for them to explore that avenue?  Kimba Digital: Do you mean to encourage them to use badges or to look at a different just badges,  Chris Badgett: like to stay on badges  Kimba Digital: Okay. I think that there’s a natural it’s very natural for somebody to think gamification isn’t for me. Badges isn’t for me. I’m not fun, or my business isn’t fun, or my industry isn’t fun. What I would say is if your industry isn’t fun and you start being fun, you’re gonna stand out. And if you are, like I said earlier as well, everyone thinks different things are fun. So you can make your badges thematic to what you do or who you are. So one organization that we worked with. The lady who ran the, it was a membership but the lady who ran it was really into Disney, and so the thing that she was selling was nothing to do with Disney, but all of her audience knew she was really into Disney. So we themed everything in that membership, including things like badges and rewards. To be Disney focused, but it wasn’t just any Disney focused, it was things like, we made a little gif of her, like waving with like Mickey Mouses, make it fun and silly, but related to either the brand that’s running it and or inside jokes that’s inside. Inside Jokes are great for the explorers. They love being part of an exclusive kind of community, and it also builds that. That sense of community as well makes it stronger. It doesn’t have to be all singing and dancing. It doesn’t have to be posh. It doesn’t have to be perfect. If you’ve got it already built into the LMS, then that’s even better because a lot of the work is done for you, and I think you can over badge. So start out small if you are concerned. Then you can always try and then take it away if it didn’t work. And I would say a good place to start, absolute best place to start is reward them for starting. It sounds so obvious, but it’s. It’s the hardest thing to get started, especially with an online course. And reward them for the most minute step at the beginning, creating their profile or watching the intro video or whatever that might be as a positive reinforcer. It’s great for the achievers, it’s great for those explorers who are looking for those kinds of little things as well. It doesn’t have to be serious. It doesn’t have to be patronizing. That’s another thing I hear a lot is people saying, oh, it’s condescending. I’m an adult. Why would I want a badge? People like the most surprising people, love a badge. Absolutely love it. So if you don’t wanna make it condescending. You don’t have to do that either. It don’t have to be a well done for doing it. It can be even a progress check-in. It can be you’ve created, you’ve done this. It can, you can still say, well done. You’ve done this first video, but it doesn’t have to be a, you get an award for doing something minor. They don’t have to see it like that. There’s lots of ways that you can reframe it. So it’s still rewarding without being patronizing. But I would say. I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve had lots of people come through my. I don’t have a membership open at the moment, but I have had two memberships for a long time and courses. And of all of that time, I maybe count on one hand the amount of people who didn’t like it or weren’t interested in it Once they got on board, I would just say, give it a go. Honestly, it’s if it’s a tool that’s already there and people aren’t using it, Chris, I’m very surprised they should be getting on it because it’s an easy tick off box and it’s not something, it’s not it’s not like competitional, scarcity or FOMO that could be off-Putting a badge is just a badge. It’s just a, it’s like somebody giving you a bunch of flowers. It’s not gonna, nobody’s gonna be annoyed by that.  Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s awesome. The, the other context I wanted to talk to you about with courses, you mentioned gamifying events. So if somebody’s doing a cohort based course and they’re like delivering those sessions live on Zoom. With slides and talking head or whatever. How do you gamify while you’re doing live delivery? What could you do. If you’re doing all right, in this week’s lesson we’re going to get into X, Y, and Z. How do I gamify that in Zoom?  Kimba Digital: We always bring it back to what is it that you’re hoping to get ’em to achieve. So I let’s say  Chris Badgett: the first thing we wanna achieve is we want the people that signed up to come to the live class. Like we, we want a high attendance rate, number one. Number two, we want them to stay to the end. Okay. And number three, we want them to do the worksheet or the action steps that come with the training for that week. Kimba Digital: Okay. The easiest one to do, to get them to do all three of those things is to offer them, if they only people who attend live have a chance of winning X. That would be revealed at the end.  Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Kimba Digital: And then at the end you say, this is the winner. We were gonna give another one of you something if you do the homework. But the other thing that you can do, which I think we talked about when we met Chris, actually, is hiding Easter eggs. Yeah. So I love doing this in live training. It’s one of my favorite things to do to get people to pay attention all the way through. So if you are doing, I would never advise doing long training as part of courses. Chunking is really important, doing things in small doses, but sometimes you do have to do it right. So if I was to do that, and I have done this before, I hide things in my background for people to find and if I can, I change those things throughout and I’ve done things before. I dunno if I’ve got a sign up here. No, I think I’ve bend it, but like this wall is blank behind me for a reason because I like to put posters there that say things that I like. What is the word subconsciously? No, it’s where like they accidentally go into your brain when you’re not paying attention. So if there’s something that I’ve noticed that people in my course are all complaining about in terms of they don’t understand it or they don’t know I have to, they have to do it, or maybe they’re all struggling with something, I will try and put something up there that is to do with that and maybe the first person to mention it. I will give them something. There are lots of things you can do with this. I went, I actually did I actually did a gamification course once where I was the student and every week they had a different letter in the background and they had the bookshelf rearranged every time. And at the end of the course you had to guess what it was that they were saying. I never worked it out. I consider myself to be pretty smart and I never worked it out, but lots of people did and especially that’s gonna really. Keep the attention of your explorers and your achievers and possibly your killers. The people who aren’t gonna be brought on board by that as socializers, they’re not gonna care about that. So it might be an idea to get them to buddy up with somebody to come to the call and say that you’ll be. They’ll have to do the homework together. So it’s almost a, in a nice way, a kind of guilt, trippy, you should come along ’cause your buddy’s gonna be there and you need to work on this together. There’s lots of things you can play with, but I love an Easter egg. Absolutely. If you’re going to do the rewards, if you’re gonna do the incentivizing, stay to the end and you can win x, make sure it’s related to what they want to achieve. None of this iPad for the sake of an iPad Spa day, for the sake of spa day. If you’re teaching it, make it, it related. If you’re doing. Knitting courses, making it knitting related, make it related to something that will help them get the outcome they wanna achieve. Does that make sense? Chris Badgett: And it’s a big thing in this community is people often build an online community on all kinds of different platforms to accompany the training. How do you gamify an online community to make the socializers happy?  Kimba Digital: Oh, that’s a big question. There’s lots of things you can do. There’s lots and lots of things you can do. I would say the most simple thing would be building some networking events. Really give them opportunities to get to know each other because a forum or a Facebook group or wherever you are hosting that community is great, but there’s only so much actual connection you can get from a profile picture. So set up networking events set up. And they can be online opportunities, a Friday coffee catch up, or opportunities for them to get together and chat through things. And I wouldn’t mix them up. So I’d have some that were purposeful. Somewhere you come in, there’s an agenda, they’re gonna learn something, and then they get to socialize, which is gonna attract your achievers, your killers, somewhere you’re gonna reveal some big thing you hadn’t talked about yet, which is gonna attract your explorers. And then some that are just a coffee chat for the socializers. If they want to talk about the course, they can, but they don’t have to. And you could even. Yeah, that’s a good idea. You could even I’ve given myself part of the back, I haven’t even told you what it is yet, so you could even praise some of your, and reward some of your best students by giving the opportunities to host some of these sessions, which achievers, they get a title of being one of the best students and running a session. Yes, please, socializers get the opportunity to run a session and have everybody know who they are. Yes, please. It’s gonna, it’s gonna be a great thing for a lot of people. That would be the first one, and I think that’s gonna help as well, because if any of those people post in the forum, post in the group, the people that have networked with them will recognize their name, will have an association with them, and will be more likely to interact with them in the group. You might think that’s not gamification, that’s just setting up a networking event. Lots of people say that to me about lots of gamification. It’s like I say, it is a plethora of using the right tools to encourage the personality types to do the thing you want to do. And if you can get those people to be super happy in that community, they’re gonna share more. They’re gonna learn more, they’re gonna help each other more and more of them will complete the course. So it’s a massive win-win, which I talk about quite a lot. I’m not sure if that’s the kind of thing you were looking for, Chris, Chris Badgett: This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my LifterLMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. that’s, that was exactly what I was looking for. And I think I’m gonna drop the hardest one on you here, but I’m probably wrong. You’re probably gonna pat yourself on the back again, and with an answer for this one, which is, there’s courses and we talked about adding community. But let’s say there’s also like a private coaching aspect. So it’s like a expensive offer that has a course plus coaching. How do we gamify the actual coaching aspect, which is just, the expert and the client or the student. Can we gamify coaching either to encourage, you’re probably gonna say what do, what job are we trying to accomplish here? It’s probably. The first level is they gotta schedule their first coaching session and get it on the calendar. And then they gotta show up and then they gotta take action on the coaching. So it’s really similar, to the same thing with a live event. It’s just one on one.  Kimba Digital: There’s a few different things that you could do, and it really comes down to understanding the person you’re coaching because some of these are risky. Yeah. So somebody I know. Once upon a Time, ran an event where all of the people who came along, it’s an online thing, needed to achieve something within a certain period of time, and so she said, this is the cost to come along. If you do all the things and get to the end, you get half of it back.  Chris Badgett: Oh, yeah. Yeah.  Kimba Digital: If you don’t, I keep your money. So there is that as an option for the people who are, ’cause not everyone is rewards focused. Not everyone is going to, some people don’t care. I’ll give you a chocolate bar if you do this. I can buy myself a chocolate bar. I don’t care. So some people are much more stick than carrot focused. So that’s a possibility. The other thing is a progress tracker. So these are the things you’ve gotta do. Tick box exercise, sending them a, congrats. Well done. It doesn’t even have to be a congrats. Well done. You’ve done 10% of what you need to do to get through this series of six coaching sessions. The first four steps are onboarding. So those are things that you can do. It does really depend on who that person is, and I think. For a lot of people, the hard part is gonna be getting them not to turn up to the coaching. They’re getting them to do the things they said they were gonna do. I think that’s the hardest part because people, they wanna turn up and have a chat with you and they come away with all these ideas and then they come off the call and then they’ve gotta deal with the kids and they’ve gotta make tea and they’ve gotta, they’ve got a they’ve got other responsibilities and all of a sudden these things come out of the. They aren’t possible. So then you need to build in and I would do this in discussion with them, a system whereby either you add in accountability and you could do that based on, again, on their personality type. So you could build an accountability where they buddy up with someone else to get that work done. You could build an accountability where if they do it by such and such date and submit it to you, you’ll review it for them. That could be for the achievers, or if they do it by this date, you will feature them in your email list. That’s a great one for Killers and Explorers, because the killers want to get it above everyone else. If they get it in first and the Explorers want something that’s exclusive, there’s lots of little things you can do like that to motivate people. But at the end of the day, I think you also have to accept that not everyone is gonna do all the things. Life happens, things happen. Sometimes people can’t do the things, but it’s definitely worth having a conversation with those people and saying, look, we can try any of these things you want to try. What do you think’s gonna be most motivating for you? Because I want you to get the most out of this as possible. I talk about feedback quite a bit, and feedback doesn’t isn’t just one way. Having the conversations, doing those surveys. Having group conversations with people, just figuring out what works for them and what isn’t working about what you are doing at the moment, because they might actually, I’m a, I’m an achiever and I don’t need any of those things that, that I’ve just suggested. If I’ve signed up to do coaching with somebody, I’m gonna do the work because that’s my nature. I wanna get to the end of it, having achieved the thing. So yeah, it’s a conversation. And feedback. And then, there’s probably a billion other ideas that I could throw your way, but there’s a bunch just there. Chris Badgett: I wanna go a little bit macro and just look at what about introducing an entire game as part of a learning experience? For example, we met at a conference and there I, it was like a kind of bingo and you had to find somebody who did, had a podcast, somebody who had a course about X, y and Z or whatever, and it filled out like a card. Then there was a drawing from, for the people that actually completed the card. So it’s, it was like a full game that those who wanted to participate could win something. And, but more importantly, the job that it solved from my perspective was it helped people get the most out of being at a conference in terms of networking, talking to people, introduction to ideas, like maybe you should start a podcast or whatever. All that stuff. It was like a whole game within an event.  Kimba Digital: Yep.  Chris Badgett: So tell us about like that, like creating a whole game that’s part of an exper a learning experience.  Kimba Digital: Yeah. I love this. So we do this quite a lot. We’ve done bingo as part of pretty much every course and launch that we’ve ever had. And we’ve done snakes and ladders as well. And trying to think what other things we’ve done, like things that are like similar than that and pick cards that give you tasks to do automatic card, automated card pickers. The main thing to think of when you’re doing that is exactly what you said. So when Mike put together that, that bingo, he thought, what do the conference people want to get out of this? They want to network with other people. What do I want from this? I want people to network with other people because then people get to know each other and it, they get what they want out of it, which means I’ll be able to sell more tickets in the end. So when we build a bingo, if we’re building it for a course, say, and what I would do is I would look at where in the course people are struggling, where people tend to fall off. And I would look at the feedback. ’cause you’ve gotta be surveying your people all the time and figure out. What they’re struggling with, what they find boring at the moment. And I would be adding those things into Bingo. So I’d be giving them a or the Snakes Matters, or whatever it is that you do. And giving them a square four onboarding and giving them a square four, completing task three, if that’s the one that’s really hard, giving them a square four, helping someone else. What is it that what are the, it’s a behavioral change thing is gamification. So what is the behaviors that you want ’em to change? Do you want ’em to engage more in the community? If they have a community, do you want them to. Ask publicly for help because none of them are, and then they fall off. What is it that you are hoping that they’ll achieve? Are you wanting them to share when they’ve learned something new? Are you wanting them to submit coursework? Can you include those into the Bingo card, but also include the things that they wanna achieve? And that is an, and this is something I say all the time. People are, don’t all join your course to learn the thing that you’re teaching. Some people will join your course because they want to network with other people. They’re the socializers. But some people will join the course ’cause they wanna network with you. The person who’s running the course, they wanna be in a space and see how you run it. Some people will join your course because they want to be in a room with other people who can afford a course of that cost. Because they think that might be their ideal customer. People will be there for all sorts of different reasons. It’s not always just, you are teaching me how to get leads from TikTok, so that’s what I wanna learn. It’s, they could be just looking at how you run a course, how you interact with your customers. They could be looking at all these sorts of things. So what can you build in to help people achieve different things within a remit? You don’t wanna give everyone everything away. That will help them to achieve what they wanna achieve. The socializers will it give an opportunity for them to network and get to know other people or help other people and also. Some of the boring stuff that they have to do no matter what. So have you read the rules? Have you done the, they’re quick, easy tick offs, but it means they’ve actually done it. And you can pair those up as well. So you could pair that bingo board up with a quiz, so you could say, or a form. So you could say, oh, you’ve done your bingo. Amazing. Here’s the quiz for you to like, confirm your answers so that you can check that they’re not just saying they’ve done it all. And then at the end. It can get, put them into a price draw. You can elongate it and add things. But always come back to the, what is the purpose of this? Don’t over gamify. Simplify it if you can. So if the bingo board on its own is enough, then just leave it at that. Yeah there’s loads of things you can do. There’s lots of mini games you can do. Learning is really good match with gamification and games specifically. If you’re going, trying to get them to learn new terms, you can get I don’t know any off the top of my head, but there’s loads of websites where you can make matching games where you match words to each other. They do that in Duolingo as well. There’s lots of. Little game software and apps online, which you can use to make your content more interactive, make it more fun. So it’s not just 70 videos and PDFs, how can you break it up? Especially if it’s a concept that they need to embed, repetition needs to retention, but that repetition doesn’t have to be, here’s another video saying the same thing. It can be, can I now? We showed you this four videos ago. Now here’s a game for you to play to embed it, and then we’ll add in something else later to embed it away again in a different format. Repetition really does lead to retention, so if you can mix that up, if you can add some novelty it’s gonna work much better. Chris Badgett: Question for you, I’m gonna ask it in the nerdy psychologist way first, and then I’ll ask it to you in plain language. So the nerdy way is. I see a big opportunity with helping transform courses where people have extrinsic motivation to intrinsic. Put simply, if somebody let’s say a nurse has to take, get 20 credit hours to keep their nursing license, they have to take it so they sign up for their continuing education credit courses. How could one gamify that so that they no longer felt like they had to take it? They felt internally that they wanted to take it because it was fun or maybe they don’t even know why they like it now, but they’ve been captured by gamification in an ethical, positive way. And I think you’ve already covered a lot of the ways we could do that, but I just want to try to. A way for people who design training for people that have to take it to maybe get the benefit of pushing them over to they, they’re motivated from the inside too.  Kimba Digital: Okay. This is a great question. The example that I love to give for the other way around. To play devil’s advocate for a second of adding gamification to something that somebody’s already intrinsically motivated to do, is I’m gonna eat chocolate. Okay? I like chocolate. If somebody says that, if you eat chocolate every day for 30 days, at the end, I’ll give you a hundred grand. I’m gonna eat chocolate every day for 30 days, but then on day 31, there’s no longer a reward. They’re not gamifying it for me anymore. I’m probably not gonna eat chocolate. I’ve eaten chocolate every day for the last 30 days, even though I like eating chocolate. So there is a, I would definitely not advise gamifying things that are intrinsically motivating, things that people are already naturally ga intrinsically motivated to do. The other way round is a question of why should they care? And this is very individual,  Chris Badgett: I would say with a nursing example, that they should care because the training is supposed to make them better nurses so that they can provide better care to the patients.  Kimba Digital: It’s more of a, that five, five why’s question framework where I’m sure everyone listening and watching this will have heard of it before where you say, but why do you care about that? Why is that important to you? Why does it matter to you? And I think you might don’t think this is a gamification answer. I think that this one is a, for you personally, as the person doing this course. What will happen if you don’t take it? How will that affect your life? Like why? So I would probably put together, yeah, I think that’s what I’d do. I’d probably put together a survey first to ask him the five, five Wises framework. Really get in with that. Or maybe have a conversation with them. One to one to, depends how many nurses you’ve gotta get through this course. And then I would build that into the program. So when they achieve the first lesson at the end of it, I’d be like, that’s amazing. Remember you are doing this because your great-granddad really, you promised him you’d be a nurse before you died. You know you are doing an amazing job. He’d be so proud of you. You are gonna take that next video right when it’s, if it’s personal to you, you’re gonna do that next video. I would also say that if people who really want to do it. I really wanna be. Nurses aren’t doing that course, even though they know it would be beneficial. There’s something wrong with the course. That means that gamification isn’t gonna help. You need to fix the problems with the course first. Maybe it’s too long, maybe it doesn’t explain things properly. Maybe they don’t have enough time to do it and you need to chunk it down much smaller than you originally thought. Maybe it’s out of date. Maybe the software is glitchy. It could be a whole range of things. And as a gamification consultant, I shoot myself in the foot by saying this, but you sometimes need to fix the thing before you can gamify it. It needs to be working before it can be gamified. So if they’re not intrinsically motivated to do it, maybe it shouldn’t be an online course. Maybe there’s an issue with the course. Maybe they need to be doing it in a different format. People learn in different ways. So it could be that nurses are hands on people, maybe they need to do. Hands-on training, maybe an online course isn’t gonna work for them. And recognize that’s not the answer you wanted, but unfortunately, sometimes that’s the truth. Chris Badgett: That’s a really important point. ’cause it’s, don’t just start adding gamification. Like how people sometimes will just turn on a Facebook group and hope for the best. What’s the strategy? What’s the core issue? What’s, what are we doing? What jobs have to happen here? Yeah. That’s Kimba Digital. Tell us again, like how people can work with you. I know you’ve got some freebies available for the course building community. Where can people go who are falling down the rabbit hole of gamification and getting excited here?  Kimba Digital: Okay, thank you. Yeah, kimba digital com is our website. We have a bunch of freebies. Go to the navigation bar and the freebies are there, but the one that’s specific for course creators is seven big mistakes. That I see when people are trying to increase course completion. Specifically, I know a lot of people struggle with that. They have low cost completion rates. It’s just a PDF but it’s got lots of interesting things. So it’s got what I see, the issue is what you should do instead, and then a question you should be asking yourself. So it’s. Much more than just a down a list. Like it’s not a blog post, it’s quite interesting. We also have a quiz which you can find on there as well. And our free group, the business game on Facebook where we saw all things, gamification of business. It’s not just course focus. There’s lots of different people in there using gamification for interesting things. So definitely worth checking that out. And we are committ everywhere. Like all the platforms, all the social places. Come and say hello and it’ll be lovely to see you there.  Chris Badgett: Awesome. Kimba, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been an awesome conversation. You out there watching her listening, head on over to kimba digital.com, check it out, connect with Kimba. But thank you so much Kimba, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.  Kimba Digital: Thanks, Chris. It’s been loads of fun. 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@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How To Add Gamification To Your Online Course With Kimba Digital appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett shares details about the biggest sale of the year for course creators: LifterLMS’s all-November sale (Black Friday through Cyber Monday), which runs from November 1 through December 1 (Cyber Monday). It’s our biggest sale in 12 years, and it’s live now on Black Friday Deals page. This year, LifterLMS is offering 60% off any bundle or add-on, plus $4,000 in bonuses. The event is intentionally spread over the entire month to reduce one-day pressure. Use coupon code BLACKFRIDAY25 to enjoy 60% off all LifterLMS products. Chris emphasizes switching from closed, expensive SaaS platforms (Kajabi/Teachable/Thinkific) to open-source WordPress + LifterLMS, which is fully extensible and configurable so you control your site, data, pricing, and feature stack instead of building on “rented land. Existing LifterLMS users can take advantage of the season to upgrade (for example, from the Universe Bundle to the Infinity Bundle) by emailing team@lifterlms.com for a special proration coupon that combines the sale discount with credit for their current license. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 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 Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, 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 Chris Badgett, and today we’re doing a solo episode called A Season For Course Creator Freedom. So it’s that time of year again, this is the Black Friday, all November sale that LifterLMS runs this time of year. We like to reduce the pressure of Black Friday sales, so we actually just open it up for the whole month of November. This is our biggest sales event of the year, and it’s really a time for course creators, coaches, education entrepreneurs, and the WordPress professionals and agencies that serve this industry to get the best learning management system for WordPress at the best price during our sale. On any new order, you’re gonna get a 60% discount, and you’re also going to get $4,000 worth of bonuses, which I’m gonna go over in detail on this episode. So if you haven’t moved over to LifterLMS yet, perhaps you’re using a hosted course platform like Kajabi or Teachable or Thinkific or some kind of what we would call a. SaaS, LMS, it’s a software as a service. They have really expensive monthly fees and a very limited feature set that you cannot extend. This is a great time to move over to WordPress, to open source software and a learning management system that’s both customizable, affordable, completely extendable, gives you full ownership of the platform so you’re not creating. Your online education business essentially on rented land, basically on somebody else’s website. If you’ve been in the LifterLMS community already, perhaps you’re using the free LifterLMS Learning Management System plugin. That’s great. This is a great time of year to upgrade and get some of the advanced features that are available in our paid plans. So you get the 60% discount. Best time of year at the best price for the best tool. And I want to go over a little bit about what’s new, this LifterLMS, black Friday, all November sale. It’s wild to think about. We’ve actually done a Black Friday sale for 12 years at LifterLMS, which is pretty incredible. But we always try to level up the. Value we create when we do our Black Friday all November sale. So one of the ways we do that is by figuring out what we can do for bonuses and really over deliver on bonuses. So if you make a purchase of any new bundle during Black Friday, all November, so basically from November 1st through December 1st, which is technically Cyber Monday. You get a 60% discount and $4,000 worth of bonuses. So let’s talk about the bonuses. If you’re here, you probably already know how awesome the LifterLMS software is and who doesn’t want a good deal and a great price. So there’s the discount, but let’s talk about the bonuses. The first bonus, which. Adds a ton of value, is a $2,000 course that we created called The Perfect Offer Playbook. Now, this course was delivered live with a live audience several months ago, and we put a lot of work and effort into solving some of the biggest core foundational challenges that course creators and education entrepreneurs have. That makes or breaks the difference between a platform project, an education company being successful or not. So at the core of every course or coaching program or internal training site or continuing education program, there’s a very specific offer that everything else is built on. So regardless of your what learning management system tool you are using. If you do not have the offer fully dialed in and the best offer, you can present it either. In the worst case, it can just lead to a failed project. But as we go out the spectrum, you could be not charging what you could, so a lot less profit. Your students aren’t gonna be as happy with what you’re offering, so you’re going to have low conversion rates and things like that. So we really went into the art and science of Perfect Offer Construction. That’s why it’s called the Perfect Offer Playbook. It’s 11 lessons. They’re very good. They’re very in depth, and it is the one primary thing holding back most course creators and coaches and community builders and online education providers. From creating something that works. So if you get the offer right, everything else gets a lot easier. It’s more straightforward, it’s easier to sell, it’s easier to attract students. It’s easier for students to enjoy your program and get the results you promised in the marketing or in the learning objective. So the perfect offer playbook is a huge bonus. If you order a new order of lifter LMS today. I would recommend you jump into the Perfect Offer Playbook today and get started on that. ’cause a lot of people get distracted into software tools and automation and video cameras and the website and all these things, but none of that matters unless you get the offer, that’s why we created the Perfect Offer Playbook, and you can get that as a bonus while getting LifterLMS at the 60% discount. I also wanna mention if you are an existing LifterLMS customer, you can also take advantage of the sale and the offer. This is the best time to upgrade to a bigger bundle, which we’ll talk about in a little bit. But if that’s you, if you’re already a customer and you’re like, this sounds great, I’m really ready for the Infinity bundle, which is all the software we make. I want to get at a great discount and get all these bonuses. Just send an email to team@lifterlms.com and let us know what you’d like to upgrade to, and we’ll give you a special proration coupon that will give you an even bigger discount for the for the sale, but also pro rating the existing value of your license so that you can save even more money and move forward with an upgraded bundle and all the bonuses. So bonus number two is the YouTube traffic system. So one of the best ways for course creators and education entrepreneurs to get leads to build a lead generation machine for their course or membership site is to make some very strategic videos. Now, here’s the thing. A lot of us may be good at video content creation because we’re used to doing that. As course creators making videos, delivering live trainings on Zoom and so on. But we don’t really have the time or the desire to become a full-time YouTuber and create a YouTube channel with thousands of videos and all of that. But you don’t have to get the benefit of YouTube, we’ve actually distilled it down to three specific strategic videos that any education entrepreneur can make. To create a YouTube lead and sales machine on I autopilot without spending money on advertisements, like promoting your YouTube videos and ads. So we’ve built this, we’ve built this system that you can use and all you have to do when you go through the training is learn how it works and then create the three specific types of videos, put them on YouTube. Follow the processes in the video of how that translates from people watching your videos to enrolling in your courses in memberships. It’s a very valuable bonus. If you want more leads and sales and you want marketing that doesn’t cost much, but about one day’s worth of your time to make three specific videos, you’re gonna love the YouTube traffic system. The next thing we offer, which is another reason. To get the Black Friday bonuses as soon as possible is the Black Friday Sales and Marketing 1 0 1 course. Now what that is it teaches you how to do event based marketing so that you can leverage existing buying behaviors that happen naturally in different niches and so on. As an example. In the software world, a long time ago, we realized that the way people would shop for Christmas at a mall, say for Christmas presents on Black Friday we, a lot of these retail establishments will use that event and do some of the biggest sales of the year. Software industry figured that out. WordPress product companies figured that out. That we could tap into this same desire to get discounts and good deals during the Black Friday season. So we, like I said, I’ve been doing this for 12 years because it works. But here’s the thing. With LifterLMS, we typically make three to five times the amount of money that we make in a normal month during the Black Friday season. So how do we do that? This free co, this course, which normally costs $500 you can get at any time, comes as a bonus during our Black Friday all November sale. If you wanna learn how to do event-based marketing and even learn what we have to teach you and implement it fast, you can even get going this Black Friday season as of this recording. That’s still like more than three weeks away. So you could learn, implement, and do event-based marketing. And instead of taking decades like we have to figure this out and how it works, you can do it in days by doing our compact training on how to do event-based marketing around holidays like Black Friday. We give you all our secrets in the Black Friday Sales and Marketing Online 1 0 1 course. So the next bonus is the online education company startup checklist. This is super powerful going back again to the classic mistakes that course creators make. People building education companies, especially if you’re early on or even if you’re established, there are a few decisions and actions to take so that you can. Set up your online business correctly. We go into business formation, how to think about the banking, how to think about all the key aspects that go into building an online education company. Me personally, I never went to business school. I never, I didn’t grow up in a family of entrepreneurs, so I had to figure all this stuff out and what the online education company startup checklist does for you. Is it will give you the key items that you 100% need to check off the box. And even if you’re an established company, whether you have an education company or you are building LMS websites for clients, if you miss any one of these things, it causes a big headache and problem later. So again, with this bonus, we are condensing decades into days. So you can. Get set up the right way. Avoid the classic mistakes, fix any, online education company, business essentials that you may be missing. The next thing we’re offering is a bonus live event with myself and our live team with, it’s a bonus office hours mastermind call. So this is a live call on Zoom if you have. This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my LifterLMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. The universe bundle or the LifterLMS infinity bundle. You have access to a call like this every single week. It’s one of the ways LifterLMS is different. We actually appreciate and like talking to our customers and users live and helping them. So that’s our bonus. One hour call. You can come with specific questions. It’s also a mastermind. So what do I mean by a mastermind? It’s a mastermind because you’ll meet other people who are doing similar things to you that have challenges and are looking for strategy or technical support or help. So you can kind of network with other education entrepreneurs or LMS website building professionals just like you. And sometimes even if you don’t have a specific question. This is one of the great things about a call like this. Just by coming and listening, you can learn a lot. You could learn about a problem you didn’t even know you had, or an opportunity that you didn’t even realize was there right in front of you. So there’s a lot of learning and connection. People have even become business partners and work together after meeting on calls like this. So it is very valuable. So no matter what you get from LifterLMS, during Black Friday, all November, we’re hosting a special. Live office hours mastermind call. So that’s a great bonus. And the next thing is a gamification resource for you, which is an achievement badge and certificate background set. So what do I mean by that? So achievement badges allow you to add little popup gamification, icons as students. Do certain actions on your site that you design. So maybe if they complete a certain section of a course, they get a certain achievement badge. The certificate, background sets, LifterLMS has a full certification engine, so if you want to create a certification program. You can do that and it can be completely automated. The certificate generation system with LifterLMS. Before that, you want to have a nice looking certificate background, so when a student earns the certificate, they, it’s presented in a way where used to seeing in the offline world, similar to a graduation dis diploma. Now the challenge with achievement badges and certificates. Is that it requires graphic design skills. So what we’ve done in this bonus is we’ve actually given you a collection of achievement badges that you can use to get started right away, as well as certificate background so that you can design the certificate logic in LifterLMS, like when somebody completes this course or this series of courses in a membership. Or a course track, we call it, they can earn a certificate. But it’s, you need a good certificate background to go with that. And we’ve given you a set that you can just start using without having to pay a graphic designer or figure all that out yourself. If you haven’t thought about gamification or you haven’t thought about certificates, I would encourage you to just take a second look at those things, even if you’re not doing something like. Er LMS continuing education where people have to, get a certain number of credit hours during a year to keep their job or, and things like that, or to keep their license. Certification is very powerful. So you may have a certification opportunity that may be more informal or just another way to motivate your learners. Or give them a sense of accomplishment and so on. So check those out. And if you’re new to the LifterLMS pricing, we have three bundles. There’s the earth bundle, the Universe bundle, and the Infinity bundle. So the earth bundle is our cheapest bundle, and what that includes is all the automated e-commerce features. If you want to be able to sell access to your courses or memberships, or create recurring revenue or one-time payments or any pricing model you can think of, you’re gonna want our Earth bundle, which integrates you with best in class payment processing through tools like Stripe and. PayPal as well as others like authorized.net, or you can integrate with the WooCommerce ecosystem through their shopping cart as well. All that’s included in the Earth bundle, so the Universe Bundle gives you all of that. Plus it gives you our theme called Sky Pilot, which is the only modern. WordPress LMS theme with exclusive focus on creating beautiful learning sites that students find engaging and easy to use. So if you’re at a point where you want to use modern WordPress and you want to have as few tools from as few companies as possible, you’re gonna love our Sky Pilot theme. The Universe Bundle also comes with some of our integrations, like with the form plugins, like Gravity Forms. It comes with integration with popular email marketing platforms like MailChimp or Kit, formerly known as ConvertKit. So that’s the universe bundle. And then our top bundle is called the Infinity Bundle, which includes everything that we’ve just talked about, but also a ton of advanced feature add-ons. For example. If you want to do advanced quizzing with grading and more question types, you’d want our advanced quizzes add-on. If you want to add an online community to your website that’s similar to a Facebook group, but on your website you would like our social learning add-on, if you want to add coaching to a learning experience, like a course you would, like our private areas add-on. We have. Many different add-ons to fulfill many different use cases like private site, which helps turn your LMS into a completely private internal company training portal type site. That’s LifterLMS private site. And the great thing is, and there’s many more, but the great thing about these add-ons is we launched new ones. So for example, we’re getting ready to come out with a continuing education add-on that you’re gonna love. If you’re in the continuing education niche, some of our most successful users of LifterLMS offer continuing education in niche scenarios like for nurses or some kind of license they need to keep or for some kind of just continuing education or professional development. In the medical field and all kinds of different niches. You’re gonna love that one. That one’s literally about to release. As we’re making this video, and I should also mention, one of our most popular add-ons is called Groups. And what groups allows you to do is offer training at scale into groups. So you can offer courses and memberships to individuals, but you can also offer them. At scale to entire groups like companies, so a company could buy your a hundred seats in your course, and then it gets its own part of your LMS where that group buyer can invite in team members and managers, and it’s all front end reporting. The people never log into the back of WordPress. It’s a very popular advanced way to use LifterLMS so that you can make more money. Or drive greater impact by offering training at scale in the groups like companies, schools nonprofits, or really any kind of organization or group that you can think of. So the Infinity Bundle has everything we make, all the e-commerce, all the integrations, our theme and all the advanced add-ons. And what typically happens this time of year. Is a lot of new people will get the infinity bundle ’cause they want it at the best price and they want everything and they want all the bonuses. And existing LifterLMS customers take the opportunity to upgrade into the Infinity bundle from a lower bundle so that they can get, unlock all the features and capabilities of LifterLMS. If you’re listening to this and this looks interesting to you, I would encourage you to go to lifter lms.com/black-friday. If you go to our website, you’re not gonna miss it. There’s a little banner where you can click through to the Black Friday landing page, and that goes over all the details. Gives you the coupon code and the links to purchase LifterLMS during our biggest sale of the year. In terms of your bonuses, instantly after purchase, you’re gonna receive an email that has a link to either enroll in those paid courses that we talked about in the bonuses, but for free. And you’ll get download links to the resources that are downloadable. So I would encourage you to go to lifter lms.com/black-friday. This is our biggest sales event of the year. These bonuses are great. We really tried to overdeliver and just add as much value and solve as many of your problems as we could, not just by providing the best software, but also giving you some great bonuses to help you on your journey. So if you want the best LMS at the best price, go to LifterLMS today. Take advantage of the Black Friday all November sale. You’ll instantly get access to the bonuses. The sale is only valid through the end of November, basically the end of December one, and it will be gone. So if you like to save money and you want these bonuses, take action today. It’s great to be with you on the journey. Thanks for listening to this episode, and we will catch you in the next one. Take care. 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post A Season for Course Creator Freedom: LifterLMS Black Friday appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In this LMScast, According to Matt Medeiros, The WP Minute is changing profoundly from being a WordPress news and community site to a resource for agencies and freelancers that is more value-driven and instructive. At first, The WP Minute concentrated on reporting on upcoming WordCamps, community conversations, product releases, and WordPress-related information. Though such information is useful, Matt found that just a small percentage of people roughly 10,000 English-speaking WordPress aficionados worldwide are really interested in this kind of “inside baseball” news regarding Automattic, leadership changes, and local politics. Matt made the decision to return his attention to the primary audience WordPress freelancers and agency owners with whom he had initially established a connection through his previous project, The Matt Report, after realizing the limits of that specialized audience. He wants to help these professionals navigate challenges in today’s landscape, especially as artificial intelligence and economic pressures change the way agencies and independent creators work. The first course created using LifterLMS for The WP Minute, which focuses on assisting users in selecting the best WordPress hosting company, was released as a result of this development. By actively assisting individuals in learning and applying the knowledge he shares, online courses allow Matt to develop a deeper connection with his audience. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 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 Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, 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 a little rusty because I’ve been doing a lot of solo episodes, but he’s back on the show. I think this is appearance number six, seven, or eight. It’s Matt Maderis. He’s from Gravity. He’s from the WP Minute. Matt has a lot of projects and has been a big personality in the WordPress community and entrepreneur community for a long time. Before we get into it, just first welcome back on the show, Matt.  Matt Medeiros: Thanks for having me, Chris. I was here on episode 500. I think we were talking about podcasting and the value of that. So excited to dig into a different topic today.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. I noticed you launched a course with lifter LMS on the WP Minute. I believe it’s the first course on the WP Minute. It’s about. Hosting and how to choose the right and best WordPress host. Before I summarize it, why don’t you tell us all about it? What’s the story? Why courses for the WP Minute, which has always been more of news newsletter kind of stuff, like where did this need for courses emerge? Matt Medeiros: Yeah, there’s a few challenges at play for my business at the WP Minute, and of course with WordPress content and with WordPress. And so I’m trying to tackle all of that with this slow, methodical shift with what’s happening at the WP Minute. But you’re right, it’s always been about more like that community focus, like what’s happening in WordPress. A lot of it lent to news. A lot of it lent. To what the community’s up to what’s happening at Word Camps, product updates, et cetera. But WordPress News Media is a challenging space to say the least. The WP Minute was supposed to be a reprieve for me. When I got into back into the workforce page, Lee Casto and now gravity Forms, I was trying to dial down all of the overhead of running. A bunch of content while having a day job and having kids. And it started off really small and then as I do with a lot of things, it just piled on the snowball effect of rolling down the hill and doing more content, doing more media started to expand. And the challenge with WordPress news and content is not a lot of people really care about it, right? Not a lot of people really care about. The inside baseball of what’s happening with automatic and leadership and what’s happening to the community. Those of us that do care, really care. But I’ve always said there’s like this 10,000 English speaking people across the world who actually care about the type of content that I’ve been producing With the WP Minute for the last, I don’t know, three and a half-ish years, four years. There’s been this shift halfway through the year of getting back to, or a little bit more than halfway through the year, getting back to the roots of what I was doing with the MAT report, which was like really focusing on. The WordPress freelancer and agency owner and diving back into that space because when I started the MAT report, the big thing that was happening and why I was really covering agency life and WordPress was massive financial crisis in 2007 and 2008, and a bunch of people started getting into services and WordPress. And WordPress was really becoming this. Go-to CMS now. The, I don’t wanna say threat, but the big thing happening now is of course ai. And what does that mean, not only for the freelancers business or the agency’s business, what does that mean for WordPress? So I really want to turn my attention of content and effort back into number one, unapologetically supporting WordPress. Like why we should all use WordPress at its core and its fundamental use case. Two how do we get back to talking to agencies and freelancers again to encourage them to use WordPress in the face of AI and in the face of continued economic challenges? So the course is a piece of that. My overall strategy, I’ve never been an, I think you and I have talked about this a lot. I have never been really good or focused on SEO. Or paid ads or like any kind of gray area promotional sources. For my content, it’s always been I’m just gonna publish content and keep doing that and hope people come to engage with it and it’s worked, right? So it’s worked for, the last whatever, 12 years. But now with. Content being so competitive and AI being able to serve up answers or even news updates really quickly, and so many WordPress content creators out there. My only thing to help the business forward is how do I even get clo? How do I get even closer to the audience, right? This is why I do the blog, the newsletter, the podcast, the videos, and I have the community, the course to me. Is, how do I get closer to that person to actually help, educate them and they’ll just care a little bit more about the total offering that I’m putting out there. So I’m trying to lean into that real like human approach. We have some more courses coming soon and some other ways to get education and stuff like that, that I have noodling around. But this is me saying. I want people to care more and I want to get closer to them and help educate them and solve their problems with the WP Minute and the community and the courses and such. So that’s the quick overview of like how we’ve got there over the last four years.  Chris Badgett: Awesome. And just a quick side question. You mentioned there’s about 10,000 people in the English speaking world that care about WordPress, community news and content. Do you have any sense on the size of the freelancer market that is somehow related to WordPress? Like how much bigger of an opportunity do you think that is?  Matt Medeiros: On the freelancer side, the freelancer or agency side, in my opinion is far greater. Than than that number, but a lot of them, don’t really care about. They don’t really care about the automatic and WP engine lawsuit, right? They often don’t care about the word camp event happening or who’s speaking and, what’s the interesting angle on that? Like a lot of people because they’re so busy or they’re not aware of it, they just want to use WordPress. They know and love the tool. They just might not be exposed to the community yet. And WordPress is, again, it’s just that tool to get the job done. So I think that number is far greater. I think it’s the people like you and I who fall into the ca into my own category of the 10,000 people, and I work that number backwards from whatever the 50,000 people that are in wordpress.org, slack. Then you work that back towards like how many people we see in the post status Slack, how many people go to Word camps and who’s showing up on podcasts and Listenerships like that, who really care about, what has Matt said today? And what’s automatic rolling out for a new like feature on wordpress.com? There’s only so few people who care about that. But lots more people to your point, who care about, how does this affect my. Freelance business, or how do I launch this new website with lifter LMS or whatever.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So why is how to choose the best host for WordPress the first course you did and you also did it with Eric Kovac, did I say his name right? Yeah. Yep. And you also chose to I mean you have an intro video and stuff, but it’s e mostly Eric’s content.  Matt Medeiros: Yep. Yep. So Eric is the instructor as lifter, LMS puts the title on. And I do the intro video of who this course is for. And I do the there’s a final video there that, like how you can apply this to your agency or freelance business. I ran an agency for a decade worked at a, worked at Pagely for three and a half years, and I’m two and a half years into Gravity form. So I know the ecosystem really well, so I’m. And then Eric has 20 plus years of being a web designer and freelancer runs his own freelance agency. And this course is the business side of hosting Andrew Agency, not like the gigabytes and bandwidth side of hosting. So we are looking at it from the perspective of how do you evaluate. Your WordPress project, just a tiny little five page site. Like where should you host this? That if all of a sudden you’ve got this, medium to large size business knocking on your door and they’ve got these real customer requirements, what, where should you host that type of customer? If you have this big learn lifter at Learn Learning site, e-learning site with WooCommerce and Lifter, where should you host that kind of site? So we’re putting that into the perspective of the business owner. Because we really feel that the bad rap that a lot of clients have with WordPress is mostly rooted in hosting too Slow it, it got a security breach. Too many popups like, every time I logged in, it just took forever for the screen to load. These are all rooted in hosting issues, and we wanna solve that. WordPress client experience with the boots on the ground who are deploying these sites, right? That’s how we see that. So we teach people how to level up their game, how to build these relationships with clients, and how hosting is very important to that whole paradigm. So that’s why we started with this course first. And yeah, in terms of like how we do things at the WP Minute, Eric is my editor at the WP Minute he puts, does a lot of content for us. And he’s always wanted to teach and be like a coach deal. So yeah, it was his opportunity to build the course and be the instructor. And I just come in as the guy that sells it on the front end and closes it out with like how I would apply this in my agency. But we both collaborate on it for sure.  Chris Badgett: I wanted to ask why you made it free, and if for those of you out there listening, particularly if you’re a freelancer or run an agency and help clients with websites, I recommend go going to the wp minute.com, find their courses and enroll. But why free? Why not a paid course and try to monetize your brand or that the WP Minute audience?  Matt Medeiros: Yeah. I don’t know if I’m ready for so if I just look at like how I run. A content business with the asterisk that I do this on the side. This is a side hustle. It’s not full time right now. The revenue stream for the WP Minute, and the best way for me to create content is through sponsorship. It just so happens that a lot of our sponsors are WordPress web hosts and I’m constantly pushing. Our, our own abilities to provide more value for our sponsors. So it’s not just the podcast ad read, it’s not just the logo in the newsletter. Now we’re trying, like I said before, we’re trying to get closer to the WordPress user with education. So it’s a, so the course is free because sponsors. Appear in logos at the bottom of each lesson. This course, the hosting course, hosting Decoded is not we don’t point to any one of our sponsors. We’re not showing any dashboards from our sponsors. We’re not saying use this coupon code for, pressable, GoDaddy Kinta, whatever. We’re just saying that this content is supported by these great hosts. Maybe you want to check them out. Maybe you go and find a host that fits, the needs for your projects. Like we’ve taught you. It’s free because that’s like the model that I’ve been on so far with doing sponsored sponsored supported work. And it, that’s what’s working for now. We do have some ideas for paid courses, maybe some cohort learning in the future. And I’d rather focus my time on paying for those types of services versus me trying to sell, a $200 course, at least at this stage in the game. Not, never say never but, that’s where we’re at right now.  Chris Badgett: So you mentioned you have a day job and. It’s interesting what I’ve seen you do with the WP Minute in terms of bringing in other personalities and personal brands and thinking about the WP Minute as not just Matt Madeiras tell us about that line of thinking and how you got to that place of having multiple people working on a project from abr personal branding standpoint. Matt Medeiros: Yeah, so that’s always been a challenge. So as I mentioned before, and people that have. I’ve seen my work before. No, I started a podcast called Mat Report. I did that for 10, 12 years or whatever, and it just became at some point in my life right around COVID, I was like, I’m an artist and I like to just destroy my art. I like to build it up and just say I’m done with that, and now I want something else. And that’s that like moment where I was, I really started to say, look I’m doing this thing called myPort. It’s got my name in it. It’s fun. I really enjoy it. It’s valuable, but it’s not a standalone like business asset. Like no one wants to own MAT report. But if you do call me up and so I was just like, Hey, look I, if I’m gonna keep doing this content thing I want to, I wanna really see if I can do this as a sustainable business. So the brand ma the brand WP Minute took over those efforts. And of course it was supposed to be much smaller but it expanded which was great. And the challenges has become, has. Has been like, how do I continue to produce this content? But also, like I said, providing value for sponsors and finding new sponsors. And finding, and like in thinking about the business and how to like, grow the revenue. So you have the memberships, you have classified ads, you have sponsorships and stuff like that. But it just doesn’t sell itself. And at some point, like you start, like I bring on Eric. He’s my biggest expense, of course, and it’s, paying him to create the work and or create the content, and he helps me produce a lot of the podcasts and the newsletter and all this stuff. He’s taking on more responsibility, he gets paid more, and I need to keep continuing to build that funnel, right? Or just build that support. So stuff like the Agency Action show that we just launched, which is with Kurt and Toby Kres, Kurt v Onan, and Toby Kres. That’s another step forward in saying. I wanna serve agency owners again, but I haven’t sold a website to a client in, I don’t know, seven years, right? Like I haven’t run an agency in about seven years and I want to put out valuable content that people trust. So I brought those two guys on to talk to that audience. ’cause I trust their work with agency and freelance life. They’re doing it day to day and they’re going to speak to that audience. So that’s like that. Sort of first expansion of, I don’t wanna call it a podcast network, but it’s a first expansion to address that audience. I don’t want I don’t want to talk about agency life right now ’cause I haven’t done it in seven years. Do I talk to agency owners all the time? Yes, I do. Every week I talk to an agency owner and, or a freelancer, but I’m not writing contracts and doing deliverables anymore. So I don’t want to say that I’m the expert in that anymore. So it’s just how I, I’ve approached tho those topics. Chris Badgett: You mentioned future courses. I don’t know if you want to get into some ideas you have, but I really admire in a given topic area, the best courses are built around pain. And there’s a lot of pain in like the hosting, like you mentioned, creating challenges for clients and straining the client agency relationship. And as a former like yourself, agency owner, I remember a lot of pain. Like I could find a lot of different topics to maybe zero in on. Yeah. But can you speak to the future courses or even just some of the pain areas of agency life or freelancer entrepreneurship that you find particularly challenging and needs a fresh take and some training around? Matt Medeiros: Yeah, certainly. You know that was the reason why we started with hosting because I was a system ad administrator. 25 years ago, and I was, running cPanel servers when cPanel first came to the market. And then I took that knowledge and brought it to my agency and I was like, oh, I’m gonna, now that I run an agency, I’m just gonna run the hosting myself. ’cause I, I know what to do. And it was fine in the beginning. You have a dozen customers or 20 customers and you’re like, oh, look at this. I’m making, nearly a thousand dollars a month in hosting. And if I just. 10 x this or a hundred x this, like this is gonna be great. And then, as soon as you start having the first security breach on your VPS server or there’s you have to update MySQL and PHP and then you realize, oh wait, I’m the one holding the bag here. And if. All of this fails, which it did a few times. Like now your customers are looking at you going, you told me, five nines of uptime. And I’m like, I’m just a, I’m just a WordPress agency. I’m not a web host. So I learned those lessons early on and I wanted to make sure that of course, technology’s different these days, but I wanted to make sure that folks. Know that experience for your customer really makes or breaks a deal. You’ve already built the website fine, but if you want to, them coming back and, growing as you grow your agency, you gotta make sure that this whole experience is good. So that’s like the pain point that we’re trying to solve too with the hosting course. The next course will be about running that agency. And much more from the pre-sales process. That’s always been a huge issue that I’ve heard with other freelancers and WordPress agency startups is how do you, like, how do you do pre-sales? How do negotiate with the customer? How do you present to the customer? How do you qualify them as a lead? How do you follow up with them, like this whole pre-sales process? At least I haven’t found a lot of content around that. And that’s one thing that we want to help freelancers and agency owners understand when a lead comes in, what happens next is do you just sell it and you think that’s it? Do you just give them one price? Do you give them multiple prices? So we’re gonna approach that topic and that probably won’t come until, after Thanksgiving. ‘Cause what we found with this hosting decoded course, it took about, I wanna say two and a half months from Hey Eric, we’re gonna do this together to, hitting publish on. The courses page on the WP Minute site and then realizing oh my God, I don’t have a login link on the WP Minute. ’cause it was never meant to be, a membership site. So it was like, oh God, I gotta do all that now. I have to set up the emails, I gotta set up the login link, I gotta do all this stuff. So what we’re finding, it’s, that first process was, two to three months and hopefully, based on what we know, maybe this one will take a month or so. So  Chris Badgett: I think that’s really smart. I like to think about a niche audience through time. And like the hosting challenge is at a certain point in time, a lot of a question I ask on this podcast all the time to serve, particularly the agent agency, the builder, the WordPress blue collar professional, as you call it, is how do you get clients? And I think that lead generation. Is a topic that’s covered a lot. There’s all these different things, but as you were talking, I was listening to oh, the presale. We’ve got some leads, like what do we do here? And Matt also comes from a offline sales background. So you have you’re a great salesperson. Matt sold lifter Old Mess on Pagely. We’re still there. That was like seven years ago. But helping agencies close is like a, that is underserved the more I think about it. Yeah. And you don’t need general sales closing, objection handling advice. That stuff’s important. And you can read about that in bookstores and articles, but let’s talk about the blue collar WordPress professionals specifically. There’s some unique variables there. Yeah, so exciting.  Matt Medeiros: Yeah. I’m trying like again, like I’m, we’re always pushing for value. I won’t go on the soapbox of WordPress media and WordPress content businesses here, but we’re always trying to push for that higher level of value for our sponsors and our, and the members of our Slack community and, web hosts. Love agencies naturally because they bring sticky customers and they bring big accounts. And multiple customers and mul and multiple customers. It’s not rocket science. Anybody who knows like the networking space in WordPress like web hosts have or tend to be the ones that sponsor a lot of outlets and we really appreciate ’cause they help us get the work done. So if I can create content that helps them and their customers, like how to choose web hosts. ’cause remember, we’re only partnering I’m not partnering with every web host. Certainly. There’s a lot of web hosts that come to us that Hey, we wanna be on. And it’s no, I don’t. I don’t think you’ve, you meet the criteria for a lot of WordPress professionals that are looking for great hosting the WordPress way. So we only partner with those types of hosts. And now if we can also bring in the agency owners and put them side by side and put them literally in the same virtual room, then like everyone wins because the hosts get to talk to these agency partners. Agency partners are always looking for more leads. Hosts have leads, right? And then like somewhere in the middle, since we know a lot of people in the WordPress space now, the product people are also in the WP Minute, and all three of these parties are congregating in the WP Minute. And that’s the secret sauce right there. Bring folks in get them talking to each other. Hopefully our work that we do at the WP Minute is raising value for all three of those parties. Chris Badgett: This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. A question about your course. I noticed you added a certificate or certification at the end of the course. I feel like I’ve thought this for a long time in the LMS space certification is totally underused. It’s not just about getting continuing education credits or doing some kind of micro credential like you can certify, you can gamify like a lot of different things. On a full level of a full spectrum of completely serious corporate business to, we’re just having fun here and this is like a game, but what, tell us about the decision to add a certification to the free hosting course. Yeah. What’s your vision for the freelancer agency owner to be able to do with that? Like why do that? Matt Medeiros: Yeah. It’s weird ta talking to you about it since you’ve, you’re the mastermind behind the software. Yeah, but I’ll show you, I’ll tell you how I’m thinking about it. And actually we did two things two kind of like unique things, right? So obviously the cert certification is there, and that’s like a built-in feature to your product, which is great. But on the checklist side. We don’t have to talk about this right now, and I, but I’d love to hear a little bit more about it. We have a, one of the lessons is a checklist in, I think resources, I forget what the title is. ‘Cause we were thinking like, how do we make the course tangible other than the certificate? So before you go through the whole thing, pass the quiz and get the certificate. What else can we provide as tooling or like utility around this education. So I built a. Hosting calculator using automatics, nut telex, ai, block builder. And a user can go in and put in the requirements for their particular WordPress project, and at the other end of the calculator, it’ll spit out which level of hosting is going to be the best fit for the requirements entered into the calculator. So that was really cool. But to answer your first question about the certification. Yeah, right now it’s fun. Like Eric and I talked about it. We’re like, Hey, we should, at the end of this, you should, we should have a little little certificate that somebody earns by passing a quiz. I thought about it for a little bit. I was like, I don’t know if I want to do that. ’cause it just becomes fun. Just becomes a fun thing. But then the utility of that sort of dawned on me like, you know what, there’s a lot of WordPress companies. Specifically agencies and product companies. When you’re the size of like gravity forms at my day job where you have 50 plus people working for you, not everyone knows everything about WordPress, right? These, a lot of like developers that you hire or project managers. It’s not like they’ve been in WordPress for 15 years. Wouldn’t that be great? But a lot of them don’t understand and they’re just coming from other parts of the technology world. Can the WP Minute. S certifications serve as a training tool for other agencies and other WordPress product companies, right? Hosting again, is super important. If you’re a bigger agency or you hired somebody as like a project manager and they don’t know anything about WordPress hosting, but they’re talking to your clients and, potentially your clients are asking them like, where should I host this site? Don’t you wanna make sure that your project manager or the face of your business understands. Some fundamental lay of the land in WordPress. So I’m hoping, I’ve already started talking to a handful of WordPress agencies to say, Hey, bring your staff in. It’s free, right? And have them pass the certification. And if they show you this certification, maybe you buy them lunch or maybe the WP minutes, splits a lunch with you or whatever. We’ll buy them like a GrubHub card or whatever, like some way to bring, the company’s already in WordPress, leaning on the WP Minute as a resource for fundamental, WordPress training, which, you’d have to be in the space for 20 years to really understand. Chris Badgett: I love that. I think that’s a great opportunity to explore for certification. Like I think about, I began with the end in mind, and I think about in your future course about pre-sales. If somebody is on a sales call with a prospective client and they’ve taken your course, they’ve printed it out, it’s in a frame in the background behind them on Zoom, and they’re certified in WordPress hosting, they’re certified in like customer experience, happiness or whatever. And you know what other, what whatever other like tech or sector innovations that this agency does, could be marketing automation, could be. Graphic design could be a lot of different things that even though it’s not like an official accredited school, that certification is really valuable. And you’re literally helping your people close deals. Yeah. And become better at what they do in the process. Who doesn’t want that?  Matt Medeiros: Yes. Yes. That’s the. That’s the hope anyway.  Chris Badgett: You mentioned wanting to go back to something about the checklist or Yeah. What were you thinking there? What’d you want to explore?  Matt Medeiros: Yeah, just like the calculator. So that was fun. That was, we’re just trying to find ways. Of course we have the slide deck which. PDF, whatever. It’s 90, 90 slides across the entire, course. But we were just trying to find ways of like, how can somebody, how can we tangibly get somebody to interact with this course so that they could. Because I’m a visual learner, I’m a hands-on learner. That’s pretty much how I do it. So like how do I apply these concepts? And this is a very beginner level course. Like I think anyone who’s been in WordPress for more than five years might understand how to, pick the right host. But if you’re brand new to this, like you might not know that, a customer may eventually ask you for. A specific SLA when they get to their host. I didn’t know, and I ran an agency for a decade, not until I got into Pagely, 15 years into my WordPress career that I ever hear. A web host customer say, yeah, and we’re gonna also need to modify your SLA and give you our terms on, like, how are you gonna support turnaround? I was like, wow. It’s gonna come with a lot more zeros at the end of that hosting bill to do that kind of thing. But it’s certainly a thing that happens in bigger enterprise, more bespoke solutions. So yeah we came up with that calculator idea as something that was a tangible way to interact with the course. Chris Badgett: Just to brainstorm on that, this is a beautiful thing. This is why I like to use the metaphor of putting your customer at the center of your business, not your product. So if your product, in this case is a free training course, there’s only so much you’re gonna think about, but when you put the customer at the center, they’re like they need training. They need videos, and I love that you also have some text with your videos and stuff, but you did something really cool, which is provide a tool. A tool is not content, it’s not a video, whatever. It’s like its own type of thing to learn with and get results. You have a quiz, which is like a knowledge check and a certificate that’s like something else that helps them, but you could provide templates like in your future pre-sales course, like having call scripts. Things like that. Those are templates that people could use. Yeah. Even things like perks, like discounts, like coupon codes that you negotiate with vendors that they’re likely to use. There’s so much you can do besides just course content. Coaching, you mentioned potentially some cohort based stuff. That’s a whole other thing.  Matt Medeiros: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: And if you really map it out, you could probably come up with 20 different types of things that could be helpful in addition to just content. Yeah. ’cause people are coming for transformation and learning and content isn’t really the only thing there. Plus you layer in the learning styles where. Some people are more tactile learners, which means they want to get busy with their hands and like they some are visual and auditory and all that, but the tactile learners I’m sure they love the tool and like giving people an assignment like, go do this. Or if I was doing a marketing or outbound sales course would be like, before you go to the next lesson, do three cold outreach emails. I don’t care how sloppy it is, just do it. So I’m like getting the learner taking action. Oh, and by the way, there’s a template here to make your first attempt like probably go a little smoother.  Matt Medeiros: Yep. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. Those great ideas we’re definitely gonna apply some of that stuff in the future course. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Now you got my brain going, so I gotta turn it off. But invoicing stuff, invoicing templates, and milestone markers and common objection handling, cheat sheets, like all kinds of stuff there. Speaking of that, one of the things that I’ve always been impressed by you over the years, decade plus that I’ve known you is your versatile on your content types. Podcaster YouTuber, course creator, blogger, newsletter writer. You’re a vibe coder. You’re an agency guy, and do you build sites, you do your own, you do great design. So you have like. All these different skill sets, and you’re putting it around your ideal customer and the niche and all that stuff. And I think that’s truly unique because a lot of times people will lock on to, oh, I’m a course creator, I’m a newsletter entrepreneur. Or I’m a podcaster, I’m a YouTuber. I’m a coach. But you do all that. And I was just looking for some advice you would give somebody on. Maybe getting outta their comfort zone, but trying on these different channels for size. What, how do you think about that? I think you do it naturally just ’cause you’re interested in a lot of things, but maybe one of those things feels harder to you than the other. Or you have more fun when you do video or something like that. I don’t know.  Matt Medeiros: Yeah, it’s a great question. I was actually thinking about this, and I’ve thought about this in the past before, but I was definitely thinking about this yesterday because. I did a video that I specifically, I only put on LinkedIn. This is a bit of a tangent, but hang with me. It’s a video that I put specifically on LinkedIn for Gravity Forums. We launched a new podcast called Crew Collective. It’s about storytelling and we interview a lot of people who are filmmakers, authors, musicians. It has nothing to do with software and tech has everything to do about like space, but creators and how they made that piece of art, right? So I did this whole like behind the scenes video of how we came up with the cover art. How that cover art in branding transcends the rest of the website, right? Like how it affects the episode images, how we use our guest images in that cover. Art, and Travis and team did a fantastic job with it, right? I’m not the designer behind it, but I wanted to tell that story of what it’s like to launch. A podcast that is virtually unknown and how to do it the right way. ’cause we were asking people that have like agents to be on the show. Like not AI agents, like media agents that we had to go through because they’re, they’re not a-list celebrities, but some of ’em are b’s, and a couple C’s. So we had to knock on the door of a publicist or an agent. And we can’t just be like, we’re a software company with a podcast. Come on. Like we needed to show them. Our own artwork to say we’re a legitimate entity. Asking your customer, your client, to be on our podcast to talk about their stuff. So I went through this whole behind the scenes thing. The point of that is, is I show people off how we did that and what our approach was, yada yada, as supplemental content to the podcast. And I just started thinking social media and algorithms has no idea where to place me. Which is my big, which I’ve, this is the point to your thing is I do so much that social media has no idea how to amplify my stuff. Because on one day I’m talking strictly about WordPress. The next day I’m talking about how to do a branded podcast. The next day I’m talking, I’m like sharing my insights of whatever marketing at gravity forms, it becomes a challenge, but. I can tell you with certainty that being able to launch this course that we just did with Lifter, I have never felt the thing that I’ve always missed in a lot of these areas because I’m a utility player. Let’s say I’m a, I don’t wanna say I’m a generalist, but I, okay, call me a generalist. The thing that I’ve always missed is the thing to, to say, here’s what I sell, here’s what I offer. And yeah, the podcast like, come and listen. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Join the newsletter to say stay subscribed to the WP Minute. Okay. But the course has built so much confidence in my ability to clearly say we’re helping the WordPress professionals. Now my customer might be a web host for sponsorship, and I can use the course. With my sponsorship customers, like I feel way more confident now saying, please support the WP Minute. Please sponsor the WP Minute because I have this course. And on the audience side, I feel more confident with a call to action to say, come on in. We’re helping educate you. It’s not just me saying, follow the podcast. Join our newsletter. Come on in. Take the course, join our community, which is also now free. And let’s get better at WordPress together. So at least on the WP Minute side, launching this course has anchored me in a more confident way that I feel like I provide value to the sponsors and to the audience, if that makes sense.  Chris Badgett: That does make sense. And I think one of the cool things that course creation will force you to do is. They’re bigger content items than like an episode or a newsletter or a single video. And then you have to, it forces you to be like, what’s the learning objective here? Who’s the ideal learner? What’s the shortest path to outcome without overwhelming them? I’ve been in this industry 20 years and I have this giant cup, but my student may be a newer freelancer and their cup is smaller in terms of what. They can absorb and what they need to hear. So it just forces you to create something that’s, it’s more complex, but it’s also in some ways more complete than a one-off newsletter or video, even though those things may fit in a broader offer. The other thing I wanna mention here is I’m a huge fan and it’s totally underused of the free course lead magnet, right? Yeah. You can do a PDF or a white paper. Or even like the tool you built, you could create like a calculator tool and somebody has to opt in to get the answer. But when you do a full training and just give that away for free. And if you’ve built a brand and an audience that already knows, likes, and trust you, and you have some longer form content, which tells you they have the attention span to invest in a course is so powerful. A free course lead magnet shouldn’t be your only lead magnet. But, and it’s not just to get leads, but it’s very powerful when you have a tight audience tied off or a tight pain point problem you’re solving. Yeah. So I think that’s smart and always encourage people to give away more than they’re free for, free than they’re comfortable. Also, somebody may not hire you, but could still work with you and get benefit from a free or paid training. I could go in a lot of directions here, but in my opinion, every company is a media company or sorry, an education company. They are a media company and they know that, that’s why they have blogs and podcasts and YouTube channels and whatnot. But they’re also an education company. And making some of that education very free is super powerful. And in software specifically like hosting or. Any tool, like there’s training and we all used to unfold, like you get something and you unfold that little thin white instruction manual that sucks and you can’t read, like you have this huge opportunity with an online course to make something way better than that. The digital version of that little paper thin instruction manual that doesn’t really do the job.  Matt Medeiros: Yeah. And immediately I was able to close deals. This is gonna sound like a testimonial for a lifter, but I have no problem giving you a testimonial. But I was immediately able to close deals with hosting sponsors when I launched the course. Which I knew was, it was part of the strategy here. It, I was able to, people, I had two customers sign up, for the for our sponsorship spots that are hosts. Because I launched the course and they were like, they saw the, my existing sponsors alongside the course and they were like we wanna be there too, alongside these other hosting companies that you have. How do we get that? And it’s just oh, okay, here’s, here’s the path to, to getting sponsorship, which was, fantastic. So when you do put out good. Great valuable content. When it’s free, it raise it depending on what your industry is, it raises some eyebrows and helped me close deals ’cause my model is sponsorship. So people didn’t wanna miss out with that. And this is not my first rodeo. I launched academy.caos.com using Lifter. When I was at CAOs, I launched learn.gravity.com, which is lifter. When I first joined Gravity this is the first time that I, I did it under my own brand of stuff. But I’ve been using Lifter a lot to do a lot of this stuff.  Chris Badgett: You’re exceptional in that, you’ve, you’re just such a great content creator and you’re doing it and you’ve done it before, like inside other companies like Gravity and Casto and so on. But in most of the case, most software companies, the best training on the software is made by some independent party. So if I look at the hosting decoded course, if you ask the question, why hasn’t this been made by the hosting industry or a player in there? It is an interesting question. One, they’re biased to their own solution, so they, that’s just an issue. So they’re not really incentivized to do the bread basket of let’s look at all the options and stuff like that. Some of that is a limited limiting belief, but for the entrepreneurs out there listening, there’s a huge opportunity to create training. On your favorite softwares and those companies, like you mentioned, getting sponsorship will help promote it, promote you. It’s needed. It’s needed. We all know as, particularly as agency and freelancer folks, sometimes when we talk to a company for support, we know more about the tool than the support rep we’re talking to. Yeah. And if you’re, if you find yourself in that position, maybe you could create a training on your own for that. Yeah. Whether it’s free or paid or whatever.  Matt Medeiros: Yeah. And a lot of, the hosting companies to be fair, ’cause again, I worked at Pagely, so I totally know, like a lot of that marketing and advertising is spent on saying things like more gigabytes than the competition, or faster support time, because their buying cycle or their customers in that buying cycle moment okay, this is the one I want. Or it’s here, first. Year is 50% off and next year, the price goes up. We looked at it as, okay, that’s great. And certainly, look at the gigabytes and the disc space and the data centers and all that stuff. But at the end of the day, how are they supporting WordPress? And through that, is that helping your agency and your customer? One, I don’t know what we have for time left, but I do have a bonus story on we had the course name and we launched it and I emailed it, and then I was contacted that I had to change the name. Oh. And we had we had to change the name the next day of launching the course.  Chris Badgett: Because it included a name that there was already a course about or something, or what was the.  Matt Medeiros: No. I was contacted that from Automatic, or yes, I was contacted by Automatic that it infringed on the trademark because the course name was WordPress hosting Decoded. Yeah. And that was clearly against the terms and conditions of the trademark. So for the course creators who are out there, who are watching, luckily. I definitely would’ve lost my mind if Eric wasn’t helping me put this whole course together, because there’s a lot, like you might just see free course, nine modules, a quiz, that’s it. But there was just a lot of stuff that went into play, including all, like the copy, the slides, the featured images, and all the course I had to go through and change all those the next day. So all of that stuff that, went into launching a course, I had to like quickly redo it again over the, over a weekend. And change all that stuff up, change that links and things like that. But yeah, so we couldn’t use that name WordPress hosting, so we had to change the whole name, which caused us to go through and change all of our assets. So definitely keep all of your course stuff and your assets organized and easily changeable. I guess if anything like that happens to you,  Chris Badgett: First. Welcome to my world, Matt. So with with plugin names and things like and when you, a lot of plugins involve multiple brands for example, like a CRM brand but we’ve learned over time through automatic and other companies and other I don’t know if it’s a cease and desist letters or whatever, but if you’re gonna make a course about some other brand. Putting for that brand at the end, like you have pivoted to here, you tend to be all right. Yeah. But if you start with the brand name, yes. You get you’re rolling on the dice. But I also want to admire you for something I noticed that all successful course creators have, which is forward and perfect action. So you didn’t get hung up on the name forever and all that. You did it. Oops. You crossed a line you didn’t realize was there. You got a letter, you corrected it, you’re fine. But that’s how it goes. This is entrepreneurship, this is life. Matt Medeiros: Yeah. That, yeah, it was certainly something that I definitely wasn’t gonna battle use it as a training lesson. And, it’s the part of the entrepreneurship stuff and it was to, it’s fine. And in fact maybe even the course name ends up being better in the long run for visibility and. Searchability and all that stuff, but definitely like when you’re you first launch, you send it out to your mailing list, you put it out on social, you’re hyped up, you do a podcast episode about it, and you’re like, you’re way up here. Then all of a sudden it’s you gotta change the name and you’re like, like there goes all that energy, out of the room. But it’s fine. And I am feeling a lot better about it now.  Chris Badgett: Just to close it out with one final question, and it could be I’ll challenge you to. To put it down to one word, but if you need three or four sentence, it’s fine. One of the things I notice with successful course creators and content and creator entrepreneurs is that there’s some kind of through line, yeah, you do a lot of things. You set, podcasting, YouTube, you work at these companies, you do all these projects and stuff. You collaborate with all these people. What would you say is the through line? Because I see people come and go in different spaces and that’s fine. Maybe you enter a new season of life or your interests or focuses change. But what’s your through line? Because I’m really glad just to see you continuing on the journey and just being around and your different forms and evolution. But what’s the through line for you?  Matt Medeiros: The through line is definitely WordPress, right? It’s the only thing that has kept me. Kept me going and in various firm forms, right? So it started as an agency, as an agency owner. Then it turned into like the podcast stuff. Then it turned into a more official career as I, transitioned from Pagely to Casto, which is a WordPress company as well to where I’m at with GRA gravity forms. And that’s the thing that makes me continue to put out this content. If it was something where, had I been a agency coach 15 years ago, would that have lasted the stand of time for me? Probably not. Like the foundation for me is WordPress for what it stands for in open source and what it empowers people to do. And that’s my foundation. Then I have these different art forms, on top of it, over the course of many years. So that’s what’s kept me, consistent and kept me going because I do love WordPress and what it can do for an individual. Right now.  Chris Badgett: That’s Matt Maderis. Go to the wp minute.com. You’ll see the course on there. Hosting Decoded, how to Choose the Best Host for WordPress. Thanks for coming on the show, Matt. Really appreciate it. And I love what you’ve built here. I’d encourage anybody listening to go check out the course and can’t wait to see your future courses and how this evolves. Matt Medeiros: Thanks, Chris. Thanks so much. 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@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Create Impact And Revenue From Free Courses With Matt Medeiros appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now Chris Badgett speaks with Robert Lunte and Dana Sleeper from CourseCREEK, a full-service eLearning provider that assists people and businesses in making money out of their knowledge through excellent online courses, in this episode of LMScast. According to Robert, CourseCREEK offers each customer a customized, high-touch experience by delivering everything from marketing and LMS creation to consultancy and instructional design. He tells the tale of a customer who constructs horse arenas and wishes to instruct others on how to make horse footing correctly. The customer used CourseCREEK’s assistance to transform their specialized knowledge into a SCORM-compliant course that was posted on an LMS, creating new revenue streams and chances to expand their knowledge. According to Robert, every firm may turn into an educational enterprise since online courses not only produce semi-passive income but also establish credibility, establish client interactions, and leave a lasting impression. Since the majority of their clients are subject matter experts without teaching experience, Dana continues, it is her responsibility as an instructional designer to turn their knowledge into interesting and useful learning opportunities. Dana discusses their process from exploration and identifying learning objectives to storyboarding, generating multimedia material, assuring accessibility, and keeping the client’s distinctive brand voice. In order to create courses that both successfully teach and represent the creator’s personality, Dana says that the process of creating courses is collaborative and iterative, combining the client’s vision with instructional design principles. 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 Badget. 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 LMScast. Today I’m joined by two special guests from CourseCREEK. That’s course creek.com. We have Robert Luty and Dana Sleeper from CourseCREEK, which is a full stack e-learning, production, implementation, instructional design, all the things. And I’m really excited to dive into it with you guys. But first, welcome to the show.  Robert Lunte: Thanks for having us. This is Looks fun. I like your setup. Yeah.  Chris Badgett: Awesome.  Robert Lunte: Great. Great to be here. Chris Badgett: Let’s just start with the big question of what is Course Creek? What are you, what are your services? What do you guys do? When I saw you pop up on the radar, I’m like, oh yeah, these are guys that are big picture, but can also zoom out on the components. But tell us about the offering at CourseCREEK.  Robert Lunte: That’s true. We’re not only guys, we wrestle get, we’re ladies as well. CourseCREEK is a full service e-learning firm. What we do is we help anybody that wants to monetize their expertise be it e-commerce executive coach types or large l and d departments that need to create content for their staff and their partners. As we were talking before. The cameras went live. There’s really no project that we’ll say no to. So we’re gonna develop course content and e-learning programs for really anybody that needs a world class job. We’re a boutique company. We don’t have great gobs of people. When you come on board and after we have our needs analysis meetings, the people that you meet in those meetings, such as Dana, will be the people working on your project. So it’s very high touch. We provide consulting. World class instructional design, which Dana will elaborate on a bit. Development on all the learning man, the learning the leading learning management systems such as LifterLMS, and marketing. So anything that you need, we can provide a full stack or we can do a la carte. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Tell us a like a client story, just as an example.  Robert Lunte: Okay. Let’s see. How about, gosh, this, all of our clients are super happy. Which one would be really good, which would be a great story. Okay. How about the the horse arena folks? So the horse arena folks, so they came to us and they make, this is an example of how we won’t say no to anything. They build large. Horse arenas for fluent folks that have horses. So that’s these big shelters. And when you’re doing these horse arenas, a big part of it is what they call the footing, right? So the footing is what the horses run on, all right? So that footing has to be done properly. It’s a science, it’s an art form. And if it’s not done properly, then you’ll hurt these, very expensive animals. They came on board and knew absolutely were clueless on how to make a course. They just had a budget and they realized they wanted to scale and leverage their expertise and get a course out there, and they wanted to offer something for people that. Can’t afford them to fly in and provide a hands-on consultation. They needed something that could take care of other folks on how to get the footing right. So off we went to build the, build those courses and we’re doing a really beautiful SCORM development program. And we’re putting them on a, one of these brilliant learning management systems. So I guess the story is they didn’t know anything except horse arenas. And we took them on our wing and now they’re super happy. We got a five star review from them. That’s great.  Chris Badgett: I think that’s awesome. I have this belief that every company is a, could be an education company, and particularly what you said with Downselling, if you can’t afford our services, we’ll see, still teach you how to do what you know we do. That’s much cheaper than hiring us. But it’s the do it yourself model and so many companies could be doing that. That’s awesome.  Robert Lunte: It’s so true. An online course opens up doors not only to some. Semi-passive revenue, which is a great thing. Maybe we’ll start there, but it opens up all kinds of opportunities. It’s a, it’s an introduction before you go on a speaking tour. It’s a leave behind. After you do a public speaking tour. It opens up opportunities and the customer journey. It opens up opportunities for the customer to potentially, if they want more of you and more information, you could do like a VIP retreat. So it sits in that, it sits in that purchase journey. Somewhere in the middle, which is super important. It it opens doors and it makes you an authority in the space. The other thing I like to mention is that people don’t mention very often is for a lot of folks, like the thought leader types, it also leaves a legacy. All right? So when all is said and done your teachings go on and people can continue to learn from you. And it can do a lot for folks.  Chris Badgett: I love the legacy aspect. There’s a concept we talk about a lot on this show that you have to wear five hats to really make it in this industry. Whether you could be a unique unicorn that can do all these things, or you can hire a team or hire an organization like Course Creek to fill in the gaps. But the five hats problem, as I describe it, is you have to be like a subject matter expertise. Whether that’s like. Horse running surface. That’s the expertise. You have to be able to teach effectively or coach or design instruction. You have to be an entrepreneur. Like you have to build a education company, you gotta do marketing, you gotta do sales, you gotta do operations. You have to be a community builder. Who are all these people that have, horse tracks? Like how do we reach these people? How do we, I mesh in their community or. Find them to begin with. And then you gotta be a technologist. We’re talking video, cameras, websites marketing automation, CRMs, LMS, all these things. And that’s a tall order for one person to be able to do. Yep. But since Dana is here, I want to really dig in on instructional design. ’cause this is such a huge problem because there are so many. People who have expertise, but they’re not trained as teachers. Even college professors, many of them did not go to teaching school or in private education. So it’s a much needed thing that’s not very well understood of how to create engaging e-learning content and to pass along information without overwhelming people. But Dana, take us to school on some top tips of instructional design and how you think about it, particularly with a subject matter expert without a teaching background. Dana Sleeper: Yeah, sure. Happy to. And I’d say that’s predominantly who we work with, right? Is me subject matter experts who don’t have teaching backgrounds, but they know something, whether it’s about horse arenas or it’s about. Running a restaurant or a youth mentorship program and anything and everything in between, they have some knowledge that would be beneficial for other folks to have. And so what we do is we sit down with those knees and we try to better understand the content. That’s our first step, right? Is this discovery and analysis phase. We identify what knowledge they have. How it might be useful to other folks, what our objectives are to get that information across. So essentially, what do we want the learners to walk away with? Once we understand what we want them to take away or what we want them to be able to do once they’ve completed a course then we can go into the design and storyboarding aspect. And that’s where we map the flow of the learning. We think about interactions, engagement. Assessments to ensure that there’s instructional strategy alignment as well as brand voice integrated, because that’s also something that’s very important in this is making sure that whoever that creator is, whoever that me, is their voice and the unique way that they tell the story comes across. And that can be something as simple as having their brand colors in there, but it could also be the tone of the course. Some folks really like to interject. Humor into their courses and be really playful Other folks, like more of a corporate serious tone. It just depends on who they are and who their audience is. So we have a lot of conversations around that. We iterate a lot on different versions of content in order to ensure that we are ultimately developing something that reflects for them and for their audience. And then we go into that development and production phase. So we use tools like Articulate, rise, storyline Beyond and other tools in order to bring the courses to life. So we integrate multimedia animation. We also think about accessibility best practices. So if we’re acknowledging that our audiences may need to use e-readers or things of that nature, we need to think about those aspects to ensure that they’re SCORM compliant ready for the learning management system. And then there’s a whole review and iterations process where we share that draft with them, get their feedback. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes they’re like, this is exactly what I wanted. And other times they say oh no, this is so far from what we were expecting. And then we just. Keep going. It is a creative process and I do think that’s something that a lot of me, the first time they go through this process, they don’t realize that they really need to lean in and be a partner, especially for that first course we developed together. There’s a lot of time investment on both sides to figure out. What that brand voice is, what they like, what they don’t like, what resonates with them. Because as much as I can provide expertise on adult learning and, interactions and what I think will be most effective, ultimately they are also a client. And if their expectation isn’t met we’re not gonna end up with a product they’re happy with. So we need to find a good balance to that before we reach the end of our development process.  Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about tools a little bit, and I’m really fascinated by this challenge of understanding between sort of instructional design and e-learning authoring tools versus using something like WordPress, which is a content management system. And you can put all kinds of different things, not just videos and lessons. How do you think about the tools for the job, and let’s just leave the LMS off the table, but there’s so many, there’s 500 LMSs out there. There’s tons of different ways to make e-learning content. How do you choose without getting overwhelmed what your tech stack’s gonna be to create effective training? Dana Sleeper: It’s a good question. So a lot of times when we’re thinking about that end audience in those ver very first phases, that’s what we will figure that out. Because if we ask them, Hey, are you yours? Yours gonna be on a mobile device, right? That is one item that’ll help us determine what software is gonna be best articulate. Rise is mobile responsive. There’s a reason why folks use it for courses that they know folks are gonna be looking at on their phones. In contrast, storyline. Higher interactivity, but designing it for mobile use can be much more challenging, particularly for S who wanna put all the content on screen and folks don’t wanna see things in size eight font on their phones. So we can think through what the right tool will be and then provide those recommendations. Oftentimes we do a compilation, so we’ll say, okay, we think the best option for you is articulate, rise with. Custom beyond animations and storyline blocks integrated for enhanced interactivity. So that way we’re actually using three tools to develop their course, but ultimately delivering something that’s best for say, mobile experience. Other times, we need to take a look at their existing. Catalog of content. So they might say, we need to match our other courses, and maybe they work with a developer who did exclusive storyline work previously, and that would make more sense than to use Storyline. Or maybe they need a really complex branching scenario that would lead us to storyline as opposed to rise. So it’s in those discovery conversations when we’re helping them map out their content that we can identify what tools you need to use  Chris Badgett: our instructional design. Question for you, Dana, when. Subject matter expert has the expert’s curse and they’re like, I have 40 years of experience, but I don’t, I’m trying to create this one course, and they’re just overwhelmed and they’ve lost touch with beginner’s mind. Like, how would you help that person? Get focused and become an essentialist basically, and teach effectively. You mentioned storyboarding and like kind of milestones and stuff, but how does, how do you work with an expert who’s really lost in a sea of experience?  Dana Sleeper: Yeah, so a lot of times what I will default to in that case is talking to them about learner attention span. How much time do we reasonably think someone can sit down? Go through their course and digest and then retain that information and maybe we’re looking at 15 minutes. So what fif, what can we teach in 15 minutes effectively that will really change what they do on a day-to-day basis, or help them accomplish those learning objectives we talked about earlier? Another great visualization of this, which is helpful for some folks is to describe folks’ brains as buckets, right? And we say, you have this much water. In your barrel, right? This is all your expertise, but your learner’s bucket is only this big, so we can only pour in this much water. So what is it that’s essential needs to go in there. The rest of it is just gonna overflow, and it’s not gonna stay in there. It’s not gonna stay in their cup or in their bucket. So I quite literally have drawn that during calls before, just on a PowerPoint slide to help them understand that. I also have an animation of it that sometimes I send to folks to remind them. So there’s all sorts of little kind of tips and tools on how I help folks understand that. But generally speaking, thinking about learner attention span is really one important way too. Coalesce and limit the amount of content that we’re putting into that first course, acknowledging that they could have a whole series. That’s a great opportunity. You have all that expertise. We won’t lose it, but we are gonna make it so the learners can actually digest and retain that information.  Robert Lunte: That’s Chris. Chris, I wanna add to that real quick, and this, she’s great. I told you we had great instructional designers. From a management perspective, while Dana’s working all on all that, on my end I’m getting the tough job of, but I’ve been doing this for 40 years. Nobody knows this better than me. And how is Dana, I know she’s great and we enjoy working with her and our but how are they gonna get it? How are they gonna know how to do this? And so the customers oftentimes as the reality of, oh, I invested in this. Oh, this is what’s really gonna happen. As that reality begins to seep in, they begin to, sometimes they begin to panic a little bit. I’m like, oh my God, what did I sign up for? How are they gonna ever get this done? But one of the things that they need to know that I help with sometimes is it’s not about you. Really, it is, you’re the subject matter expert, but the course is about somebody else, a different ICP. We’re not making a course to sell to you. Okay? If we made a course to sell to you, the storyboard would be completely different. It’d be more advanced and that sort of thing. We’re making a course to sell to who you may have been 20 years ago, so let’s get that straight. The other thing is this is what we do. We do this five days a week. Eight hours a day for 20 years, and I myself have nine courses and five languages in another life. So we’ve done this before. Trust, trust me, trust Dana. Trust our platform people. We will give you everything that you need. We’ll capture everything that has to be said. And more. And if it’s one thing that these instructional designers are really good at is picking up on business models real quick and removing, that’s not necessary with, that’s necessary and they know what they’re doing. So the customers have to be, the clients need to be managed sometimes in that regard. They need to let go and let I call. It’s a joke with my clients. I say, just let go. Let Uncle Bob take care of it. Uncle Bob and his superhero team will take care of it. And we get done. That’s why this is a plug. We have nothing but a hundred percent, five star reviews on trusts pilot. So that’s awesome.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Robert, you mentioned nine courses in some in different languages. I always find people’s path into the course space or the e-learning industry is always interesting. Tell us about the genesis Of Course Creek. Where did it come from? How’d it start? Why’d you do it? Robert Lunte: I’m gonna make a long story very short because I’m, because we wanna get back to instructional design in Course Creek, but in another life I’m a recognized voice coach, father-in-law, sing a song.  Chris Badgett: Okay.  Robert Lunte: All right. So I’ve been doing that for 30 years. A company’s called the Vocalist Studio. We’re sitting on Kajabi, which is a great platform for that kind of teaching. And, I wrote a book and have nine courses in five languages that teaches people a methodology for physically training the voice to build the motor skills and the strength and endurance of the voice so that you can sing amazing, and it tends to lean into rockers and heavy metal people so they can scream notes without hurting themselves and that sort of thing. Lots of fun, really great. Still sell the courses. Don’t do the one-on-ones anymore because it’s not scalable. I took that business as far as I can possibly go, that industry can sustain. The industry just in itself doesn’t have a lot of money. So there’s not a lot to trip down, even if you’re one of the best in the business. So I just, one day I went through a lot of misery for about six years as a voice coach thinking, what the hell am I gonna do when I grow up? What else can I do? And I realized the only other thing I can do is make courses and help people make courses. So off we went. We created Course Creek seven years ago. And and and it’s really mostly about people like Dana. It’s about the talent that I surround myself with. Yeah, I just got tired of working with musicians. They don’t have any money. Awesome. And they’re flaky. Chris Badgett: This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. I love our industry. We’ve talked about horse running surfaces and voice coaches. Which is awesome. But in, in terms of the perfect customer for course Creek, like what are some of the qualities they have? Because you mentioned that thing where they have to be open and trust the process and some people just kinda wanna steamroll through and go alone. But how do you really identify or seek out a perfect fit client? Robert Lunte: The client that does his homework and follows that lead that point that I made earlier, the client that signs up and says. I’m ready to go to work and joins the team and follows our lead and gets their stuff in on time. We do a Slack, a client Slack channel and Dana and the rest of the team will engage with them. So that’s active, involved, removes their ego and just lets us lead and lets us get it done. That’s the best kind of client and, clients that are. When we execute and we always execute great. When they’re happy about that they share that with us and they share that with the world. And so that’s big part of our payback is that we like to know that they’re happy and we like, and we want people to know about that. Dana probably has a, an instructional design perspective on that. No doubt Dana.  Dana Sleeper: I would say that clients who are communicative, so using the Slack channel and, making sure that they stay up to date with those communications as well as responding to us. Probably the most important thing. Everything else we can work through if you at least talk to us, right? It’s really hard to make progress on a course if you can’t get client input or you can’t get them to review a course. So that engagement that Robert mentioned in the Slack channel is really key. And it also streamlines things so that all of our communications are in one place. Shs, who works on the manages, all of the LMS platform work for clients on our end. He can see my communications. Client, I can tag him and let him know, Hey, there’s four courses that are gonna be coming your way soon to upload to the LMS. Or, I had this conversation with the client and they mentioned gamification, and I wanna make sure you’re thinking about that when you do the LMS setup. So it keeps the entire team really engaged and informed throughout the process. Besides that, in terms of clientele, I think, I would say communication’s number one. And number two is, like Robert said, doing your homework, right? Some folks show up and they have no content, like they haven’t actually written anything down. And so we then have to have the conversation about okay, you need to do your homework to take your expertise and put it on paper, or put it in PowerPoint slides or put it on something. Or literally voice record yourself. I don’t care what format it is, but give me your knowledge. Yeah. And so that’s really important because if we. Don’t have that information, then all we can do is Google search, right? Or use AI to try to generate content and that’s not gonna result in the same end product as something that’s coming from a subject matter expert. So those two things are really what I look for. Again, everything else I can work with  Chris Badgett: you guys also help with, or I’m sorry you guys and gals also help with marketing automation or marketing funnels. So like one of the main questions we wanna solve with this podcast. Is helping people get clients like we want their courses and membership sites and e-learning projects to be successful. And of course there’s other kinds of courses, like internal trainings at companies, but if we think about the subject matter expert selling expertise. What kind of marketing funnels or marketing advice do you have? I know Robert, you had your own experience with being a voice coach and finding leads for that, but how do you, how did you do that and how do you help clients set up, a lead system or get their own clients? Robert Lunte: So we have four phases in the client journey, consulting, instructional design LMS, working with your platform and marketing. So it’s like phase four in this journey. We have. An inbound director, an inbound marketing director, and an outbound marketing director. Inbound is paid media, social media, writing blogs, that sort of thing. So the traditional stuff, and the outbound director does outreach sequencing on LinkedIn where it applies, and outreach sequencing on email, cold and warm email campaigns. Now, the cold and warm email campaigns is interesting in that. In order to do that properly, you have to have somebody who is an expert in commercial class. Outbound email tech stack, which is stuff that I’m still learning about, and we happen to have a fellow like that. His name is Matt Armstrong. He’s a total geek. He just, he builds on clay and Apollo and instantly, and all these systems that are all designed to make sure you don’t go in the spam folders and don’t get in trouble, that sort of thing. Personally, I prefer the outbound stuff because you get the most return for the investment. It’s a great value. Now, if I had more money than God and I don’t, I’d probably do paid media, right? So paid media can be very effective, but it’s a rich man’s luxury. All right? So if you’re not one of those folks, and we got a great guy that handled that for you, but if that’s not you, I lean towards outbound initially to try to get leads in. Now, the other thing that you should do is go to work. That means get in front of a camera. So as far as the vocalist studio is concerned, it’s, it is 15, 20 years of YouTube. I think I was the very first voice coach to do a singing technique video on YouTube before Google even bought them. So you gotta do that if you, if it’s relevant to your business. I understand that l and d departments at a hospital might not be doing that, but if you’re like, a thought leader Filipino kind of dude, you need to get in front of the camera. Then the underlying point in that is just because you have the beautiful product and we’ve delivered you beautiful product, that’s when the sounds cliche, but that’s when the work really starts. You gotta get involved. You gotta make a little bit of investment in marketing. We’re talking about e-commerce people and you gotta get in front of a camera if you can make noise.  Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Robert Lunte: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Just  Robert Lunte: What you’re doing, Chris. You gotta do what you’re doing right now. You gotta make content. Chris Badgett: I appreciate that. I think my first YouTube video was in 2007, something like that. But anyways I’m just guessing, but some, sometimes, like migrations are super important in this industry because, and I’m guessing that you guys deal with a lot of. Migrations, there’s this perfect client’s, open-minded subject matter expert, coachable, blank slate, canvas, and you just go with all the best practices. But a lot of times you’ll probably get somebody they don’t like their LMS, their course isn’t working and it’s current form and you’re, they wanna move somewhere else on the tech stack side point or the content creations point and. They’re just, they need to migrate, they need to go to version two or version three or version four. Robert Lunte: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: What’s your experience and advice for people that are in that migration or reset mindset? I.  Robert Lunte: I’m gonna, I wanna give Dana some airtime on this. I’ll start with that. And then Dana. I’d like to get the instructional designer’s perspective on that as well. I, compatibility and that sort of thing. Early on at the agency, we recognized that migrations was heavy lifting, dirty, no fun work that no, that our competitors didn’t want do. All right. They waived those opportunities down the path, but we stepped up and embraced it and wrote SOPs for it. So in fact it’s a piece of work. It’s a kind of work that we do enough that it’s made our main nav bar to go out our websites is migrations is right at the top. And we’re real good at it. Your question is, we typically are migrating to, to best class WordPress platforms. Okay. And SaaS platforms. The way we do it is we migrate content. We’re focusing on content and data, client data. This is a great question for Shaban. Chattery, our senior director of platforms, but it’s a lot about SOPs and being really super tight on those SOPs, bringing stuff over. It’s gotta be really super organized. I’ll mention this, then we’ll pass it off to Dana. If you’re gonna migrate, you gotta get, you’ll get all of your content and your data in nicely, neatly titled folders and ready for us to migrate. Okay. One thing we can’t do is go in and go into a big, huge mess and figure out how to do it. You gotta work with us and you, so you gotta prepare for it.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. One quick question before Dana goes. In terms of migration, there’s a lot of noise in the space. And what I mean is like some LMS companies have slick good marketing, and the client may be saying, Hey, I really want to go to Brand X. But you all, you guys also do LMS recommendations where you’re like, based on you, you might disagree, you might think oh, this person is a great fit for. Kajabi or a WordPress solution or talent, LMS or something else based on their unique needs. Indeed. So how do you let’s say you had a client who’s sold on brand y, but you really think Brand Z is a better fit for them? Robert Lunte: We are the trusted advisors. So we’ll go back to the other point that I made. If you’re. Gonna hire us to do the business, let us do our work. So we’re gonna make sure you get on the right platform. And frankly the first most critical decision is that platform is that LMS. So we do work with a lot of LMS platforms, and they’re all brilliant. They’re all brilliant. They all do something a little different, a little better than the next guy. And they got strengths and weaknesses, but they’re all pretty much mostly brilliant, including yours. It just, we take a look at their needs and we just align the needs to the platform and make a recommendation. That’s pretty straightforward, but they have to trust us on that. Dana?  Dana Sleeper: Yeah. I would say on the content migration side, there can be a. There’s a whole slew of reasons why folks come to us and say, Hey, we did version one and we’re looking to make some changes. It could be that their content was developed internally by someone who maybe doesn’t have learning design expertise. Maybe they don’t have software to make it interactive. So it could be something that’s pretty bland, like PowerPoint deck, or it could literally be PDFs with texts and image. And so they’re not seeing a lot of engagement in their content. Maybe if they’re selling it. They’re not selling a lot of courses because folks aren’t giving them rave reviews. Whatever the reason might be. They wanna upgrade their content. And so in those instances, we’re often looking from converting from those base files into SCORM compliant content, in articulate, rise, or articulate storyline to increase engagement. I would also say that one of the other areas that we see some desire. Is when we need to use squirm content because they’re looking to expand their reach. So having items packaged in as squirm files makes it easier for them to sell across multiple platforms, right? If that’s something they’re interested in doing, but their content is currently is set up in some format where they cannot do that easily and they would have to manually recreate the content in another system. That can be another reason for folks coming and saying, Hey, we’ve decided we’re gonna go full S score so we can package our content and sell it. We need you to migrate it. We’ve had a lot of clients do that. And I would say, Robert thinking recently of Boss Academy, they actually set up all of their content in their LMS and it’s YouTube videos, text and images, and now we’re moving it into Squirm compliant content and articulate rise and storyline and using beyond animations and the video elements that they provided. So that’s one where we’ve really repackaged it in a way that’s much more engaging. And frankly, like it looks prettier, right? So there’s the marketing element there. And other folks in similar cases, maybe they provide us a PowerPoint deck, something that they’ve been training folks with for, years in person. And now they’re saying, okay, we need global reach to do this training. Let’s take this PowerPoint deck and turn it into something in the e-learning space. All sorts of reasons to migrate content from one format to another. And we’ve certainly found the gamut on doing that.  Chris Badgett: You folks have been in the industry for a long time. It’s a funny industry because some things never change. Like the internet was literally invented in the seventies or whatever for college professors to communicate in military or whatever. But like online education has been around forever and some things don’t change, but sometimes things do change the market, the industry, the macroeconomics change.  What do you, when you two look into the future, what do you see as like emerging trends or opportunities or how to think about e-learning in an AI world? Or what do you see when you look into your crystal ball of what’s coming or what’s here and maybe not readily recognized? Dana,  Dana Sleeper: yeah. Happy to start on the content side there. So I would say you mentioned ai, right? So that obviously has a big role, assuming that AI stays around and there’s not some like global worldwide crash like AWS services going out yesterday. Thank you very much for that, my friends. Yeah, my software not work. But using AI tools as a way to really make our processes more efficient. So I think that a lot of learning designers are headed in this direction, and it’s only going to happen more where basically ai co-pilots are going to handle 70, 80% of the build work in e-learning, meaning that. They are going to develop the storyboards, they’re going to do the initial drafting of narration content. And that really allows instructional designers to focus on strategy and pedagogy, creativity with the interactions, because that’s something that the AI can’t build, right? Those are individual triggers and JavaScripts and things that we’re doing on the backend. So AI definitely has a big role. I would also say that AI is going to help in terms of personalization. So something we’re seeing, particularly for larger corporate clients is that adaptive learning paths or real-time feedback maybe some automated content generation is really gonna redefine how quickly training can be created and tailored to an individual learner based off of the assessment information we’re getting back from a course. I would also say there’s a shift in general, we’ve seen this over time, but I think it’s still occurring from these larger courses that are hours long to continuous learning ecosystems. So moving away from one-off training to more of an integrated learning experience embedded in your daily workflows. So let’s say on teams, you have an AI copilot who’s also reading your email, and they see that you are having. An issue with a coworker on one topic or you’re struggling in one area, they might suggest to you, Hey, take this five minute micro learning on X, Y, z, maybe very timely, very flexible, mobile compatible and really support the learner where they’re at in that moment of time. So I see AI and those changes occurring in terms of how folks are structuring their learning content. I think most of the other. Shifts are not new items, right? We’re in a hybrid workforce environment, so we need more e-learning, more distributed learning. Up-skilling and re-skilling is important as generations age out in the workforce and retaining information. That’s been a struggle for a long time. Storytelling scenario-based and experiential learning has for a long time been something that folks have focused on, but integrating that into e-learning format has obviously been more of a challenge and more possible as we advance our tools. So I’ll pause there ’cause I could talk about this for a long time. Robert, what do you wanna add?  Robert Lunte: That’s brilliant. I’m not sure I can best that, but from my perspective where we’re recommending tech stacks, that sort of thing on the early on and say AI for the heavy lifting, micro learning, multi-tenancy, continuous gamification, adaptive learning, and copilots. That’s awesome.  Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s I love what you said about, I’ve heard it called just in time learning versus just in case, and that AI can help. Hey, you might be ready right now for this one, micro training on this one topic. That’s really cool. Let’s talk about Course Creek. If somebody’s watching this or listening to this and they’re like, these guys and gals sound pretty awesome. How like what’s it like to get started working with you? What should they do? Yeah, like how do they get in touch and how, what is the beginning of the process? Pretty simple.  Robert Lunte: Thanks for asking. Go to course creek.com course as an online course Creek as an little river one word, course creek.com. Go to the top left, top right corner of our website. You see the happy button? It says Book a meeting and we will meet with you. And it won’t just be me, it’ll be me, Dana, shebang Chow, our platform expert. We, one of the things I’m really proud of and that I think is super helpful for clients is we team consult. And so when the client comes in, it’s not just Robert it’s me with my. Talented specialists and they’re diving deep on answering, asking the questions they need to ask all the content we’ve talked about here today. And and we get it done. So after that, I then get scope documents from my team. I put a bow on it, send it out to the client in about four eight hours. And we’ll go back and forth a little bit perhaps if we need to. And we bring ’em on board. And we’ll create a client channel or a Slack channel and we’ll get to work everybody.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. And just to highlight some of the kind of niche specialties you mentioned LMS migration. There’s healthcare is like an industry you’re interested in.  There’s all kinds of subject matter experts who do a million different things, which you guys have or have experience in any other just really sweet spots that you love. And really enjoy those clients in terms of niche or industry or type of platform or whatever  Robert Lunte: the migration work is a big strength for us. And that includes the instructional design that goes into that as well. Taking a look at old content and doing an audit and improving with the instructional design, which is something that Dana had referred to verticals, healthcare, FinTech, executive coaches. And don’t be shy if it seems a little bit out of the box. I think we’re probably the company for you as well on that as well. ’cause as I said, we’ll try anything from cowboy hat to horse arenas. If we can get it done and on demand support. I have a popular service called On Demand Support. It’s basically prepaid development, instructional design hours, every 30 days. And it’s a way to chill out the cash flow if you’re kinda low on cash flow and don’t need to pay prepay for four to 70 hours every 30 days. We can work that way. So that is something that is been popular and and useful for the clients.  Chris Badgett: Awesome. Robert and Dana, thank you for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Go check out Course Creek, that’s course creek.com. Reach out to these guys, book a meeting and thank you so much for coming on the show and thank you for sharing what you do and the passion, the shared passion for this industry. We really appreciate it.  Robert Lunte: Thanks for the opportunity. Chris Badgett: We look forward to sending clients your way. 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Building Full-Stack eLearning Solutions with Robert and Dana from CourseCREEK appeared first on LMScast.

Chris Badgett offers a very personal tale in this LMScast episode that relates endurance running to entrepreneurship and personal development. He ran 100 miles from Vermont via New Hampshire to his home in Maine at the age of 47, completing a significant objective for which he had been preparing for more than two years. This self-sponsored ultra run. Which was encouraged by friends, his business partner Jason Coleman, and his wife, was more of a personal challenge than a competition. The fact that Chris had battled persistent back pain for the most of his adult life. Which was entirely resolved by regular fitness and strength training, adds even more significance to the accomplishment. Chris worked with a running coach to progressively increase his endurance with strenuous runs, such as a 30-mile mountain run in New Hampshire and a 50-mile walk across the Grand Canyon. For Chris, the objective was to become the type of guy who could accomplish something amazing, not to get recognition or ego. He highlights that success, like endurance, results from persistent work, resiliency, and a strong commitment to personal development by drawing a comparison between this experience and the path taken by course developers and education entrepreneurs. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 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 Badget. 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 LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett and this is gonna be a solo episode. This one’s gonna be a little bit different. This podcast is all about you, but I’m gonna talk a little bit about me and this one and tie it in to your journey as an education entrepreneur, as an LMS website building person. So I just accomplished something last weekend. A big goal. I’ve been working on kind of for two years, so I’m 47 years old and I just completed a 100 mile run. I started on Saturday morning, and then I finished on Sunday, early afternoon. So I ran a hundred miles all the way from the state of Vermont across the entire state of New Hampshire. To Maine where I live and it was a hundred miles. There was actually a kind of a route that people do that was 80 miles. From Vermont to Maine. I wanted to do a full 100. So I actually ran an extra 20 miles before I got to the starting of the journey that I did. From Vermont all the way to to Maine. So that was a hundred mile run straight. I did take two 20 minute naps around mile 80 and mile 90, somewhere in there just because my body was giving out and I had to reset the brain and stuff. But it’s pretty much a straight run. This was not a race, it was self-supported. Which means there was no like official race event or anything. It was just me and the trails and the back roads that I was on. I did have a couple of awesome people who supported me in the process who would meet me at road crossings for resupplying water and food and that sort of thing. So I was joined by my business partner at Lifter LMS, Jason Coleman. And a good friend Adam Silver. And Adam actually ran a section of it with me near the end, but for the most part it was a, I was out there by myself in the woods on trails and on back roads running all the way through the night. And some of it is in a very remote part of Vermont. So this, any distance over a marathon is known as an ultra. So this was definitely an ultra run. It was a hundred miles. And ultra is, it’s pretty much what I did is running four marathons back to back all in a row. Now I was, didn’t start training until about two years ago. I’ve always been active. I’ve always been an outdoors person. I started training and getting into shape. But I was in a bad place because for most of my adult life, like from age 20 onwards, I’ve dealt with chronic back pain. So whenever I would wake up in the morning, the first conscious thing in my awareness is my back hurts. And I was still very active and I did physical jobs and things, but I always had. Struggles with my back and it was very painful for a lot of my life and a lot of my waking time. And the crazy thing is through this run is that not just the ultra at the end, but about a year ago, my chronic back pain completely disappeared from all the training and just getting in the right shape with the right muscles and all of that. That to me is the biggest win of all this process. The a hundred mile run was fantastic. I had a great experience. Really appreciated the support of Jason and Adam and my wife Samantha, who came out to support at various parts. But I also hired a running coach two years ago named Kevin, who had worked with me over the past two years to really design the. Running training and strength training program that I did. So that is I consider it a great accomplishment. I’m really proud of what I accomplished. The first 80 miles of the a hundred mile run was actually pretty smooth, but the last 20 were brutal. I was moving very slow. I wasn’t feeling well. My stomach was upset. And it was very challenging, but I was able to complete the a hundred miles so that’s the a hundred mile run just happened. I have no idea, what my next goal is gonna be. But like I said, I’ve been working on it for two years with the Running Coach. About eight months ago I had done a 50 mile run that was very challenging with my wife, where we. Went down one side of the Grand Canyon, down the river, up the other side and back, which is a very hardcore 50 mile ultra run that we did. So that was a touch point in that training. I also did a 30 mile, very strenuous mountain run over the tops of six mountains in a mountain chain in the White mountains of New Hampshire. That was also an ultra event that I did on my own, on this journey. But in all that, there was lots of training runs, walks, fast runs, strength training, all kinds of different training. And I want to tie this into you, the listener. I appreciate it if you’re celebrating with me and proud of the accomplishment, it means the world to me. I wanted to share a lot of the things that I’ve learned just with developing endurance, setting big goals, doing training. And the first thing is really about the foundation and motivation. So why did I decide to do a hundred mile run at 47 years old? Really I’m not motivated by the. Kind of reputation or ego of having done that. I’m happy that I’ve accomplished that, but mostly what I wanted to do is just become the person that could do that. So there was a transformation there. Yes, I’m getting older, but I believe I’d like to, age gracefully and becoming in the kind of shape that you could do something like a hundred mile run. Was very appealing to me just because of the person that I would become in the process. You could call that an athlete and there’s lots of different types of athletes, like for you, maybe it’s some other sport or some kind of physical physique thing or whatever it is for you, but not just like an event, but the person that you become in the process is really the main motivation for me. I also like to challenge myself and that was quite the challenge and to do that successfully. I’m proud of that, but also I like the example that sets for, particularly my children who saw their dad work really hard and train in training, but also accomplish something that sounds impossible at any age. So that was a big part of that. And when I was training first starting out, I’ve always been active, would go on morning walks and little runs here and there, but usually not more than three or five miles. But in the early days of training, particularly with my back pain challenges, I would have a lot of setbacks. When you first start training for something like that with a big goal, whether you’re trying to lose weight, get big muscles, or develop endurance or whatever, you’re not gonna see results like every day at all. It takes a while. So in the early days, I stayed motivated by trusting the process and just putting one foot in front of the oth other. It’s like I mentioned with the back pain where. Eventually I woke up one morning and it just never returned. But over the, those two years, I could see the impact of the back pain getting less and less. But it is all like in the rear view mirror where you look back and you notice, oh wow I’ve made some significant change or transformation here. And that’s motivating even when. Day to day you’re not really noticing any results or immediate, huge wins. I particularly like endurance because I feel like you get a lot more out of it. Particularly as an entrepreneur, I’ve been an entrepreneur for something like 15 years, building my own business. Building a company doing all the things, hiring people, building a team, charting a vision doing a lot of the day-to-day work of running and implementing and growing a business. And that requires a lot of endurance. No matter who you are, where you are, there’s a lot of seduction with the idea of. This episode of LMScast is brought to you by Popup Maker. The most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my LifterLMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. Get rich quick or overnight success and that’s just not the reality. The whole passive income thing, it’s a lot of active, a lot of active work. And part of that is just staying mentally healthy. So one of the ways I do that, ’cause I spend a lot of time at the computer, is I like to get outside and exercise, spend time in nature, spend time with my family, be out, be around my house outdoors. That’s helps create a lot of balance in my life. And in terms of like small incremental improvements, when I first started training, I was doing a lot of walk run combinations, very short distances, variety. So maybe one day there’s like a short run, another day there’s a longer walk and run combination. Another day there’s some strength training. Another day. There’s some really short hill running uphill speed work, cardio things going on. And business is a lot like that because we have to wear a lot of hats. One day we’re doing marketing stuff, another day we’re doing sales stuff. Another day we’re building product like our courses or our website another day we’re doing other technology stuff like. Doing marketing automation or more website stuff. Another day we might be doing research or talking to potential customers or reviewing competition and things like that. And to do all those things. The trick is not just to do all things and wear all the hats, but also to do those things over time. So one of the ways I do that in business. Is I have a lot of time blocks on my calendar so that an essential function of business does not get left behind. So I have dedicated content creation time blocks on my calendar. I have dedicated time blocks to work with my team and support them. I have dedicated time blocks to do management type activities. So those time blocking, that time blocking approach is really effective. And I like to work in systems and routines over projects. So instead of just being like, I’m all in and I’m focusing on this one and only thing right now, until it’s finished. I will have multiple projects going simultaneously and through my routines. I am slowly working away at all those projects which work together with each other to grow the business or further whatever initiative or goal is in place. And when I can try to systematize those things so I’m not constantly trying to invent the way of doing things. Whatever it is we’re focused on. It’s also important, when you run a hundred miles, you learn the value of patience and you have to be patient, right? So yes, you could create and launch a course in one day. You really could do that. I’ve done that, but. It’s better to be patient and build an education company, or if you’re an agency building a website. Building agency it’s something that’s built brick by brick over time and all those things compound and help each other. Another part that comes up during. A long run or a long decade. Building a company is setbacks, so it could be pain or fatigue when you’re running. It could be injury, but there’s business equivalence of that. You could not like what you’re doing at the moment, and as an entrepreneur. It’s really easy to get distracted and just focus on the things that you want to do or you’re excited about doing. I call it sweeping the floor. Sometimes you have to sweep the floor. Just do something that is either uncomfortable or that you’re not that excited about. That was one of the great things about working with a coach is. I used to think that I didn’t need accountability, and I also trusted maybe too much in my ability to, come up with a plan. But when you work with an expert like a coach. That created a lot of accountability. I didn’t have to plan my workouts. They were in an app. I knew what I had to do. And knowing that, my watch, my GPS data and heart rate stuff and everything is gonna end up on my coach’s computer, it’s very motivated to get the work done. So if it’s raining, if it’s snowing, if it’s cold, I’m still going, I’m still getting the work done, and businesses like that. Sometimes you just gotta keep going and just do it. And having that accountability and particularly that guidance from an expert can be very helpful and motivating. And I also just want to note on my a hundred mile run, I mentioned Jason and Adam and my wife Sam, who. Supported me in the process. They didn’t run for me, but they were there. Smoothing over the gaps, making sure I had enough water, making sure my bag was resupplied, making sure I had enough batteries that were charged for my headlamps and stuff like that because I was running through the night. So not doing it alone, even if most of what you do as a loan, but not entirely alone is really helpful. And having a coach, a mentor, or a guide of some kind to help you in the process, either for the whole big picture or maybe just a piece. Maybe you just need like a marketing coach, or maybe you just need an instructional design coach, or maybe you just need a business coach that’s gonna help you better manage a team. Or maybe you need like a mindset coach or some kind of psychological assistance. To help you keep your head screwed on straight and have a solid mindset. The power of coaching is very powerful and it’s easy to look at like the successful course launch or the successful business. But really a lot of the coaching and the personal development that happens, it’s all about the process leading up to those milestone events like a course launch. A hundred mile run, or a company that makes X amount of dollars a year or has been in business five, 10 years and those sort of things. Those are just blips of time where the whole journey is really what it’s all about, and getting support in that process is really important. Another interesting thing happened to me on my a hundred mile run as I got into it. I normally, when I run, I listen to a lot of podcasts and audio books. It’s one of the things that motivates me to run because people laugh. I’m thinking of a guy named Nathan. I ran into at a conference in England and I was telling ’em about my upcoming run and I said. He said, you sound like you must really like to run. And I said to him, I actually hate running. Which is true in the sense that it’s painful. A lot of times I’m doing it and not the best weather. Maybe it’s raining, maybe it’s super cold and windy, or the snow is blowing, or I have something else I’d rather be doing with that time. But what I love is the, the way I feel after and the mental health benefits and the person I’m becoming in the process. That’s something that’s interesting. And then the other thing I mentioned about the, not listening to podcasts or audio books on my a [00:20:00] hundred mile run, I normally do that, but in this case. I did not, and it was just an intuitive sense I had. Once I got into it for one there was a lot of navigation. There were a lot of turns in the trail intersections, road crossings, and I just had to make sure not to get lost. Cause you can get lost easily on a hundred mile run through the woods and back roads and all this stuff. But more importantly, I just had this intuitive sense that I should really stay grounded in the moment. So the run took me just over 30 hours, and that’s a long time. But also when you consume information, it actually burns calories. And I know that’s true because when you study professional chess players like Magnus Carlson or whoever, when they’re in a chess match, they will actually burn an insane amount of calories when they’re playing a game of chess just sitting in a chair. So [00:21:00] energy conservation is really important, especially when you’re doing a Himalayan effort, and I just intuitively felt that I needed to let my brain only focus on the essentials of running survival navigation and that kind of thing. But businesses like that, particularly on the internet, because there are so many distractions. You’re at your computer, there’s infinite content on YouTube or social media. You could have a movie playing a tv, going you could be having side conversations with people around you at a coffee shop or whatever. And focus is extremely important as an entrepreneur. Sometimes the key factor that limits the success of somebody. Is there inability to focus or stay focused? So removing distractions is really important. That’s why I’m a big believer if you’re a work from home entrepreneur, that it’s really important to set up your home office or workstation environment so that it’s very productive. There’s not a lot of distractions. So for example, right now I can just walk up to my computer and start recording or making a video at any time. Everything’s all set up. The microphone, the camera. I can just go. So it’s set up for productivity. That was just an interesting fact about limiting the mind. And I mentioned I took a couple of 20 minute naps. And it was like I was at the point of exhaustion, but my muscles were doing pretty good. It was more mentally I needed a reset. So just laying down under a sleeping bag on the ground and, with my eyes closed, allowed my brain just to take a moment and reset and get ready for the next 5,10, 20 miles. That was important. So there’s an ultra runner named David Goggins who says, when you think you’re at the end of your ability, like you’re outta gas, like there’s nothing more you can do physically. You’re actually only at 40%, which is, if you think about it, that’s what a lot of ultra is about. It’s getting past barriers, a lot of which are mental. So if you do the training and you’re, you have the condition to be able to do something or you do your business and you’ve been doing, putting the reps in, learning marketing, doing marketing, learning sales, doing sales, creating content, learning about creating better content, making more content, making products like courses coaching people one-on-one, learning how to be a better coach and, practicing coaching. With clients and so on. Building websites, you just keep going. And if you’ve put in the reps, you’re often capable of much more than where you think your limits are. So one of the biggest challenges is not that we aim to high with our goals, it’s actually that we aim too low. Think about that and really keep putting one foot in front of the other when it comes to your business and adopt the ultra mindset. Even if you’re not like a hardcore athlete or anything like that you can develop, you can become mentally strong and mentally endure and mentally carry on and do the work of building a business. Helping people and becoming a better person in the process. So my biggest wall I hit was around around 80 miles and that’s when I knew I could finish, but it was gonna be very difficult. So I felt great going to, to about mile 80, and then things started to fall apart. But I knew I could continue on. I would have to walk a bunch. I would have to slow down. I would have to take some stops. And even in those moments, that’s when my support team was the most there for me to help me carry on, to help me keep moving forward. And that’s the power of having a vision, having a mission, having people with you on the journey. That’s what motivates me at Lifter LMS. You’ll often see me sign off in my emails. It’s great to be with you on the journey, and I mean that because I see myself, our team, the lifter LMS product, we are part of your journey and we’re here to support you. We’re here for you at mile 80 when you have a question and or you have a challenge or you’re trying to launch and you’re trying to figure these things out. We have our live calls where we help people, not just with the software, but with other ideas and strategy and things like that. So we are part of your support crew at Lifter LMS on your business, ultra Endurance Marathon, and I would just encourage you to consider, if you’re not already there, adopting an ultra mindset, which means going far. Putting in the reps expanding your limits, expanding your comfort zone expanding your goals, aim a little higher. Do some planning. Surround yourself with people and processes and systems that can support you, whether that’s team members or coaches or standard operating procedures, or documenting how you do what you do. All of these things come together to create the ultra mindset and to build an education company and a website and an online business that can stand the test of time. Some of the, best lifter LMS sites I love have been around for over a decade, and I see those entrepreneurs continue to learn, take forward, imperfect actions, have setbacks or challenges, but carry on. Grow their teams become better versions of themselves, help others on the journey. It’s really awesome to see. In, in hiking I’ve done a lot of hiking and backpacking and stuff, and there’s this, there’s something we all know for those of us that do long distance hiking, which is, it’s not very crowded. One mile from the trailhead. And what that means is if you really get out there. There’s a lot of activity and buzz around the start, but when you get out far and you get up the mountain a little bit there’s just the people out there that are going the distance and then you get really out there and you barely see many people. That’s the ultra people and businesses like that. Whether, you’re building an agency or you’re building a product, or you’re building courses, coaching program, education company. It is fun and energizing to get out there with the people that are really doing it, that are really going the distance. And of course we want beginners and people with goals and dreams to get started and all of that, but strap on the ultra long-term distance mindset and it’s amazing what you can accomplish. So thank you for checking out this episode, letting me tell my story of my a hundred mile run from the state of Vermont to Maine in New Hampshire, and pulling out some lessons of that are related to entrepreneurship and education and building an online company because it definitely takes a lot of endurance and, going big and going far. I’m in your corner. I’m a champion for you and champion your goals and dreams, and it’s great to be with you on the journey. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Entrepreneurship Lessons from Running 100 Miles appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett shares about marketing automation. According to Chris Badgett, marketing automation is the foundation of a scalable online education company. Its role is to generate leads, cultivate relationships over time, and turn those leads into paying students for coaching, academies, memberships, or courses. In order to automatically offer value and engage users in follow-up sequences, he suggests first creating an email list using straightforward registration forms or integrated platform code, followed by helpful automations like RSS-driven newsletters and lead-magnet distribution (PDFs, checklists, or free mini-courses). Chris recommends concentrating on three lists instead of dozens of them: prospects, free users, and paying customers. Then, using tags and custom fields, audiences can be segmented and focused nurturing sequences that mostly deliver value and occasionally present offers are sent. He identifies the main conversion tools (webinars, one-on-one calls/trials, and sales pages) and describes how automations may promote various conversion channels to boost sales while scheduling calls, reminding participants, and rerouting signups to buy sites. In order for automation to build connections rather than come off as spam, he emphasizes pace (drip/timed campaigns), reasonable segmentation (by course, use case, or behavior), and consistently favoring beneficial material. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 Transcript 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 Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, 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. Today I’m back with another solo episode. I’m Chris Badgett, CEO, and co-founder of Lifter LMS. And in this episode, we’re gonna go over the fundamentals of marketing automation for course creators. So what is marketing automation? The purpose of marketing is to get and keep a customer basically, but primarily to create a lead and then send that lead down a path where that person eventually buys a course, a membership, a coaching program, access to your academy or your school. So let’s talk about the fundamentals of marketing automation. What are the jobs to be done? With marketing that we can figure out how to automate. That’s what we’re gonna go over in this episode. At the very beginning of a lead or a prospect’s journey it, we want to capture the lead in our marketing automation system, also known as an email list, A CRM, which stands for Customer Relationship Management. There are many great CRMs out there. There’s tools like MailChimp, which has a free plan. ConvertKit LifterLMS, by the way, integrates directly with both of those, but there’s literally 50, even a hundred out there, about 60 of the marketing automation platforms you can connect directly to your WordPress site that’s powered by things like LifterLMS or WooCommerce or other tools in the space using an awesome tool called WP Fusion. So I’m gonna mention a lot of tools in this episode. If you wanna find the best software tools, the recommended list for course creators, just do a Google search for LifterLMS, recommended resources and you’ll find a page on our website, which has all the tools I’m gonna talk about so that you can easily find them. But this episode mostly isn’t about talking about tools and saying you should get certain tools. But I will mention some tools as we get into it because there’s WordPress, the content management system, and then there’s tools like Lifter, LMS, which adds the learning management system. But then the whole CRM or marketing automation piece is a third leg of that stool to make an online education company. I also wanna mention there are CRMs and marketing automation tools. That work directly inside WordPress that integrate with tools like LifterLMS, for example. Groundhog and Fluent CRM are really popular for that. But let’s go back to marketing automation. So if I was just getting started, what are some of the first things that I would automate in my marketing on my WordPress website? One of the first things I would automate is building my email list. So the absolute most simple way to do this is to basically build a newsletter email list. So in order to do that, what I would do is I would put a form on my site to sign up for my newsletter. You can use one of the popular WordPress form tools like Gravity Forms or WSForm, or. Ninja forms, WP forms, formidable forms, et cetera, and capture an email when someone signs up for your newsletter. And then one of the things you can do from there is it just automates the population of your email list. If you ever want to send out a newsletter your list is growing over time as people sign up by filling out the form that’s on your blog sidebar. Or maybe you have a dedicated page on your site or a form like in the footer of your site to sign up for your newsletter. And by a form, I just mean like a headline sign up for my newsletter, a place for people to enter their name and email and a sign up button. That’s it. You can also embed the signup form code directly from your email marketing platform. They, they can give you. Like a form code that you copy and paste on your website to create the form. Or you can use one of the WordPress form solutions that makes it easy to just build the form right there in WordPress. But just to get a little bit fancy, one of the things you can automate for your newsletter, let’s say you write regular blog posts or articles, you can do what’s called an RSS Driven campaign, which just means that, you can set that up directly inside your email list platform, where anytime you publish a new blog post, the content gets put into an email and automatically sent to your subscribers. So that is the easiest way to do an automated newsletter that automatically grows without your involvement. Automatically sends new content that you put on your blog directly to your subscribers. And that might be the entire article content, or it could be an excerpt, like a little like the title in the first, 200 words or so that people then click on in the email, go to your website and read the full article. So that’s the most basic form of marketing automation. And a way to help you grow your email list by creating an RSS driven campaign. As we expand from there, there’s a concept called lead magnets. So what a lead magnet is it’s something that you offer for free that somebody puts in their name and email and they get the lead magnet which we’ll talk about the different types in a second. That gets emailed to them or downloadable or whatever it is at that time, they’re gonna get added to your email list and you can then do follow up campaigns based on that lead magnet. So the earliest been around for a long time version of a lead magnet is called an ebook. So some people get fancy and call that a white paper. Basically any kind of PDF resource you can create that helps your ideal learner for free that’s ideally not too big to consume. Like we’re not trying to send somebody a 150 page real book, but just something of value that they would appreciate and be happy to give you their email address for. That is the basic ebook lead magnet. The concept of a white paper is basically just something that’s a little bit more formalized, in depth, scientific researched, but it’s still just an ebook or information. Essentially. It’s a PDF. There’s other things like cheat sheets or checklists. These are like templates or resources you can provide. In PDF format that your audience would like. So for example, if I was doing a course or coaching program around health and fitness, I might do a lead magnet about a shopping list of what you need to get ready for the program. Could be a certain type of running shoes or certain type of workout gear. So on. So that would be, my lead magnet, PDF, if you will, in a pro tip about PDFs. You can also put those inside of your WordPress media library on your website. So when somebody signs up, you create the marketing automation. I use a naming convention when I construct things like. Tags or automations. In my CRMI call this stage lead magnet delivery. So if I was doing the shopping list for my workout program. I would make a tag or automation called lead magnet delivery shopping list. When somebody signed up through that form to get that lead magnet, it would. Send an email. Hey, thanks for signing up. Here’s a link to download your free shopping list. Please let me know if you have any questions about that. And then the link, I would actually just link them to the media file in my WordPress media library so they could download it directly from that email. So that’s how I would actually deliver the PDF. So that’s like a one step. Or two step marketing automation where somebody enters their name and email clicks, submit. That’s step one. Step two, they get an email with a link to download the resource. So that’s the, that’s like the basics of email marketing and how that works. There’s other type of lead magnets you can get fancy, like you can do free courses on your website if you’re using a learning management system like Lifter, LMS. That is also a lead, lead magnet. A free course or a free mini course, in my opinion, is one of the best lead magnets, particularly if someone is already somewhat interested and they’re willing to invest a little more time. Then a one to five page PDF and wants to get some free information from you to make sure you’re a good fit for their goals. So you can set all that up in LifterLMS also has. An email system built in so that when somebody enrolls in a certain course, lifter can send a certain email instantly, then again on day two, day four, day five, and so on. So you can create what’s known as a follow-up sequence. So the cool thing about marketing and marketing automation is that it allows you to time travel. This episode of LMScast is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my LifterLMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. And what I mean by that is. It’s important to think about your customer journey through time, so it’s not like everything is instant and everything happens all at once. It doesn’t. So one day they might sign up for your email newsletter and then a month later they might decide to get one of your lead magnets, and then a month later they may want to jump on a sales call with you about signing up for the membership. So when you think about these things through time, when you set up these marketing automations, they can, trigger sequential sequentially at the right time, not all at once. Some people call that drip campaigns or, time delay campaigns. So it’s all about thinking about your customer journey from, when they first hit your website. To where they might be in six months. There’s all kinds of opportunities to create automation to help communicate some of the communications that you would have to do manually if you don’t set up any marketing automation. And then, once somebody is on your email list, usually when people first get started with marketing. They will over complicate it and build all these different lists. But in my opinion, in my experience, I would recommend only having three email lists. So everything else you can do with what’s known as tags in custom fields, which we’ll talk about in a little bit. But the three email lists that I find most education companies need. Is a prospect email list. So this is somebody who’s never signed up for any of your free things or been a customer. They’re literally prospective possible future users or customers. Then I like to do a, what I call the users list or free user. So most education companies have some free training available so that free training is valuable. It’s they’re still a free user. They haven’t given you any money, and that’s okay. And maybe that’s all they’ll ever be. They won’t graduate to being a paying customer, and that’s okay, but they’re a little bit more invested than a prospect who maybe just signed up for your newsletter on a whim or downloaded a PDF report from you. So the free user is like the second email list that I like to have. And then the third email list are your customers. These are your paying customers. Maybe they spent a little bit of money, maybe they spent a lot of money but these are your. Your customers. And in each of these email lists, you can set up what’s known as a nurture sequence. So again, we’re gonna start thinking through time and the way I like to do it is when somebody joins, say the prospect email list if you get fancy, you can have I don’t know, like 30 emails that go out, spread out over an entire year. Or you could do less. You could only do let’s say three follow ups and if they don’t move from prospect to free user, you’re just done and you stop emailing them in an automatic automated fashion through your marketing automation, that is completely fine as well. I like to nurture the email list. So what that means is I like to add value and not just pitch products or pitch becoming a free user or pitch my most expensive thing. I like to just add value Hey, I see you signed up for my newsletter. You might also like this specific free article I published five years ago. That’s the most popular. Blog post on my website about X, Y, and Z. That could be an email. And then the next email I could just, go for a personal connection and say something like, Hey I helped this type of person achieve this type of result. Do me a favor and hit reply to this email with your biggest challenge, and I’ll see if I can just help you or point you to the right place on my website where we have some free content that will help with your particular challenge. And then I might send ’em another email. Hey, by the way, did you know we have a YouTube channel or a podcast or this other thing that you might also like? I’m not trying to sell them at all. And then on the next email, I might actually try to pitch something. It could be a recommendation for the free course on our website, or one of our sales presentations or one of our paid products. But when you’re nurturing somebody through email, it’s important not to just constantly hit them up with pitches to quote, buy my stuff. That’s the, that’s what you wanna avoid so that you’re actively developing a relationship where you’re giving way more value than what you’re asking from them, which is something you can do with marketing automation. And I do recommend spacing those out when somebody first joins your email list. In my experience, it’s Ty typically okay to send them with a little more frequency, like day one, day two, day four, day six. But if somebody’s, if you have a long nurture sequence I recommend spreading things out so that you can as their excitement about first joining, maybe they’re turning into more of a long-term sales cycle, as we call it. You’re not just like hitting ’em every single day with something new. So space, those out. And, free users, it’s the same thing. Nurture free users, add value. And then on, the fourth email, recommend one of your paid products. Then go back to adding value. Adding value, and so on. And then when it comes to customer nurture sequences. I like to do the same thing Hey, you’re a customer. I’m not just gonna instantly start pitching you my next expensive thing, or to buy more quantity of X, Y, and Z. I’m gonna add value and be like, Hey, did you know you could get help in this way? Reach out to us here if you’re stuck. Hey, did you know we have these five resources for customers only? I wanna make sure you saw that and so on. And then as you get through the. Add value. You get to the point where you can send a, an email about, Hey, you might wanna upgrade. We have this other thing over here. Or you might, I also like this other product or program course or membership that we have. So those are nurture sequences. And important thing about nurture sequences is you set these up to create an automated follow up. Create touch points where you’re primarily adding value and building a strong, healthy relationship with the people that have entrusted you with their email address. That’s what nurture sequences are. But around all that, you still have an email list and can do dedicated one-off broadcast email campaigns. So as an example, you may have nurture sequences running. You get to, let’s say the New Year’s holiday of the year and you’re doing a January 1st. It’s a brand new year sale. You can still email your list, either just the prospects, just the free people, just the customers or all of them together about your January 1st New Year sale. So just because you do marketing automation, you can also do. Broadcast emails on top of that. And the key to email is that email gets a bad rap. Oh, people are just gonna spam me and all this stuff. But if you’re genuinely care about your people and you’re genuinely adding value through your nurture sequences and your lead magnets, and when you do make an offer for something paid or to move a customer further along in the journey. It’s a good fit for them. It could really help them in their life. That’s a really good thing. So just keep that in mind. And then the other great place for marketing automation is what I call conversion tools. So this is where you move from like you’ve generated the lead, you’re nurturing the lead, and now there’s this step before somebody becomes a customer where they can, go through a sales process basically. And I learned a framework here I’d like to share with you, which is there’s really only three conversion tools. So the first one is a sales call, also known as a demo, a trial, or a proof of concept as it’s also known. And a webinar, which is a group sales presentation. Now, depending upon your price point, a different one of those conversion tools makes more sense for your offer. And I’ll just add that there is one more conversion tool, which is primary above all of this, which is the sales page for a course and membership. So even if you’re, you don’t have a conversion tool like the other three I mentioned previously. You probably have a course description or a membership or a coaching program description or a page. That sales page is a type of conversion tool. So that’s this. This is one area where you can create marketing automation. You can create marketing automation around scheduling sales calls where people you know say, yes, I’d like to have a 30 minute strategy call. You can go through a calendar booking link, and automatically. Set all that up there. There’ll be follow up emails out of the calendar system to capture those signups, and then send reminders about the future sales call. You can automate webinars as well, particularly if you do a prerecorded webinar. So if somebody signs up and then they get redirected to a page that has a presentation, from there, there can be a call to action. To purchase your program. And the other important piece of marketing automation is to do what’s called segmentation. So segmentation is where when people are signing up, you’re creating, you’re adding tags or what’s known as custom fields to segment your audience so that later. You can do marketing automation or broadcast emails based on the unique characteristics of this segment. So there’s different types of segments, like with Lifter, whether you’re using our MailChimp or ConvertKit integration, or you’re using WP Fusion to get to other tools like ActiveCampaign and HubSpot and Salesforce, you can segment based on which course they’re in. So if you ever just need to do marketing automation or nurture sequence based on course. Membership specifically, you can do that. The other thing you can do is use cases. So maybe you have a couple different types of customers. Maybe you work with individuals and you also work with companies. That would be another way that you can segment and have different kind of micro campaigns for your different use cases. And just a pro tip for you here, one of my favorite ways when you’re trying to increase sales, if you have multiple conversion tools, if somebody comes in through one of them, let’s say they sign up for a free course or they sign up for a sales call, or they watch your webinar and you have all these things available, if they sign up for one and they signed up for this one, but they haven’t seen these other two and they haven’t become a customer yet. You can, send future resources to send them to your other conversion tools, which will help increase your sales and give them more time to consider your product, learn about it, and buy. And of course, with our existing customers, we can create expansion revenue by creating marketing automation that lets people know about other opportunities, future opportunities that you release. How to upgrade and upsell through various offers. So that is a high level overview about how to do marketing automation for course creators. If you have any questions, comments, ideas, just let me know. I’m happy to hear what you’re doing for marketing automation. And if there’s any questions you have or you want me to go deeper on a specific topic, just let me know. Thank you. 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@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Marketing Automation For Course Creators appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now Chris Badgett argues that in-person interactions are a powerful tool for internet businesses. Get away of your computer and spend time with your consumers where they already congregate. At Retain, a conference for membership-site owners (creators and instructors using technologies ranging from LifterLMS to Kajabi), he presents a new example from England. Instead of sponsoring or pitching, he just turned up to listen, which resulted in more in-depth discussions with devoted clients like Funk Roberts and KPC (Slick Business) as well as open discussions with potential clients who were fed up with inflexible, expensive systems. He emphasizes that WordCamps contribute similarly to the WordPress ecosystem by providing insights on users, partners, and products. In addition to attending, he suggests including an offline component into your service, such as quarterly meetups or an annual user summit, and then recording the conversations to utilize in your membership library or course. He uses SaaS Academy as an example: a membership that includes group coaching, a community, and three annual in-person events in major cities (he names San Diego and Atlanta), where the conversations in the hallways, at the table, and over meals foster momentum, ideas, and trust that are impossible to duplicate online. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 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 Badget. 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 LMScast. Today we’re joined by a special guest today. It’s just me, it’s Chris. I’m here for another solo episode, and today we’re gonna talk about when and how to get offline for your online business. This is a topic that is often very overlooked in terms of getting away from your computer. Going out into the world and meeting people, doing things, and how that can affect your online business. Now, the first and most important reason to get on offline is to actually go out and spend time around your customers or perspective customers. So me personally, I recently just got back from England. I was at a conference called Retain, which was put on for membership site owners, and these are mostly course creators and coaches who run membership sites. Some of the folks at the conference we’re running LifterLMS. Other WordPress tools as well as hosted platforms like Kajabi and so on. But I went there because I wanted to hang out with some of my customers and, possibly future potential customers. Though I wasn’t there like hard selling, I didn’t even sponsor the event or do any kinds of sales pitch or anything like that. I just wanted to go out and hang out with education entrepreneurs. Who are aspiring to or who already are creating and building an online business around a membership site. Now at this conference, retain, I was lucky enough to hang out with a couple of my customers. Just to give a few examples KPC who runs Slick Business, which is a marketing automation education platform powered by LifterLMS. It was awesome. I’ve known Kay for eight years, but I have never shook her hand or had a meal together, and we did both those things and it was wonderful and had many conversations. I also got to hang out with a customer named Funk Roberts, who does online fitness education for men over 40. I’ve known funk for a long time. It was awesome to finally shake his hand, have some conversation, and just be together in person. I also met like a lot of other people who, are maybe frustrated with other learning platforms and they want something more powerful, customizable, affordable, and all that. So of course the conversation drifted towards LifterLMS, but this all comes from just getting outside of the building. And hanging out with your customers or prospective CU customers. And a great way to do that is at a conference that is on a topic that is either exactly about what your topic is or very related. Another example of that just using LifterLMS is an example, is there’s these conferences called Word Camps, which is where WordPress agencies, product people, and users go. To spend time together to learn to hang out and just enjoy each other’s company and have conversations. I’ve been to many Word camps over the years and I’ve met a lot of customers there. I’ve met a lot of industry partners and I’ve met many prospective customers who were, perhaps looking for an LMS. So regardless of what you do, whether it’s courses coaching. You build sites for clients, I can’t stress the value of getting out from behind your computer and going out into the world and, running in to humans, pressing the flesh as they say, like shaking hands, meeting people talking, breaking bread, sharing conversations. Also getting out from behind the computer. One of the coolest things you can do is actually make your offer or your product, your online education opportunity to have an offline component. So that could be a live event, maybe once a year, three times a year, something like that, four times a year. I was in a coaching program called SaaS Academy for software entrepreneurs, and it was a membership site. There was group coaching there was a bunch of resources in the membership site and so on. There was an online community, but there was also three live events at a major city every year. So I would travel to places like San Diego or Atlanta and go hang out at the. The in-person, get together and there would be, several hundred people there who were just like me building the same kind of business. There would be presentations, which would also be recorded and put into the membership site, but there were also all these great conversations that all the tables, going out to meals with your. Fellow people doing the same thing, and that was just a phenomenal experience. There’s a saying in membership sites or information products or online, learning programs that people come for the content, but they stay for the community. So my experience with SaaS Academy was the content was amazing, it was phenomenal. But the relationships I developed, the partnerships, the co-promotion, the people who were running a different type of business but needed LMS, so they thought of lifter LMS. It was a very powerful formative experience. If you can and dream a little big, you can bring people from off their home computer and their phones and get them. Part of your offer is actually an in-person community. Now there’s a concept called a popup event, so this is really cool. So for example, if you sell a membership site and it’s mostly full of passive online learning content like courses. You want to create some recurring value, even if you just run one event per year that creates recurring value. And if your community is small, it could start as small as just like an Airbnb with five bedrooms and five people come. And then when more people sign up to your program, you need to expand and do maybe a block of hotel rooms, hotel has a conference room, maybe it expands more and you get a bigger and bigger venue. That is a really powerful way to think about making your membership or your courses have recurring revenue by offering this recurring annual in-person get together. And the cool thing about online education companies and platforms. I’ll just say entrepreneurship in general is there is a lot of isolation, loneliness, feeling misunderstood. Feeling like you haven’t found your tribe, if you will. You may be doing this like crazy online thing and nobody in your home community or family even has any idea what you’re really doing. They don’t understand it. They’re not that interested in it. But then you get out into the world at one of these events. And you meet people just like you that are doing the similar thing and they’re like, oh my gosh, I feel so isolated. So nice to finally meet you and all that. That is a great experience. The other thing you can do to get offline is to go to an industry event. So for me, I’m in the WordPress space, so I go to Word camps. These are agencies and product people. People there aren’t necessarily looking for what I offer because they’re they have their own products. But some of the agencies may be looking to develop LMS sites for clients and so on. But I act, I’ve actually been to some smaller events, smaller industry events, like independent events. One of the favorite ones I went to that was really, in many ways life changing for me is called Cabo Press. So this was in Cabo, Mexico, and I remember when I first saw a blog post about it, it was an event put on by somebody named Chris Lima, who’s a awesome guy, and it was for WordPress product people and agency entrepreneurs. You had to apply and go. And at the time when I did it, the sales page that I read for the event was just really speaking to me and I’m like, we gotta do this. We can’t really afford it. Our business is really new. I went and I hung out with other WordPress product people and agencies and it was so good. I actually went, I think seven times. So I went year after year for I think seven years. And there are so many relationships that I developed from that conference. And it was a small pop-up conference at a hotel. It was usually somewhere around 30 people, maybe 35, maybe 40 at its biggest. But I met all these amazing entrepreneurs trying to do similar stuff to me. I made affiliate partnerships. I created co-marketing opportunities. I’ve got agencies excited about Lifter, LMS, I got a lot of guests for my podcast. I did so many things and some of the most mind blowing part of the whole thing with the Cabo Press. My current business partners I met at Cabo Press the current lead developer at Lifter LMS, I’m met at Cabo Press and these are very important relationships. In my business journey. But that all came from me getting out from behind my computer, going out into the world, and being somewhat uncomfortable, getting outta my shell and just going to this event where I don’t know anybody and start forming these relationships. And what’s cool about it is when you find an online event like that, that you really love and resonate with. If you keep going back to the same event over time, it starts feeling more comfortable. People who are gonna be there, it gets easier. Ideally, your business is growing over time and you can share and help other people, not as far along in the journey and so on. And those kind of industry events are very powerful for. Furthering your business, your career. But it’s all about relationships. And yes, you can form relationships online, in Facebook groups, over social media, by email and so on, but there is a place. To get out from behind the computer and actually go talk to people, strangers, and it’s a really powerful thing. Another great thing, and I’m a huge fan of this in terms of getting out from behind your computer, is to do a concept that I call masterminding. So this is not a new idea. This came from a guy who named Napoleon Hill, who wrote a book called Think and Grow Rich. It’s a very old book. I highly recommend you read it because it’s very powerful in some of the core ideas, even though it’s old and dated our really true, and there’s this concept. Of the Mastermind and the mastermind concept is essentially that when some people that are on a similar journey kind of put their heads together and share their challenges, give value, ask for help. When these mines come together, the sum of the mines is greater than. The individuals, or even if you were to add up the potential of the individuals individually, the mastermind of this group of minds is exponentially powerful. I’ve been a big masterminder. I’m in three or four masterminds right now, which is a lot, and I’ve been that way for a long time. I’ve gone to popup masterminds like the Cabo Press event. And I went to one in Canada once with some entrepreneurs in the online education space, and I just get so much value out of that. Now, there are online masterminds, right? You can create masterminds within your course or your membership site if you like, and pair people together to create their own masterminds. You can also form them informally. And that’s what I’ve done for the most part. I’ve gone to some official mastermind events, but the best masterminds I’ve been a part of have formed organically where, a group of people decides to meet on a regular basis, like monthly, as an example, and just share, ask for help, give value, potentially have a. Asynchronous slack community or other way, other ways to connect asynchronous asynchronously. But masterminds are very powerful. And what’s really cool is I’m in a mastermind of people who run a similar business to mine and occasionally, usually a couple times a year. Some or all of us will meet up in person around some other conference somewhere in the world. It’s been a far as far away for me as like Taiwan as an example, or Greece or in the United States. And we spend a lot of time masterminding online in formats like Zoom or, asynchronous, asynchronously through. Email or Slack, something like that. But actually getting together in person is so fantastic and you really build, not just lifelong friendships, but also business partnerships and relationships. It’s super powerful and it’s hard to do that if you don’t get out from behind your computer. You can have a virtual mastermind, but, and those are great and I’m in many of those. Almost every mastermind I’ve ever been in there has been at some point, some in-person component to that. The other great thing to do to get out from behind your computer is to actually sponsor an event. So this is an event that your customers would be at and some sponsorships are not that expensive. Now you can just attend the event and meet people. And I like doing that personally. The last event I went to, I did not sponsor. If they run it again, I would like to sponsor it. But if you do sponsor, you get your logo all over the place. You potentially have a table where you can give away swag items, like t-shirts or. Notebooks or some kind of branded merchandise, and this is a great way to just get your brand out there. So getting out from behind your computer and sponsoring event can, put you in front of customers. Now the t-shirts and the branded swag are great. But the real value of a sponsorship is all the conversations that you have while you’re at the event. And the cool thing about sponsoring an event, a lot of the times you will get a table where you can sit. Like when I sponsor a Word camp as an example, I’ll have a computer monitor up with a looping video showing lifter LMS. This episode of LMScast is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my LifterLMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. Ideally, there’s me and some team members there, and we’ll be at a table. And people are just shuffling through the sponsor area constantly throughout the event. And just stopping is friendly. We have conversations. Sometimes existing customers will walk up, people who are interested, people who are just curious, and you never know where all those conversations will go. So there’s just a lot of opportunity. Sponsorships and it’s something that I recommend you try at some point. Now, the funny thing is that people will often ask, what is the ROI or return on investment for a sponsorship? Most of the time when I’ve done sponsorships. You can’t track it. You can’t track the ROI. You could give out a business card that has a coupon code on it or a special promotion link or something like that, but it’s more of a long game strategy. It’s humans talking to humans. Over time, relationships evolve. They may not use your coupon code. You may not be aware that someone said Hey, I met this person. At an event and refer your product to a friend or something like that. So I just encourage you, if you do go down the sponsorship route, don’t get all wrapped up in tracking the return on investment. But what I will guarantee you is if you pick a good event to sponsor that has a lot of industry partners, and more importantly your customers and ideal customers, it will pay off. And if you do it again another year and another year. It really spreads your brand around, and you’d be surprised how many events are out there looking for sponsorship and sometimes these sponsorships are really not that expensive. Now, another benefit of getting out from behind your computer is what I call the value of travel. So I don’t know if you’re anything like me. But when I travel, when I get outside of my daily, weekly kind of normal routine and I’m flying on planes or driving in my car somewhere, I normally don’t go and, meeting a bunch of strangers, it shakes up my brain and gets me outta my patterns and I will make new connections, new ideas. I might be a little jet lagged or on a plane without wifi, just thinking. And it’s like those shower thoughts you have where an inside will just drop to you because when you’re just sitting behind a computer doing the same thing you do every day, your brain goes on autopilot and just start cycling the routine. But traveling can really open up your mind. Your brain has to be more aware ’cause you’re in a novel environment and you’re just not on autopilot. ’cause this is all different. You’re trying to figure out where to go and logistics and talking to strangers and it just shakes up your brain and that just stimulates, in my experience, a lot of creativity. The other great thing about traveling is that people. Will ask you if you’re meeting a lot of strangers Hey, what do you do? Or, what’s your business? It forces you to get really good at your elevator pitch. And for me, I like to do for an elevator pitch is I help X achieve Y without Z. I help course creators create, launch and scale online learning platforms without spending a ton of time or money. That’s an example, really short elevator pitch for me. And then what happens when you give your elevator pitch is one of two things. One route or fork in the road is that’s awesome. And then you ask them what they do and they do something completely different. And it’s cool you made a nice friend or had a great conversation, but you guys are on different paths. But sometimes when you give your elevator pitch, someone will double click on that and say, tell me more. What is that exactly? Or How do you do that? And then you give a more expanded elevator pitch and maybe it stops there or there’s another fork in the road like. You know what? I’ve always wanted to create an online course coaching program or membership site. Tell me more, like how could I get started and stuff like that. So there’s all these opportunities where, you never know where it’s gonna go, and it’s fine if somebody’s cool. I do courses around organic gardening and another person’s oh I sell real estate. Cool. You met somebody, it’s awesome. Great connection. They might know somebody who wants to get into gardening, but then you might also meet your perfect prospective customer who’s oh, that’s awesome. I’m awesome into gardening, or I’m into music and I want to figure out how to take my hobby and turn it into an online business, and so on. And it can just evolve. So talking to people in person forces you to get good at describing what it is you do, and you’d be surprised how challenged a lot of people are at clearly articulating what they do. And particularly talking to strangers is a great way to refine that craft and also get good at. Taking it a step further if somebody shows interest without being a pushy salesperson or anything like that. But those conversations are fantastic. The other great thing about getting out from behind your computer is it’s an opportunity to meet future team members in your organization. So I’ve met people who have become developers in my country, at my company. I’ve met. People that became business partners, investors in my company, you never know who you’re gonna meet when you get out into the world, and it’s has a different feel than when you’re just meeting people online or discussing something on a LinkedIn direct message as an example, or over email when you actually shake hands and build relationships. Even the people you meet may not be the best employee for you, but you might also meet somebody who’s not a great employee for you, but they could know somebody who would be a perfect fit. So a great example of this is if you’re looking for a virtual assistant and you meet somebody. They’re like, they do something completely different, but they’re like, you know what? I hear you’re looking for a virtual assistant. My wife recently retired or is in a job transition, wants to work from home. She has this background in, X, Y, and z. I think she could be a perfect fit for what you’re looking for. Would you like me to connect you? That kind of thing. There, there’s just a lot of magic and serendipity that happens through those offline connections. And the other great thing too, that this is more out of the box thinking by getting out from behind your computer and going to a conference or an industry event that is not directly related to your main business. You’re still gonna learn things. So one of my favorite cheat codes in business is to learn something from a totally different industry and translate that over to mine. So for example, if you can probably relate, you probably are a lot like me. If you go to a restaurant and you’re an entrepreneur and great service or like a experiences that’s designed for some fun experience. And you see the gears behind the scenes of oh, this person’s doing this. They structured this. This is the user experience. Then you can take what you’ve learned and apply that to your business, even from a completely different industry. And that’s just another kind of pro tip. Around getting out from behind your computer and getting out into the world and just learning. Maybe you have some hobby, it could be investing or gardening or robotics, anything, and go out into those industries and see what you could bring back to your own. A lot of education entrepreneurs and technology professionals and website builders can get a little bit isolated, so I just wanted to encourage you to get out from behind your computer because some of the best things I’ve ever done in terms of attracting talent, recruiting great customers, deepening the relationships with existing customers or team members or industry partners. All of that happened from getting out from behind my computer. So even if you’re an introvert just like me and you spend a lot of time solo, you like your privacy, make it a little fun, comfortable, and get uncomfortable. Go out into the world and meet a lot of strangers, and I guarantee you it will pay off. And especially if you do that. Over an extended period of time, and I don’t mean like a lot, like maybe twice a year for five years, you’ll be really impressed at the results you get from that. It’s not just about clicks or online business, it’s also about bricks. So clicks and bricks. Bricks, clicks is the online world. Buildings in the real world are made of bricks. People are inside. Online communities and have email and stuff like that’s all clicks, but people are also out in the world inside brick buildings and other types of buildings or outside. So it’s clicks and bricks, not just clicks. That’s it for this episode of LMScast. I love to hear the value you’ve gotten. From getting out into the world, and I hope one day to meet you in person. If you’re listening to this podcast, take care. 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@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post When to Get Offline For Online Business appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett highlights how each model works for various kinds of entrepreneurs as he compares the benefits and drawbacks of membership sites against stand-alone online courses. With a one-time payment structure, a standalone course usually provides students with access to a specific collection of learning resources, such as videos, tests, PDFs, and occasionally certifications. Recurring revenue is not automatically supported by it, despite the fact that it is simpler to build and maintain great for focused entrepreneurs that wish to improve one major service. To maintain revenue, creators could have to rely on marketing campaigns, relaunches, or extras like community access and mentoring. A membership site, on the other hand, is more adaptable and sophisticated, frequently combining many courses with recurring advantages like private blogs, resource libraries, group coaching, or community access. Although memberships enable ongoing value creation and support recurrent revenue, they also come with a higher workload and more regular content delivery requirements. Serial entrepreneurs that thrive on creating and overseeing a variety of offers would be more suited to this strategy. According to Harris, whether you want the concentration and simplicity of a single course or the scalability and continuous engagement of a membership site, success relies on your personal style and company strategy. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 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 Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, 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 Chris Badgett, and this is another solo episode, and today we’re gonna be discussing the pros and cons, the differences between membership sites and standalone courses. There’s a very important decision you need to make either in the beginning or as you’re getting started and figuring out how you’re gonna build an online education company. As to which path you’re gonna take. Either I’m gonna build a membership site or a standalone course, or multiple standalone courses or potentially a hybrid model that is, I offer standalone courses and I offer memberships. So first, let’s talk about the difference and come to agreement on terms. So what is a standalone online course? A standalone online course typically has a one-time payment. The student gets access to the training. Could be a series of videos, other resources, PDFs, maybe quizzes and assignments, perhaps get a certificate. Now it is possible to add recurring revenue to a standalone. Online course in a couple of ways. One simple way, which isn’t real recurring revenue, is to actually add a payment plan. So if it’s expensive, let’s say it’s a $1,000 online course, you could have a price tag of $1,000 or four payments monthly for $250. That’s not necessarily a recurring revenue situation. It’s more of a payment plan. But you can add a recurring revenue to standalone online course by simply offering things like group coaching every month, or an online community so that they can cancel any time. Say your goal is to still make $1,000 and you charge a hundred dollars a month for access to the course and the coaching and the community. Most people who join your program end up staying for approximately 10 months. So there you get your $1,000 as an example, through mostly really just a standalone online course that has that added benefit. Now, what is a membership site? Memberships, the word is often used in many different ways, so I want to tell you how I think about it particularly at lifter LMS. And how membership sites can be different from online courses. So if you’re building an education company, you’re probably gonna have a courses aspect to your site. But in a membership site, there’s probably gonna be a lot of other things going on outside of courses that people get access to by enrolling in your membership. So one way to think about a membership site. Is that it can grant access to an online course or multiple online courses or future online courses you have not even created yet, but plan on creating over time. It can also include aspects, access to other parts of your website. Like private content that exists outside of courses. A simple example might be. A members only blog or newsletter or resource library of digital downloads. It could be parts of pages or expanded content beyond what’s freely available on your site. With a tool like Lifter, LMS, you can control access. Outside of courses via memberships to other parts or pieces of your website or other benefits like access to a community calendar, which is, has access to coaching calls or community events and that sort of thing. So the most simple way to think about it is that a standalone course is just one course. Usually those are sold for one-time payment. And a membership site is much more complex. It can be a bundle of courses and other benefits or access to other parts of your website. Now, a tool, a learning management system like Lifter, LMS is infinitely flexible. So however you want to do it, whether it’s a simple standalone online course. Or a multi instructor online school with fancy membership benefits as well. Both are possible with lifter LMS. So just to get into the pros and cons, the benefits and drawbacks of either option, standalone online courses, if it’s particularly just access to the content, maybe a certification. There’s really no way to get. Recurring revenue because it’s pretty straightforward. There’s a limited scope course. People go in, they take the course, they learn the knowledge, they create skills, maybe get a certificate, and they’re done. That’s not really a recurring revenue situation. One of the benefits of a standalone online course is that it is a lot less work for the course creator. So once you’ve created it. You’re done and it’s up there. But a drawback to that is you may have to do continuous marketing to get new people over and enrolling in your course. Now, there’s a lot of great education entrepreneurs out there that all they have ever done is they have one standalone online course and every year or every six months, they make it better and better. They do a launch or a marketing launch of their course multiple times a year, and that’s the launch model and there’s nothing wrong with that. So one thing I’d like to highlight here is some of this depends on your personality. So in all my time as an entrepreneur and working with other entrepreneurs. I found that there’s a spectrum, two ends to the spectrum of different kinds of entrepreneurs. One I call the focused entrepreneur and the other I call the serial entrepreneur. So a serial entrepreneur creates like many different businesses and many pro products or, they’re constantly creating and ideating and doing a lot of new things. Now, there’s. Pros and cons to being a focused entrepreneur like I have my one thing, I’m actually more of a focused entrepreneur. I am super focused on lifter LMS. I’ve been doing it for over a decade. I am a focused entrepreneur, but a serial entrepreneur, would. Create many different software products and many other businesses and just have this portfolio, if you will, of businesses and neither is better or worse. And a pro tip for you right here is it if a focused entrepreneur teams up with a serial entrepreneur and they have good chemistry and they can work together is really a beautiful thing. They’re just the different ways they see the world and operate when they’re in partnership. It is super powerful and unstoppable in that way. So that’s just a pro tip. I know there’s a lot of like husband wife teams as an example, creating education companies or business partners and if one, if they’re different in that focused versus serial aspect. They can be really powerful. But a standalone online course is more of a focused approach. But if you’re gonna be like, okay, I really want a membership site and I have ideas for 20 different courses and the coaching program and online community. You can do. You’re more of a serial entrepreneur in that way, and that is very cool. But it is also a lot more work. Focus is more scattered, in my opinion. Success is less likely because focus is spread out. So it really depends on your approach and who you are and what your personality is. The big benefit of a membership site is that you’re going to get multiple options for recurring revenue. You can keep adding new courses, you can add other resources to a digital library. You can keep creating a private blog, private newsletter. Keep delivering online coaching, keep developing your community. This episode of LMScast is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells in guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. So the trade off between a standalone online course and a membership is the membership is a lot more work. The demand on you to create content and the surface area that you have to manage is a lot more with a membership site. Now I’m actually a big fan of what I call the hybrid model. So the most simple version of a hybrid model is to do a standalone online course and then just add a coaching or community aspect to it. That allows you to get recurring revenue while also having a focus on one main course and a lifter LMS. You don’t even have to create a membership to do that. You can use. What we call access plans to, let’s say you have one plan that’s like just the course for $500 or another access plan in the pricing table that says you get the course plus these ongoing coaching and community benefits, and this plan costs a hundred dollars a month. So you can literally offer both options. You’re opening up the world to recurring revenue. So that’s a very simple example of how to create a hybrid model. One of the ways to also do hybrid is to have a standalone course, but then also a membership that has way more stuff in it. So if you think about your Buyer’ss journey, let’s say. Earlier in the journey, you have a $500 starter course that helps people get started and get going. That’s your standalone course, and it’s like your 1 0 1, like you have to start here. You have to start with the course to get oriented and really become a perfect fit for the membership, the 2 0 1, which is available later, so the. The membership, then, let’s say it includes three advanced level courses. Also additional benefits like community or coaching as well. So in that way, if you look at your ideal learners journey, you’re asking them to, Hey, start here in the jv. Or the junior varsity, the level one, the freshmen using traditional university language. And then if when you’re ready, you can jump into the bigger membership. Which is more exp, more expensive, more benefits and recurring there’s a recurring cost to that. So that’s a hybrid model. I’m also a big fan of free courses, so like free standalone courses. So maybe even before they’re ready to be a freshman or jv, you have a free course to get people ready to even be ready for the standalone course. So free course, then standalone paid course, and then membership. And when it comes to offers, I like to only offer. Three, a maximum of three choices like that. ’cause once you get more complicated than that, you start to really confuse buyers. And there’s a saying that the confused mind doesn’t buy, which is very true. So think about that and how you and how you construct your model. And just some examples of this, like KPC, who does. Slick Business is the name of her platform and she does active campaign and marketing automation training. And she’s very membership site focused. So I’m just pulling up KPCs website. You can find that at slick business.co. And if I go to her active campaign academy. There’s basically two options. There is the Essential Academy, which is $97 per month at the time of this recording, and there’s the Advanced Academy. That’s $187 per month. And within this, she has training, she has office hours. She has community, she has, the entry level course for the first option, the Essential Academy. And then she has extra courses with, more information for the advanced people in the advanced Academy plan. And this is Kay is doing a classic. Membership site and that’s awesome. But Kay is going to have to deliver ongoing, office hours, what she does weekly, and continue to support her other member bonuses. So that’s like a classic membership site. Kay’s done very well with her platform and she’s such a great. Example of building a membership site. But then if you think about a standalone course creator, we have people that have, let’s say they were a Udemy instructor and they had a course on this topic. It sold for 50 bucks on you, Demi, and they want more ownership, power, control, and customizability over their course. I’m thinking of someone like Frank Kane who has made over $2 million in revenue with over 600,000 students in his standalone courses. So he does several standalone courses and Frank does a lot of education in the tech sector helping, engineers level up on certain things like how AWS, Amazon’s. Platform works and so on. So that’s just a, another great example of a standalone membership, or sorry, a standalone online course, and Frank is a serial creator, so technology is constantly changing. So he’s creating new courses that help with a particular tech skill to help people get good jobs or do their job well. That sort of thing. So that’s a example of a standalone online course and we talked about free courses. So one of lifter, LMS’s most popular course is a free course called the Official Quick Start Course for the lifter LMS community. That’s awesome. And that is free. It’s only about an hour of content and we’ve had something like 40,000 people enroll in that. So it’s a very strong, like lead magnet and gets people ready for the software. Which technically is a membership, by the way, an annual recurring subscription unless you get a lifetime license. And the course, the free course gets people really ready for the ongoing. Membership to the software that learn how to use the tool, make sure it’s a good fit for them, and then it’ll also help them get started once they become a customer, to learn the essential 5% of the software so that they can launch their education company as quickly as possible. So that’s an example of a standalone free course. So it’s really up to you which path. You choose to move forward with in terms of standalone courses versus memberships and you can just have a standalone course with no coaching and no community. One-time payment, lifetime access. These, this is the quote, least amount of work. It’s still really hard to create like a great standalone online course, but when you commit to a membership site, you are committing to a much bigger ongoing commitment that’s gonna have a lot of demand on your time and your the need for you to create content. So if you’re gonna create. Recurring revenue, you have to create recurring value, which means you’re either going to have to continually be creating new courses and other content to drop into the membership or have ongoing benefits like office hours, group or private coaching, or a helpful, supportive online community. So different ways to think about that. We also have a lot of continuing education or professional development creators using lifter LMS. So this is also a great niche. This is more like a standalone course approach. So if someone needs to get, let’s say, two hours of continuing EDU education credits to keep their license in the medical system or. Some business niche or legal or real estate or whatever it is, they need to get their continuing education credits by taking standalone courses. Now you can introduce a membership using left or LMS where you get a bundle of courses so you can get all, say, 20 hours for the next year or two years for to keep your license and so on. So there’s a lot of people doing. Hybrid approaches. But the main point is if you’re gonna do recurring revenue, you have to do, find a way to create recurring value. So I’d love to hear from you any questions or comments around the decision to do standalone courses or the membership site model. I would encourage you just to do some soul searching. Really decide if you are a focused entrepreneur or a serial entrepreneur. Serial creatorand again, neither one of these is better than the other is super powerful. If you know within the same education company you can combine. Both the focus and the the serial creator aspect. It’s a dynamic duo, if you will. So that’s it for this episode of LMS Cast. I hope you’d enjoyed that. I wish you all the best with your standalone online courses and or membership site or hybrid model. 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Membership vs Standalone Courses Which One Wins appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now Chris Badgett stresses in this LMScast solo episode that producing a successful online course involves more than simply developing a website, marketing strategies, or technology; it also involves effectively instructing the students. Many instructors suffer from the “expert’s curse,” in which they possess important knowledge but find it difficult to communicate it effectively, leaving students feeling overloaded or disinterested. Chris explains the importance of using a teaching framework, a repeatable structure for each lesson that keeps students engaged, makes the content easier to create, and ensures clarity. He describes how he utilizes mind mapping to generate ideas at the beginning of each lecture and then arranges them into an organized spreadsheet template. Course designers may provide lessons that are both powerful and simple to understand by shifting from abstract concepts to tangible examples and adjusting the framework to the requirements of students. In the end, Chris emphasizes that although course designers have many responsibilities, honing teaching abilities through a framework is frequently the most important and disregarded phase in creating revolutionary online programs. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 Transcript 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 Badget. 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 Chris, and today I’m joined by a special guest, and that’s me. This is another solo episode, and in this episode I’m gonna go over how to become a teacher without going to teaching school so that you can make a fortune, make impact in the world, and create freedom in your life. So there’s a lot of talk about marketing online courses, selling online courses, the technology like Lifter, LMS, which people build use to build online courses. But in this episode, we’re actually gonna talk about actually teaching in the product, like delivering the online course and how to do that. I’m gonna give you one of the biggest unlocks. To help you remove what’s known as the experts curse. See, the challenge that happens in our industry is that a lot of aspiring education entrepreneurs, course creators and coaches, they get all excited. They buy some software, they look for marketing tactics and strategies. They started thinking about ads. They start building the website and, maybe starting some content marketing and putting all the LMS pieces together. But at the end of the day, let’s not forget about the actual product, the online course, which is comprised of lessons. So in this podcast episode, we’re gonna dive into how to remove all the chaos and craziness. That comes with taking your expertise out of your head and actually packaging it and delivering that in an online course. So the solution here is to actually have a teaching framework and I figured this out on my own and watching other people teach and learning frameworks for business. But in this episode. I want to really zero in on the lesson content, particularly on video content. Though this is bigger than just video content. It can expand to things like text and on the lesson and quizzes and assignments and things like that. But for the most part, I’m gonna be talking about the teaching framework that you can use to make lesson videos. And not just to make them, but to make them high quality and effective. So the magic trick here is to go from the abstract to the concrete. And what I mean by that is as a subject matter expert you have all this experience and ideas and theories and tactics and things you want to talk about, stories you want to tell. Examples, you want to give processes to lay out systems and structures and all these things to teach, but it’s so overwhelming if you’ve never learned how to actually be a teacher or a coach. So part of our whole thing at Lifter LMS is that you have to wear five hats simultaneously, either within yourself or at a team. We call this the five hats problem of being an education entrepreneur. You have to be a subject matter expert. You have to be a teacher, which is what we’re gonna talk about today. You have to be a technologist. You have to be an entrepreneur, and you have to be a community builder. And the reality is, a lot of those skills and tactics are learnable, but teaching is also learnable, but often overlooked when it shouldn’t be. What happens if you don’t develop a teaching framework? You’re gonna end up just creating some giant course. You’re gonna ramble. Your students are not going to stay engaged or complete the lesson content. They’re gonna get confused, they’re gonna have lots of questions. So let’s like slow down and back up and talk about it at a high level first, like what is a teaching framework? It’s basically a structure or an outline of how you deliver your lessons. And this can work if you’re teaching business concepts or you’re teaching health and fitness workouts, or you’re teaching parenting strategies and advice or challenges in that niche anywhere. You can develop your own teaching framework. And the cool thing is it’s not one size fits all. What you need to do is create your custom teaching framework that works for you and your niche, your market, your personality, your ideal learner style, and what happens when you have a systematic way that you teach each individual lesson. Is that it makes your students relax ’cause they know how to, how it rolls with you, what class is gonna be like, what the lesson is gonna be like. They’re gonna know your flow, if you will. It also makes your life a million times easier when it comes to creating content. ’cause this is where you marry your expertise, subject matter expert brain with a system that’s designed to pull that out of you in a structured way that’s easy to make. And in a way that your students will love. So at the highest level, the way I think about it is as a subject matter expert, you know you have your ideal learner, you have their challenge or their problem, and at the end you have the solution, the learning objective, the transformation that your course promises to create if they go through your course. And we’re not gonna get into the high levels of curriculum design. That could be a whole other topic. If you want to hear about that, let me know. What we’re gonna talk about is, let’s assume you have a course outline and you figured out who your ideal learner is, and you have the sections and lesson names for your course, but you’re staring at your computer. Now it’s time to create the lesson content. And this is where a lot of people get stuck. I’ve seen it a million times, and what’s missing in this scenario is a teaching framework. So enough of the buildup I’m gonna go into describing what it looks like and how it works, and how I make one and use one. So first thing I do is I’m a, visual thinker. So I’ll just start mind mapping and drawing bubbles. If I have a lesson about a certain topic, I’ll start just throwing bubbles and making connections and just getting it outta my brain and getting it on paper in a very disorganized fashion. But the beauty happens when you go from brainstorm to. Spreadsheet and I’ll explain what I mean in a second. And so I get my brainstorm going oh, stories, I want to tell an example, maybe a worksheet idea. Maybe some challenges people have when they’re in this part of the training and things like that. And I just get it all out there on paper. Even just short words that will jog my brain so I can quickly access that part. Of what I was gonna talk about. But the teaching framework is essentially an outline for the lesson. It’s a template that you can use over and over again in every lesson. So that you’re efficient and effective. I personally like to do teaching frameworks in a spreadsheet. So I create a te a template for how I deliver my lessons, which we’re gonna talk about in a second. Then every time I do a new lesson, I just add a tab to the spreadsheet. I copy the template and I do lesson one content. Then I do lesson two content. But before we get into that, what is the actual lesson template? And this is where the magic happens. Like before we get into actual creating content we need to come up with a teaching framework that works for you and your market. I’m just looking at one I have over here. I’m recently actually as of this recording, tomorrow I’m recording the last lesson in a course I’ve been teaching live called the Perfect Offer Playbook, and I’m on lesson 11, which is the final lesson. And every single lesson I have the same teaching framework, but the content is very different. So the teaching framework, it just starts with welcome. So this is where I just say hi. And welcome everybody in. I’m doing it live. But if I was doing a prerecorded course. I would do the same thing. Hey, welcome to this lesson on X, Y, and Z. We’re gonna get into this subject matter today. Remind people of the support systems. If you have questions, feel free to reach out in this way and so on. Then I start with the problem. I get there pretty quick and some people call it a hook. The problem statement is really about getting people interested and also identifying what kind of mini problem within the greater problem of the course are we gonna solve today. And the hook part of it is making it interesting. So I even did it in the title of this podcast episode. How to become a teacher without going to teaching school. That’s an example of a hook. And the problem we’re solving today is learning how to teach without being a teacher so that you and your students aren’t overwhelmed and everybody’s effective and having fun. The next thing I like to do is drop into a story. Part of teaching is teaching through stories, examples, case studies. If you look at a famous business school like Harvard Business School, most of the coursework is looking at case studies of examples of things that happened before in big businesses and small businesses and things like that. So story teaching through example is very powerful. So for you, it could look like this. Like I had this client named Jane. Jane had all this back pain from X, Y, and z. We implemented this protocol. Here’s what happened in week one, week two, week three, so on. I’m like providing an example that’s demonstrating the problem and outcome and the process. The next thing I like to do is go into the challenge. So here’s the, and then I do three challenges and three promises. This is a challenge I know because I’ve recently overcome it, which was two decades of chronic back pain. So the challenge with chronic back pain is that challenge number one you’ve tried all these things like chiropractor, massage, going to the doctor, stretching, yoga, and nothing provides a permanent solution. Challenge number two. The first thing you think about when you wake up is My back hurts. And that’s just really sad. And then the third challenge is, you’re willing to do the work, but you just need to know what actually works. So I’ve created my challenge problem statements, and now what I’m gonna do in my lesson is I’m gonna go into the promise and basically do the inverse of things. I’m gonna show you what actually works to heal chronic back pain permanently and forever. I’m gonna show you how to wake up to get to a place where you wake up and the first thought in your brain is in your conscious mind is not my back hurts. And promise number three is I’m gonna show you what actually works. And it’s even a lot. Think you is, it is even a lot easier than you think. It will be easier to commit to. You are gonna have to do ongoing work, but I promise you it will work. So as a recap, where we are right now in our lesson about chronic back pain relief is we did a welcome statement, a high level problem statement, a story three challenges, and then three promises in copywriting or marketing. The challenge part is called agitating the pain in instructional design. This is called enrollment. We are enrolling people and getting them motivated. We want them to see, understand, feel the pain. But also see, feel, and understand the solution and the promise that we’re driving towards. Then the next part is the main meat of the lesson. Which I call the learning or key principles. Now this is gonna vary wildly about what you call these things, depending upon what niche you’re in, but the key principles, and I like to do five and props to Dan Martel. I learned this trick from Dan. He called them hot principles, and I like Dan’s approach to this. He essentially said that. The key principles are all about teaching people how to think, not necessarily exactly telling them what to do. However. I’m a big fan of actually telling people exactly what to do as well, which we’ll get to in a little bit. But part of learning is just helping people, change how they think about something or, discover a strategy or have a mindset shift. So the key principles I like to do five, and then within each principle I get into like subpoints to reinforce it. And I’m not gonna do five principles about back pain relief. But we’ll do one here. So one key principle is that. You have to strengthen your back. So it’s not about stretching, it’s not about massage. It’s not about cracking and popping. And chiropractic, you’ve been like your body. Connections are all messed up and you’ve been like favoring this back problem and you’ve really got a weak core. So we need to address the strength in your back and your core. And I would get into a bunch of sub principles about that and teaching about how strength and flexibility are different and how to build up strength slowly and so on. And then my next principle might be around recovery. After exercise. My next principle might be about multi strength, endurance and flexibility and something else like multimodal exercise. My next one. Might be about dealing with setbacks and flare ups. So that would be like my fourth or fifth principle, and you can see how I’m getting my body of work together around how I cured for myself chronic back pain, and that those are, that creates my learning principles. This is the main meat of teaching people how to think. And then I like to do something called expert story positioning, which is. Where you share your personal story. Like in the beginning, I like to share like a customer story or a client story like Jane and her chronic back pain, but then in the expert story positioning, I’m gonna go into a two to five minute story about my own journey with chronic back pain since I was 19 years old till finally solving it at age 46. And I’m gonna tell that story, and the reason I’m doing that is, one, to provide another example, but two, I’m also just showing that I know what I’m talking about. This is part of my personal brand. This is part of who I am and a struggle I’ve had. And I’m just showing my leadership and authority in that. I’m not just regurg regurgitating about some topic that I thought would be very successful or. Going after because it is trending. So this is my expert story positioning. And then the next part is myths. I love this part. So I usually do one to three myths. And a myth is where people go down the wrong rabbit holes. So to stick with our back pain example a myth I might do is that that curing that back pain, chronic back pain is uncurable. That’s a myth, right? Another myth, which I’ve personally been told by chiropractors is you should really stop running. You should never run again. And I’m, I like running. I’m, and now with my cured back pain, I’m actually an ultra runner. I just ran. 30 miles on Saturday and eight miles on Sunday with zero back pain. So the myth that the doctor is always right, ’cause sometimes you will get bad advice. So these are myths which is, this is also a part of teaching is uncovering a faulty view or taking a counter view on a topic or challenging common knowledge. The next section is one of my favorites. So after myths I go to pro tips. So pro tips are like, let’s say somebody’s like really doing well in your course or they’re advanced, like maybe they’re already on the strength training journey or training smartly and so on for their back pain. I might drop a pro tip. Which would be, Hey, you need to go way lighter than you are capable of when, if you do any weight training, which is something I learned. And I would get into how I had to learn how to train much with much lighter weights than what I was physically capable of picking up and particularly certain motions like bending over to pick something off the ground or anything with a arch back. I had to. Learn, and even still to this day, do those exercises, body weight only to avoid flaring up my back. So that’s an example of a pro tip. Another pro tip is, Hey, I got back into running, but I got the thickest fattest cushions on my shoes to limit the pounding on my back and it, that’s worked for me. So those, these are examples of pro tips. The next part is probably my absolute favorite part of the teaching framework, which is the model. So the model is, this is a unique to Chris thing and there’s other people that do it on the internet, but I actually go off video and share my iPad screen with an Apple pencil and actually create a visual model to teach some core ideas or concepts. Now, this is hard to explain in a podcast episode. If you ever go check out the perfect offer playbook. I have a whole training on visual communication and how to do models and how they work and all the shapes and all the stuff to do. But think of it in the traditional classroom as a teacher’s aide. It depends how old you are. People. You used to see teachers draw a Venn diagram on the chalkboard or on the overhead projector. Or you’d get a worksheet with an a diagram or a model, A visual representation of an idea or a concept. Models are really powerful teaching tools, especially for visual learners, of which I am, I’m particularly strong and visual learning and auditory learning. The other, by the way, from the. The theory of multiple learning styles is kinesthetic, which we’re actually gonna get into in a second. So part of this teaching framework is to give all, make all learning styles happy because people are not robots and different people learn in different ways. So I do a visual model and I actually draw in front of the person. One of the best people in the world of visual models is a guy in Australia named Simon Bowen. So go check that guy out. He’s where once I learned this visual communication and models from Simon Bowen, my brain just exploded. And the reason it exploded was because I learned how to take. Abstract concepts are just my head, swimming in information and data and put it into a visual model that makes sense. And there’s a lot of cool things about visual communication, which we’re not gonna get into in this episode. But having a diagram, like if you think about it this way there’s a famous productivity book called Good to Great, but jim Allen, I believe his name is, and the whole thing is built on one Eisenhower Matrix or four box model where, on one line is importance and the other is urgency. So there’s four boxes, like important, urgent, important, not urgent not important. Urgent not important. Not urgent. Anyways, he built a whole like empire off of one model. That’s how powerful these are. The next thing I personally like to do is a worksheet. So this is for the kinesthetic learners, the doers, and even if you’re teaching ideas like you’re not teaching worksheets, like if I was a fitness instructor, I would be this part. We would go into the workout, like here is the workout. But I like to use worksheets to further deify everything I’ve been teaching in the lesson. And I love to create worksheets in a spreadsheet like Google Sheets. The reason I like to do this is because of the challenge of there’s no abstraction. There’s like a label and a cell or a box or a checkbox or something to write in or fill out. And what this does is it takes the training like the key principles, the stories and everything, and helps the learner apply it to their life and their situation. In the perfect offer, playbook. I just actually before recording this, I completed the last worksheet, which was about how to launch a brand new offer and we talked about all kinds of like efficient early course marketing, launching and how to do it, and examples and stories and the whole framework I’ve just told you. But then I created a worksheet. I’m like, this is exactly what to do. Like these, put in these three things here. Build this list of people right here. Contact them with this message. You need to write about X, Y, and Z. Here’s a checkbox to check when it’s done, and so on. So that’s worksheets are all about getting learners taking action. So that’s a worksheet. And then the last part is a review. All that, all the review is I like to just go really quickly through the five key learning principles again, and that’s it. And then at the end of a lesson is your call to action. So this is where you can thank people for coming and spending their time with you today, but more importantly, you can tell them like, now go do the worksheet. If you need help, use this support system to reach out. And it’s also an opportunity to drop in like what’s coming next. If you wanna keep the anticipation high, particularly in cohort-based courses where you need people or want people to show up next week so you can plant the seed for what’s coming next. So that’s the call to action, close to a lesson. Now think about how awesome that template is. So when you go through your lessons, if you use the same template over and over again, as the learner is progressing through the learner journey, it gets very comfortable and efficient for you as the course creator. It’s also very comfortable and efficient for the learner to they know what to expect. They know your flow. They’re like, okay, we’re gonna do the principles now. Okay, we’re gonna do the worksheet now. Okay, here’s the model. Let me pay attention. ’cause this is really important if the instructor created a model around this and it seers the model in your brain. So that’s an example. Now not all teaching frameworks are need to be exactly the same, but that’s just an example of one I’ve just used to create an awesome 11 lesson course called the Perfect Offer Playbook. Which one of the benefits of all this here’s a pro tip for you is when you create a new online course project and you do the work and you figure out your offer and you get the course outlined together, but you haven’t created anything yet, you can pre-sell that. Give it a start date one month from now and start selling it and people can look at it. They can see your well-written sales page and they can see the course outline. Okay, this looks interesting. I know where this guy’s going. But then you give yourself permission, if you create one lesson a week, with a live cohort that you deliver it to and record it, turn it into an evergreen course, that’s a really efficient, fun way of doing things. When you are a subject matter expert on the topic, once you have a teaching framework, creating the content goes pretty fast. So for me, it probably takes at, for this course as an example it would take me about three hours to put together a, one of those lesson outlines that I would use to teach from on camera. And also another pro tip for you is once you have the your template, you can also create a slide template that follows the flow. So in our case welcome problem story, challenge, promises, learning principles. Expert story myth, pro tips model worksheet review, and then the call to action. So you have a slide template. So if you’re gonna teach from slides or talking head, you can structure all these and templatize all these things. And so anyways, like for me, it took about probably about four hours to prepare a lesson. One hour to deliver it, 30 minutes to turn it into evergreen asset, put it in lifter LMS in a course, the video link up the worksheet for download and so on. And then it’s done. And just keep in mind, this is not new. Teachers have been doing this forever. So new teachers’ lives are harder because they don’t necessarily have the curriculum yet. Or they’re using some curriculum that they just obtained from somewhere else, but they haven’t really internalized it and taught it, so it’s harder. But then what happens over time is a classroom teacher will deliver the same curriculum semester after semester, year after year, decade after decade and so on. Hopefully improving it some along the way. But the beauty of online courses is you can. You can evergreen it and automate everything with a online course and LMS website powered by lifter LMSI am a fan though of if you can like at least the first time teach it live, you don’t have to do that, but you can. And I’m also another pro tip as I am a really big fan of revisiting your course, making it better over time. Maybe reshooting the videos, update the worksheets. Maybe insert some new, more relevant stories and so on. But that is how you keep, you create a teaching framework for your lessons. And I hope you found this helpful. One final thing that I just want to tell you that’ll blow your mind, hopefully you can do this too with marketing content. You come up with a content template for the content marketing you do, it’s likely gonna be a slim down version of what you would do in an actual lesson. If you get really advanced, and I’ve done this before, you can actually structure your teaching template for your actual paid course in such a way that it’s perfectly set up, so that when you’re done with the recording video. There’s a piece of it that you can cut out and move right over to your marketing. If you have a YouTube channel as an example where you’re not giving away everything, but let’s say you’re doing the problems, the challenges and the principles, but you’re not getting into like the model and the worksheet and the action steps and all the support and everything that’s offered in your paid training. So you, you can actually double dip and do marketing and education at the same time. That’s next level pro stuff. That’s it for this episode of LMS Cast on how to create your teaching framework. Smash the like button. Tell your friends, lemme know. If you like this video, drop a comment down below and I wish you all the best on creating impact, income, and freedom in your life with online courses. 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@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Become A Teacher Without Going To Teaching School And Make A Fortune With Online Courses appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now Chris Badgett offers his advice on creating and running an email list that now has over 100,000 subscribers in this episode of LMScast. He makes the case that, when compared to social media, email is the most reliable and efficient marketing medium since it is used by everyone and can be utilized for prospecting, nurturing, sales, and customer support. Chris emphasizes that although having a larger list frequently results in higher revenue, the caliber of members is significantly more significant than the number. Chris emphasizes that if the proper individuals are on them, even tiny, focused lists may provide meaningful commercial outcomes. Additionally, he outlines the fundamental procedures for configuring email systems, selecting the best platform, and connecting LifterLMS with CRMs like ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, or ConvertKit. He also provides helpful advice on how to handle corporate email accounts, such as utilizing shared inbox systems like Help Scout to expedite communication and use role-based addresses (support@, ceo@) rather than personal ones. In order to maintain professional, scalable, and well-organized message, he concludes by advising every company to set up a minimum of three email addresses: one for personal correspondence, one for marketing/sales, and one for customer service. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 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 Badget. 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 Chris Badgett, and today I am not joined by a special guest. It’s just me, and we’re gonna be talking all about everything I’ve learned in building an email list over a hundred thousand people. Last time I checked, 115,000 people have. Join my email list and I’ve learned a lot about building an email list, email marketing. I’m gonna share all of that with you today. So welcome. The first thing I just want to talk about is why I love email. Why email is, in my opinion, the most important channel for marketing, but also just supporting your customers. Email is an essential platform. For, doing prospecting sales, warming up an audience, making offers, adding value, delivering your product or service. There’s so much you can do with email. And the neat thing about email is that everybody uses it. It’s not like social media where some people are on Twitter, some people are on Facebook, some people are on TikTok. Yeah, everybody on all those different social media accounts has a most likely a primary email address. Maybe they have one or two, maybe a business email, maybe a personal email. But in terms of building an email list, like this is the most important thing for a course creator, a coach or education entrepreneur, to be doing, ideally, even before. They have launched their course or their membership site. And even if you’re an agency building LMS sites for clients, it’s really important to also do email marketing, to also build your email list. So today I’m gonna go over. So several of the ways I think about email, and I know you’re gonna find some gems to help you create more income, impact and freedom in your life. An email list is a very important piece of your business. There’s an old saying that the quote money is in the list and it’s very true. I’m trying to remember the exact formula, but there’s this equation. Where based on the size of your email list you probably make somewhere between three to $5 for every email subscriber you have in your business. And I’ve seen this across multiple businesses when I’m, hear about their revenue numbers and how big their email list is. It’s very much a part. Of just the math or the physics of business. And that the bigger email list you have in general, the more money you’re gonna make. Now, of course, you want to have a high quality email list. Quality is more important than quantity. There’s plenty of people that have built great businesses with a very small email list, as a related example. I forget the exact number, but the lifter, LMS YouTube channel is very small in terms of subscribers, but we actually do a lot of revenue with a very small subscriber base. Now, there’s YouTube channels with a million subscribers who make far less money than us. So the lesson there is that it’s all about quality, not necessarily quantity. So don’t get too wrapped up, if you only have an email list of a hundred people. 50 people, if those are 50 or a hundred really awesome, qualified, perfect fit people. That’s great. So it’s not just about getting, a thousand subscribers, 10,000, a hundred thousand, a million, and so on. So the foundations, before you start building an email list, this is one of the, these are some key ideas that people don’t really think about. The first thing I would say is you need to pick. A tool to gather all your emails into. So the CRM, the email marketing, the email broadcasting platform, there’s a lot of great ones out there. I’ve, and many of you may have used MailChimp over the years. That’s a great place. They have a free option. I personally currently use something called ActiveCampaign. I’ve been on ActiveCampaign for probably about eight years. We switched at lifter LMS to ActiveCampaign from Infusionsoft eight years ago. And really I got my start in kind of the integration between WordPress and marketing automation with Infusionsoft. That’s actually where I began as a agency owner and where we focused our agency. And later we ended up building lifter LMS and focusing on the education entrepreneurs. My technical expertise has always been around marketing automation, WordPress, website building email marketing and so on, and combining all those things. But going back to platforms, there’s so many great email platforms out there. Like a lot of people are happy with Kit, formally known as ConvertKit. There’s a lot of great solutions in WordPress for email like fluid, CRM or groundhog. And there’s many other, email platforms. Some people love HubSpot and so on. If you’re using Lifter LMS we have a native integration with MailChimp and Kit. Also, there’s a great tool called WP Fusion. There’s a WordPress plugin that can connect your WordPress website to 50 of the most popular CRMs. So definitely check out WP Fusion. It’s a great tool. Now, the simple way this works is that when you get a new user on your site, like in a learning management system or a membership site, you just take that person their name and their email address and pass it over to the email platform, so it creates a user over there as well. If you’re not using one of the. WordPress solutions like fluent CRM or Groundhog that you could have on the exact same website. But if you’re using something like lifters integration with MailChimp or ConvertKit, you can do fancier things like add them to different lists based on which course they enrolled in, or which membership they enrolled in, rolled in. You can add tags, trigger automations, and things like that. WP Fusion does that. As well. And again, it allows you to integrate with tons of other email marketing platforms besides MailChimp and ConvertKit. Another pro tip and just when you’re getting started with email, go easy on yourself. I wish people knew how important this was to figure out the naming convention of your. Email accounts. So more than likely you’re gonna have multiple email addresses in your business. This kind of thing is a hard thing to change later. So it was probably 15 years ago where I was listening to a podcast about organization design, and it was a really smart thing this person said. They said, when you build an org chart for your company, think instead of. Names or job titles, do email addresses. So an example of this would be ceo@lifterlms.com or cto@lifterlms.com, customer support@lifterlms.com. So that’s just a way to think about it. ’cause sometimes people create like way too many email addresses. Or they attach something to a name like robert@lifterlms.com and then Robert leaves the company. But now all this stuff was set up with Robert’s email. Another pro tip like we do at lifter LMS, if you start getting at scale and you’re doing a lot of things like pre-sales and supporting existing customers, is we actually use one email inbox for the entire company. It’s called Help Scout. It’s a great tool, and basically the way it works is the public is only interacting with one email address, but inside that help Scout, there’s multiple users who have their own unique email address, like their Google Company workspace, email address, and, they can be assigned to conversations and past conversations around and so on. But that makes it really easy for the public to just have one email to communicate with. And then it also allows you to work as a team with multiple people just interacting in one inbox. So that’s just a pro tip there. But so there’s like your personal email, your business email, but then you’re gonna be sending email broadcasts. Or maybe when students sign up for a course and they get a welcome email, it’s important to think about what email address we’re going to use for those services. As an example I, if I could wave a magic wand for you, I would just give you, for your entire company, three email addresses. And the first one is just for you. So if your name is. Susan, it would be susan@mywebsite.com and create that inside of Google apps or whatever. That’s your primary one-on-one email address. But then what you wanna do is you want to set up two more email addresses that are gonna be used as scale for things like mass communications and stuff. The first one is more sales oriented. Oh, and marketing oriented. The second one is for customer support. The sales one and the marketing one I do not recommend naming that email address something like marketing@mywebsite.com. Nobody get, gets excited when they see an email from marketing at something. So for that email address I would do something like, hello, at. Your company name.com. So that’s an example. So that’s like the pre-sales one where you’re doing like mass marketing, you’re doing marketing automations, you’re doing newsletters, things of that nature. And then on the support side for your customers. I recommend an email address support at your company, name.com, or help at your company. name.com. Now the reason this is important to have three email addresses, and I should just say you’re gonna have more as you add team members. Like they’ll each get their individual email at your company. But if you’re operating solo you need those three. So sometimes people unsubscribe from emails that are, marketing related. It’s just the nature of doing business and sending emails. That’s why you don’t wanna put your personal email like chris@companyname.com as the email address. You’re gonna be sending, marketing communications from, because somebody out there may want to sign up for your newsletter, they’re loving it, but then they unsubscribe or even they get tired of your emails, your marketing emails, and they mark you as spam. And then. You try to reach out to them one-on-one for something and your email never gets to them, or they try to reach out to you like, Hey I’m done with all these newsletter emails, but I still have a question for Chris. And but they’ve blocked your email. And the same is true for marketing and support. So if you set up your email system correctly, people won’t be on two email lists at one time. If somebody’s, doesn’t want any more of your newsletters and they became a customer and they had you, they have nothing left to buy from you and they unsubscribe from your marketing, you still want them to be able to receive like your customer onboarding and nurture emails. That’s for customers. So that’s why it’s important to have a wall between your prospects and your customers. So different email address. For those two. So that’s a really important piece of setting up your email architecture. And then also keep in mind that emails have a kind of reputation score. So this is why you never want to buy an email list or spam people who don’t want to hear from you is because you’re just gonna get marked as spam a lot, and your reputation for your email is gonna get dinged, which means fewer and fewer of your emails will make it to their inboxes, and even your whole domain name can get tarnished. So always hold email in high regard in terms of ethics. Don’t spam people, don’t add people that shouldn’t be added or didn’t give you permission to add consent is very important. So let’s move on from the foundations and talk about attracting subscribers or email addresses. Like how do we get emails? There’s a lot of different ways to get emails, but. Some of the basics, and we do all of these things at Lifter LMS as an example. We’ve been doing this a long time, so we’ve created a lot of things that generate an email address or a subscriber in our system. So one thing we do is the newsletter, but if all you’re doing is a newsletter you’re just limiting yourself because back in the day, that used to be all you needed. But now people’s inboxes are full. They just may want like one thing from you. They’re happy to give you your e email address, but they don’t want to be emailed every week or twice a week or every month. So give a menu of options for ways for people to join your mailing list. So I’m gonna try to rattle some of the ones we have for Lifter LMS. We do have a newsletter, this podcast that you’re listening to right now. We have a. Subscribe by email and basically what that one does is if you go in, you, the person gives their email, there’s an automated system that adds ’em to the email list saying they’re interested in podcast episodes, and it will automatically email them a link to every new podcast episode and a little summary and even a little graphic. Of the episode and it’s all automated. We set that up an active campaign that’s called an RSS Driven campaign. Now, my favorite ways to get emails are through what’s known as lead magnets, which you may have heard of. But if you go to the lifter LMS blog or the lifter LMS podcast, and you look in the sidebar beside individual posts or podcast episodes. You’ll see about five different things that people can sign up for to that’s gonna give them something of value. And then we’re going to get the email address and permission to send them future communications. So you’ve probably heard of lead magnets, but I want to give you a pro tip about how to create them. 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Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. And there’s this idea that oh, I just need one lead magnet. Maybe it’s a quiz of some kind or an ebook. But the reality is if you wanna gather the most email addresses possible, you have to think about your customer existing through time, and not just your customer, but like your ideal prospect as they find out about you, as they become interested in you and so on. What that means is creating different lead magnets for different stages of the buyer’s journey. So I’m just looking at the Lit LMS podcast sidebar. You can go check that out out@podcast.lifterlms.com. And I’m just gonna walk through the lead magnets. The first one is a pricing calculator that helps people figure out the pricing for their course or membership. And the way this lead magnet works is it’s earlier on in the customer journey, they’re just wondering how much could I money can I make if I create a course or a coaching program? And it’s just a calculator that we created using gravity forms and conditional logic. And there’s an option at the end of the calculator for people to give their email to get, a free course about pricing. But this, because we’re early in the journey, they may not trust us yet, so they can actually use the calculator, get the result, not give us our email and move on. And that’s great. So they’re just getting started. But if they want to go deeper, they can give us their email and get a full course on how to do pricing. Then we have what’s called the Education Entrepreneur Playbook which is a much more substantial ebook. There’s a larger time investment. The person at this stage is committed to creating a course or coaching program. They can enter their email address, but they’re also gonna make a larger investment of time than just completing a pricing calculator through three questions. So this is like a. 40 page ebook and most eBooks it’s recommended that they’re shorter than that. But this one is really in depth. And then we have something called the course organizer. Somebody’s, yeah, they’re definitely doing a course at this point, and now they got gonna get organized. So we created a workbook worksheet for people to fill out, to organize all the chaos in their mind and, organize their course on a simple one page document. And then we have the WordPress LMS Buyers Guide. So this is where people are, what we would call solution aware, product aware stage of the buyer’s journey. They’re trying to decide between options. Okay, I’m gonna build a course, I’m gonna price it this way. I’ve learned everything from Chris and Jason in the masterclass. I’m really ready to move forward with the software. There’s a handful of options. Which one should I choose? That’s where the WordPress LMS Buyers Guide comes in, which is a shorter, like eight page ebook that helps people figure out how to choose the best learning management system software for them. And then the next lead magnet is actually free software. So you sign up and you get the free core lifter, LMS plugin, which is super powerful. Industry leading more powerful than most paid LMS solutions and WordPress and beyond. So that software, somebody enters their email address and then they get redirected on how to access the free software. So now we’re using software as a lead magnet. Then we have a course. Okay, now that you’ve got the software, there’s another lead magnet, which is, hey, here’s the lifter LMS Quickstart course. It’s free to sign up for, and it’s gonna show you the 5% essential parts of the software to, so that you can be successful with the free software. You just download it basically. So that is another lead magnet. Then the next lead magnet is the what we call the WordPress LMS Growth Engine. And what this these are is, these are actual kind of sales presentations, but they’re not just selling. It’s more like a a presentation depending upon your e-learning use case on, what lifter LMS can do for you. Why it’s awesome and essentially go from that free stage to a paid customer. So that’s like another lead magnet or conversion tool. And then the final lead magnet we have here as our prospect is becoming a free user. Getting interested, looking at the sales presentation is a down sell, lead magnet or objection handling lead magnet, which is an opportunity to. A demo site for just a dollar. So when someone buys that, they are added to our email list. So if you look at those lead magnets, there’s many of them, but they’re in boxes alongside our blog and podcast content and embedded within the blog and podcast content in some cases. Those are made for people at different stages of the journey. So not everybody is always at the same place where they just want their ebook or they want your free thing, or they wanna learn how to use your thing, or they need to talk to sales or have a demo. All these stages of the journey are important and you can collect emails at every step at the stage and people will self-select. Where they’re at. Not everybody gets all your lead magnets or comes in at the beginning and comes and takes everything you have. So having that portfolio or quiver of lead magnets is really important. So how else do we get email addresses? We get a ton from what I just showed you the quickstart course. The Lifter, LMS Free Quickstart course is one of our top performing lead magnets. We get I think we’ve gotten about 40,000 people through that one, and that one’s really interesting because it’s both doing marketing and sales and customer success all on autopilot all the time, all day long. So in my opinion, everybody should have a free course lead magnet, which shows the five perc, the most essential 5% of. How to use your thing or get the value out of your course or program because it’s gonna. It’s gonna help prospects get even more interested. It’s gonna be people close to buying from you have the confidence to buy. And It’s gonna make new customers be more successful in getting started without necessarily ha necessarily having to contact you for support. So there’s so much value that goes into that. Also within lifter LMS for your paid courses or memberships. Like in the lifter LMS Academy as an example, we have about 15 courses. Some paid, some free. Whenever somebody enrolls in any of those, all of those email addresses flow into our active campaign email platform. People get tagged and segmented into the different, they bought this course so they’re gonna get this email. The same is true in our WooCommerce store where we sell our products, depending upon which bundle you buy or individual add-ons, the prospect ends up in our active campaign, or not prospect, actually, customer, and they get tagged okay, this person bought the infinity bundle. Then there’s an automation inside our email platform that delivers the onboarding sequence of emails over time for that Infinity bundle customer. And and there’s so many different segments. I’ve been doing this so long, like our system is pretty complex now at this juncture. And you may be on, in this camp if you’re listening to this. Sometimes it’s easy to get in place where you send too many emails, but what’s more dangerous is not sending enough emails. So always try to segment your emails well, your email list, so that people get stuff that they’re most likely relevant to them. And remember, they can unsubscribe at any time. So it’s okay to put it out there. Maybe somebody has been through all your stuff. Maybe they were a customer, they’re happy, they’re good, they’re done, they unsubscribe. No harm, no foul. Maybe somebody comes into your email and realizes your solution is not a fit for them and they unsubscribe, that’s fine. But the more you can segment and divide people up and only send relevant emails, the better. And also make sure that the emails you send are not just constant sales pitches like. Deliver value. Like this is podcast episode number 520 or whatever. So all of our podcast episodes, 99% of them we’re not trying to sell you anything, we’re just adding value. Like I’m adding value to you right now, giving you some pro tips on growing your email list. So deliver value as much as you can. Another pro tip is we have a. Like a tag in our CRM where if somebody’s Hey, I appreciate it, but I’d really, I don’t wanna unsubscribe, but I really don’t want this much email. We have a low volume email system to help get those people more so they don’t lose touch with what we’re up to, but they’re not getting as much of the other stuff. So you can always do that. You can get fancy and at the end of the day though. It’s probably more than likely that you’re not sending enough email, and if people are complaining that you’re sending too much email, you might be sending the wrong emails to the wrong people and you’re, or you’re not doing segmentation and so on. And look, this is hard. Nobody’s perfect. It takes a while to figure it out. And e never forget email is two way street. People can reply to your emails. I can go from one second. Someone’s like replies and they’re like, oh, this is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you so much for this email, and open the next one. And somebody’s oh my gosh, you send too many emails. And you know what I’ll do is I’ll let ’em know they can unsubscribe if they’d like. And also, offer to put them on the low volume email list if they would prefer that, things like that. So you gotta get thick skin, ’cause people will say all kinds of different things when you interact across like a large email list. We talked about using lead magnets. We talked about using courses or memberships and lifter, LMS feeding our emails. We talked about WooCommerce products. Feeding your emails. We also do webinar registrations. So we do informational educational webinars that feeds our emails. And in terms of nurturing, I want to talk a little bit about that. So what do you do once you have an email? I create email automations called lead magnet delivery automations. So if somebody opts in for the LMS Buyer’s guide, they’re only gonna get one email and it’s Hey, thanks for signing up. Click the link below to download the LMS Buyer’s Guide. And that’s it. That automation is done. But then they get moved to the a prospect nurture sequence that goes on for a long time. And the pro tip here is when people are first show interest in you. They’re giving you permission to send a little more frequently. So whenever I’m adding somebody to a nurture sequence, I will give them more information faster in the beginning, but then the space between the emails gets longer and longer till they’re about like a month apart. So I’m not trying to do like daily emails or anything like that forever. But think about it like this, if you’re doing a customer nurture sequence, okay, they just bought your product. They’re really excited about your course or membership. You can hit ’em with even multiple emails in the first day. Awesome. Welcome. Here’s how to get started a little bit later in the day, even Hey you’re probably busy getting started, but here’s this awesome bonus for you to help you get even better results. Day two, Hey, we’re here to help support you. Just so you know, you can just reply to this email with any question and we’ll help you get going. Day three, here’s how to join our community of other people just like you using the same product or service. And then maybe I’d start spacing him out, then a week apart, two weeks apart, and so on. I learned this idea from Gary Vaynerchuk. He calls it jab, right Hook, which just means don’t always pitch something. So the jabs are value and the hook is a pitch or an offer, if you will. So always try to deliver way more value than trying to sell or upsell. Something. So think about that. And there’s all kinds of ways that you can just send in an email where you’re not trying to sell anything but just trying to help people and deliver value. So space those out. There’s also like popups on our website. So you can use a tool like Popup Maker, which is has Lifter LMS integration. And as of the time you’re watching this, they’ve either just released or about to release major Lifter LMS integrations. So popup maker is awesome because you can put an opt-in form inside of the popup, but what triggers the popup? Maybe they click a button on your site. Maybe they’re about to leave. Maybe they’re about to abandon checkout. Maybe they just landed on a confirmation page and you wanna do an upsell. There’s so many different ways you can use popups and collect email addresses in that way. And just a pro tip of around how this technology works is that, your email platform it’s gonna have contacts or users in it, subscribers, whatever your platform calls them. But it’s also gonna have forms, like a form for you to put on your website to generate a subscriber for them to enter their name and email and so on. So you can embed those forms in your popups, on your webpage and so on. But you can also use tools like form plugins, like Gravity Forms, ninja Forms, WP Forms, WS form. Kind of use the form that you’re used to building regular contact forms and things on your website, but to actually build a opt-in form that then passes the subscriber to your email marketing and CRM platform. And that’s so forms are super powerful and you can use ’em everywhere. And the more you think about forms. You’ll realize how much of the internet is powered by form. So like a course enrollment form in lifter LMS is a form. And then you know that data can be automatically passed to the email marketing and CRM tool. A checkout form is a form, and when someone becomes a customer, that data can be passed to the CRM platform. They can be moved from being a prospect to a customer. There’s not just contact forms and comment forms. When you when students submit a quiz or an assignment. And those are forms. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Forms are really everywhere. But what I recommend when it comes to building your email list, it’s just figure out that technical piece of. Making an offer, sticking a form on it. Then getting that data into your email marketing. CRM, whether that’s on your same WordPress website or on an external platform like active campaign. So building an email list is a long term game. Consistency is key. Keep doing the work, keep showing up and keep adding value and always remember. That building an email list is, these aren’t just email addresses. These are real people. These are real human beings with hopes and dreams and pain points and trauma. So treat it with respect, like respect your community, your email subscribers, and when you have an engaged email list, like if you ask people to reply at the end of a newsletter or after receiving a lead magnet. And they do. And then you reply and have a one-on-one conversation with ’em. That’s fantastic. And that kind of engagement is important to be, keep the humanity and all of this automation and emails and all this tech. If you create an engaged email list, you can build a thriving LMS business. Staying in touch with people and caring about them is really what it’s all about. When you believe in your product, whether that’s a course, a membership site, or your an agency and your selling services to clients, keep in touch with your people. Just the very act of. Sending an email, whether it’s one-on-one or through a newsletter or other automation or nurture sequence you’re opening a door of opportunity for human connection and to build real relationships. So that’s it for this conversation around email marketing, email automation, and how to build an email list. If you have any questions about email, drop a. Comment wherever you’re seeing this and feel free to ask. I’d be happy to help you with that. But that’s it for this LMSCast episode. I’m Chris from Lifter lms. Go to podcast dot lifter lms.com and subscribe to the podcast by email, so you never miss another episode. And I hope you have a great rest of your day. Take care. 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@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How to Build A 100,000 Subscriber Email List appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now Ziv Raviv explained how he started his business ten years ago with a podcast, which paved the way for him to pursue coaching and online courses. After learning about LifterLMS, he expanded into creating over 300 courses in a variety of micro-niches, such as balloon art, the floral industry, children’s entertainers, relationships (Generous Marriage), and copywriting (Daily Cookie). Ziv’s first course was just a Google Doc with unlisted YouTube videos. He clarified that by narrowing his focus so much, he was able to establish credibility and trust in close-knit groups, which produced unexpected outcomes, such as generating over $1 million from the balloon art specialty alone, which has just 3,000 members globally. Additionally, he described how his earnings increased from $20k in his first year to $88k in his second, then to $277k, $377k, $430k (when he plateaued for a few years), $475k, and now to at least $540k in 2025. He eventually came to the realization that, although “niching sideways” into several businesses was effective, his greatest innovations came from discovering his area of expertise, which was instructing others. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 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 Badget. 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 friend and one of my favorite people in the lifter LMS community. His name is Ziv Ravi. You can find him@zivravi.com and also K media.co. And we’re gonna get into some really cool stuff you haven’t heard before today, a concept called Super Coaching. Ziv and I were just chatting about it and I’m blown away and fascinated. Ziv is also a master of micro nicheing, and good niching is a big challenge with so many education entrepreneurs, or just entrepreneurs in general. And Ziv is a master at it, but we’re gonna get into all that. But first, welcome back on the show, Ziv. Ziv Raviv: Hello, Chris. It’s such a, an amazing pleasure to connect here and to share this journey of of online business and educational businesses and being a, like an entrepreneur in this space. With you again, like this is the third time I’m here. I’m excited to share some new concept with the listeners. I hope this will bring a lot of value to everyone.  Chris Badgett: Before we get going, Ziv also has a podcast called Beyond Six Figures. So check that out. Add that to your next, listen after this one, let’s let’s just start high level Ziv. If somebody doesn’t know you you’ve done a lot of things and you’re, you’ve, you’re really focused on super coaching now and having a unified vision. But what niches have you been in? What kinds of entrepreneurial activities have you done over, say, the past 10 years?  Ziv Raviv: It’s actually 10 years since I launched my first podcast, and that podcast turned me into a cost creator and into into a coach. I remember my first course that I launched was actually with a Google Doc and a few unlisted videos on YouTube. Later on I found Lifter, LMS and started to create multiple online courses. So I, I remember the second year of operation. As a podcaster, we were launching eight different courses in a very small micro niche of balloon art. There’s are people that are serving as balloon artists, as balloon decorators, as balloon entertainers, and they needed some education about the craft and about their business. And so I launched eight courses on the second year. Since then, we’ve launched through Lyft, LMS. Way over 300 courses in many niches, including in the floral industry, in the kids entertainer industry. We had a bit of work in the relationship niche with a platform called Generous Marriage. We had a round of activities in the niche of copywriting with daily cookie.co. And all of that, like going each time to a different micro niche and serving clients there, serving the niche with with free online courses and paid online courses and later on with coaching. All of that was something I did year after year to get to a point where I start to realize I need to start focusing, I need to start removing some of the activities and understand what is my system, what is my. Where is my zone of genius? Where can I actually bring the biggest transformations? And that’s when I realized just a little bit after chat, GPT was starting, like Che GPT-3 0.5 started to be a thing. Copywriting as a service became something that is not as needed as before because it was just too easy. And I realized in parallel that I wanna focus and that’s where super coaching was born.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s quite the journey. And if you feel like it, maybe just share some revenue numbers of how you’ve grown over the years and also, yeah. Really what people wonder sometimes is, there, especially like if you go back to your early self with the Google Doc and the unlisted videos, you don’t really know you’re gonna make it and you have a lot of self-doubt. And what happened or why do you think it worked out for you?  Ziv Raviv: So first of all I wanna say that. I wanna start with the numbers ’cause it’ll put everything in perspective. So the first year online as a content creator, we did 20, we did 20 k, that’s what we did, 20 2K. The second year we did something like 88 k. Over the years we started to grow dramatically. I was interviewed on your show. The listeners can actually go and listen to it. When I was doing 277 K and then a year later or so, despite the Corona and everything, we were doing 377 K, which was already is a case study where people can listen to the different things we were doing. We then go to 430 k. We got stuck at that for a couple of years and then we grew to 470 5K and this year we’re targeting and nothing can stop us now. Like we will probably do more than that, but at the very least we’re going to do 540 k. In 2025. So we grew over the years dramatically. We had to grow the team as well. We had to change the way we do business. We had to let go of certain ideas like certain focus points that no longer served us to grow and to be impactful. So yeah that, that is like the context of the numbers. And, the idea that always led me in doing business, in attracting clients was the idea of microing. And it’s the idea that people are so busy these days. They see so much content they don’t care about. Other things that are happening. They don’t wanna buy stuff that are not, that are, that is presented by strangers to them and so on and so forth. So it’s almost like the tribes, the different tribes of people are locked inside bubbles. And the bubble is so thick that in order to pierce through the bubble, you need some, someone from within the bubble to introduce you to the tribe. In order to do that, you need to micro niche so that people will listen to you so that collaborations will make sense and people will agree to collaborate with you so that they will agree to be interviewed by you and so on. So on our first micro niche, we just recently reached a total income of $1 million. All from people that are making a living, from taking balloons and putting some air into them and tying them and making, events look good. And we’ve managed to, and it’s such a small micro niche. These are like 3000 people throughout the world. Those 3000 people have like I’m very humbled to say that they have paid us a million dollars, a little bit more than a million dollars over the years. For their education and for their services and for their coaching and so on. And and we are continuing to grow. But in, at the beginning it was micro nicheing sideways, so from one micro niche sideways to another micro niches that is similar. And these days we’re starting to niche up.  Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s awesome. And congrats on the success with the balloon artists. And if, correct me if I’m wrong. But it’s, I know you yourself are a balloon artist, and you also have a niche in florist. Do you, have you been a florist?  Ziv Raviv: Actually I did not I was never a florist. The first few niches that I chose, micro niches that. I chose to do to produce a podcast. Salon online courses. In that micro niche. Those were things related to my passions. Over the years, I started to do this more professionally. I would choose a micro niche. I did this in nine different micro niches, right? So I would choose a micro niche that I think I, I could provide some service to that. I think I have some passion in that condition. Sometimes I found out that I don’t, and I failed and I stopped. Like I turned off the shelters some say on that podcast because I just couldn’t really connect with the people in a way that would yield results fast enough. But on others, I went in professionally, right? So with the floes industry I don’t have any experience with flowers. I actually I don’t know the names of the flowers. It’s really bad. I know marketing and I know business, so I You’re entrepreneurs,  Chris Badgett: right?  Ziv Raviv: Yes.  Chris Badgett: And you’re an entrepreneur and a lot of your current coaching clients are entrepreneurs. Is that right?  Ziv Raviv: Yes. And you know what one client led to another client as, as often that happens. And I started to serve florist people. I had clients that were florist. And they were such cool people. They were really good in business. They didn’t need to kind apologize. When people ask a balloon decorate or What do you do? And they say the in balloons they kind ask you, yeah, but what do you really do? But what? It’s like not a ho it’s a hobby. It’s a hustle. Even though there are people doing a million dollar a year from Baco, but. They always felt like they need to defend themselves. Florists don’t need to defend themselves. They know what they’re doing. They’re running successful businesses with TE teams and with clients and with locations and multiple locations. And so I decided to go into it professionally. And I partnered with another coach that, that I started to serve his business and his school and I even turned his entire school into a lifter LMS school as a part of our work together. And so over the years I had. Niches where I went in and I succeeded to bring myself to a point where I have coaching clients in them and on some I stride. I saw that I didn’t like what I’m seeing and I stepped back.  Chris Badgett: I love seeing your growth and just journey over the years and where you are now, like when somebody kind of compounds and keeps improving and being curious and. Creating value in the world. That’s awesome to see. And now you’re at super coaching as a concept. Can you explain how you came to that and what it is and how you do it?  Ziv Raviv: Super coaching is the concept of coaching plus benefits, which means that you add some value to the client in some way, shape or form. And over the years I have. Added a lot of value to my clients beyond education. I always included a lot of free education for my clients, but I’m talking about something even more than education, which is in the trenches working with the client in order to help them with other problems they have. So one of the first problems I solved for my coaching clients was. Was through a company called Design Picker. They, or even these days, they offer unlimited designs for a flat feed. They’re amazing. I was coached personally by Rasper for a while, and I adore what they do. I, and I used their service to serve my clients, so my clients would get free designs. For quite a while over the years, I started to hire my own graphic designers, and then I needed a lot of website fixes. So I would hire a website developer on WordPress to fix a lot of things. And then they started to fix things for my clients. And then they started to build, websites for my clients from scratch. And then we created a copywriting company and a team. Once I decided I wanna go all in with super coaching the copywriting team became another resource of my coaching clients. So at some point, actually, we actually accidentally turned into a marketing agency where the clients come to me about eight 70% of them, they come to me when they look for a coach and they found out, they find out that they have. Way more than like that. I give, I, I give them way more than just the coaching. So we do all of their designs. We control the websites, we build them, we create sales campaigns, advertising campaigns, everything. And some of them come to me because they heard about the transformations. They don’t care if I will call myself a coach, or I will call myself A-A-C-M-O-A fractional CMO, or if I, they don’t even care if I have a title. All they care about. Is they know someone that I helped them grow by 20 to 50% in a year. And for seven figure business, that’s a lot of money to grow by 20 to 50%. So they heard about that, they came to me and then they received like this concept. So super coaching is. It’s a different type of a relationship, and it’s a very deep relationship. It’s a very close relationship. Some of my clients, I meet them I kid you note, I meet them four to five times a week, so we have a one-on-one session, and then I make myself available for four times a week, sometimes five times a week on a group session level. So pretty much every day almost they have an opportunity to show up and ask a question. And remind me about something they needed and ask me about some design they were waiting for, or some bug they need fixing or some campaign they need me to look at. And the result of it is that I am a little bit of a business coach and a little bit of an implementation coach, and a little bit of a marketing coach, and a little bit of. Of of like a relationship coach and the holistic approach, coach, but I will be whatever the client needs in order to get them to where they wanna go.  Chris Badgett: Wow. That is so cool. What from on the coaching aspect what are some of the common challenges you help people work through to unlock growth? And I, you mentioned a lot of things. It could be a relationship, it could be a marketing challenge, it could be a technical challenge. Do you see any patterns or themes that are common across your clients?  Ziv Raviv: We, the more we work with like over time with our clients, the more we see them get to the point where they have new problems to solve. So I’m actually really interested in this idea where businesses actually have different stages in their in their growth. And a lot of time they struggle with they struggle with identifying what to focus on, right? So they think that they have many problems and many times the first problem that they think they have is we don’t have enough leads, or we don’t have enough sales. That’s what almost all clients think. That is the main problem, but they actually, that the lead problem is not a problem that you need to solve. Like it’s actually a temporary problem. Believe it or not. Your lead problem is a temporary problem. Your growth as a business, that’s an infinite problem. You will always want to worry about that. The difference between infinite problems and finite problems, is it infinite problems. You need to think about them. In an annual level, in a quarter level, you level, you need people responsible for that problem, right? And you need to monitor that problem forever. But if like you have a Jessica and Jessica decided to resign and she’s a part of your team, that’s not an hiring problem. That’s Jessica problem. It’s a very temporary problem that you just need to fix. You just need to replace Jessica. So when you know that the problem is actually temporary, you just need to put in the efforts, you need to trust the process and put in the efforts and fix it. So a lot of people, they will think they have a lead problem or a sales problem, but actually they just need to understand that it’s a fixable problem. And if they put in the efforts, they will be able to solve that problem.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I wanna ask like, how you developed as with your coaching skills, and part of me knows that you’re just a natural, like you’ve been making people smile, laugh, reading the room, big picture, creative problem solving guy your whole life. But how do you beco, how does one or anyone become a better coach?  Ziv Raviv: I think you. You there, there’s a lot of way to improve in coaching and in business and in, and it’s not. First you need to understand that it’s not an easy process. It’s, there’s a lot of skills involved and you need to work on them with the passion. Of a violinist or pianist that, that really practice for hours. So one of the things that truly makes me better as a coach is just the fact that I work a lot. Yeah. I just, I’m putting in the reps, I’ve been doing I’ve been fully booked for many years. I talk about that in my book. I, I’ve been doing this week. I’ve been doing 12 meetings with cl coaching clients, 12 meetings a day every day. It’s just something that I put in that’s a lot of hours of work and I didn’t always do that. I took a couple of years where I only worked for three days a week and I walked, I battled through burnout and I. I’m glad to say I’m now on the other side and I have my energy now back to do like more meetings like that, but but one of the best ways to. Grow as a coach and become better a coach is just to put in the reps. There are many books to list to read about coaching that are amazing. There are many books about business and entrepreneurship that are amazing. There are many podcasts like lifter LMSs, LMS Cast podcasts which is really a great way to, to be open for ideas that way. And to learn about different educational and entrepreneurs. So I think that I’ve done my share of listening to clients of helping them. I’ve done my share of being in business myself and building businesses myself and launching things. I’ve done a lot of webinars and a lot of online courses and a lot of group programs. I launched four different mobile apps so when you put in a lot of work in wraps, you can get better quite fast. Chris Badgett: You mentioned learning from books. You have a book, the Fully Booked Coach. Can you tell us what that’s about and what inspired you? To write it. This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells in guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version. So you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. Ziv Raviv: this is a work of love that took a good two years to fully work on and polish and edit and proof and launch. This year we’ve launched the book and it actually, shares my systems completely, openly how I coach, how I, what type of tools I actually use on, on, on a day-to-day basis. And what’s my philosophy in business in getting coaching clients that will stick around. So it’s all about microing, where you actually get people to listen to you, to hear you, to respect you, to trust you, to work with you. And it’s and in order to do that. You choose a micro niche and you go in and you listen to what they need, and you create some online courses for them for free, and you create some online courses for them for that they can buy. And you do webinars like you do the whole thing and you can do it differently from one micro niche to another. Based on where they congregate and this whole system is detailed in the book. And after doing that so many times it was, it just was clear to me that this is like a system. At some point I got into a new micro niche and I detailed everything. Like I, I did it with transparency with meetings online and whatnot, and within 90 days. I was able to secure a coaching client in a totally new micro niche, right? So it’s actually if you know how to micro niche and you put in the work, you can find clients relatively fast as long as you’re bringing value and into that micro niche. The second concept that I talk about in the book is about super coaching, which is how to. Basically, in order to be fully booked, you just need one thing. You don’t need to be a super coach. You don’t need to provide more than just coaching. They’re purists coaching coaches, and they’re amazing. They’re really good. They provide a lot of value. They solve problems on the call. They listen. I accountability. It’s great to be a purist coach. I’m more in the trenches. Guy, type of a guy I want to be a more meaningful part of a relationship with my client. And I chose super coaching, but either way, the most important part is that they stay around long enough. Yeah. As soon as people stick around long enough with you, you will become fully booked at some point. So the concept of how do you provide coaching services that are so fun? And meaningful and so impactful and so transformational. I wanted to document all of the ways to do that in the book based on my experience. And so the book gives you both of these tools, the microing and the super coaching in order to get you to the point where you’re fully booked. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. Go check out the fully Booked Coached book. I’m sure that’s on Amazon.  Ziv Raviv: It  Chris Badgett: is, yeah. Let’s double click again on Micro Nicheing. What do you say to somebody, particularly creative entrepreneur people? They tend to have a lot of different interests and maybe what they get paid for in their day job. There’s some niche they’re in, there’s some hobby niche they love. There’s like maybe a fitness journey they’re on and a certain type of fitness or like they’re into some kind of. Diet nutrition thing or something. How does one choose a micro niche when they’re a polymath or have a lot of different interests and subject matter expertise? Ziv Raviv: A lot of times saying no to some of those ideas is way more important than than which one you chose because you actually. It’s better for you if you start with one and and put in certain amount of work to assess if this is the right one for you. So I have these three tests that I ask myself in advance before I go into a micro niche. I ask myself, how easy will it be to find people for for interviews on a podcast or for collaboration on YouTube or for collaboration of, on an ebook or on a blog? So my, so the first question I ask myself is, how easy will it be to find someone the second and get them to collaborate? The second question is, will they brag about it? So I call this brag ability. And the third question is will they collaborate on helping me sell something? Or will they buy something for me? And they call this the sellability test. So Findability, breakability, and sellability, these three tests initially helped me realize if it’s a good micro niche or not. I can give you an example of where I failed. So I chose to create a podcast called. Plumbing and money Life. Plumbing and money life, yeah. It’s a show for plumbers to help them with their money. And I did some research about how to help them with their Google ads. I did some research about how to help them locally with Facebook ads. I was very proficient with both of these tools. I had a copyright opportunity.  Chris Badgett: I’m getting sold on it right now. There’s plumbers everywhere. They need help. There’s  Ziv Raviv: what they need help. What, so I went in all, all in, and I checked my numbers. There were enough. There were enough plumbers to, there were more plumbers in the world than balloon artists. So good for me. I’m getting into bigger niches now, and I contacted 1000 people and one person agreed to be on the show and it was interviewed on the show. I realized that through the responses as they said no to me, many times, many of them just ignored. But those that said no. Taught me that this is a very shy audience, of course I’m biased. I only talked with a thousand of them. I only was in touch with a thousand of them. I talked with a few of them. Obviously there’s a small number bias, but basically I realized it’s not a good match. When I was under Facebook groups trying to connect, trying to let to get into the head, trying to meet more people, I could not. Ignore the fact that my nose is imagining the smell of what they’re doing because they were sharing pictures or look it, I fixed this and I fixed that, and they were so happy. Yeah. And I started to realize I’m not a good fit for them. I’m not feeling comfortable in, in, in the in, in where they congregate, where they show me those pictures of tulips. So I decided to stop on that. I thought it was easy to find them. I realized they do not wanna be on a show and be featured, right? And I stepped away and on other niches I was able to, get different results and grow. So those three tests are a good starting point. I’ll give you one more. Quick tip for anyone listening, go into sales Navigator on LinkedIn. It’s worth 80 bucks of your money just one month. Do some research with the proper tool and or use the, other tools for research. It doesn’t matter, HPT, whatever, but find a micro niche where you can actually find people and be able to contact them through email or message. And you want a micro niche that has about three to 20,000 people. If there’s more than 20,000 people, it’ll be harder to get them to to actually, respond to you because they’re too busy. Potentially, if there are less than 3000 people, it might be too small to actually make you a living and find enough people. But think about this way. You only need 50 of them to agree to collaborate in a year. 50 people. That’s all want that. 50 people are standing. Be that, that you collaborate with, that you wanna help them and provide them value for free with the podcast interview. That’s all that is standing between you and starting a business that is a serious coaching or educational business. So you want to find a niche that people re, that you will be able to find those 50 people relatively efficiently.  Chris Badgett: What do you, what’s your perspective on like the education entrepreneur niche? I find it somewhat challenging. This is my niche in the sense that we make software in this niche, but yeah. There’s a lot of different types of creators out there. There’s a lot of different types of online education. They’re spread out all over the world. They can’t they’re if you go to LinkedIn, there’s no education entrepreneur like group or as like a job byline. So like within the education entrepreneurs, the creators, like what do you see as a really cool micro niche? Ziv Raviv: That’s a great question. I want, I wanna flip this question just to Yeah. To understand. It’s even better. Would you like to play a game where. We look into lifter LMS as a company that, that micro niches and consider micro niches for you, or would you like me to, would you like to play a game where I, as a coach, I’m thinking about how to find, educational cost creators. Are specific enough that I can maybe go into a micro, like who do you want? Chris Badgett: I, I think the first one. So if you look at lifter LMS, like as an example people like, yeah, let’s talk people like you who are subject matter experts, creators, content creators, coaches niche audience, is an awesome group of people. In many ways, lifter was built like this has always been our core customer, but a lot of other people show up with like different types of e-learning situations and whatnot. And that’s fine. But I’ve always struggled with niching for E-learning or LMS or course creators and coaches and stuff. ’cause I think course creators and coaches is too big. I think I’m outside that 20,000. Guard.  Ziv Raviv: You are. You are, yeah. A lot of time. It’s okay to micro niche by solving one problem. Yeah. Even on a bigger group, right? So when I say three to 20,000, that’s for someone that. Doesn’t know yet, what are they going to solve necessarily. They’re willing to listen and adapt and that’s lift LMS has a proven solution and it’s solves one specific problem. Unfortunately there’s also competition, right? And I think that ai, the AI era. Is forcing you to create a new strategy for Lifter lms? That’s what I think. So it’s almost I don’t remember, was it some Altman said that at some point AI will get to such a level of efficiency of it. It’ll be embedded with so many things in our lives. And that it will be transparent. You will not feel the technology right. You will just experience that everything is easier for you. And to some degree, I think that’s what Lifter LMS has done for me now in my business. We don’t treat lifter. LMS is something that we need to think about. It’s invisible. It’s a tool that we use when we need to train new people, when we need to train. My, our clients teams, when our clients are in the educational world and they need to sell online courses and to sell memberships, right? So it’s a tool that we just assume it’s there for us and we go in and we use it. And it’s like driving a car. You don’t think about the engine, you don’t think about the wheels. You just go in and you drive it, right? So I think that, your approach to selling lifter LMS has to change as well to be to help people see that it’s actually getting more and more transparent. And you see a lot of companies are doing this thing where, for example, Zael you go into Zael, there’s a bot. You tell it what you want to automate, it shows you, oh, so you mean this, and this is the steps of the automation. You go into active campaign. You write an email. You immediately have a chat bot that says, would you like to expand this, like campaign to additional things. You can chat with it and it’ll literally create. Some follow up based on automation and triggers and tags for you. And there’s other platforms that give you like more and more of these feelings where the technology is managing itself to some degree. So obviously I would love it if lift LMSs wins the race and releases a lot of really cool. Features like that and I think that’s very important for people. Back to the question about niching. I think I think that there’s a lot of opportunities, a lot of examples I would consider for for you Chris and for Lyft. The first one is actually business coaches. Yeah. So business coaches often. Need lifting LMS as one of the tools in their tool belt. Some people need a wrench. We need a an LMS. We need it for our clients. We need it for our teams. We need it for our niches, right? For our micro niches. That I’ll give you an example from the Beyond six Figure Podcast. This podcast. It is a podcast for business coaches, right? We contact business coaches, we contact book authors that write books about business and about coaching. We contact podcasters like Johnny Duma and Jo Jordan Harbinger. Were on the show. We contact Walker, right? Like the people that are in the trenches. We were able to get. 45 people and by the end of next week it’ll be 52 people. It’s like very fast. 52 interviews all scheduled. For the most part, they’re already recorded in 12 weeks. Wow. So people are saying, yes, I want to be on your show very fast. And so we’re building relationships with new people. Business coaches, for the most part, they have. Problems that they need to solve. They wanna be featured. And if you look at the numbers, like how many of them say Yes, I wanna be on the show in comparison to those palumbo be before such a completely different experience. Like back then I worked for three months, I got one, an interview, and now with this one in three months, I got a year of content that will be scheduled. For me, and it’s like in the pipelines, and I don’t have to worry about it. And now I’m starting to think about how to collaborate with these people and how to help them. And help them and and ask for the help as well. So I think that if you with Lyft, MS would do something like a secondary podcast maybe, or just leveraging your existing platforms. That could be an example where people are responding very fast. I can imagine a situation where at the end of an interview you tell people. Hey, you are qualified for this package. If you ever choose to try us out, or we have a service where we will migrate your course from this platform to this platform. Some white label thing or whatever. Here’s 90% discount on the white label thing. We’ll move you into Lyft, LMS, literally for free or so on. So that’s just one example of of Microing that will be relatively easy based on my experience. Another way to look at it is to. Go into places where you didn’t go before. So I think that you do need to be on LinkedIn. You need to be loud on LinkedIn. I think you need to even consider the younger generations gen Zs 20 to 27, a type of entrepreneurs. Educate them when they’re young, on TikTok and on vertical videos. So I would definitely put in some work on that type of a front. What do you think how much of this is like stuff that you considered or,  Chris Badgett: I love it. I’ve always loved business coaching. It’s one of the ones that I think resonates the most with me simply because. I’m a business guy, I’m an entrepreneur, so I’m and I’ve been in it a long time and I’ve had business coaches and had amazing experiences and stuff. When you think about the three mega niches like health, wealth, and relationships, so there’s business coaches, there’s life coaches, there’s health coaches, those are all more micro niche and, yeah you’ve triggered like a pa you’ve reminded me the passion I’ve always had for business coaching and I call it, our market, the education entrepreneurs, but the word entrepreneurs in there, which is like business, and a health coach can be an education entrepreneur of their own, but they’re not necessarily helping other entrepreneurs. And I have always probably very similar to you, which is why we resonate, is I like hanging out with other entrepreneurs. We think differently. We’re a small percentage of the population, we’re in that we’re in our bubbles, different entrepreneur bubbles and yeah, it’s, yeah. I appreciate what you’re saying and I see how you’re a great coach. ’cause you’re like lasering in and just on a podcast episode, it’s awesome. Part ano, another question I would ask you where I think people get mixed up, and these are just a bunch of business terms, but there’s like niche. There’s your customer avatar, your ideal customer profile, your target market segments and all this stuff. I think people get a little overwhelmed with all the slicing and dicing. I think you’ve done a good job with saying Hey, just focus on the micro niche, right? And Sure. Within that you probably have the ideal floris shop owner. That’s like a perfect fit. And that’s like your avatar. And like for a lifter, one of the things that’s always a challenge not with you because you’re both, you’re also, you’re an educator, but you’re also an awesome WordPress website builder. But we have a split audience of agencies, I build sites for clients, or I’m building this site for me and my niche and my passion and stuff like that. And some people are both like you. But I don’t know if you have any comments on that. Just like the, I see a lot of people get trapped in who is my customer avatar or what’s my niche? Or those just. The, either create a ational person or somebody you’ve actually worked with or earlier version of yourself. There’s just so much here that I think it gets overwhelming sometimes.  Ziv Raviv: I think that Microing actually helps you make your avatar a, a group of real people. And I think it’s way more efficient. You’re  Chris Badgett: guessing, you’re not guessing. It’s like this is, yeah. Yeah.  Ziv Raviv: It’s a person you met. It’s a person you talked to. Yeah. So instead of having this really fun and clever exercise where you answer questions based on a fix person. You have that perfect person guide you through every decision you make. That’s something I never really resonated with on a personal level. I wanted real people to talk to me. And these days with ai, you get AI to answer the questions for you and then you are trying to convince like to you serve a client and your avatar, which is completely fictious. That was designed by a machine for you based on the stuff that it’s read. There’s zero soul in it. PE people buy things from people. Yeah. From humans. And they buy it based on their own problems, based on things they want. And if you are fixing theoretical problems, you are, it’s going to be very hard to get people to notice you. It’s not going to come up. Authentic. It’s going to be really frustrating. So I think that, I think it’s really important to, to talk with people. And when you micro niche and you start to collaborate with thought leaders in that micro niche you realize what are the problems. And you have to be curious to ask the questions and to find what they want to you to solve. And that over time helps you. Realize what they need and if you really want in desire to serve, if you are in servitude of a group of people, of a tribe, of a micro niche, then you would try to solve all of their problems. Really? Yeah. As I’ll tell you what they  Chris Badgett: are, right? Like you don’t have to guess. Ziv Raviv: Yeah. And then you will try to solve their small problems and you will try to solve their bigger problems and you’ll try to solve the biggest problems. At some point you’ll notice which of those problems actually. Is the most impactful, transformational problem that you are really good at solving, and that’s what you take into the Google ads or the Facebook ads on or to the scaling, bit of, let’s do this on other micro issues and so on. I think if you ask yourself I will ask you instead of saying, who do you think is more influential in their ecosystem, the WordPress developer. That if they know lift LMS, so well then they could refer their clients to lift LMS or the business coaches that that guide clients through decisions including potentially the decision to. Launch online courses or membership sites. So what do you think which one, the developer or the coach, which one do you think is like their world is respected a little bit higher than the other one?  Chris Badgett: That’s a tough question for me. And the reason why it is because it just happened organically where I was like. Just another freelancer building websites for clients. But now, like the whole, like WordPress community and a lot of agencies and stuff, I’m like a, I’m known and like wherever I go, like on social media WordPress is with me, and and it’s like effortless. But for business coaches, I also have a lot of VA value to add and. Just for whatever reason, I would say the website building folks, the technologists, whether they’re a developer or a person like me who just puts plugins and themes together to solve business problems, those type of people have always just resonated easily. But I see the opportunity with, the coaching industry and. All of that as well. So it’s not the right answer, but I feel like both are good. I’m just saying for whatever reason the website builders, I call them WordPress professionals, that tribe I just naturally fit, or I grew up inside the bubble, so I’m like already there, in the micro niche. Yeah, because I’ve been doing this since 2008 with WordPress. But I’ve also been an entrepreneur that whole time and interacting with other entrepreneurs and business coaches and getting help and going to masterminds and taking courses and all that stuff too.  Ziv Raviv: I think in both cases you have a lot of value that you bring to the table. Like with the WordPress WordPress professionals. You speak the language, obviously you. It’s the easier solution in a way. But the business coaches, which is why it’s  Chris Badgett: Like you starting with the balloon artist. ’cause you Yeah, you did a lot of that and you were already in the bubble, right? Yeah. Hey guys. Yeah.  Ziv Raviv: So that’s like the easy solution the low hanging foot in a way, which I think you already. Maybe even exhausted to some degree. ’cause it’s already there. You actually can manage the maintain your reputation with a couple of events a year with so some not. It’s not a lot of efforts to just maintain it so your team can actually maintain that for you in a way. I think that business coaches, you have a lot of value to I’ve learned so much from just connecting with you. I did a strategy session with you a while back, and that strategy session made me a better coach. It just opened me to the way you look at things and it inspired me to dramatically, I actually talk about it in, in the book. Awesome. So it’s really something that you can bring value to other business coaches and I think. I think these days they are, they’re very influential on their clients. So I think that their ward is considered like they, they take their ward, they take the ward a lot they list. So both of them are mavens, right? Yeah. But I think that it’s time to maybe try a new group of mavens. To  Chris Badgett: leave the nest. Yeah, that’s yeah. That’s awesome, Ziv. That’s awesome. I wanted to interview you, but I also got a coaching session.  Ziv Raviv: This was fun.  Chris Badgett: That’s Ziv, Ravi. Go get his book the Fully Booked coach. You can find that on Amazon. So check that out beyond Six Figures podcast. About how many episodes are out as of now?  Ziv Raviv: Right now it is 15. Okay. And they’re going live every week. And and it’s been a tremendous opportunity to create this resource for the industry because if you are a business coach and you’re listening to this, you get. A lot of ideas about different business coaches in different niches and their different hurdles and their different ideas and modalities and the money that they make, the amount of clients like we’re such a group of privileged people. We business coaches is such an amazing business model to be a business coach because you only need about 10 people, or 15 people, or 20 clients, that’s it, 20 clients and you are really doing well. In your life in, like in, in creating results for people in reputation and so on. And if you get there to your fully booked and then you only need to replace maybe three clients a year. As a business owner, how many sales scores and sales you need to bring in every year, every month, every week. A business coach only needs to be active enough to replace three or five clients. If it’s, if they’re good, they’ll need to replace three or five clients a year, and that’s not so hard. So you can actually get to become fully booked. Relatively fast in a year or in 18 months or so. If you follow the process in the book, and I think if you are listening to this and you are a a business coach or an educational entrepreneur that also want to do business coaching, and reach out to me on zero.com or say hi on beyond six figures and we’ll be happy to to interview you. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s ziv reiv ziv reiv.com. Go get the book. Thanks for coming back on the show, Ziv. We’re gonna have to do this again. Let’s not wait three years. We’re gonna have to increase the cadence maybe once a year. I would love that.  Ziv Raviv: Would love that.  Chris Badgett: But thank you for coming. We really appreciate it. Ziv Raviv: 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@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Meet Serial Education Entrepreneur And Super Coach Ziv Raviv appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In his LMScast solo episode, Chris Badgett discusses the new safeguards in LifterLMS 9.0 and delves further into the significance of WordPress LMS website security. He describes how tools like Akismet spam detection, sophisticated CAPTCHA integrations with Cloudflare Turnstile and Google reCAPTCHA, and IP blocking for repeatedly unsuccessful checkouts help guard against bots and fraudulent activities. By implementing secured media, Chris also resolves a persistent WordPress problem with the Media Library, guaranteeing that only enrolled students can access course materials and downloads. He highlights effective practices, including employing technologies like Vimeo’s domain limitation for video security, depending on safe hosting with backups, evaluating admin accounts, and enforcing strong passwords. Chris emphasizes that LifterLMS has always placed a high priority on protecting course developers, their users, and their intellectual property going one step further with version 9.0 while understanding the necessity to strike a balance between security and user experience. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 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 Badget. 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. Today I’m joined by a special guest and it’s just me. I haven’t done a solo episode in a while. My name’s Chris Badgett. I’m the CEO and co-founder of Lifter LMS and host of the LMS CAST Podcast. Today we’re gonna do an episode about. WordPress websites and security, particularly in the learning management system niche. So recently Lifter LMS released a new version, a major version, which is called Lifter, LMS 9.0, and it has a lot of new security features in it. And I wanted to discuss security with you because it’s helpful to understand and get into the details. Security, what it is, how it works, what it’s preventing, and so on. So some of the great things about Lifter LMS 9.0 there’s so many things security related, but just to go through them the first is that we now have a setting you can turn on to block IP addresses that have 10 failed checkouts in 15 minutes. And basically what that does. Is that prevents bots on the internet or scammers from essentially trying to create free accounts or use stolen credit cards or fraudulent credit cards to test them on your website to see if they can find one that works. So the reality of the internet is there is a lot of. Scammers, bots that are trying to get access to your website. There’s probably actually a lot more of it going on all the time than you realize. But the truth is WordPress is actually a very secure platform. LifterLMS is known as the most secure learning management system because since day one. Which is over 12 years ago, we’ve always been focused on security. And protecting the users of lifter LMS, but also your users. Users. So we’ve implemented from day one the best security practices and we have continuously improved as time goes on, making things more secure, adapting to new issues of the time. So on. When someone tries to, check out too many times in a row, it’s not a real transaction and lifter LMS will stop that and block their IP address temporarily. So if somebody made a honest to goodness mistake and, entered 10 different credit cards of their own trying to make it work, they are gonna be able to get back in, but they’re gonna be locked out for a while. And most of the stuff that is gonna block is actual fraudulent activity. And if you don’t know what a IP address is, it’s just a location on the internet where somebody is trying to access your website from. So your router, your wifi, has a specific IP address or a location that you are connecting from. So if a spammer is at home. Trying to test credit cards on your website, they’re gonna get blocked. Anybody in that home is not going to be able to keep doing what they’re doing. And the reality is that most of that is actually bots or computer programs that are running and, trying to test hundreds or even thousands or tens of thousands of cards on a schedule. So it will shut those. Fraudsters, scammers, and scammers down in their tracks. The other thing we implemented in lifter LMS 9.0 is the most advanced capture protection currently available. So there’s two types of the main tools that you can integrate with for free to create a kind of a login or checkout. Or registration blocker if somebody is not a legitimate human or real user of your site. Those two integrations that we’ve added natively into the free version of LifterLMS one is called Recapture and the other is called Turnstile by CloudFlare. And basically what these technologies do, you basically sign up for free, you get an API key. You put it on your site and through the lifter LMS settings. And what they’re gonna do is they’re gonna use the advanced capture technology that those companies have to essentially score your user’s behavior on your website. And if anything looks out of line like it’s a bot that’s like clicking on a million things at once. Or, too many like rapid actions all at once. It’s not really a human activity and there’s a lot more that goes into scoring than just that. But just as an example it will stop those people from being able to register or log in or in some way get into your site when they’re not a legitimate user. And it’s likely, again, not a person, it is likely a computer program. That a spammer or a scammer is using to try to get into your website. So LifterLMS is implemented the most advanced capture technology currently available for free to Protect You, and we have resources on our website that show you how to set it up. It’s really just a couple things you have to copy and paste and turn on, and you’re good to go and you have dramatically improved the security and protection of your website. We also did a native deeper integration with Akismet, which is also an anti-spam solution that you can turn on to prevent spammers from registering and commenting and doing things on your website that you don’t want ’em. There to do. So Smit has been around WordPress for a really long time. I highly recommend it. It’s a great tool. You can get started for free with that as well. Again, the integration of that is built for free into the core free version of Lifter LMS. Now, let’s talk about a different aspect of security. Let’s talk about your intellectual property, your content, your media. So lifter, LMS as if you’ve been using our learning management system, you know you have to enroll in a course or a membership, and maybe you have to pay to enroll or maybe it’s free. But either way, you have to become a, a user of the site that is allowed or granted access to specific course content or other membership protected content on your website. That whole user system protects your intellectual property from just being public on the internet. And for a lot of people, they’re charging for access to their courses and memberships with Lyft or LMS, and it might not be lifetime access. Maybe you have to pay a monthly fee or you sign up for an annual membership. There’s a million different pricing models you can implement, but in terms of protecting your intellectual property. WordPress has had a challenge for a long time where the way that it handles media, like in the WordPress Media Library, which you’ve probably heard of those media files are actually public on the internet, and a lot of people don’t realize that. If you’re in a course, if you’re a course creator. And you’re adding a PDF or a PowerPoint presentation, or an audio file or a download of some kind to a lesson that’s actually publicly available in the media library, which ha, which means the way that it’s publicly available, unless you really get into the guts of WordPress. You may not have realized that, but the WordPress Media Library, every file in there, every image. Every PDF, everything has a URL associated with it that is public to the whole internet. So LifterLMS has solved this problem so that if you add media inside of a course. Or membership protected areas you can select which course or membership someone needs to be actively enrolled in. In order for that content to display on the screen. So basically we have solved the issue that WordPress has had for a very long time about the media library being public, and we don’t fault WordPress for that. It started as a blogging platform. So when people would add images to a blog post, there was no reason to protect that image file and it was just publicly available all over the internet. So if you’ve ever used Google search and done an image search, a lot of times you’re just surfacing media files from the WordPress media Library, which is not protected by default. But Lifter, LMS has solved that with protected media. We have other innovations as well. Where, when you’re creating a course, let’s say you’re creating a quiz and you’re putting images into the quiz questions, all that stuff is automatically protected outside of the WordPress media library. So the only the enrolled students in that specific course or membership can see that particular media. So we’ve given you both smart media protection that’s happening, where it should be at a global level. Also giving you the ability to restrict content anywhere on your website to specific courses and memberships. And by content media files. So that’s something you should know about how the WordPress Media Library works, and it’s always been important to us to help course creators, coaches, education entrepreneurs, school administrators. Protect their media assets. So we’ve locked that down to the maximum ability that you can, and there’s a lot more in lifter LMS 9.0, but I just wanted to highlight some of the top security innovations there. And also just do a solo episode around security. Why it matters, what it is, how it works, why is it important, so for example. Lifter, LMS has a password strength setting that you can choose to make super strong, make it medium strength, or make it weak. Now, the, one of the most important things about website security is having particularly a site that has a lot of users on it, not just you as a WordPress administrator. Or a couple people that work on the site. But if you have hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of users, every user account, ideally in a perfect world, would have a very strong random 16 character password that’s only ever used on that one website. It’s not also that person’s. Bank account login or email account login or social media account login. Strong passwords are really important, and if you want to enforce that on your site, lifter, LMS, because people are creating accounts as they enroll in courses and memberships. They are, they’re essentially creating a user, a WordPress user on your website with a login. So you can enforce that, Hey, you really need to have a strong password. Now, keep in mind that there’s also a concept of permissions. So in WordPress there’s a lot of different user roles, like the person who can do everything. The site owner is called the administrator, but there’s actually several other default roles like editors and authors and subscribers and so on. In default, WordPress Lifter, LMS has roles too, the LMS manager, the student the instructor and these different levels have different per permissions. So all I’m trying to say here is even though your student has the lowest levels of permissions, ’cause they’re just a user that can log in and consume their course or membership content. That doesn’t mean that if their pass, if their account got compromised, that somebody could come in and, start changing plugins or looking, doing, changing the website and stuff like that. The permissions are already way reduced to the necessary permissions for that user role. But even still a student is entitled to their, privacy and security. So even if you know your community of students or learners or clients are not security experts, you can still enforce a stronger level of security by using strong passwords. Now, if you’ve been on the internet for a while. Like myself, with over 15 years of being a power user, I probably have something like 3000 accounts in different apps and websites and logins and things, stores, whatever, on the internet. Because of that, I use a password manager. I particularly like one password. And what that allows me to do is I don’t have to remember all my. Super strong, at least 16 character random passwords. My password manager, which has its own levels of security on it allows me to quickly create new logins that are always unique, always strong, and I can always log in from all my devices, from my phone, my laptop, my desktop, and so on. This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells in guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. Chris Badgett: So if you’re old school, like we all were one day, you might’ve kept us. Spreadsheet, or even before that, you would write ’em down on a piece of paper, right? And then as you start getting more passwords, you start creating a spreadsheet, and then ultimately you graduate to using a password manager. And your whole world just gets so much easier, and you’re being a much more secure citizen of the internet by not reusing passwords, by always using strong passwords. So I highly recommend that you start using a password manager. Like One Password or LastPass, and there’s some other ones out there. The other thing when it comes to security is you should always look at your users on your website. And particularly there’s a filter for who are all the administrator users on my website. And when you look at that, you can see. Okay, there’s me, there’s a freelancer I work with, there’s my business partner and so on. But what happens over time with some people is, particularly if you are hiring out a lot of different people to work on your website, is you start handing out administrator passwords and they just exist on your site. And maybe it wasn’t even. The business owner of who you were working with, it was a team member who worked there, maybe they’re not working there anymore, and so on. So it’s always good to review the administrators on your website. And if there’s anybody on there that you know is probably a great person but doesn’t need to be on there anymore go ahead and delete them, delete that user off the site. Pro tip, when you delete a user, you can assign all their content to yourself or somebody else. You definitely want to do that. If that person was, creating content on your website and WordPress prompts you with how to do that. Another thing you can do is you can just reduce somebody’s role from being an administrator to being a subscriber. So if somebody comes back, a freelancer you worked with, and they’re like, Hey. Let’s do another project together, and it’s been a year since we’ve worked together. You still have them as that lowest permission level as a subscriber, and you can just move ’em back up to administrator. Obviously, the most secure thing you could do is just delete that user and when you work with somebody, again, create a new admin user or whatever role user you need for them to work on your website. Another part of security is having backups. So if something goes wrong, you need to be able to revert your site to basically restore your database and files. Now there are a lot of WordPress plugins that can help with things like backups, but the reality is, particularly in the WordPress learning management system, niches. This is like table stakes for good hosting. So you should always have a good web host that is doing daily backups, even monitoring your site for anything that looks off or things not loading or the site is down. And you should also always have a web host that if there is an issue, even if you’re not a developer, all you have to do is call or send an email. They can fix your site or restore it for you. So when you’re selecting web hosting, I highly recommend the middle to upper tier. Which does mean it’s more expensive. It’s gonna come with more of these security features built in. Blocking bad traffic for you so that you don’t have to do it as much on your own website. And also. They have a quote, disaster recovery plan if something were to go wrong and you needed to restore your site. Another thing that lifter LMS does is it has a setting called copy protection. So if you turn that on, what that does is that allows you to. For your users not to be able to copy and paste stuff off of your website. So if you have text content inside of a lesson or some members only content, they literally won’t be able to copy and paste. They get a little message if they try to do that. So that’s just another level of security. Now it’s important to note that. There’s only so much you can do. If somebody wants to pull out their phone and take a picture of what they see on your website while they’re a paying customer and logged in, there’s nothing you can do to stop that. So security is a game of just do as much as you can, but people are people and if you have downloadable PDFs and you’re. Training, somebody may share that with a friend, and there’s only so much you can do about that. And another pro tip for you, a lot of course creators and membership site owners are using a tool called Vimeo for their videos. I highly recommend Vimeo. It’s very popular among the course creator and membership site community. But there’s a feature that not everybody knows about. Vimeo Pro where you can set a website domain where the video is allowed to be playable. If you have a video, you put it inside your lesson and in Vimeo you say, Hey, this website is only, or this video is only playable on the website, my academy.com. If somebody were to somehow find the link. To that video, they’re not gonna be able to play it through vimeo’s protection of that intellectual property through the domain level protection. So that’s just another layer of security that you can add to your WordPress LMS website. It’s one of the things that makes Vimeo great, and that’s super easy to set up and even set up as a preset. So whenever you upload a video. To Vimeo, it will always have that protection on by default. So it can only be playable on your website. And if it’s only playable on your website and the video’s only published inside of an area like a lesson or a membership protected page, you’ll be protected in that way. So Lifter LMS has long been known as the most secure. Learning management system for WordPress 9.0, which just released, has taken that to a whole new level to protect you, to protect your users, to protect your intellectual property, content, and media. So definitely check out lifter LMS 9.0. If you have any questions about that or about security in general feel free to reach out to the lifter LMS team. I hope you enjoyed. This solo episode on security, I want to see you keep your WordPress LMS website secure follow best practices. It is okay to be human like. So let me give an example. If you enforce really strong passwords but your audience is particularly let’s say like older generation maybe not as good with passwords and they’re having trouble even just creating a strong password or knowing what that is. ’cause it needs special characters, numbers, capitalization, lowercase, and all this stuff. There are times when it’s okay to reduce your security stands to a medium strength password. Just to make sure your users can actually get into your site. But so it, you do wanna accommodate and not make things too hard. But I always like to err on the side of being as secure as possible to make sure everyone’s protected, you, your users, your website, your content, and so on. Thank you for checking out this episode of LMS Cast and engaging in this conversation around security. If you have any questions on any of that, just reach out to us and I hope you have a great rest of your day. Take care. 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@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post WordPress LMS Website Security With Chris Badgett appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now Victor Julio Coupe reveals in his LMScast interview with Chris Badgett that his strategy for sales, particularly in the SEO space, differs much from the conventional, hard-pitch method. According to him, the market is already weary of frequent outreach via email, LinkedIn, and other platforms, frequently from independent contractors or even artificial intelligence (AI)-generated profiles. He discovered that, regardless of language or location, cold pitching rarely succeeds as a result of this saturation. Rather, Victor focused on connection and honesty to build his career. Instead of using forceful sales tactics, he spends time listening, building relationships, and asking prospects straightforward but insightful questions like “How are you doing?” This makes individuals feel at ease enough to talk about the true state of their companies, which inevitably sparks discussions about possibilities and requirements. Additionally, he highlights that sales isn’t always about making a purchase; sometimes it’s about honoring current relationships, learning from others, and politely moving on when a fit isn’t found. Victor believes that his sincere, people-first approach sets him apart from the competition and fosters enduring trust in the sales process. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 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 Badget. 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 LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Victor Coupe. Victor is an expert in sales. He’s an expert in SEO. We’re gonna dive deep, particularly on sales today, what it is, how to do it, how to do it differently than you think you have to do it. But first, welcome to the show, Victor. Victor Julio Coupe: Thank you, Chris.  Chris Badgett: How are you doing, my friend? Really great. I had so much fun with you when I was on an episode with you and I loved your energy and I thank you. I’m a talent scout. It is just something I do and I was like, this guy, is obviously great at sales, but just at a high level, for the agencies out there building LMS sites for clients or the course creators and coaches, they have a product or a service they need to sell. What is sales like? How do you define it in a way that is probably different than what people are thinking? Perfect. I  Victor Julio Coupe: think especially in the SEO world sales is a very delicate talk and conversation overall, and I’m gonna give you a very quick rundown as to. Then I can come back to your question. I decided to join the SEO world last year, so I’m not even a full you even presented me as a, as an expert. Thank you so much. Why? I’m not, I’m just a guy who likes to talk, likes to relate to people, likes to listen, and to really pay attention to what they’re saying. And as a bonus, I sell. That’s how it works for me. That’s how it’s been working for almost, oh my God, I think seven years that since I started doing this, but. Again, the sales, talking to agencies, talking to people in SEO that might be listening to us right now, sales is very delicate because I don’t know exactly when this started, but when I got into the market it was already a thing. You have a lot of freelancers, especially over on LinkedIn, connecting daily to a lot of people. And once you click accept, you’re gonna start being slapped all over your face with their pitches. So it’s very aggressive in a way that a lot of the market right now is exhausted. Really. They’re exhausted of going to LinkedIn and seeing those profiles that are, you see they have some common things in between them, usually. It’s younger people, usually they don’t have a lot of information over on their LinkedIn account. Right now, you are able to find AI generated accounts, so AI faces, there is a human being behind it, but it’s not gonna be like Victor, it’s gonna be somebody else. So the SEO world, especially when we talk about selling SEO services, selling links, which is a huge product inside of the SEO market, is a very, as I said, delicate one, people are exhausted. People receive emails, dms, even sometimes phone calls in a daily basis. So how I did it to. How can I say, separate myself from most of the noise. It looks counterintuitive, but I just stopped trying to sell. I stopped pitching. Of course, there is always a moment where you can, and you should, the elevator pitch, the thing where it’s okay, give me a 20 seconds pitch. That’s a good thing for you to practice. And sometimes on elevators, that’s a good moment for you to literally pitch somebody. But I learned from my own use and my own time and efforts, spending hours and days outreaching people both on email and on LinkedIn to try and sell SEO. I noticed that it doesn’t work out. You’re gonna find people on YouTube, on articles and blog saying that. Of course it doesn’t. Of course it must it must work for somebody out there. Otherwise this wouldn’t be a topic. But when I was trying it. Giving a little bit more, I think, detail so that people can either mimic or not. When I tried to do this, I tried over the uk, I tried in Portugal, I am living in Portugal, so same language I tried in Spanish, I speak the three languages by themselves, so Spanish, Portuguese, and English. And I was teaching themselves those people with their own primary languages. And even so what I understood was most of them are never gonna reply back, never. They’re never gonna be bothered to reply back. And now with the information that I just shared, I understand why because it’s 10 new messages every day. But not only that, SEO is has been around for such a long time. It’s not the hottest thing in the market right now. Whenever we think of the hottest thing, we think of AI something. We think of a software with ai. We think of FinTech, crypto. And go back to ai. That’s it. So even ads, I imagine SEO influencer, they have been around for a couple of years, so people know who they wanna work with. If you wanna do SEO, some people already have in their top of mind, what’s the company that they’re gonna go after? Influencers, same thing. Paid ads, same thing. Of course you have new entries every day. You have new companies. There’s always gonna be somebody breaking from the masses. Still casing that sometimes you may be a different person and this may give you a different result. But coming back to it, all selling SEO, from what I’ve learned from my time, so only talking about my opinion and my experience. Not saying that this is what everybody should be doing, but in my place it worked by being a nice guy, it worked. By genuinely asking, how are you doing in professional terms? So let’s pretend I came across a case company in a conference, in an event, in a podcast. I wouldn’t be the one to ask them for their metrics or their priorities. I would just ask them, how are you doing right now? How is it going? Are you happy with who you’re talking to? Yes, Victor. I’m working with these agency. They are amazing. Awesome. Who are they? Let me see what they’re doing. Not, I’m not gonna try and steal their customers because there’s also a lot of this in the market. No, I just wanna learn, I just wanna learn from who is doing it in a nice way. See if I can learn from their, not mistakes, but from the things that they got. And apply it the same way. But again, Chris, if I. More than five times, Chris, more than 10 times. I promise you, I promise over camera. I don’t know exactly how to reply back to your question because people just like talking to me and I feel like just again, being there with your mind and your body and literally asking, looking at their eyes, how are you doing? What’s going on? This makes so much of a difference in regards to sales. Because it makes them comfortable and they start sharing what what I usually said at my meetings was, open your heart. Let’s pretend we are in a cafe, or I’m a Tinder date. I’m a first Tinder date. Tell me about yourself. Tell me about your traumas. Tell me about the things that have happened. In the past, those that worked and those that did not work. And then I’m gonna tell you how I can see myself getting inside. Maybe I don’t. Maybe depending on the conversation, and this is something that a lot of salespeople don’t understand, sometimes the sale is not for you, is you can do whatever you want. It’s not gonna work out. They already have a good supplier, a good provider, a good app, a good solution in house. That’s fine. Just say thank you. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for letting me know that this is working. Thank you for letting me know that this is how you’re behaving. Now I’m gonna collect myself. I’m gonna drink a glass of cold water and I’m gonna think maybe I should do that as well. That’s how I feel. The SEO world is nowadays considering sales.  Chris Badgett: I have a background in anthropology and I love different cultures and cultural differences. Perfect. Tell us about selling in, let’s say, the United States, the uk, Europe, south America, Asia. Perfect. Perfect. What are some of the differences that people may not think about when it comes to selling cross-culturally?  Victor Julio Coupe: It’s something that I never figured out that I would do. If I were to travel 10 years in the past and tell younger Victor that he was gonna be literally selling to all regions of the world, but Antarctica, because penguins still do not rank on websites, I would’ve left 10 years ago. But now I am confident to say that yes, I did it all from all continents and it is different. Let’s talk first about the Americas because I think there is not much of a reason to separate the north from the south. Especially talking about Brazil, we Brazilians grow very much into how can I say this, but North America is like the golden standard for South America. Brazilians want to be Americans. Brazilians wants to live like Americans. And you can even see this today, literally today in the politics version, you have Trump fighting against Brazilians Brazil’s President Lula. And you are gonna find people from Brazil defending the United States only because we grow by learning to love the United States. So why am I saying this? Whenever I needed to sell to either Americans or Brazilians, FOMO would work wonderfully. The fear of missing out because it, the capital is mindset is way more stronger over on that region. Chris, why are you not doing SEO? Is it because, I don’t know, you are afraid or something, or you just don’t have the money? Ah, Victor, I don’t like it. I don’t feel like that’s useful. I just, I’d rather pay ads and work with ads, sir. Nice to know. But do you also know that your main competitor is spending money on SEO? What? What is it that’s gonna change for you? Maybe you see, maybe it’s fomo, maybe you missing out on SEO will make sure that competitor that you hate will have the Porsche nine 11 that you don’t have, but that you don’t wanna have. Resilience and again, I’m always gonna say this in my opinion, my experience, my time, Brazilians and Americans, they fear missing out very much so in a way where if you come to them. We have a good enough strategy and product and service and you know that the clo, the their closest competitors, sorry, are indeed utilizing the same service and product. This by itself can turn like a light inside their head and say okay, maybe let’s pay closer attention to this. And then with that said, coming to Europe, whole different beast. As I said, in the Americas, there is more of a sense of urgency, way more of a sense of urgency. In Europe, Uhuh, it’s their timing. If they want to, they’re gonna pick you up. If they want to, they’re gonna listen to you, but only if they want to, because if they have something else, even if it’s 1% more priority, they are gonna prioritize that other thing. Especially whenever we’re talking about sales. We talk about cold outreach because life would be beautiful. If it, we didn’t need to cold outreach to anybody, but since we do it is a huge part of a sales life. So doing cold outreach in Europe, again with my experience with the companies that I worked for was also a different beast out together. In the Americas, the content could be more sales. As we say. We have a CTA about booking a demo. We have a CTA about get getting started. We have a CTA that would convert in Europe. If you don’t give them a cold glass of beer first, you’re gonna have to work yourself very much hard to make sure that they even read you out. So how I did it in a way that it worked for me. To sell to European companies events. And conferences with Europeans, having beers and pizzas with them is a must for anybody who wants to literally grow themselves in the European market, they value the in-person communication way further than the Americans do. The Americans are super great for cold calling. They are more open to the idea of getting a phone call. They are more open to the idea of talking to somebody unknown. Europeans are not like that. They are more closed. They are more in towards their own groups, so finding them in their natural habitat, just like an animal, usually works best. Now coming to a close, we have the other side here of the world. We have the Asians and the Australians. Let’s put them together. This by itself, I feel is, I’m not gonna say it’s a mix, but if it’s a Chinese guy, maybe he’s gonna follow the American mindset a little bit closer because he’s more related to Americans. If it’s somebody from Vietnam, if goes way more around the European side where you need to be nice, you need to. Go to the beach with them, have a dinner, have lunch talk. Just be fun. Be a nice person to be around. This is also what I found. Find the works in Asia, in Australia, since there is a. Sometimes there’s a lack of services in Australia, so they go with what they have. I don’t think they have too much issues from, besides of huge spiders and kangaroos. So in Australia, if you’re also somebody with a reputation, with a credibility, high effort, and to understand that your good, they will go with it. And in Africa. Lastly, coming to Africa, it’s growing now. Which is great. I love the idea that Africa deserves so much to grow and it’s growing. Now you have more companies investing money, buying from there, or even approaching Africans, and they are just lovely people. It’s so easy going, talking to any African whatsoever. They are, I think, because they have not been used to the idea of being freed good enough. They are just wonderful people to talk to. They are way easier to understand what you’re trying to say, and if they don’t understand what you’re trying to say, they will let it go. So of course it always changes and an American can be shy and European can be an extrovert, so it will never be a formula, it will never be something that AI can replicate. Which is good, but literally selling to these regions will make sure that you, by yourself as a salesperson, will have different personas of yourself depending on who you’re talking to. It is gonna change. It is always gonna change. And you need to understand, even with AI today, Chris if I were starting today and I knew already. Or I listened to this podcast and I heard this guy named Victor talking to me about how different it is. I would go to JDPT and ask, okay, I’m selling SEO services for Americans and Europeans. What’s the difference? The AI will help for sure, but there is a difference and we must consider that. Chris Badgett: This episode of LMS is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells in guiding users to helpful content. Pub Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. There’s also B2B versus B2C, B2C. I know you got, I know you got your start in selling iPhones. Yes. Which business to consumer play and a business to business play is a different beast. There’s also like scale of business. There could be an enterprise client, lifter LMS is an example. We have big clients, but we also have. What’s called A VSB, which is a very small business. It’s like a education entrepreneur, creator type person, but it’s still a business. It’s just a small one, especially in the beginning. How te what did you learn from selling iPhones and how are B2B versus B2C? The same and different?  Victor Julio Coupe: I think I got it very lucky by starting small. Because it was yes, selling iPhones to ordinary people, okay? In city centers, in galleries, in small shopping centers. So we’re talking about your mom, we’re talking about your kid, we’re talking about your neighbor. Literally, we’re talking about any kind of people whatsoever. And what I learned, what it taught me can, instead of what I learned, but what it taught me was how to handle different egos. Because when you’re talking B2C. You can’t, let’s that, let’s only pretend that we’re talking B2C. Even inside B2C, there’s gonna be an SMBA mito and an enterprise, meaning there’s gonna be the director who is wearing a tuxedo who is very successful. There’s gonna be that analyst. Victor here, normal guy, knows how to speak to people, knows how to behave, but doesn’t have infinite money. And we’re gonna have intern Victor, who was me 15 years ago when I only had a minimum wage and I wanted an iPhone. So it’s always gonna depend what am I’m gonna sell? What are gonna be the benefits? What are gonna be the priorities for such people? So by understanding that a mother of two kids prefers battery over performance, but by also understand that the internal Victor prefers gaming over camera. You start understanding that even though you’re selling the same product, I’m selling the same set of AirPods for the entire guy who is taking a bus and a train and leaves his home by eight in the morning and coming back at midnight. Battery is imported because he’s not gonna have a charger all the time. But if I’m talking to Victor nowadays, who is mostly at home working remotely. Sure battery is important, but it’s not the best thing that I want because I have chargers all over my house, so I want quality. Now I’m looking for quality. I’m looking for something different. So why am I giving you all these examples? When you take into consideration that B2C has different means and you apply to B2B, you’re gonna see that it’s all the same. It’s the same it’s people that you’re talking to. It’s becoming a cliche right now. People buy from people. Yeah, it’s true. But it’s a cliche, but it’s true. So when I was, let me give you a real example. This I will never forget. Back in Brazil we have this company called XP Investments. One of the, one of the biggest ones, I think it’s the biggest one in regards to trading stocks. All of this FinTech world back in Brazil, and I had to sell to XP investments back in 2020, a little bit before COVID. And I was selling then an influencer platform that I worked at the time called Tagger. And it, I never talked to XP about the cost of the product. I never talked to XP about onboarding. I never talked to them about, I don’t know, basic. Technology about the product itself? No. They wanted to know the ROI. Everybody wants to know the ROI, but it’s different when you’re talking to an enterprise and an S-M-B-R-O-I is a different thing for both of them. For the enterprise level, they’re talking about millions and millions in more than a hundred percent in return over investment. That’s what makes them tick. When I’m talking to an SMB, if I give the guy 10% of return over investment, it’s already a good thing. It’s already 10%. So selling iPhones to entry level people and management level people taught me that it’s gonna be the same. You need to ask the priority, and if you can’t ask the priorities, your job as a salesperson, to set the priority. To understand the priority. Because once you do, once you, you have that information. Doesn’t care. It doesn’t make, like it’s not gonna make a difference whatsoever if that person comes as a B2C or as a B2B lead. Everybody has their ROIs and you need to understand, okay, how big of an ROI do, you need to talk to that people in relation to that other people. So you see again. And I wish there were formulas. I wish there were magic equations that I could just talk here on camera and say, if you are focusing on S and B, B2B, two B sales, you need to do X and Y and Z and enterprises A, B, and C. But they’re all gonna be the same. What’s gonna changing between a small brand and a huge one is what they prioritize. Sure. But what you can give them back, if I can only give the enterprise company 10% of return over investment, that’s nothing for them. That’s literally nothing. For a small one, it is a lot of things. Imagine you taking a huge ROI to a small company. Wow, that’s amazing. That’s even better. Sometimes life isn’t like that. So yeah, it’s. It’s different. Sure it is. You have tons of materials showcasing how different it is. How on B2C, you have to be more human on B2B, you have to be more about numbers. But if I can tell you this, Chris, I noticed, especially after COVID, that the companies that closed the deal with me, they closed the deal with me because of support, because of credibility and authority and because they liked having a good time around with me sometimes because they were friends. Let’s not pretend that this doesn’t exist. Of course it does. Of course it does. Being well connected, being well networked, pays too much, but it’s always gonna be a case of you understanding first who you’re talking to. Then applying those settings to your mindset and going to market with that mindset filtered for that specific type. Customer, no matter if B2C or B2B, you need to understand what moves them forward. As I said, is it better for somebody who stays out of home all day long or is it quality for somebody who’s always nearby a charger and wants to extract the maximum out of the investment? There you go.  Chris Badgett: Awesome. Victor. I have a challenge I wanted to propose to you. Oh, nice. It’s commonly known in like B2B software companies. There’s a challenge with moving from founder led sales to a sales team and getting perfect, developing a sales function within a business that isn’t necessarily founder led. It’s also true for an agency. I know a lot of agencies who feel like the agency owner always has to do the sales or do the closing. For course creators and subject matter experts, they’re like it’s my brand, it’s my authority. I have to do sales. And of course, you have to do that in the beginning when you’re a one person show. And there are great salespeople and not so great salespeople. How do you help people that are stuck in this like founder led sales cage? Nice. Get out and empower their sales team. Find good salespeople, give them what they need to be successful. Let’s look at this problem of founder led sales.  Victor Julio Coupe: I think we can even talk about King Show, the company that I’m working for right now. Yeah. S Show Media is a UK agency that has been working since 2008. The founder has been the sales guy. Yeah. I am the first, I am the first step towards having a sales team. That came show is taking right now. So up until literally now, I’m still not selling. It’s very, it’s a very new venture for me. So I’m still learning. I’m still doing a lot of things behind the scenes, but I’m still not going to market to sell. And what’s gonna change, because right now the customers that came show has, they were all acquired through the founders. The founders were there. The founders made sure that it worked, and they’re not gonna be there anymore because I was hired. Because the founders don’t wanna be salespeople. They don’t like to talk. They’re not extroverts. So they are amazing technical guys, but they’re not the social type of people that are always there on stage. On conferences. On podcasts. They don’t like this. When I got into my first day, and I understood that as you said, so yourself, this company was founder led, the sales efforts were founder led. I immediately asked them what is it that they managed to give in order to sell? Was it their expertise or was it just because they were at the right place at the right time? Was it because something else altogether and then I learned, yes, in their case, this is an SEO agency and an affiliates agency. Having knowledge of what works and what doesn’t is very important here. It’s most of the services knowing what you’re doing, but I’m not selling my boss’s face or his name. No. What I did, what I am gonna be doing, and this is something that a lot of people can definitely mimic and copy and go and try themselves up, is I shared the knowledge itself without naming the knowledge. So I shared that we have IGA experience since 2008, but I don’t share that the person that has the knowledge is the founder. At the end of the day, if I’m doing code outreach. The lead that doesn’t know who the founder is, nor who the sales team is, right? He doesn’t know anything at all. So instead of focusing on a person, on a face, on a history and a name, I took that person and I actually spread them to become this whole company, which is came true. And when somebody asks me, Chris, when you ask me, Victor, what it is that you do? Oh, Chris, we are a company that has been doing SEO and affiliates for iga, casinos, battings, sometimes cryptos and fintechs since 2008. Therefore, we managed to update ourselves. A lot of times we had a lot of mistakes that are now fixed. So if you’re starting now. You don’t know what’s yet to come. The chances of us already been through that thing are very high, so you’re gonna buy from me the security. The comfort of knowing that Key Show Media has been doing it since 2008. But let me tell you this, Ken Show has not been around since 2008. The founders have, both of the founders. They have been working with casinos since 2008, and that’s proven. But the company itself has two to three years. So coming to your question and finalizing it. The challenge itself, moving from founder led to team, led to product led to service led, whatever. You don’t need to get a, you don’t need to remove the founder from the equation. You don’t need to remove the knowledge, the expertise, the authority of the founder from the equation. But you can, and you should stop talking about the founder if you wanna scale, because otherwise we don’t want astronomer CEO type of problems here where, the CEO E is gonna be. Yeah, we don’t want that. Let’s just take what the CEO has built. Let’s just take what the founder has built. He has built so many things. He was there for so many years. We take the history of the man, but we remove the man. We just talk and by men, human being can be a woman of course. And what I’m saying literally is. Let’s not disregard the history, but let’s talk it in a different pitch. It’s not about Chris, it’s about Lifter. It’s not about the founders here, Alessandro Art Lummi. It’s about Kahu. So yeah, Kahu is Alessandra and Lummi Lifter is Chris and his team. So Alessandra and Lummi, they’re always gonna be around. They’re always gonna be a point of the conversation whenever I’m selling, but I’m not gonna be selling their faces. I’m not gonna be selling. Their ideas. I’m selling their breakthroughs, their mistakes, their WANs, and of course, once this all came together, here’s K show media, let’s work together. The story itself is already very nice to be told. You don’t need to be, you don’t need to be very you don’t need to change your mindset altogether. But, and this Alessandro, I think he, he knows very well. You do need somebody that. Can understand that very easily because one thing that I saw already happening, mostly in Brazil, were salespeople wanting to become bigger than the brand they were selling. This happens, let’s talk about football again. You have players who sometimes feels like they’re bigger than the club and they start charging things on the club. You have em, mba, G, you have mass at Barcelona, Ronald Mad or Juventus, don’t turn into that guy. You’re not Christian or Ronald. Another, you’re not El mess. They were enchanting millions of people all over the world. You’re only enchanting your mother, your spouse, and your kid. So what I would say is if you’re a founder, you are looking to scale, but you’re looking to also step away from the sales machine itself. You are gonna have to hire somebody who likes to talk. Yes. And usually this comes. Easier in some regions. But you are also gonna have to share with that salesperson exactly how you made it happen so that person can take your stories and start sharing that same stories. But instead of, Chris did this, it’s lifter does this. This is a, I think that of course, I’m not giving here a full structure of how they can grow, but I think this by itself can be a good starting point. Chris Badgett: This is awesome. Victor. As a side note, maybe you should do a course on sales one day just for your personal brand. That would be fun. But  Victor Julio Coupe: let me actually talk one minute about this, Chris. Yeah. I was this weekend here in the public parking Porto. It was nine. It was on Sunday. It was 9:00 PM The sun was setting, and we were literally about to leave. Then two guys approached me. It was me, my wife, and my friend, a close friend of mine. The guy approached me and he was like, he was very high, but he was around his 40, 45. So he was like, you look like a very nice guy, and you look like you know about a technical pla, a technical club around your port. I was like, ah, I know. Good for you. Random dude. I know. But then I just, we were ready to leave and I wanted to leave. Sometimes even though I like to talk too much, sometimes my battery dies very fast. And I, and they didn’t want us to leave. They started talking and they started talking. My wife jokes about this ever since again, it happened two days ago and she was like, honey, what is it that you’re always charming European man? And they’re always talking how good you sound, how perfect your English is, and how extrovert you are. And that’s the point Chris. If I were to do a sales course or a course, whatever, it would be about teaching people to be Victor, and I don’t want them to, because I don’t know what makes me be me. I just am. I just. Open my mouth without thinking. I just smile to everybody without considering that I should smile or not. I’ve been assaulted and robbed more than 10 times already in my life because I was too much of a nice guy. But sometimes a Robert came to me, he asked for the hours. I said it was 2:00 PM He was like, nice cell phone. Give it to me. There is, I don’t know if this is something that I can put in the course, but I appreciate the comment. Of course. It’s nice to know that. People like how I behave, but if I could tell people what they should do, if I were to go back in time, or if I were to talk to somebody who’s young and is starting their own sales life right now, I think if you are gonna be doing sales, unfortunately being introvert might hold you back. You need to like to talk. You need to like to be the center of attention. You need to like to have all eyes around you. You need to like to be a speaker because this plus a sales role equals success.  Chris Badgett: That’s it. Just to challenge you and push back that sense in that feeling you have is very similar to the founder led sales dilemma. Just throwing that out there because a business has a product, but a business also is a product and a function like sales is a product. And so it is that founder led trap. And I, it’s that it’s a hundred percent. It’s Last question for you. Love your feedback on this. There’s common, somewhat common knowledge in the course creation space or really selling anything that there’s, I’m gonna talk in United States dollars. But basically 500, below 500 or even a thousand dollars. There’s a concept of we can do all the sailing with a sales page. I’m not gonna, I don’t need to talk to somebody to buy a $20 course on Udemy or potentially a thousand dollars course from a influencer that I’ve been following for years. I trust ’em. It’s fine. Once you get up into the, like the 2000 to 5,000. You could do a webinar and do like group sales so you can bring that sales process. And then above that it’s considered high ticket. There’s definitely needs to be a one-on-one conversation and so on. Just what advice do you have somebody who’s trying to figure out how to sell at the different levels? IPhone as an example, is a thousand bucks or whatever. It’s it’s on the high side of low ticket, but you still talk to people and Apple has done a lot of marketing and, influencing and branding over the years, but at the different price points, what advice do you have? Victor Julio Coupe: I, I think I can do a parallel with iPhone selling. Because you have $200 iPhones and you have a thousand dollars iPhones. Of course Apple does all the heavy lifting. You don’t need to explain why one sells over the other. But one thing that I notice in regards to the pricing gap between the 200 and a thousand is if somebody buys a 200 iPhone, which right now would be what? An iPhone 12, and they don’t like it. Or battery doesn’t last that long, or the camera is not the best, it’s okay to let it go because you only spend $200, right? But if you are buying from the newest iPhone, the 16 chrome max, you want it to do everything. You want it to last longer than a day. You want the pictures to be crystal clear. So if you were to put that into courses, what I would say is Apple. As we all know, huge company, one of the biggest, if not the biggest. They don’t need to showcase that their iPhone is good enough for people to buy, right? But here they are every single year doing huge multimillionaire events only to talk about the newest, most expensive iPhone. So even Apple needs to separate months of their schedule to create an event to showcase the newest iPhone. I think you, as a course seller who is charging a thousand dollars for a course, should also take the time to put your face around the camera. Now with ai, we have AI avatars, right? You can. Talk to the camera for three minutes within this AI avatar software, and then it’s gonna create a video of you talking. But it was never you. Why am I saying this? People are seeing how easy it is to pretend, to care, to pretend, to be around, to pretend, to put your face, to pretend to even go live. Those that. Don’t follow the AI route and still put their human side content up on the internet. On Instagram, if you’re selling a product on LinkedIn, if you’re selling a service, I think this by itself. Can lead to more sales because you’re gonna be building what authority, and this is what SEO is all about right now. Google wants all websites and all articles and all blogs to have authority. And what do they say by that? Is that they want Q real humans writing the content. They don’t want ai. There is this SEO expert, her name is Lily, and she taught me something that I will never forget about it. Google doesn’t want people from the Philippines writing about the top 10 best restaurants in New York. They want New Yorkers who are living in New York for a set amount of dates. And times to talk about their experience, not Trip Advisor rankings. So what I, what if I am. And if I can tell that to anybody who is gonna be selling a thousand dollars course before it’s high ticket one bro. Si, put your face around. Sew yourself. Create an Instagram. Be there. Go to events, take pictures, go to network round events. Shake hands, just, and the more you can do for yourself in regards to authority and to positioning. Not even talking about your course courses, not even talking about, it’s just showcasing the victory exists. Because once you exist, you can, what term in English, but people can take you for accountability. Is that how you say? Yeah. We know where Victor is. We know that Victor is always in this white. Okay, I’m gonna buy it. It makes it easier. It makes it easier for people to buy from Victor knowing that he’s always in this living room, that he’s always talking on camera, that he’s, he was online in July of 2024, and he’s still online in July, 2025. It’s a thing that pizza. Places back in Brazil, you should do a lot. Like since 1998, since 2005, cooking the best pizzas. Yeah. Great. Because this shows me, and it’s fine if it since 2025, but in 2027 it’s gonna be two years. So from day one, put your faces around from day one, start talking to the company. Not to the company, sorry, to the audience. As both you human being and as the founder of the company, it might not give you quick results. It might not be, instant, but if you keep on doing it, just like SEO, if you keep on doing it, if you keep on placing links and articles and keywords, eventually Google’s gonna. Showcase you more around the first page and that’s when money will come. I don’t see any reason as to why a course seller shouldn’t do anything, similar to this. So yeah, that’s it. Show your face, be around, go to podcasts, come to Crisis podcast. I think this by itself is a, is what everybody should start and try to do for sure. Chris Badgett: Victor, this has been awesome. Thank you for dropping so much wisdom and knowledge around sales and. Just where can people find you if they want to connect? Perfect. Victor Julio Coupe: They can find me on LinkedIn. I love being on LinkedIn, so this name by itself is the, is a unique name. You can find me over at Victor Kopay on LinkedIn. You’re gonna find me@kingshowmedia.com as well. I’m working over there, as you can see by the subtitle here. But come on, let’s connect on LinkedIn. Send me a message, send me a dm. As long as you are Openheartedly wanting a conversation, I am gonna be there to reply back to it for sure. And of course, I think you can find me at a future episode at Lifters LMS podcast because I am more than open to being around here to talk more about sales. Chris Badgett: Awesome. We’ll definitely have to do that. There’s so much more we could go into. We will have to do a Joe Rogan episode and go for two and a half hours or something like that. But I,  Victor Julio Coupe: I, I would be  Chris Badgett: open, I would be open. Thanks for coming on. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Chris.  Victor Julio Coupe: Thank you,  Chris Badgett: Chris,  Victor Julio Coupe: and 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@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How To Sell More Courses, Memberships, And Websites With Victor Julio Coupe appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In this LMScast, Zachary Katz from GravityKit presents Gravity Board, a WordPress add-on for Kanban project management that integrates Trello-like features into your website. Zachary Katz founded GravityKit, a business that creates robust Gravity Forms add-ons like GravityView, which gives customers extensive options for how to display and manipulate form data on their WordPress websites. Using customisable phases like to-do, in progress, and done, Gravity Board, which is built on top of Gravity Forms and GravityView, lets users graphically organize tasks. Gravity Board’s primary benefit is that all data is self-hosted. Which is particularly advantageous for institutions who are unable to rely on external SaaS technologies. Such as government agencies or internal business websites. Onboarding, project tracking, and other internal procedures may be easily streamlined using Gravity Board’s capabilities. Which include task assignment, filters, and automation rules that transfer objects across columns depending on form submissions. All of this is possible while maintaining control over your data within WordPress. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 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 Badget. 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 and friend, he’s back on the show. It’s Zach Katz from Gravity Kit. We’re gonna be diving into Gravity Kit’s newest add-on, which is called Gravity Board. It’s really awesome in terms of project management. Creating a, Kanban, Trello style board in your site. There’s lots of ways to use that as an agency or as a course creator. But first, welcome back on the show, Zach.  Zachary Katz: Hi Chris. Thanks for having me.  Chris Badgett: Yeah, it was fun to get into this I mentioned this. I think every time we talk on this episode. Somebody once told me that all the internet is and websites are, is a bunch of forms. And once I like really understood that deeply, I’m like, oh my God, this is wild. Then Gravity Kit has this flagship product, gravity View, which allows you to display form data on your website site in interesting ways. We use it in many ways at Lifter LMS, but let’s drill in on Gravity Board. Why did you, what is it and why did you create it? Zachary Katz: Yeah, so Gravity Board is a Kanban style board. Plugin that it replaces Trello. Essentially it can replace Trello if people have also used GitHub projects. It’s similar to that, where GitHub Projects has a way of seeing it in in a vertical columns mode where you can assign tasks by dragging them across columns and update the statuses. By dragging each individual task through a ready for building all the way through completed. And each of the stages of that project are represented by a column on the board. Gravity Board, we built it because people were using Gravity View to do a lot of project management, where every time something needed to happen the form would a, they would submit a form that says, this is another task that needs to be done. It would be shown in a gravity view table, for example, or it’d be shown in a gravity view custom layout that they built to try to mimic the behavior of Trello or of similar, functionality. And we realized that we could be doing this ourselves in a much better way than Gravity GravityView is able to do by having it be purpose built. And we purpose built it to be really good at. At project management, but also at being able to visually see quickly all the different stages of your data no matter what kind of projects you’re trying to optimize.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. And a Kanban board or is so powerful. I remember discovering this as the agency owner. I think when you just start out, we all try to manage projects over email and then the complexity gets a little outta hand.  And then, let’s see. I’ve used Trello. I’ve used Basecamp, Asana GitHub and others. I’m trying to think of that other one. But Monday, yeah, monday, monday.com. But then one of the cool things about WordPress and all the innovation and entrepreneurs here is. Like fluent CRM okay, we can have a CRM just on the WordPress website instead of this separate SaaS tool. And you were like, Hey, instead of paying for Trello or whatever else. Why not do it on your site?  Zachary Katz: Yeah. And it’s interesting, one of the most fervent customers of the users of the add-on is a government employee who said that their government contracts prevent them from using external services like Trello to manage their data. But they can use Gravity board ’cause all of that information is on their own website. It’s not being sent externally. So that was a really good representation of the power of WordPress and the power of owning and hosting your own content.  Chris Badgett: Yeah, and we get that a lot in the LMS space as well, particularly with internal company training portals that kind of want to have their own website. We have add-on called Private Site that locks it down from the public internet. But instead of having to in parallel run some project management tool, like a lot of internal training. LMS sites are for, onboarding new employees,  Zachary Katz: right?  Chris Badgett: So part of onboarding new employees is like filling out a form that needs to go to HR or whatever. And now you can do that. You can get the data through the gravity form, even have it viewable on the site with gravity view, and then also set up the HR team member to do whatever they need to do with that data, right? Manage like a big company. ’cause you can only keep track of so much of that stuff by email, right? Zachary Katz: That’s true. And intranets are an excellent, and onboarding are excellent use cases where in combination with other add-ons currently. But we’re looking into adding this built into gravity board. You can update values using logical rules that you create so that let’s say you’re onboarding somebody and they submit a form that can automatically move the. Did they submit this form from no to yes columns, for example or like maybe they completed a bunch of steps and that allows them to step to move into a new a new phase of their onboarding. We’re working on automation integration with automations tools that will allow that type of thing to happen. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And if you’re new to Kanban boards, and we’re gonna do a demo in a little bit just to show how this works. So if you’re listening in your earbuds or listening to the podcast audio only, this is also on the Lifter LMS YouTube channel. Just do a search for Zach Katz or Gravity Board, and you’ll find this episode. But the way, like when I’m teaching a new team member how to use our tr, our Kanban board. It’s the simplest way to think about it is to do, doing and done, right? These are the, there’s only three columns, right? So that’s the process. There’s a list, there’s a bunch of stuff to do. There’s a bunch of cards for each of those things when you’re working on it, actively move it to the in doing column. And then when you’re done moving to the done column, but that’s the power of process. That’s a very simple process, like to-do list in progress. Done. But there’s all kinds of more complex processes. Like I know when I’ve used Kanban boards, some of them have 15 columns. And the, and multiple team members working on different columns or collaborating on different cards or whatever. Zachary Katz: Yeah. They were created, the concept was created, I believe, by Toyota to track the progress of building a car on the factory floor to see. What has been done already and what hasn’t been done. So they had a bunch of different stages of the development process. And I might be wrong about this, but you could look up the history. But it’s cool that it started in a manufacturing world. And now if you have, if you are a website builder, there are a lot of steps that you need to keep track of when you’re building a website. Okay, do we have the design? Yeah. Has it been coded? Is the code reviewed by, code? People. Has it been accessibility checked? Has it been staged on the staging site and tested there? It been merged into live and has it been tested again, like all of these, everything that I just said represents a stage that you can move the. Each project through on visually on your ban board and ban Kanban. I never know what to say. Chris and I currently say Apple like banana and banana. But that’s fine. You could say that however you want. And so what we were doing while building Gravity Board was using Gravity Board. To track the process of building Gravity Board. So we were dogfooding it and saying okay, here are some features that need to be built. And then I moved them into, currently being built. And one of the cool things about Gravity Board is you can assign these different tasks to different people. So you can filter the tasks that are assigned to you that are due in the next week. You can set up all these filters and see only the most important tasks that are needing to be done right away all visually. And a really nice user interface. So task management is important, and Gravity Board, I think is a great task manager.  Chris Badgett: Another thing that’s great for agencies and course creators is the sales process, like the handoff from marketing to sales. And this is why it’s so awesome. It’s integrated with. Gravity forms. ’cause you can start at like the top of a marketing funnel. Yep. You could have somebody opt in to get a lead magnet and WP Fusion or whatever pipes that data to whatever your CRM is. But it also creates a card perhaps on that opt-in form. You ask for other information like team size or budget or. Niche or something like that, that you use as a scoring mechanism for who are the best leads, and then that can go into a follow-up process and based on how, what they filled out, certain leads are priority over others. And then maybe there’s like a attempt to schedule a one-on-one sales call, if you’re doing high-end coaching or selling an expensive website. Where we’re talking thousands of dollars. A lot of those things require a human interaction on a call of some sort. And then you get the call scheduled stage and then you get, then you move into the closing process of like closed and in sales there’s this concept of win loss at the end. But like that would be perfect with Gravity Board to. To manage lead flow for agencies and course creators and coaches.  Zachary Katz: Absolutely. And when I got started doing doing web stuff, I would cold call the Yellow pages one person at a time, and I would and I would, check them off if if I had done it. If you have, cold leads, warm leads, hot leads tracking their progress using a K Ben board is perfect. I don’t like to look at a table all the time, and I don’t like to look at a CSV, like a spreadsheet. That makes me sad. I don’t like spreadsheets. But I like to look at things in a Canada board. It just makes sense to me more so you can re-visualize the same content in different layouts in gravity forms admin on the entries table in a table on Gravity view. You can see it in a table and, but you can also manage the same content. And when you update it in Gravity board, it also updates in gravity forms and on gravity view. So it’s nicely integrated with the rest of the ecosystem.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And I think the other big unlock with a Kanban board is when it’s more than just one person working on a project. Yeah. You have teams. So if we use our sales thing, you may have somebody that works in marketing, somebody who does the sales calls maybe somebody else who does the closing call, the like final sales call, and then maybe. A customer success manager or something to manage, or a coach to manage the project after it’s sold. And those are like five different people. And maybe there’s teams of people within each of those divisions. How do you think about like how does Gravity board work with like assignees or teams?  Zachary Katz: Yeah. So one of the ways that you could do that during, in like this leads example, is that somebody would assign somebody else when a lead comes in that they receive the lead. Okay, I know this person is the person who should be assigned, so they assign them. That person does the first call and confirms that they’re a viable lead, then they assign to somebody else. And that can happen with inside the card itself. You can choose different assignees at that time. You can also at each stage leave a note. So let’s say you call somebody and they weren’t there, you add a note to the lead, and you say, I tried contacting them and it didn’t work. I’m gonna call back later. So then you update the due date and it shows up in the Kanban board as due on a certain day. And as it approaches it, it changes color to show you that it’s ready to be, acted upon. And so let’s say you follow up and you contact them and they’re ready to go. They need to be moved to a different stage with a customer success manager. You update the assignee, you add a note so that everybody’s on the same page regarding the lead and what you talked about. All of this is inside your WordPress website using Gravity Forms on your own, with your own data. And you can at mention people and they get emails. You can have all sorts of notifications set up so that everybody’s informed all the time with what the project status is.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s amazing with teams like as an entrepreneur, you can come in and look at absolutely everything, but also in, when you’re in execution mode, you can look at which are my cards? And simplify the right and stuff like that. If you would spin up a demo and if you’re listening just head on over to the lifter LMS YouTube channel and do a search for Gravity board, and you’ll find this. If you wanna see this in action, but we’re gonna take a look at this awesome innovation. Zachary Katz: Alright by the way, if you want to sign up for your own Gravity Board demo site, you can go to. Site dot try dot gravity kit.com and sign up for a demo there, or go to the Gravity kit website and and go to the Gravity board page and there will be a button that says, try a live demo. And you can get the exact same content that I’m gonna show you on this demonstration. It, I’m just using a stock demo right here. So what we’re looking at is the gravity kit all board screen where if you’ve created a CanBan board that it shows up there. But let’s take a step back and go start with a gravity forms form. We have a form here called tasks, and the form has the task name a priority, like a medium, low, high, critical, the description of the task due date and the status. The statuses that we have set up currently are backlog. I don’t know why it’s not showing up, but backlog in progress, et cetera. So we have a bunch of entries that have come in from this form with each task represented as an entry in gravity forms. So a task called update website copy, low priority has a due date assigned to it, status backlog. Each one of these entries is going to become a card and a Kanban board. And what do I mean by that? I’m gonna click into the existing board that we have where we can configure the gravity Board to be connected to the gravity forms form that we were just looking at. So the lane field and the lane is the column. I’ll show you this on the front end. So each one of these columns is a lane. So backlog, active, ready for review, complete in future. Each one of those is a lane, and you have the option to choose what field from the form you want to be the columns. So here we’ve chosen status, but you can also choose, okay, let’s say the priority is a lane and you can move between. When you move a card between lanes, it changes the priority from high to low priority. So you can configure the fields, that you want to be mapped to the cards. The due date is the due date of a form field, for example. You can enable and disable different functionality including entry notes and assignees and really cool stuff. You can enable card checklists and this is a nice thing where you can have subtasks and I wanna show you this, so I just enabled checklists and I’m gonna refresh the front end here and open up Update website copy. Now this is assigned to a user called John James. If I wanted to assign it to somebody else as well, I could add assignees by clicking their user profile images here and remove them as by clicking them as well. So this is an example of, okay, I wanna assign this to Matthew Markon, and I wanna set the priority to. High. Okay. High priority. And then describe the the task. So this task is critical to meet our launch goals for updating website copy. But what does update website copy mean? That’s where checklists come in and you can have multiple items that are associated with updating website Copy change the header text to. Cool. And when you add a checkbox here. You can add multiple items and you can see that the checklist is marked off. It shows zero out of two are completed. And when you check off the checkbox, it updates the progress bar to say one out of three completed. And that is also visible on the front end where you can see one outta three has been completed on the front end of the card. So you can get a good summary on. From the Kanban board view, or on the entry details modal. And you can filter then by saying, okay, I only wanna see tasks that have incomplete checklists. And that allows you to quickly drill down on these are tasks that still have items that are remaining for me to do. I also wanna see ones that are overdue or due in the next day. And you can really quickly identify, oh shoot, I need to do. All of this stuff or let’s say you’ve update website copy is no longer backlog, but it’s actively being worked on. You simply drag it from backlog to active, drop it, and then updates the card status in the backend on gravity forms. So that update website copy now is active in Gravity forms itself. If you look in the backend here, and you can see in the columns of the Gravity Forms entry table. The status has been updated to backlog or to active, and when it’s done, you move it to ready to review. And that’s been updated in gravity forms as well. So it’s a different way to visualize gravity forms data, but because of the functionality that we’ve added with checklists and things like attachments where the cards can have items attached to ’em. It makes it okay, so you wanna update website copy. You might need some assets. So let’s add a, let’s add an LMS text file to make sure that’s get us gets updated on your new website. And once you’re done you can say, Hey John James, this has been completed. And when you at somebody using the at mention functionality, they’ll get an email if they for each mention that you give. So John James, this has been completed. They’ll get an email if you decide you need to change this to have more information ’cause that’s not very helpful. Ready for your review and you can update the note as well. And then John James will be able to see, Hey, it’s assigned to John James as well. Save the card and and that’s all  Chris Badgett: set. Wow. That’s awesome. And while Zach was doing that awesome demo, I just looked up and on January 9th in 2017, Atlassian, a tech company acquired Trello for $425 million. And this kind of innovation here, like what I’m seeing is it does what. Trello does, but now you can do it on your website. It’s literally a multi-hundred million dollar of value that’s sitting inside of gravity kit all access pass or in the you can get the individual add-on if you just want Gravity Board. But this is really cool. And unlike Trello as an example because it’s WordPress base, and correct me if I’m wrong here. You’re not, you don’t get charged more based on the number of users,  Zachary Katz: right? Number of users, unlimited number of entries, unlimited number of forms, unlimited. And you can have multiple boards that are set up to be filtered for different users. So you, you might want one board, let’s say a roadmap, a public roadmap, and you have each feature in work in on a roadmap on your website, like planned on doing in progress and done. You could have a public version of that people are not able to update and they’re only able to see and browse, but, and search, but they’re not able to change. But then you could have the same form that’s powering a different board for internal users where internal users are able to update the statuses and leave notes and actually communicate about the status of things. It’s all, we designed it all to be very secure so that all the data is going through one, one endpoint that is able to be monitored closely in terms of the the data that’s going out. So we have lots of security guards to make sure that only the people who are supposed to see the data do see the data, and you can manage these missions using, a very in depth board permissions page for who can add checklists, who can view them, who can add attachments, who can view them. Entry notes, assignees lanes. You can lock it down or open it up as much as you want, including the ability for this to be the source of your feature request form. You can have feature request forms that are completely powered by Gravity Forms and gravity Board where people can add. A new feature to by just clicking add card and they can add a new feature request. And that’s easy to do. And you can only filter, you can filter to only include the ones that have been reviewed if you want to have a review status so that the administrator could decide whether or not to show it on the public page. Chris Badgett: Wow, this is this is really cool. I think I’m gonna get off this call and go cancel my Trello subscription because this is this is really awesome. And just to clarify what you were saying on front end versus back end,  Zachary Katz: right? Chris Badgett: This episode of LMS is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells in guiding users to helpful content. Pub Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. Like you said, the public, you could have a public board, like a feature roadmap for a software company, say, so that’s like on the front end or, and so where does the, where do these boards live? Are they sure? Is it all front end and it’s based on user permissions? Who sees it? Or is it backend or both? Or what is it?  Zachary Katz: So you can have, you can view gravity board boards inside the backend as of the WordPress dashboard. And that’s what I’m doing here. You can see it works just as well in the backend as well as it does on the front end. You don’t need to embed this on the front end of your site at all if you don’t want to. It can be fully internal, but we do offer blocks. And let’s say you wanted to have a page called, future requests. You can add a Gutenberg block that says Gravity Board, and then you choose the board you wanna display and you publish. And just like that you have the board embedded in a page. One of the cool things about Gravity Board is we’ve added full keyboard integration. So if you wanted to know what keyboard shortcuts there are, you can press shift question mark and you can browse completely using your keyboard. So let’s say you wanted to. Navigate around using up and down. You can’t necessarily see what I’m doing, but I’m pressing the side to side keys. It’s selecting the other selecting different cards, and if you hit enter, it opens the card and you can tab through the forms, add items as you want, and then hit escape to close it slash opens the filters, and you can search for something like SEO, for example, to only show cards that are related to SEO. You can hit escape to close that hit f to go full screen. And full screen mode is the way I like to use it. ’cause I don’t like to have my content be limited by the size of my windows.  Chris Badgett: I love this. It’s so powerful. You can use a Kanban board as an individual, just like setting your daily goals and stuff. You can use it, if you’re building a site for a client, maybe the client’s gonna use it to manage a coaching process, onboarding process, learning objective. There’s so many different ways you can use these boards and it make brain not hurt as bad trying to keep track of everything.  Zachary Katz: That’s true. Apple Notes recently added canman board layout to their actually Apple reminders. That is, you can say okay, I use reminders on my phone, apple reminders for stuff I need to do around the house, refill the bird feeder, take it, take the trash to the transfer station, like all sorts of things I need to do, mow the lawn, et cetera. And I like to go move the item from, not done to done. And I like to see those visually sometimes in a canman boards layout. I’ve been using Gravity Board for Gravity board development, and we are just getting started. We’re going to be moving from user voice for feature requests. We’re going to be using gravity Board instead. And the feature request board is not just a hypothetical. We’re gonna be doing this soon ourselves.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And if that’s it for the demo, I might pull this off and  Zachary Katz: yeah,  Chris Badgett: We do have a question from a live podcast watcher, so I’ll pull it up on the screen. I’ll I’ll start with it and give you time, Zach, to wrap your head around it. But Jennifer says that she owns a micro school. Would I be able to utilize this tool to create learning objectives or specific skills by subject? Each student needs to master throughout the year. My first reaction to this is if you particularly have some manual grading and feedback processes in your courses or coaching programs or schooling where you need to keep track of students and they’re submitting some things and you’re grading and making sure they’re getting the concepts and obtaining the learning objectives. It’s a little chaotic the way you run it. Now, this might be a great way to just transfer your process of how you think about achieving a learning objective to two stages and like how that fits with your course or lesson flow. And you can manage that with gravity board. ’cause there’s, there’s quizzes, assignments, grading, progress tracking. But when you add something like. Kanban board on top, you’re just making your learning platform and process even more effective, easier to manage. And particularly if there’s a group of people working on it, everybody can collaborate much easier. But I’ll pass it over to you. Zach, what thoughts do you have on this one? Zachary Katz: Yeah I’m trying to imagine how this would, it would be set up using a gravity board and the lanes might be stages of learning. And so let’s say you visualize the progress of learning arithmetic from. If you learn plus and minus, then you finally get to division and multiplication. You might wanna drag the user, like the student from plus this person’s mastered subtraction. Let’s let’s move them over to working on division at this point. So maybe that’s that’s a way to see it. It’s helpful to identify. The, Chris was saying, like trying to figure out the stages of the process. So if I don’t have the stages right that you’re talking about, Jennifer, then please get in touch with me and support@gravitykit.com, and we’re happy to help you figure out what a good fit would be. But surely with lifter LMS and with Gravity View or Gravity Board, something would be helpful for tracking that type of thing. Chris Badgett: Yeah, and just as a lifter, LMS feature reminder, if you’re in Jennifer’s case, as an example, if you’re wanting to get input from the student, there’s this, there’s a Gravity Forms integration in lifter LMS that where you can require the student before they can complete the lesson that they have to submit whatever information you want to collect, which can then feed into the gravity board and really use those things seamlessly together. Make sure your people use them if you want them to be submitting data, or it could just be a back, back office process that you use just to keep track of learners and getting those completion rates and compet competency rates up.  Zachary Katz: Gravity View integrates with lifter LMS so that each student on their student dashboard can have a tab that shows the forms that they’ve submitted. Which is really cool. Yeah, it’s a great integration. So that might be another way that you could do that, Jennifer, is to help visualize the courses that they’ve completed on their own dashboard using the form data they submitted, not necessarily the courses that they’ve completed, if that  Chris Badgett: makes sense. Since you mentioned that, and we do have past episodes on Gravity View. But could you just give us a quick rundown of like how, what Gravity View is, how it’s different from what we’re talking about here, which is also part of the Gravity Kit suite of products@gravitykit.com.  Zachary Katz: Yeah, so Gravity View is more of an app builder. Gravity Board is a specific app functionality to display in a CAM member board, and we’re actually going to be doing different layouts as well. But gravity view allows you to do more, creating a custom application for exactly the type of flow that you need using point and click. Let’s say you have more complex needs where each student submits multiple forms and has each student creates multiple entries using a form, like homework assignments. But then you have multiple teachers maybe grading those assignments and each of those requires a new form submission to say, this assignment’s an A, this assignment’s a b. And then those need to be visualized and exportable and added to a calendar, like all of this stuff that we just talked to somebody who was about to be charged one and a half million dollars a year for this application that they built using gravity views, point and click solutions. If you’re paying, if your school is paying, if you’re paying for these systems that track performance and fill out forms online, fill out the forms on your own website. Use GravityView to build custom applications to do whatever you wanna do. And we do so many things, it’s really hard to summarize, but like we know that there, you’re being charged too much elsewhere. We know that it’s pretty easy to set up with Gravity view and that users love using it. And it just integrates with your existing flows. So if you’re running a camp like a an in-person summer camp. We have people that track all the students, all the parents, all the activities, all the extracurriculars. All of that using Forms and Gravity view, and they build a camp dashboard that saves them thousands of dollars a year. Anytime you, you look at your budget and you say we’re paying a lot for X, there’s a good chance that gravity forms and gravity view can replace that and gravity board now as well.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You’ve made it Zach, to the advanced segment of the interview, so we’re going back to the idea that forms and app building, it’s just mind blowing how, what forms and moving data around and displaying it can do. If you would just pull up for your own, use Gravity kit.com/products. Okay. And either go through all of ’em or just, give a quick summary of, you mentioned Gravity Calendar in the, in your last answer there. We haven’t mentioned Gravity charts yet, or Gravity Math. What are some of these other things included in the All Access Pass at Gravity Kit? Zachary Katz: Yeah. Gravity Revisions let’s say you edit these entries using Gravity Board and gravity view, but you want a way to undo entries undo these changes, like track changes. That’s what Gravity revisions does. Gravity export. So many people use. You fill out a form and then. What do you do with that data? I don’t know. I have my client log into the website and go to the Gravity Forms, export screen, export entries, and then download it. Choose the columns that they want, and then download the CSV and then they have to download the CSV. That’s how they do it. Gravity Export makes that, so it’s a single URL that the same client can access to download a pre-filtered set of entries in different formats, including C-S-V-P-D-F, Excel. So you don’t have to, if you’re trying to walk your client through using a website and using, accessing their own data on gravity forms gravity Export makes that real easy. Gravity Math, you can say let’s say you have a tasks form that has a custom, that has a field for the number of hours that you estimate a task would take. And gravity Math can be able to sum each of those entries into, okay, all of our tasks are going to take this number of hours. So it’s the ability to do math with Gravity Forms data. And that same goes with when you sell products using Gravity forms, it can calculate all sorts of good metrics for your product sales. Gravity charts, you can chart that same data. Gravity forms data. And Gravity Calendar. We use Gravity Calendar as a team vacation calendar on Gravity Kit. So we have a form for vacation requests. They submit a vacation request. When it’s approved, it shows up on the team calendar. Now that team calendar, it’s an ICS feed, which means that you can connect it to your Apple Calendar. You can view it in Google Calendar. I love being able to see my team availability on a calendar in, on my computer, on my phone, wherever I am. That’s powered by Gravity Calendar. Gravity, import imports, gravity forms, entries, and forms. Gravity gravity migrate is really cool. So let’s say you have this incredible application that you’ve built for your needs and you know that this is going to be helpful for somebody else who has very similar needs. You don’t wanna have to download and export and reconfigure all this stuff. Well with Gravity Migrate, you export your entire Gravity Forms configuration, and that includes Gravity Kit, that includes third party add-ons, that includes all the stuff you need. So you go to your other website and then you import it into Gravity Migrate as well. And all of your pages that have forms embedded on them, all of the forms themselves, all the entries, all everything, all the attachments, if you selected, that will be automatically uploaded and migrated from one site to another. That makes migration super easy. Instead of migrating a database, which there are a lot of database migration tools. We wanted to really drill down on the needs of the Gravity Forms community. So that’s why we created Gravity Migrate. There are other tools out there that we have. But yeah I check out Gravity Kit and if you have any questions about this, if you’re listening I am available for consultation call. I will talk to you about your needs or your, what you want to accomplish. And if you’re not sure how to do it, I will help you. If it’s not the right fit for Gravity Kit or Gravity Forms. I will tell you, you should probably use something else. I don’t wanna sell you on a software that you don’t need, like any good software entrepreneur, that is our goal is your success. And I know that’s the same approach that list LMS has.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. Gravity kit is awesome, and once you see the power of forms and doing stuff with data it really blows your mind in terms of building what you want. And the learning management system is a web application.  Zachary Katz: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: And you can customize your. Learning management system, web application even further with Gravity Forms and Gravity kit. You mentioned demos. The Gravity Board has a demo. Do all of your add-ons have demos or how did the demos?  Zachary Katz: All of our add-ons have demos? If you go to site dot, try dot gravity kit.com, that’s where our demos live. The default demos Gravity View. But if you go to the top under More Gravity Kit plugin demos, you can see. Each of them have demonstrations and each of those is live. So you can click a button. Have your own working version of that demo site so you can go in there and see how it’s set up and change it to your needs. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Zach, I was looking forward to this episode ’cause whenever you drop a new add-on, I’m like, this is gonna be really cool. And as a project management guy who’s dealt with Kanban for a long time, it’s really great to see this. Available in WordPress. And so flexible for so many different ways, not to mention all the other great stuff that comes with Gravity Kit. What’s the best way for. You out there watching or listening to get started? They could take the demo. These add-ons are individually sold or you can get them in bundles. Is that right?  Zachary Katz: That’s right. Gravity Board is available standalone and all access is actually also includes all of our add-ons, including future add-ons. Yeah, go to gravity kit.com. We’re actually having a 40% off sale right now for the next three days. We have, we’re celebrating our 11th birthday of Gravity View and Gravity Kit. 40% off ends July 31st. So check out our sale and you can snag a license at a big discount.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Zach, thank you for coming back on the show. Really appreciate it. I can’t recommend Gravity Kit, Zach and his team enough. Go check that out. Any other ways people can connect with you?  Zachary Katz: I am on Mastodon at Zach Katz and Mastodon Social slash Zach Katz. And I am on LinkedIn add me to your professional network. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thanks for coming on, Zach. We really appreciate it.  Zachary Katz: Thank you so much, Chris. I really had a good time. Thanks. 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@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How To Manage LMS Websites Inside WordPress Like Trello With GravityBoard appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In this LMScast episode, Kurt Von Ahnen disclosed that John C. is the source of one of his fundamental ideas on leadership. According to Maxwell, “Leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less.” He thinks that everyone has an innate ability to lead, whether it be in the form of managing a team, a small group, or even just one other individual. But a lot of people think they are better suited as a “number two” or support person, so they avoid taking on that job. Like in physics, when that occurs, a leadership void is created, and it will always be filled often by the wrong individuals, which will result in bad choices and unfavorable outcomes. Kurt used a tale from his business background to demonstrate this point, in which a sophisticated bonus scheme for merchants was implemented without first determining whether or not they wanted it. Kurt was the only person in a boardroom full of international executives who had ever worked at the retail level. Based on his personal experience, he cautioned that the program would fail despite making him the “protruding nail” a Japanese term for an individual who deviates from the group. The scheme ultimately failed as he had feared, but his bravery in speaking up gained him a say in subsequent initiatives. Kurt believes that being a leader frequently entails stating the truth, going into awkward situations, and stepping in before someone less qualified does. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 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 Badget. 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 repeat GA guest. His name is Kurt Van Ahnen. He’s from Manana, NOMAS, and Kurt and I are gonna be talking about leadership today. But first, welcome to the show, Kurt. Hey, man, it’s always good to see you. Yeah. I know you’ve written books on leadership. What’s the name of your book again? My book is Action Leadership from the Edge. Awesome. Let’s just start super high level. Like when you, somebody asks you like, what is leadership? How would you answer that question?  Kurt Von Ahnen: I actually steal that answer from someone I consider a mentor. That’s John C. Maxwell. He is if you don’t know, he is like an unbelievably prolific author on leadership, but he is quoted multiple times as saying leadership has influenced nothing more, nothing less, and that’s that alone has helped guide me on my pathway to continuous learning in this space. Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s a, it is an interesting question and it’s such a broad topic. I feel like everybody’s a leader in the sense that once you grow up from being a baby. You have to influence yourself and make decisions and move throughout the world. And then you have friend groups and you make decisions and so on, and it just keeps going out. Not everybody goes all the way to becoming a transformational leader that LE leads a country or a religious movement or something like that, but there’s like leadership potential in everybody.  Kurt Von Ahnen: You’re touching on. The actual purpose of the book I wrote, and that was for me and I saw this through the pandemic and stuff, so I really got amped up through that space. But I personally believe everybody, every single human on the planet has some natural calling to some leadership position, whatever that is. You’re called to have influence on somebody or a group of people. And personally, I feel a lot of people bypass or abstain from that calling, right? So a lot of people go, oh, I’m not really a leader. I’m more of a good number two, I’m a good support person. I’m not, and when you see people pull back or restrict themselves from fulfilling that natural call, I believe it just leaves a gap in leadership. And and I think the universe. All the energies of the universe. I think it hates the idea that there’s a gap in things, and so it allows that gap to be filled, but then it’s filled unnaturally and that’s how we see things where. Normal people like us can look up, people running things and go, how did that moron get in that position? And you go, oh, that’s how, because the people that were meant to fill that position never stepped up. They never stepped into their natural call of leadership. And it allowed poor fits to fill those gaps. And then they land and expand and it propagates nonsense instead of what’s meant to be.  Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s a huge deal. A leadership vacuum, I call it. Yeah. Like it’s missing and like you said, it’s like physics. Something will fill that space. Yeah. And it’s not always the best thing, but it will, that’s, that vacuum will always get filled. Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah it’s crazy to watch. I have a ton of corporate experience and I, and so many times the most visually striking one was I wa I was in a boardroom and it was packed. We had to bring in extra chairs, giant table, extra chairs, people from different countries, vice presidents, and there was this giant new initiative, it was a distributorship that was going to. Implement a new program for all of the retailers. You must do this to earn this bonus. And they were gonna put this giant program out and it was immensely complicated. And and they were acting like it was a bonus for the retailers, and I had worked retail before in that field and I kept thinking, this is about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. And I said, Hey I raised my hand and I said, Hey I wanna recognize my position in the room as not the leader, right? Because I’m president and vice president. Everybody’s in this room. I said, but I’m just really curious, who, who has a team or who reached out to the base to find out if this is a program they actually desire? Who wants to participate in this program? And they were like, oh, Kurt, that’s not a. That wasn’t a consideration. We’re gonna launch this thing. This is what we need to see happen, and this is the bonus structure we put in place and this is the way it’s gonna be. And then I was like buy a show of hands. How many people in this room have actually worked at that level of retail? So you know how to absorb. The program that’s being promoted. And it was me and one other dude that put up their hand and I was like I can tell you firsthand, this ain’t gonna fly. Yeah. Like the half million dollars you’ve already spent on salaries and all the junket took to, to build this program up. We’re in this meeting and I’m like, I can tell you right now, this ain’t gonna fly. It doesn’t go over real well. When you’re the contrarian in the room sometimes there’s a saying in Japan the protruding nail always gets hammered, right? And so I was the protruding nail in that situation. But I’m also a fortune teller. It didn’t go over well, and then that kind of catapults that natural fit for leadership for the next. Project to, to then be considered and consulted and hey, Kurt, what would you do in this situation? But sometimes that step to leadership comes through a contrarian or uncomfortable moment. Chris Badgett: Yeah. And there’s a bunch of words wrapped up in here that overlap with leadership. One of them is power. Another one is politics, which you ran into in the boardroom. And then there’s like leadership and then there’s management and all these things overlap and relate to each other. I’d like to keep this focused on leadership particularly, but just let’s talk about the difference between leadership and management. So I see leadership as. More of the influence, the vision, the setting, the culture kind of stuff. Management is actually like the mission and getting the work done and having a great experience for employees and customers and all that kind of stuff. So they’re different. And keeping this this conversation on leadership, but let’s take a sidetrack for a moment. Bring in management. How do you think about the difference between. What a manager does and what a leader does. And it may be the same person or it could be two different roles or whatever. How do you d differentiate? Because I, I see confusion in the space, like where a manager is not necessarily a great leader or a leader may have really poor management skills.  Kurt Von Ahnen: I don’t know that you and I have ever been this transparent before and I don’t know that you’ve seen my other content, part of my draw to the leadership space. Was that I was a horrible leader. I was disgustingly bad at it. I was such a driven, a type personality coming, like before high school, like coming outta mid school. I was crazy competitive. Like when I had a paper route in the seventh grade. I didn’t just have a paper route as kids quit their paper routes. Adopted their paper routes. And next thing I had seven seven paper routes. And the guy that ran, the guy ran a bunch of kids for paper routes, so he obviously he’s not, wasn’t the top of the list. He was totally confused, like, how is Kurt delivering? Hundreds of papers every day on these paper routes. You didn’t realize I’d subcontracted to younger kids to go deliver the newspapers, and I just went around, knocked on doors, collected money, and went and bought Mountain Dews. And that was kinda like my first but I drove people hard and I did it even then. And so when I got outta school and started picking up these management jobs, like I managed the tuxedo store, I managed a furniture store, I ran a pizza shop. I did these things before getting outta high school, but I did it like with this iron fist we are gonna produce, we are gonna, we’re gonna be productive, we’re gonna be on time and on budget. I was like, rah. And I was barking at people, push harder, push faster. I was a where it really came to a head. I was a training supervisor at UPS, at one of the hubs in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. And for a long time I held the load record there. I’m just I was always a really hard worker, even physically, just a really hard worker. And so they said, oh, Kurt, you’re really good at this. We’re gonna put you in charge of a team. I had this poor kid crying in the truck, like literally sobbing because he couldn’t load the truck fast enough. He is I feel like I’m gonna throw up. And I’m like, suck it up buttercup. Let’s get in there, throw those boxes, and that’s not a leader, right? That’s a manager. The manager is like, what are the spreadsheets? What are the results? How hard can I push my people? And I was very much like that. Work harder. Work faster. We’ll see the results. And I had to really do a lot of studying and a lot of what would you call it? Self humility or something, right? Like I had to realize I got this wrong. And I gotta figure out what’s right. And trying to be more empathetic and figure out how do you get performance out of people without making ’em crumble and cry in the back of a truck. Like how do you do that? And it’s a real arc form. So leadership is completely different, but the results can be very similar.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. And let’s talk about power and influence. You mentioned a leader creates influence. Influence can have or, it can also mean like exercising power and making, willing something to happen that can have positive and negative connotations. But what, what, in your view is like a great example of wielding influence in a leadership capacity to get great results in a very win kind of way. Kurt Von Ahnen: You might be embarrassed, but you’re a really great example of it. You built a plugin by your own admission, you felt like you were late to the party when you launched lifter LMS. You weren’t late to the party. It had space to grow. And then think about it like, you have me on the team, I’ve been with the team. I think we’re five or six years or something crazy like we’ve been doing stuff together. Emily’s been on the team for a long time. You brought Nadia to the team and she has just really blossomed and she’s knocking like every task outta the park. And the Colemans have joined the team, from an ownership perspective. So then you have that 360 degree leadership, right? Like where you’re expanding at the peer level too, right? Not just downstream, cross stream. And so when someone takes a look at an overall picture and goes, oh, wait a minute. He’s leading down, he’s leading across, he’s leading up. And when I say leading up, you have the LMS cast. You have influence at the different, like I’ve seen you at Word Camp, I’ve seen you interact with other people in the space. So that’s leading up, that’s leading across, that’s leading down that is like a full bubble of. Influence. And then it sounds manipulative. I don’t mean it to sound manipulative, but when you have that full bubble atmosphere of influence, yeah. You get to say, this is the direction I want this to go. Or I’m thinking, Hey, you know what, I’m being led to think this is a good thing. And then people come along with that. And so that’s part of that power, that’s part of that, the influence, the power that the thing that people talk about. But it’s. If you do it well and you do it with the right heart and the right intention, it’s organic. It’s not pushy, and people want to come along. It’s not like that. You’re pushing them along. And so there’s a big difference in, in how it’s subtle but it’s a huge difference in how it really occurs. Chris Badgett: I appreciate you saying that. I think one of the, if I’m ever evaluating a company as an example and I’m asking myself the question, how good is the leadership here? One of the things I look for is how long have the team members been there? Because people and sometimes people move on and that’s fine. But if, particularly when people move on, they were there for a very long time and then they did something different or whatever, that’s a good sign. But if you have all this churn in your organization for employees, to me that’s like a flag that, oh, is there a leadership issue here? And it can be a lot of things. It’s complicated.  Kurt Von Ahnen: But you, I gotta jump in. You’re reminding me of a consulting call I did two weeks ago. Yeah. A motorcycle dealership. I do some training in the power sports field for those that are listening and don’t know. I do some training in the power sports field and we had a dealer owner on a call and I said, so tell me about some of the problems of your dealership. What are you trying to fix with this training? And he goes our technicians are flaky. We got one guy comes in a half hour late, takes two hours for lunch. Half the time you don’t know if he’s gonna show up or not. We’ve had, technicians turn in, turn out like like a bunch of people quit and leave. ‘Cause you can’t trust technicians. And then, our parts guys are, really struggling with back orders from the OEMs and the suppliers and. But for the most part, our sales team is strong, right? And then so he goes to this thing and I said okay. I said, you’ve done a really good job of outlining some symptoms, in this training we really need to talk about root causes. And he was like, what do you mean root causes? I just told you what the problems were with the dealership. And I said, no, you told me what the symptoms were with the dealership. I said people don’t leave positions. They leave leadership. So if you have a revolving door with technicians leaving your service department, that’s not a sign that technicians in general are flaky and undependable. That’s a sign that something’s broken. Broken in your leadership, tree, right? You’ve got a broken branch in the leadership tree that’s causing these guys to realize, hey, this place isn’t being run well. I can’t make enough money working under this leadership. I’m gonna have to go find something else. You can imagine that probably didn’t go over very well, but piece by piece. Every problem he brought up, I was like, that’s another symptom. Let’s talk about how that root cause works. And then we got into process development talks and things like that. But it’s really interesting to see how people. The perspective what’s the perspective of something that’s not working? And when you talk to somebody, especially if they’re really close to the problem, chances are they miss they start talking in terms of symptoms instead of what’s the root cause, how do you get, how do you establish relationship with people so that they will perform or will come to work on time or will not take a two and a half hour lunch. Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s a heavy load to carry. But I think about that a lot. If there’s a problem in a bus in the business, I’m like my first thought is how am I responsible for this? And I think that’s uncommon yeah it’s easier to point the finger and of course multiple parties are participating in whatever the issue is, but ultimately it’s a leadership or management issue. I’ve watched you take personal leadership and. In short order, move your family from California to Kansas. And like part of what a leader does is they hold space or they provide safety, security through hard things. And so I watch you like, move the family to Kansas and then I’ve watched you lead into developing your network and. Your influence locally in Kansas and get involved in lots of projects and community and stuff like that. How do you think about that transition just from a leadership, like what kind of wisdom for others? Because one thing a leader will do typically is they will make dramatic change if they need to. And you did it, you can get stuck and just keep doing what you’ve always done and cross your fingers. But there’s times when you have to burn the boats and try something else. So what tips do you have around that?  Kurt Von Ahnen: When I talk to people in general about the switch from California to Kansas, the paradigm shift in our quality of life is, it’s darn near immeasurable, Chris. It really is. Chris Badgett: That didn’t, it felt risky in a big bet at the time, right? It is lot of  Kurt Von Ahnen: resistance. It is risky in a big bet, but. Here’s like where I’m going to, I’m just gonna get to brass tacks with it. If you’re a leader, if you’re in charge of stuff and you feel external pressure to say yes to projects that you know you normally wouldn’t want to do, or you think are a bad idea, but you know that you have to say yes because you gotta create the revenue. That to me is, that’s the sign. Like something. Something’s gotta change. So then you have to start really doing, again, go back to root cause analysis, right? Why am I in this position? Why am I saying yes to projects that my team shouldn’t have to work on? Why am I taking on these liabilities? And stressing myself out about stuff that I, that normally I wouldn’t say yes to. And any business owner or a project manager is gonna have those moments, but when it becomes a consistent thing, you have to like go, wait a minute, I gotta really take stock of what’s happening here. And when we were in the Southern California economy post pandemic. I had to say yes to so many projects that I knew I normally wouldn’t do. Either the money wasn’t right or the project was poor or something was, it just wasn’t right. And I was under a lot of stress to do a lot of things that I normally wouldn’t have done. And so I knew we had to change the economic makeup of what we were doing, but I really. This is gonna sound, weird. I didn’t really fully understand what I was opening up when I moved away from California. So when we got to Kansas, we lowered our overhead by 65%. I’ve always been really on point I don’t need a bunch of car payments. I don’t need so if you think about the basic cost of living. We lowered our expenses by 65% moving to Kansas. And what that did was it immediately freed me up to not have to say yes to certain projects. So by being able to pass on certain things that were not, high margin items or high, good fit items, I was able to say yes to things that were a good fit or higher margin items. And that allowed us to grow and scale at a much quicker rate. And then you look at. What’s the population density and the expectations of one region could be anywhere. Right? And then you look at, we live in a fairly small community in Kansas now, and so all of a sudden I’m big fish little pond. I show up and I’m like, I have all this enterprise web building experience. I’m connected to plugin developers. I’m connected to, different WordPress hosts. And so when I go to local entrepreneur meetups. And have conversations with people. I’m able to communicate in a way to them that lends confidence that I don’t think they’ve really seen before in this space. And it’s give, and they’ve just adopted us. Everyone’s opened up their arms and let us in. The community college, the high school, the city the entrepreneur development organization in town everybody’s just been super open, super, super friendly, and they want to be, they want. They want to be in our space, but they also are inviting us into their space. It’s very much a, it’s very much a co-mingling and it’s working out really so far.  Chris Badgett: One of the things that interests me is the difference between a founder, entrepreneur and a CEO. And from your story you had to. Make a sacrifice, make a move, step into the unknown. And that’s what founder entrepreneurs do. And there’s like a lot of sacrifice. So there’s particularly if you’re bootstrapped, self-funded, just starting from nothing. If later you’re doing well, it looks that you’ve, it’s like unfair maybe, or it happened overnight, but there was actually like this trail of sacrifice and stuff in the past. And part of what leaders do, it takes courage, right? Because sometimes those sacrifices don’t work out. And it was a test, it was an experiment, but it was a failed experiment. And then the more times you come back, in my experience. The more things you try, eventually it starts looking like luck, but you just, you’re actually really good at failing fast and then trying something else. Kurt Von Ahnen: I, it’s such a weird thing because I actually used to say, failing forward and then all of a sudden John Maxwell came out with a book called Failing Forward, and I felt cheated. I was like, is he reading my emails? I completely believe in taking a lot of swings. I take a lot of swings and it’s okay if something doesn’t work. Some things I get emotionally tied to and and I share this all the time, like my Power Sport Academy project. I put that together. I’m super passionate about power sports. I know I’m gonna help hundreds, if not thousands of families find, financial freedom or at least, financial de, consistency. Through this training. And I’m really proud of it, but it wasn’t selling. It just wasn’t selling and it was years and years. And you even helped me with it. You were like this headline sucks. ’cause you’re really good at that kind of communication, right? So you were like change this headline, change this. And I kept trying different things to try and promote that product and it wasn’t working. And then to your point. I was gonna turn it off. I was gonna say, you know what, I’m done. It’s too much of a distraction. I’m gonna go in another direction. And, but it was five years, like I’d let the thing sit there for five years trying to promote this thing and then all of a sudden guy calls up, he’s got a hundred dealerships that need trained and that. Instantly turned that project into, 55, $60,000 a year of revenue. And so then people see that, like last year I went to the AM expo and I was a speaker at the AM Expo, which is a power sports thing. And people are like, Hey, you’re back. ‘Cause I used to work for Ducati and Suzuki and so they’re like, Hey, you’re back. And they’re like, oh man, it’s so cool. It’s like you’re an overnight success. And it like, they’re acting like, it’s like some immediate. Gift and it’s no, this was five, this is the result of five years of work that I almost gave up on, and now it’s actually starting to come true, which is a cool thing. Chris Badgett: This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. 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One of my favorite things is to develop other leaders and and the reason why is because when I was younger in my leadership career. I had some people develop me, so at the place I worked in Alaska, there was an opening for a manager and I felt like I, I was probably less Type A than you. Like I was a all star employee. Worked really hard, pulled more than my load was always helpful. It was, I’m a good employee and then. One of the other managers at the time brought me aside. He is you really should apply for that manager position. And then I got a lot of mentor from my boss and other managers and stuff like that, and really developed and also just naturally found that I liked also to develop other leaders and stuff like that. But what advice would you have for somebody and let me just say, I see this at lifter, LMS, like the entrepreneurs that use our tools are some of them, if I’m looking for case studies, some of the best ones are like super humble and they’re like, oh, I’m not ready yet. And they’re like, but they’re actually like doing great and making great progress. But they’re underselling themselves on their. What they’ve accomplished and the influence and power that they have, and there’s different leadership styles. But for someone who’s maybe not realizing how much of a leader they already are, what advice would you have to like, discover that or encourage that, that, that  Kurt Von Ahnen: seed to grow? I almost don’t wanna encourage it and spoil it to be honest with you. True leadership to me, like people that are organically great leaders. One of the, one of the things, one of the traits of that is a sense of humility, right? Is like they’re still approachable. They’re still normal people. They’re, I can go and I don’t really like, like domestic beer but I can still go to the neighborhood pub, grab something that tastes decent and and get along with everybody in the room, and there’s just a certain. That’s a certain sense of humility, right? I’m not above any of these people. Farmers, tow truck drivers, whatever. It doesn’t matter. You’re in, you work hard, let’s crack a cold one and have a good time. There’s a certain like that trait, that humility is so attractive to people that you don’t wanna spoil that. You don’t wanna put people on a pedestal and be like, man, you’re slaying it. You’re awesome. You are kicking butt. Because then you run the risk of leveling down the humility, which is the attractive part of leadership. And then they start to get, inflated. There’s gotta be a certain balance to things. So for me it’s like I really like to focus on accomplishment or direction or, apparent potential of somebody, but not so much you’re slaying it, you’re the bomb, you’re the this. It’s more I wanna say, Hey, you’re in a really good space. You’re in a really good, this is a really good moment. Momentum. Momentum moment, can’t speak. This is a really good momentum moment. We want to capitalize on the momentum, right? But I want to use that kind of talk instead of break them out of their shell, because that shell is part of the attractiveness that’s making them successful. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And one of the, my favorite quotes from the DA by Lao Sue is he says, the people will say, we did it ourselves. So great leaders, in my opinion, are almost invisible, and they’re empowering others and they send out, influence and positive change through others and don’t even necessarily care or need to take the credit for it. Kurt Von Ahnen: When I tell people, like when I first started coming outta my shell as I’m gonna be purposeful about this leadership thing, I took over as a service manager of a Pep Boy store. And this place was, I’m not gonna say it was in the ghetto, but it wasn’t in the best of neighborhoods. It was a little bit rundown. The shop was filthy. The cars were junk in the lot, it was a pep boys service center. And I walked in there. In regular clothes. I didn’t have a uniform yet. I walked in and it was like a day or two before I was actually supposed to start the job, and nobody stopped me. Like it was one of those stores, like no security. Nobody gave a credit about nothing, right? So I walked through the shop, nobody said anything. So I picked up a broom and I started sweeping. And then I, so I cleaned the back room where the oil disposal place was, and then I started cleaning the shop and I literally started pushing like toolboxes around and scrubbing the floor and. Usually if you touch a technician’s toolbox, you’re fixing to get, some hands, right? Nobody said a word. They all treated me like I was some kind of paid labor to come in and clean the shop, which to me was fine. I went into the restroom and it was just coated and grease and hand prints. So I basically pressure washed the bathroom, slapped on some gloves, cleaned the bathroom. It took me two days to clean this shop, clean the whole shop. On the third day, I walked in with my service manager uniform shirt on, and I said, Hey, gather everybody up. We’re gonna have a quick meeting, and they were like. Oh no. And I just said, Hey, does the shop look good? Oh yeah, the shop looks great. I said, great. Now you guys already know I’ll never ask you to do something I wouldn’t do myself first. Now we just need to maintain it, and they were like, oh. But it was like instant buy-in that way. There wasn’t any there wasn’t any question about whether Kurt was gonna come in and work hard at this job, and then. I gotta admit, I’m pretty good at running a service department. So everyone started to make more money as soon as the sh like the shop was already clean. But once they started to make more money, these technicians were like, what can we do next? Like that influence starts to take over. And then we ended up having one of the number one stores in the district for profit. But it’s, to me it is the way that you come into leadership. When I started at Suzuki, it was the opposite. They had, Suzuki had promised my job to people that were on staff, and then they hired me from the outside, right? And then I show up and it’s this is Kurt. He’s the new manager of publications and training. Everyone that was promised that job instantly hated me. And then I had to overcome all this negativity that I didn’t create. I had to overcome all, it took two months to get people to have any buy-in with anything I wanted to do. Because that’s the difference of how you enter the space, right? And the difference is like 15 years between Pep Boys and Suzuki. So at the beginning of my leadership journey, I had this great success. And then near the end, recently in my employment career, I have this giant failure I gotta overcome. But I guess that overcoming is part of the success.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. Leading by example I find is really powerful. And I see some entrepreneurs not do it in the sense that like for me it wasn’t a surprise when you were two minutes early to this meeting. I’m timely to my meetings, right? And if I’m late, something crazy happened or if I like, it rarely happens. But if I completely missed something, something came up that was outside of my control. So I demonstrate the behavior that I like to see, which is respecting each other’s time. Being ready and prepared. A funny story from Alaska is we would have our team meeting in a tent in the morning with about 20 people, right? And outside of the tent, it’s about a 50 yard walk to a dog yard that has a couple hundred sled dogs in it. On the corner of the dog yard is a porta-potty, right? And it was interesting like how. 25% of people would use the porta-potty before the meeting and 25% or and, or 75% before the meeting, 25% on the clock out to start their shift. And I just, it’s, part of leadership is to pick and choose your battles. Is that really a battle I want to have or do I care more about this other thing over here? Yeah. But. Leading by example. Like being prepared to work and ready for go time is a very important signal. And if a manager or a boss or a leader doesn’t do that themselves, they’re literally setting the bar like really low and then they act surprised when performances, basically similar to what they’re doing. Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, that do as I do not as I say, or do as I say, not as I do nonsense. That’s there’s a couple of different ways to look at that.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a, it’s an interesting one. Let’s talk about leadership styles, because there’s not just one leadership template, there’s like the humble leader, there’s like the command and control leader, and a lot of it depends on context. Are we going to war? Are we doing life coaching? Are we doing like fam, like some kind of major decision as a family? There’s all kinds of context, but there’s so many different leadership styles, yeah, the, the humble one, the command and control one. Another one is I position myself probably more as like a servant leader. I’m the opposite of command and control, but I’m still effective and I’m, I care more about unblocking my team, making sure their goals fit inside the goals of the business, adapting and, lifting people up. I’m not trying to push ’em down and push ’em out and deploy. That happens like through the work and stuff, but it’s just, I have my own style. It’s soft. It’s not hard, but you can also be a hard leader too, and be effective and respected and respectful. So tell us some thoughts on style and finding your own style.  Kurt Von Ahnen: I, if anyone is like thinking, let’s say that someone listens to this and they go this is a different message today. This is cool. I’m inspired. Maybe I should do something. One of the first steps is to figure out how are you internally wired? Yeah. So take an assessment and there’s. Half a dozen right off the top of our heads that we could go through, right? Whe whether it’s A-A-A-A-A-C-V-I or a Briggs and whatever, and or a disc or, but find out like how are you internally wired and then how do you actually naturally communicate or naturally work within systems. And then Chris mentioned a couple of things. Is this a process driven leadership example, right? Is this something that is really dependent upon process, organization, and conformance? Like you have to conform to a certain process to find success as a team? In this arena, whatever that is. Could be war, could be making cars on an assembly line, could be like all kinds of things. Certain things are very process driven, whereas if you get into like the coaching space, you are more like, like a really great coach never teaches the subject anything. A really great coach asks phenomenal questions that allows the subject to teach themselves. And so that’s like a form of leadership where you’re extracting it out of somebody else, but you’re leading and you’re having influence because of your method of extraction. But the success is really coming from the person. So it’s completely different. And some people are wired for different ways. For instance, sometimes I’m really good at asking these questions and being this coach kind of person. But if I’m honest with myself and how I’m really wired. Sometimes I just don’t have the patience internally. I just don’t have, ’cause it, it could be like a tattoo on somebody’s forehead. Like you’ve got this issue and you are skirting around it. Someone needs to bring it to your attention. And so I’m the kind of person that’s a little more direct and I’ll bring something to someone’s attention and then I’ll say, now let’s do some root cause analysis and figure out how to erase this tattoo issue. So that’s not really great coaching. That’s more like. Great consulting and that’s like a different thing. So I really thrive in the consultant space. I thrive really good on seeing things that most people don’t see from their own environment. Maybe they’re in too deep to really see the details. And so I’m really good at saying here’s our existing structure, here’s our existing process. Here’s our existing, results. Data set that we’re looking at. Where is this coming from? If we take a snapshot of this right now, what’s actually causing this snapshot to be reality? And then where do we want it to be? And then I’m really good at so what would be the next steps to get to where we want to be? So that’s more of a consulting leadership mindset. And that seems to be like where my real strengths are. The coaching side, like I said, I don’t know that I have enough patience for it. And when it comes time to crack the whip and really get something moving like a soccer team that needs to win the big game. That’s one of those that’s process driven, right? Defense is defense. Offense is offense, the triangulated play, and the art of the sport, like all of that. So when you’re yelling from the sidelines, yeah, it’s maybe, it seems like you’re being really hard in the moment. To me, successful leaders that are in those environments, they are hard in the moment and the team looks for them to be hard in the moment. They’re looking for that discipline in the moment, but you have to have the cognizance the self-awareness to realize that when the moment’s over you, you can gear back and be more relational. Then it’s that relationship that allows you to gear up in the moment. It’s that emotional bank account. If you make enough positive deposits in the emotional bank account, when you’re not in those moments, then in those moments you are fully qualified and fully deposited so that you can make that emotional withdrawal, and be demanding in the moment. Chris Badgett: Let’s leave people with an actionable leadership superpower or something to work on. It can be anything. I’ll do mine first, which is realizing that people are not robots and realizing that we, there’s something called the superior worth hypothesis, which means this is from my anthropology background that, you perceive a culture, another culture through the context of your own. And I think it was Margaret Mead that said we see the world as we are, not as it is. And so once you realize that not everybody else is neither a robot, nor are they wired, just like UNC, have the same mindsets and viewpoints and everything, you start realizing how different people are. If you can empathize with people and really take their perspective, you can be a much more effective leader. And the human brain likes to take shortcuts like you may see yourself like, oh, I’m a b plus leader. I’m pretty good at what I do. But the reality is, if you have followers this person over here sees you as an a plus. This person over here sees you as an F. This person sees you as a c. Like, and you can’t control that, like respect is earned and stuff like that. And maybe your style doesn’t match their style. So what I learned is if you can really take the perspective of the other person and adapt, particularly in a one-on-one situ situation, like if you have a global challenge at your work and the te the whole team is involved and you go to people, maybe you have a team meeting about the challenge. But then you go to people one-on-one. I might approach this person who, and you can use things like personality type assessments and things to figure out how people are different, but I’m like, this person over here needs a lot of autonomy in the work they do. And what they need from me is to just clearly paint a picture of where we need to go and then give them a hundred percent freedom on how to get there. This other person over here is more of a process person. And they’re gonna, if I give them like, here’s what I would do, and maybe structure like a flow chart of changes and activities and time boxing and calendaring and chart the path they’re set up for success. But those are two completely different approaches that achieve the same outcome. When you’re leading first be okay with lots of people having different perceptions of you within and with and outside of your organization. Also treat your team, your customers, your industry partners, your colleagues. Everybody’s different. And if you can meet them where more, where they are, it, you become a lot more influential as a leader. Yeah. That’s good stuff. What about you? What’s a superpower or insight you had that you would hope other leaders could unlock or explore further? Kurt Von Ahnen: One of the things I think really needs explored by most leaders is a lot of leaders don’t give themselves the space to be able to find success. They allow themselves to get into too many obligations or putting out too many fires or, not having that clarity of thought in the moment where they really would perform well. They didn’t set themselves up for success in advance, so they don’t perform as well as they could. So one of the things I recommend to people is, and you’ll hear this with a lot of people, right? But it, but I’ll say, Hey, just get up a little bit earlier, right? Have some quiet time. Do some kind of inspirational reading, whatever that is, a chapter of the Bible some book that you like, whatever. And then for me, I use a digital planner and I actually write down my schedule every day. Even though I have a digital schedule, I have, nine calendars for all these different projects I do, and everybody’s trying to book time on that calendar. And but I have everything set up so that they can only book an appointment. 24 hours away, right? So when I get up in the morning, there’s not gonna be any more appointments booked on my day when I get up. So I get up and I physically write down my calendar every day. And what that does, Chris, it sounds stupid, but it like. Plugs me into the day, it aligns me with what are my requirements for the day, and then what am I able to fit into the other spaces of the day? And then that’s my time blocking, like when you say time block, right? And if a customer needs to meet with me, they’re gonna if it’s today’s Thursday and they need to meet with me, they’re gonna go to my link and they’re gonna pick an appointment. The next available one’s Friday. Not a problem. So when I get up tomorrow, I’ll see that appointment. I’ll put that, I’ll write that into my schedule. So if that appointment’s at 11, I know that I’ve got from nine to 11 to knock something out of the park, and I’ve got from 12 to five to knock other things out of the park. And I think that a lot of leaders don’t have the clarity of their day, so they’re constantly jumping from one. Distraction to the other, and they never really get the time to succeed at any one element. And I think if you build that as a habit, you’re able to have influence on others to build similar habits. And then if you have a team of people seem to be more organized, more, more together in their space, more clarity of thought. And I think you start to see a lot of great things happen.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. And just in closing, leadership is it’s a whole other job and you have to make time for it. Like I have a, yeah. I have a block in my calendar and I learned this trick from somebody else. So leaders are supposed to be visionaries, right? And a lot of leaders and entrepreneurs are, they have a vision for the future. But I have a block of time on Fridays where for 30 minutes I have everything off, every device off. And I just sit with one question, which is, how can I create more value for. My, my users, my customers, the person I’m serving than anybody else in the world. And that’s a, that’s like literally an exercise or a workout around vision. But if I don’t make the space for that and I’m just in reaction mode like you’re saying and oh, that time block just went away, but make time, like you said, get up early, read a book on leadership, pick one area of leadership and try to just work on that over a month. And if you do that for 12 months, you’re gonna be a much better leader at the end.  Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, the time blocking thing is huge. Personal development is huge. Part of that personal development, and I know that you’re strong on this one, Chris, some kind of physical activity. Oh yeah. Our talk today has been mostly about, mental stuff, mental gymnastics and relationships and emotions and all that. But I think there’s a lot more clarity in that space when you’re physically fit or when you. Exert energy. When I’m working on the computer and I feel like nothing’s happening. Like I get that, just that weird I’m not being very productive right now. I don’t force myself to work through it. That’s, to me, I’ve learned over the years, that’s not gonna work for me. I’m just gonna get more and more frustrated and work slower and slower. What I do is I go jump on a bicycle, knock out 10 or 20 miles, come back, take a shower, sit down on the computer and knock out three days worth of work in an evening. Like it, it’s so if you’re a physical person. Don’t let this other, don’t let the stuff that Chris and I are talking about distract you from that physicality. Make sure you still center yourself with, the exertion that you need.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. Burnout is real for everybody, but particularly leaders. You have to have, it is a balancing act and you have to unplug and do other things and just be a human and just like you getting outside, exercising is a definitely a superpower that. Kurt Von Ahnen: Is, I really opened the door for you to say you bike 15 to 20 miles. Heck, I run that far almost every day. Hey, I’m a humble leader, Kurt. I’m a humble leader. They say that they say that bicycling they, how is it? It’s four times the distance for running, isn’t it? That what it is. I don’t know. So so a marathon is like 23 miles? Yeah. But a century ride on a bicycle of course is a hundred miles. Yeah. So running is four times harder than bicycling. I just wanna be super clear on this show running is four times harder than bicycling. So if I’m biking 10 miles and you’re running three or four a day you’re slaying me. You’re absolutely slaying me.  Chris Badgett: Awesome. That’s it for this episode on leadership. Hope you enjoyed it and continue to develop as a leader. It’s a lifelong thing that never ends, but it’s one of the most rewarding things in life, both in business or work, but also in your personal life, like personal development is personal leadership. Thank you Kurt, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it, and we will do another episode down the road. Take care. Nice. 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@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Becoming a Better Leader | Wisdom from the Trenches appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now Greg Zakowicz from Omnisend offers a useful, data-driven strategy to assist course developers in expanding their audience and boosting enrollments through successful multi-channel marketing. Greg highlights the significance of moving beyond conventional email campaigns by including SMS, online push alerts, and personalized messaging into a unified approach. Greg has more than 20 years of expertise in e-commerce and lifecycle marketing. He describes how course developers may utilize automation to offer timely, pertinent information at every stage of the learner experience by segmenting their audiences based on behavior, such as engaged prospects, new leads, or inactive users. Greg outlines important lifecycle automation processes that are intended to increase conversion rates and student retention, such as welcome sequences, abandoned cart messages, onboarding emails, and post-purchase interaction. Additionally, he emphasizes how crucial it is to keep email lists healthy and optimize message timing to match client intent. Creators may oversee all communications from a single location by utilizing a unified platform such as Omnisend, guaranteeing consistent message at every touchpoint. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 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 Badget. 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 Casts. We’re joined by a special guest. His name is Greg Zow. He’s from Omnis Send. You can find Omnis send@omnissend.com. Greg is an e-commerce and retail advisor at Omnis Send. We’re gonna go deep on marketing for LMS websites and the creators of those websites. We’re gonna talk about marketing automation, multi-channel marketing. Changes in buying behavior and what’s going on at the macro level. But first, welcome to the show, Greg. Thanks, Chris. Super excited to be here and looking forward to a good conversation. Yeah, I’m really loving Omnis. Send Omnis send has done a lot of great things in the WordPress space, both with WooCommerce, LMS plugins, membership plugins, and the digital commerce side of things. Let’s start at the macro. What are you seeing in terms of how spending behavior or cons, consumer behavior is changing in ways that might be relevant to course creators and coaches out there?  Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, it’s a good question ’cause we’ve been seeing it for the past 18 months and it’s finally coming to a head now. So I’ll start from the product level and we’ll back over. Because that’s where a lot of that consumer behavior changes data comes from. We all know we live in a relatively uncertain economic time right now. Every day seems to ebb and flow a little bit here and there. But the changes have been coming, like inflation’s been around for years, so we’ve been dealing with it ever since the pandemic. And really it’s, while they say it’s come down, it’s come down over the previous level, which was high, right? So I feel at the grocery store when I go. Buying product. So about 18 plus months ago, we started to see a shift to value focus. Private labels, right? Customer or consumers, would trade down when the value of the private labels matched, product quality or whatever it is, stores now. Costco, target, Walmart, they’ve all expanded their private label offerings. And that’s just an example. So we were starting to see like this value focused mindset, which was groceries, it was products, it was sneakers, it was clothing, whatever. And then you had stores like Teo and stuff like that and Shane, which are facing their own problems now, at least for the US audience. But they were contributing to that. So yeah, I can get a. Desk clamp for four bucks, why not? If it breaks in 12 months, I’m out four bucks and I’ll just buy another one. So that was the shift, and over the last probably six months, we started to see that accelerate a little bit more. So spending was still up, but what we were starting to see was the number of orders were down. So what you would have is consumers focusing on value. So Walmart’s a good example here. If I. Start to buy a couple things at Walmart and my dollar, I need to stretch further and I get the value here. Now what I do is I start to consolidate my purchases. So spending was up, but the number of orders across the board were down. So what we were doing is consolidating purchases. But what that tells me as. A brand as a course creator, as an agency, every sale really matters at that point because there are fewer sales to go around. You wanna capture those dollars. So average order value would go up. And then last month the report came out, came out last week, but last month we started to see consumer spending slow for the first time in almost 10 years. So those tariffs and stuff and kind of that hesitation and concern is caught up with us. So ffr. If you’re a course creator, you’re not selling, widgets per se, where you need to worry about consolidating value, but the shopping behaviors have changed. Consumers are in this value focused mindset that’s gonna translate to everything. Whether you’re buying a car, you’re buying gas, you’re buying a service, you’re buying you. HVAC services, right? You start to evaluate those purchases a little bit differently. And if you’re a course grader, you now need to look at, okay, this is a lens which consumers and my customers are going to order through. Do my offerings, do my value props. All these things match that lens and can I filter that a little bit more? And that’s I know we’ll talk about this a little bit more, but that’s really what course creators and agencies should be looking at. It might not. Directly apply to them from a product standpoint. But that lens at which those same consumers that are buying those things and have shifted their mindset, that’s the lens they’re looking through and that’s what we need to talk about and flesh out a little bit more.  Chris Badgett: Does that make sense? It does. And and I guess it’s somewhat of a controversial issue, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the cost of higher education. I’m a fan of university and liberal arts education as an example. I’m an anthropologist, but I’m a business guy now. And I got a lot of value in university. But when you think about that value lens and the uncertainty of the world I just have this sense that course creator, subject matter experts. Can put together offers that kind of help fulfill the promise of the quote, American dream of get good education and get a good job, or chart your course in life. It seems like there’s a lot of opportunity for course creators and as an example this was several years ago I think in 2 20 19, I was like thinking I could spend two years and get a MBA. Or I could, work with a business coach that really understands software entrepreneurship for a quarter of the cost and it’s more focused and targeted on my domain. And I did that and it was an amazing two years. But what are some thoughts about that in terms of. Creators who want to help people get jobs or grow skills, like in a more decentralized, non-traditional higher ed fashion. Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, it’s a real we could probably spend two hours talking about this, over a cup of coffee or something, but I’m like you, I went to college, loved my experience. Learned a lot, right? There’s a lot of growth that goes in there, especially at those ages. I’m also saving for my kids’ college now, which you talk about the cost increasing. Holy cow. But I work in marketing, like you talk to a marketer, did you go to school for marketing? And it’s 95% of ’em did not. And I did marketing was my minor communications guy. I went to radio broadcasting, right? That was my focus. And I transitioned to marketing. I look at this and go, okay, do you need a marketing degree to work in marketing? Absolutely not. Do you need a X, Y, Z degree to work in a different field? Some cases, yes, doctors, stuff like that. In some cases, a lot of cases, no, you don’t. Now we live in an era where YouTube is probably the best educational platform. Think about it out there, right? I replaced a fuse in the back of my dryer a couple weeks ago, which normally would have to pay a guy to come out. And I just looked at a two minute video and bought a three minute $3 part on Amazon. I’m like, boom. Done. So we talk about courses and stuff like this and upleveling and learning new skills, and I think the, for me, we live in a, that age where, yeah, these things make sense. The more you can, the more you can learn about a specific topic industry. Having a mentor. And then sometimes these things are important for just connecting who’s the instructor on this thing? Can I connect with them on LinkedIn and learn more and ask them questions and things like that without having to pay $20,000 a year or $40,000 a year? Do. So I think it’s great. I think what we talk about courses. We should be like, this is a value add to me. We talked offline about this before about promoting value add, and I think this is one of those value adds. Yeah. Cost of education’s increasing, cost of everything’s increasing, and we have these less costly courses that you can still learn the same skills that will get you ahead and whether you’re full-time in your career. Omni Send, we still do training courses and we take classes and we do stuff like that. You never stop learning. And that’s the thing. And I think that’s the one thing where people, I say this probably more so young people, and I was definitely one of these, one of those where, you get outta college and you’re like, all right. I’ve done it, and now I just need to learn that specific role of my next job. And once I do that, and really the learning never ends. And I think that’s where chorus creators are looking at this going, okay, we have a value here that fits with what people need in a very competitive but really expensive world, and we don’t, we’re not that expensive and we still get you the same value. It’s the one thing people never look at is, okay, I’ve got an instructor here in college that is charging me 45 grand a year to go to, and I’ve got an instructor here that maybe has the same qualifications, has charging me 400 bucks or 300 bucks or 200 bucks to do, right? I might have a little more interaction here maybe not, right? I might have more direct access here, but. Does this person over here have so much more knowledge in this person? A lot of times, no. There’s a lot of people out there that have more knowledge than me on certain topics, and that’s fine. And it doesn’t mean that I’m not valuable. It doesn’t mean they’re not valuable. So I think this is the one benefit that course creators have now is that. People are seeking upleveling, they’re seeking cheaper ways to do things. And it doesn’t mean those cheaper ways are any less effective or any less better. So I don’t know if that answers the initial question, Chris. I might have just skipped over the whole thing, but I went on this diatribe about education, but I think course creators sit in a really unique position now where maybe they did in 20 years ago because it was harder and even 10 years ago. It is, you get these online universities that. You get the bad terminology when the student loan thing was happening a few years ago about these, the fake colleges and stuff like that. But I think people are smart enough to realize, hey, there’s a skill, there’s a class there. That skill will help me. That class is good. It’s got good reviews, let me do it right.  Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s awesome. You nailed it. Let’s talk about email marketing or email automation through the lens. I think Omnis send one of the things that makes Omnis send great. Is, it was born out of the Shopify retail space. And what can course creators and coaches learn from more of the traditional online retail email marketing and automation space. Like what tips and tricks, what transfers over quite well that course creators may not be thinking about? Yeah. This is, so this is  Greg Zakowicz: fun because 20 years ago, your B2B. Marketing approaches and D two C were fairly different, right? You had different mediums and stuff like that, and strategies were different. And really those things are like this now, right? You might have a fringe here and there, but for the most part, those strategies are the same. You have the same consumers buying products, running organizations, making organizational decisions that are also buying a pair of shoes on the weekends. What we’ve seen over, I would say the last 10 years, but notably in the last five years specifically was just the convergence of these. So whether I’m looking at a B2B company, their email program, or a D two C company, I’m still seeing the same things. Be more effective than others. Value of email is a first party channel, right? And I don’t discount paid ads on paid social or paid search. I think they’re all part and necessary parts of the journey. But email is a first party channel, so you can. We get this later, but there’s ways to reduce retargeting costs using email and cutting your costs on social platforms and stuff like that. But email is a first part. Channel SMS is the same thing. Someone willingly gives you a piece of information saying, yeah, I want to hear from you. That is gold in itself, whether it be two B or D two C, it’s perfect. The things within that we’re seeing to be most effective, we’ve been saying it for years. I’ve been saying it, everyone’s probably sick of hearing it, but it’s still true. It doesn’t make it less true. It’s automations and. We put out these stats reported on me. Send, we have, excuse me last year, 26, almost 26 billion emails going around for a variety of customers. So we’re looking at the data. It holds true every year. Automated messages are driving 37% of all email orders. They’re accounting for 2% of sends. Reason is they’re timely and they’re relevant, they’re naturally then sending individually. So I take an action, I get an email based on an action. That email is customized and it sends automatically, you don’t have to be awake, you don’t have to schedule it, you just need to set it up one time. So those things are disproportionate from a revenue and it’s a send standpoint, but it doesn’t mean all automations are created equal. So this is like you’ll hear oh, send the birthday message or do this write in engages, and those. Sure they’ll engage. You’ll get high opens, but they don’t necessarily drive conversion. So yeah, you could have, you could create a course, you can try to retarget a customer, maybe you asked their birthday ’cause you’re trying to create a connection. You send ’em and they’re like, okay, great. I got a birthday message. So what three messages that drive more than anything. And this is related to products, it related to course creators, it related, it relates to agencies selling services, welcome messages. Browse abandonment or product abandonment, however you wanna do it, and card abandonment. So check out abandonment. Those three, whether you’re selling something, a service, those things, three things apply to you. Those will make up more than they’re roughly around 87% of all automated orders come from those three messages. So you talk about out weight performance here. Those are the things. So if I’m a course creator I’m gonna have a popup on my website that I probably got you to my website through a paid social ad or a paid search ad. Something. So I’ve already invested money in that. So I get you to my website. I’ve got a popup. I wanna capture that email address. ’cause now I can retarget you, right? I don’t have to spend tons. My email costs what? An email costs which is not much. So I captured that information. Now I can send you that welcome message. That’s one of ’em. That welcome message I can introduce, right? The offerings, the value add, really promote that value on there. If I don’t get you to buy. To put something in your cart, go to the checkout page. I know at that point what you’re viewing. I know what products you’re, your pages you’re going to, so I know a level of interest there. I also have an email that welcome email where I might have links in there where I can look at and say, okay, I clicked on upleveling on marketing. The marketing cores versus the admin course, or HR course, or whatever it is. So I can now do any sort of automation retargeting based on what you clicked or based on the pages you viewed, which is your browser abandonment, right? Viewed. So now we’re sending these things off and we can do email or SMS or both at those things. And if I can get you to a checkout page, conference con conferences, were doing this 15 years ago. I get to the checkout page, I don’t register for the conference. I get the abandoned cart one. It’s really just a checkout abandonment one. And that’s still, that applies to, it could be agencies and it could be course graders. So you’ve got these things that are transferrable over. But a lot of times what I find is either B2B companies, course graders, agencies, they neglect them ’cause they automatically think, ’cause they go through ’em on their personal lives, they think. Oh, this is for products. This isn’t for me. A service or I’m an offering or I’m an online product. So it doesn’t matter. The fact is, it does, and they still work. They’re timely, relevant, and they’re based on intent. I’m on your website ’cause there’s some sort of intent there. I might not be ready to buy today, but I’m interested and that is the intent you need to follow with that stuff. It’s a long answer for you Chris, but we can dig into any one of those strategies you want. We can dig into. Whatever you want but those are the three I hit. Welcome messages. Browse abandonment. Checkout abandonment. Chris Badgett: This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells in guiding users to helpful content. Pub Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. Wow, I think you nailed that. 87% of automation orders coming through those three and. Just to put it out there, if you’re watching or listening this, you can do this easily with Lifter LMS or WooCommerce, or paid memberships Pro with Omnis Send, which integrates directly. And you guys have like templates and all kinds of stuff to make setting this up easy.  Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, everything’s pre-built. You can customize anything you want, but we pre-built segments. We pre-built workflows based on what you want. You select it and you can. Even though it’s templatized, you can then customize the template if you want. But the whole thing is designed to get you to build it in literally a matter of seconds to maybe a minute a couple minutes to create a message, but we even templatize the message for you so you can just customize a couple things and super easy to do. And then you can get more advanced and sophisticated as you want and slowly add and optimize it. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s riff on Black Friday, cyber Monday a little bit. I noticed, the software industry was looking at the retail industry and like what happened at malls and shopping centers and stuff with this craze to buy on Black Friday and Cyber Monday and all these things. And the software industry got on this bus, and particularly in WordPress, where with a very value focused buyer, black Friday typically has substantial discounts. Lifter. LMS is an example. We make five to 10 times a normal month’s revenue during this kind of November, end of November period. And I see a lot of course creators and coaches not leveraging Black Friday or at least trying. Another thing I see, which is interesting is some people do a Black Friday campaign once and then they stop because they’re like. They get bored of it, but I heard this quote that you’re, you may be tired of your marketing, but your market never is. Black Friday will come around like clockwork every year. But stepping back, what could course creators and coaches do, or, and even agency professionals around Black Friday to, get those massive increases in sales or perhaps tie into another event that has. Shopping behavior kind of baked into the psyche and the cultural landscape?  Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, it’s a good question. So I love the analogy kind of you gave there, there was an old saying in radio boss told me it was like, play what you want at home. Play what they want at work. So it’s the same, like your marketing thing was always spot on with it. It’s the exact same thing. Here’s the thing about Black Friday, cyber Monday or whatever. Keep your right if you’re back to school season, which we’re currently in right now, right? Whatever your big sales period is. We talked earlier about the lens of value focused shopping. Nothing screams value focused shopping more than Black Friday, cyber Monday. Those, that, how those holiday deals. So whether you like offering ’em or not is one thing. You can offer ’em. People are expecting it, right? It doesn’t have to be the biggest thing in the world. And I’ll give you an example. I have a couple pieces of exercise equipment at home. I have an iFit membership to check my workouts on and they run Black Friday deals and yearly memberships are not inexpensive. I’m a value focused shopper and they run ’em and. Every Black Friday, I go look to see what the discounts are, look at the previous year, and I will renew my membership at that point. But it’s the subscription, but I’m looking for value on it. I don’t need to do it in June when it expires in December, and I just start stacking ’em. So the one thing I will look at is one, people are expecting some sort of value. So be in the conversation, right? It doesn’t have to be the biggest discount, but be in the conversation. Reinforce to your audience, yes, I’m in the trend. I see you. I can offer this to you. And if you can’t offer, if everyone else is doing 40% and you’re like, you know what? I could do 10% off. That’s what we do here, right? Add onto it with focusing on value. What makes your course different and really promote 10% off for Black Friday. So let ’em know it’s a deal. Let ’em know 10% off. Let a limited time window on there. For four days, only, five days only, whatever it might be. You can use SMS as a flash sale, two hours, maybe get 15% off, but then focus on the other values, direct access to course or have your questions answered by course creators or whatever your value props are. And that’s how you wanna build that whole thing together. So don’t have to give away the farm. You don’t have to do 70% off. Again, you don’t have to, but you need to be in the conversation. If I’m looking at this is just consumer mentality here and the marketing psychology, but I’m looking at two courses. One is, 50 bucks more, but they were giving me 10% off and this one is flat fee. And at the end of the day, they’re at the same price. I’m gonna look at this and go, okay, I’m gonna take the 10% off ’cause it’s priced more here and I’m getting a better deal. So inherently I think we have better value over here. Might not be true, but if they’re not, they’re just promoting 10% off this course and I’ve got. Hey, flat fee, but we get this, and this. Now I’m looking, okay, where is that value? I’m looking through that lens. Where am I getting the best bang for the buck? And it might be on these value props here, so we need to be in the conversation with it, if nothing else. And I think that’s the one thing to look at is, look at margins. Obviously you should have fairly decent margins, I would think if you’re a course greater because you’re not manufacturing products per se. But you need to be in the conversation. But I would promote it. I would try to do, find ways that work with your brand, work with your product, your discounting philosophy as a organization and kind of move from there for it. But I gotta be in the conversation for it, in my opinion.  Chris Badgett: Let’s learn from retail again, and I’m hoping you can do the same thing for SMS that you did with. Email automation. Three emails welcome, email browse abandonment and card abandonment. SMS is underutilized by course creators and coaches. Omnis send makes it easy, but at a international level ’cause a lot of course creators have people all over the world. I think a lot, there’s a misconception that. Email’s easy ’cause everybody has an email. But how do I do all this international text messaging? Omnis Send actually does, it makes it easy to the tech part and the infrastructure part of that. But what kinds of SMS campaigns could course creators do? Greg Zakowicz: I think give you the same answer. It’s gonna be the same messages. So what we see from SMS, just put it in perspective conversion rates, click rates on automated SMS more than double. Just scheduled messages so effective there it’s not 37 to 2%, but it’s, I think the number was 18% of all or SMS orders came from automated SMS 9% of sent, so still two to one ratio. Again, the reason is simple. It’s relevant, it’s timely, and it’s personal to ’em. So what I would do from an SMS standpoint is look at the same ones, right? I talk, I talked a little bit about focusing on high intent messages, birthday messages, great. They can engage, but they’re not high intent. I’m not opening the email because planning on shopping, maybe I am, but. I’m opening ’cause you’re wishing a birthday. And people like their birthdays generally, and they wanna feel good. It’s the intent, the welcome message has an intent. So send an automated SMS message. Just get in their inbox, get in their messages, slide in their dms browse abandonment. Again, there’s a high intent there. What am I checking out? So that’s an easy place where you can just slide an SMS in there and be like, Hey, we noticed you checking out X, Y, Z. Or don’t forget, all. All new subscribers get X, Y, Z, and just have a link there, getting it back. So if they decide, 12 hours from now, they’ve got an easy place to link. And then again, abandonment, check out abandonment. You’re so close, don’t you know? And you just promote Hey, get ahead, get that promotion, whatever that value add for taking that course is right. It’s the same three messages that I would start with, and then you can expand from there. But I don’t think you need to expand a whole lot. Maybe. A re-engagement message if they stop logging into the course or whatever lapse purchase, stuff like that. But I don’t think you need birthday messages on SMS for a course creator. I don’t think you need, back in stock messages. You don’t only have back in stock. So really what I tell people is look at the intent of a, the customer, consumer, whoever it is, what’s their intent, and that’s where you wanna follow your messages. So that’s the second lens that put it through. I’m sure you’ll probably ask me about it. Like we were chatting offline about this is like people are scared to jump in S mess. They either don’t know how to do it, they don’t think, for course creators, it makes sense, or agencies it makes sense. They think, oh, it’s too intimate, it’s too personal, and I’m not a fun brand, right? I’m trying to, I’m trying to educate someone. I would say it, it’s hogwash. So the best thing to do. Is test it and how do you test it? You put ask for mobile. Ask for mobile numbers at signup. On the popup. Leave it an optional field. Do not make it required. Do not make it seem like if they get an incentive, whether it’s an ebook or a discount on the first course or whatever it is for setting up for an email address, you then go to a second step that makes it sound like they need to sign up for mobile to get that. A lot of times they’ll say it, but they still do it. Sometimes they require it. It’s okay to have two steps. Just make that second step optional. If people sign up for your SMS, it’s an indication that yeah, they’re okay getting an SMS from you. If they don’t sign up, it’s your indication that, yeah, maybe my audience for this particular product or course it’s not their jam and that’s okay. But that’s a simple way to figure it out. And then if you need to start, if you start to see those, estimate, those mobile numbers come in, the simple way to start is just put an SMS message in those automations we talked about. Let the automated SMS do the work, and you don’t have to schedule messages every week or every two weeks to those people until you’re ready. Let ’em see if it works. Like my kids say, let it cook, right? That’s the simple way to start. You let the automation do it, you let it test out. If it’s not gonna work on a really high intent, ones that are proven to convert, maybe it’s your indication that yeah, they want SMS, but we don’t really have the formula for what they want from that SMS. And you could slowly refine your automated ones until they start working, and then that gives you an indication of how to build your scheduled messages out.  Chris Badgett: Awesome. You mentioned fund brand and maybe we could use potentially the university professor versus an independent subject matter expert as an example. This is so from like a marketing angle. How do we build, a fun brand office, authenticity, trust, and authority? Because I see a lot of people get hung up in this imposter syndrome stuff. Yeah. And in our marketing, just how can we be more authentic and authoritative and really at the end of the day, build that trust. Greg Zakowicz: I, I think you, the word you used is authentic, right? Like I look at it from a couple, couple different ways. I’ve been in this, I’ve been in email for almost 20 years now, I think 19 plus years. I’ve been doing it for a long time. I’ve been in SMS for over a decade. I’ve been through B2B, I’ve done D two C. I’ve done kind of all roles in it. I still suffer from imposter syndrome. I’m like, I know my stuff, but I still suffer from it, right? I think it’s natural for people. We also live in an era where the industry changes a lot, right? You think about e-commerce five years ago, it was pretty well fleshed out, but it’s so different now. Right now we got a agent tech AI for shopping and browsing and doing all these things and it’s continually changing, and I think that’s where kind of imposter syndrome comes in. But then I look at, okay, if I’m a professor and not knocking professors here at universities, but if I’m a professor and I’m not in the actual field, I’m. Doing coursebook and studying, lecturing off that versus here’s Greg over here who’s living in this day by day and looking at numbers and, talking to brands. Which one might be better for me, from a practical skill standpoint. And it’s probably gonna be the subject matter expert. So it’s not really answering your question yet, Chris, but I think there’s a lot of value to being in the field day to day and figuring out, hey, this is working, this isn’t working. But it used to. And it’s less theory, it’s more practical. And I think the practical skills sell how to build it. I’m really bad at building things like this. Just personally it takes a lot of time and I’m not a course creator, but YouTube, we talked about being I mentioned as the greatest educational tool out there. Right now. You got other ones like Khan Academy and other courses. But collectively, YouTube is awesome. So you have the ability to build. Short videos and things that kind of reinforce it there. You can be more fun on YouTube. You don’t have to be stuffy. TikTok, Instagram, whatever social channels you wanna use, you can be a lot more fun and build the authenticity there. You can write bylines for, industry articles, whatever you want. So I think it’s just a collective effort. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of, it’s a collective effort there to, but you have the ability where. People don’t care if you’re, suit and tie professional anymore. For the most part. They care that whether you know your stuff and you can relate that content transferable and they trust you. And I think that’s the biggest thing. And you build trust by, say say what you’re gonna do and then do what you say it’s the same thing, right? If I’m telling you that automation is awesome and everyone’s automation stinks, they’re gonna be like, this guy doesn’t know what he is talk about, but we see the automation work and now. We can see which ones work or whatever. So it’s all about just building trust and having fun and smiling and, self-deprecating when it matters. You know your audience best and what type of course you’re building, but be relatable. And that’s really the biggest thing.  Chris Badgett: Question about Omnis. Send email marketing platforms and multichannel marketing platforms. They’re a little sticky. But I’ve noticed every two to three years people start, getting frustrated with their current setup. And maybe they’re starting to shop around and looking to switch. If somebody’s looking to start or switch with, switch to Omnis, send particularly around this idea of, welcome automation, browse, abandonment, automation, card abandonment automation. What’s the best way to get started and why should they take a hard look at Omnis Send.  Greg Zakowicz: Yeah. Best way to get started, I think for anyone, regardless of the type of platform, is to understand what else is out there. So you look at your own capabilities okay, what are we lacking that we need? Why do we think we need that? So you gotta figure out what you’re missing, right? And it could be the platform is not advancing. We got ai, but the platform doesn’t have any AI in it. And now I’m using three tools to get one thing done. So you gotta figure out what you’re lacking, why you’re lacking, and then. What you want on the next platform. That’s the easiest thing to do. It’s not always easy, but that’s the simplest place to get started. And then when you start looking at what else is out there, you have to look at the platforms. Do they have these things? And what else did the platform offer beyond these core things? So I think every platform in the world has features that most people aren’t going to use. You get the 80 20 rule, or, 90 10, whatever they want, where, 20% of the features used by 80% of the people. But do they have the ability to have the features? Should you grow into ’em as you scale? Can they meet your scaling needs? And when you look at that, I point you back to Omnis sound, but the platform is just good. I’ve been in, in the email email marketing and SMS platform space for 13, 14 years now. The platform’s good. We have AI built into things you can. Generally talk about segments you wanna build and they’ll build a segment for you, right? So it’s small things like that. We talked about automation. Do they have automation? Is it customizable and is it gated? Now, that’s an important thing too, because you’ll have email providers that say, Hey, we have all these things. You go on there and you get this cheap plan. It’s oh, you gotta get the enterprise plan to get these things. So look to see what’s gated and what’s not. And that’s gonna be an important thing. Our automations, you could be at our free plan, you can use the automations. You gotta figure out that stuff out. Does it integrate with your platform? So WooCommerce WordPress, do you have an integration that syncs the data? ’cause that’s gonna be important then what other tools? Right? Popups. Okay. Popups built in. I can use ’em, I can choose not to use ’em, but it’s there for me if I want to. Do they have testing with the popups? Do they have segment builders? Do they have, like what’s the email builder like what I, when we talk about like why should you use Omnis send, we just check the boxes, we follow the industry trends, we build it into the platform. We integrate very quickly on these things. We take customer feedback and that’s the one thing I will say about Omnis Send versus others. We’re organically funded, so if we don’t have investors to report to, we have our customers to report to. And if we’re not providing a value to our customers, they’re not gonna choose us. They choose us, get 125,000 happy customers. It’s just a really solid platform. When you’re looking, go talk to someone there. You can sign up for Omnis, send for free. You don’t have to put a credit card down. So if you wanna just play around with it, go sign up, play around with it, integrate it, do what you wanna do and see if it works for you and see if those customizations. Reaching out to the company a lot of times will give you a sense of. Are they business oriented? Are they customer oriented? Are they fun to talk to? Are they very stuffy? A lot of times just having a conversation with someone’s easiest way word, approachable team over here.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s Greg Zow, e-commerce and retail advisor at Omnis Send. Is there anywhere else people can connect with you online? Greg Zakowicz: Yeah, usual places. You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m on Blue Sky more than Twitter now. Not many people are on Blue Sky, but I’m over there. If you go to my Twitter, you can link over, but LinkedIn’s probably the best place you can find me. Anyone else on Omnis Sun there? Omnis Sun as well. They’re pretty active on social too, so just feel free to pop over. We’re friendly.  Chris Badgett: Awesome Greg. Thanks for coming on the show. I could have talked for hours with you on marketing, but it’s been a great conversation. Really appreciate it.  Greg Zakowicz: I appreciate the invite and thanks for having me Chris. I enjoyed as well.  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@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Master Multi Channel Course Marketing With Greg Zakowicz From Omnisend appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In the episode, Lindsay Halsey from Pathfinder SEO delves at the ways artificial intelligence is changing search behavior and the implications for website owners, particularly those creating online training programs or e-learning platforms. She explains that with the rise of AI-generated search results such as Google’s AI Overviews and conversational modes users often get direct answers without clicking through to a website. Because of this change, websites find it more difficult to become visible using traditional SEO alone. However, Lindsay emphasizes that this is merely a new challenge and not the end for content providers. She highlights the ongoing importance of human connection, pointing out that when people wish to learn a lot or make an investment in something worthwhile, they still look for reliable professionals. Lindsay suggests producing very specialized, long-tail content that is suited to certain audiences and situations in order to remain competitive. She advises going narrow and answering specific search inquiries that represent issues and objectives in the actual world rather than focusing on broad, fiercely competitive keywords. Lindsay suggests producing very specialized, long-tail content that is suited to certain audiences and situations in order to remain competitive. She advises going narrow and answering specific search inquiries that represent issues and objectives in the actual world rather than focusing on broad, fiercely competitive keywords. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide 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 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 Badget. 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, she’s back on the show. It’s Lindsay Halsey from Pathfinder, SEO. You can find her and pathfinder@pathfinderseo.com. We’re gonna get into all topics, SEO, and AI, and getting found on the internet. But first, welcome to the show, Lindsay. Lindsay Halsey: Thanks so much, Chris. I’m excited to be here.  Chris Badgett: Let’s just jump right in and the big question I know a lot of people have, if you’re building a website or an e-learning website is how is [00:01:00] AI changing the behavior of people that are, going to their laptop or their phone or their computer to search for stuff Like what’s happened in the past four years? Lindsay Halsey: A lot’s happening and things are evolving reasonably quickly. And really AI is starting to reshape the way we think about search and search engine optimization and and some of the kind of behavior changes. And we can dig into a few of these in more detail. The first is that there is the opportunity for essentially like generative responses directly on, on Google, Yahoo, Bing, right? So when you go on Google and you type in your search query, you get a new row called AI overviews, and in there you get a generated response that has sites or citations and some links to the websites that sort of trained up the ai. But that you may, in this case, one of the things changing is you may decide as a, as the end user not to click through to a website for information, but rather to just receive the response directly from Google. And [00:02:00] then as Google often sees do another Google search and and you can have that more conversational nature. If you’re in the US right now there’s AI mode which allows you to take that that conversation further and have and continue on almost like you would with chat GPT. So that’s just one of the things that we’re seeing happen right now is in some ways people feel like the search engines continue to make it harder to get traffic to your website. Because Google is answering things directly in the search results. So it’s the people also ask boxes that used to pop up where you could just see the results or you put in something like movie Showtimes near me and it just tells you the showtimes. You never go to a website. You can think of AI overviews and AI mode as being in that similar vein of changing user behavior. But on the flip side, the more optimistic piece of this all is that it really is an opportunity for your brand, for your business, for your training, for your expertise to get [00:03:00] shown directly on Google to build brand awareness and to educate, which I know a lot of your audience is all about education and training and, and so I, I see the positive side of these changes. But in the short run, one of the things a lot of businesses are experiencing is a decrease in sessions or traffic from organic search  Chris Badgett: before we zoom in, like on a macro level. At what point, like we often still want to get the visitor to our website to buy the movie tickets or take our paid course or read our, the full article. For the content creator, how do we, where does the wall stop where AI isn’t enough? Even if you think about teaching a course online, there’s pressure from people just learning a skill or knowledge directly from AI without needing a course. Do you have any thoughts on like, where does the creator still hold territory in terms of, getting that traffic all the way over and out of the chat [00:04:00] interface? Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, definitely. So like the biggest thing I think about, because we’re in the same situation as we’re, in the field of SEO education and and so when somebody searches for something like how to learn SEO they’re unlikely to click through to our course about intro to SEO, right? That would’ve been the old user experience. Somebody would’ve made. But now you’re more likely to either put that query into chat, GPT, Gemini Perplexity or Claude, something like that, and get some structured response on how to actually learn this tool or this, the skillset. Or you might put it in a Google and see the AI mode or the AI overview and not click through to a website. I still see the role of the human expert is essentially that we are still human and so we wanna connect with other humans. And so we only go so deep with where the AI response will take us. And the way you can create value in this space is to have contrast. So have an [00:05:00] opinion, take a corner, have an opinion about, what’s happening in your space, share something unique. Tell stories that are like basically founded in real world experience so that your content on your website is different from all of the AI generated response that’s just average out there. And that you, as an expert really shines through because at the end of the day. There is a trust issue with ai and when you’re gonna invest time in learning, you wanna know who you’re learning from and that they’re a genuine expert. And I personally think a lot of user behavior will basically touch on the high level of Hey, it’s nice to get a structured response about how to learn SEO but at the end of the day, if you’re really gonna dig in and get hands on you’re likely gonna benefit from learning from a human and not from the ai. Chris Badgett: Question. And first I just wanna say I got a ton of value out of working with you and your team at Pathfinder. On leveling up our SEO game, even though we’d been at it for a long time. But just to give a real specific example we wanna rank at lifter LMS for the best WordPress LMS plugins and. We had an article on that, it was like rank 23. Now we’re regularly at one or two. Awesome. I give Pathfinder a lot of credit from working with you guys on like really going deep on SEO and throwing every tactic in the book at that. And it worked and it sticks. It’s not like it’s moving. It stays there and we are constantly refreshing it. Awesome. But to get to my beginner question, I think it sometimes when I saw AI come on. I’m like, wow, that’s great. We’ve been in the space for over a decade. So the AI and the language model already knows a lot about us and I’m really glad we’re not new is the thought I have. So what would you say to somebody who’s new in a competitive space to get. At least into that AI [00:07:00] conversation as a source or a personality or whatever, because if you’re not established, that seems even harder than it’s ever been.  Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, definitely. So a couple of tips there. The first one is go very specific. It’s really hard to rank for something general, right? Take your expertise and create a piece of content and rank for the big keywords. But one of the things that’s shifting here is people are putting a lot of information in their queries in more detail. They’re putting like the who, how they’re trying to get from point A to point B, what those points might be. All sorts of different scenarios are shifting in how we search online. And so when you start to think about the kind of content you create, instead of playing in the like general competitive keyword space. If you go hyper-specific, you’re gonna find the right audience and likely get more visibility more quickly. And so this is that concept that’s been around in SEO forever, which is that concept of the long tail of SEO, that you don’t just go for like the mothership. Two word, [00:08:00] keyword phrase that everybody else is optimizing towards and has thousands or millions of searches a month. But rather you create more specifically shaped pieces of content and that goes further faster. And so you see a shift in people’s content marketing, for example, away from the definitive guide to whatever the subject is into really specific pieces. And so that’d be my biggest tip is invest in content marketing that really showcases a specific topic. Then layers in who it’s for because that’s what Google is getting better and the rest of the search engines. And really AI is getting better at connecting those dots between the individual behind the search. So that’s the first piece of the puzzle. The other piece of the puzzle is when you’re new you also need to go out and think about how do I build a little like authority and trust out there in this space? And that’s one of the things that established brands get to rely and relax a little bit on is having a domain. And a brand that has a lot of [00:09:00] mentions and backlinks and things like that to it. When you’re just getting started, you don’t have those things. But you can go out and find the low hanging fruit. And so what I mean by that is if you’re just getting started, consider creating a Google Maps listing, even if you don’t consider yourself a local business. And the reason is because it’s a place where you can get some reviews online and it really is training up the AI quite a bit. Reviews on anything go a long ways. So showcasing reviews on your own website, getting them on Google Maps anywhere you can get a review is helpful. One of the things you’ll notice in a lot of the AI generated responses is things when they start to actually talk about businesses in a space is that there’s, they put in like reviewers or people often say things like that, so they are able to very quickly process all of the reviews out there about, say, lifter, LMS. And smush them into a, one to two sentence phrase. That’s a synopsis. And then if there’s a list of like best, whatever [00:10:00] plugins in this space, et cetera, then they’re gonna be able to do the same for your competitors. So just starting out right out of the gate and going and trying to pick up a couple of reviews, whether it’s Google Maps, Facebook reviews, directly reviews you put on your own website that’ll build a little credibility. Then trying to get those back links which is one of the ways you can do it, is just sharing your expertise. So if you invest in writing a blog post on a topic, try to get out there and be a guest on somebody else’s podcast, for instance. Try to get out there and share your knowledge and your experience and do that on as a webinar guest, a podcast guest. All of the, those things go a long ways in building a little bit of brand recognition and authority. Chris Badgett: It seems like for both AI and SEO or just the search engine results pages, there’s a lot more emphasis on things like Reddit conversations. Yeah. Why is that? It’s Google’s [00:11:00] prioritizing, like real people having a discussion, not some listicle about the best, whatever.  Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, the Reddit thing has been surprising to me as somebody that like doesn’t tend to go to a lot of forums for answers and things like that, and I thought it was a fad and that Google would play around with it and then back off. And we’ve seen that before, but it does not appear to be a fad. Reddit really does appear to be, it gets strong placement and visibility on Google in and of itself. So being there and it’s training up the AI and and it’s seemingly not going anywhere. Yeah, I don’t know. Or maybe it’s because like you said, it’s real people and and now it can really take all of the information about a topic or a brand or whatever, all of the conversation on Reddit and create a structured sort of understanding of that. And yeah, Reddit’s kind of crushing it right now in the SEO world, and it’s in a lot of those kind of best of queries, et cetera.  Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about AI for content creation. For SEO as, [00:12:00]yeah when I’ve tried, I’ve. I tried to write a whole article with AI and I’m like, it’s just not there. But for research or like building on what I already have, it’s great. Yeah. But and also related to this, do you get penalized if you just publish some AI generated content that’s totally AI generated?  Lindsay Halsey: Good question. So the first you do not get penalized by publishing AI generated content. There’s not like a flag that says, created by ai, don’t show in the search results. Or even worse penalize the brand for it. Instead it’s just that AI generated content doesn’t really add new value. It doesn’t have contrast, doesn’t feel as powered by genuine experience and authority, so it’s unlikely to perform well. So I really think about basically this human centered approach to content ma marketing that’s AI supported. Yes, I think AI tools are amazing. I haven’t published a blog post in the last year without relying on some component of ai. To help me create the content, refine the content, et cetera. That being said there’s always a human involved and so I find that sometimes it creates a better final product. In the ai it takes our weaknesses and can fill in some gaps depending on how you’re using it. It also speeds the process up, but and that content is doing, we’ve done some experiments, like fully human powered content, didn’t touch ai, fully AI powered content in that sort of middle ground that human centered AI supported and we’re not finding that the totally AI created content doesn’t do anything. We’re doing just as well in our performance, in our rankings and making it quicker when we go with that kind of combo approach versus when we just go a hundred percent human powered with no ai, if that makes sense. So you gotta figure out kind of the workflow that works well for you. I think the research piece or just creating structure and a frame can be really helpful sometimes. We are so close to our love our area of expertise. One of the [00:14:00] things we struggle with is seeing the big picture and teaching it, whether it’s in a blog post, a YouTube video, or behind a course paywall or wherever the teaching is. Sometimes, like we’re so zoomed in and narrowed in, we skip the beginning or we miss a step or something like that. And I personally find AI to be really helpful for, Hey, here’s this topic I’m thinking about writing about. Here’s who I’m trying to reach with it. Help me create an outline, et cetera. And then I’ll do some writing, and then I’ll have it reshape it. I’ve used it in so many different ways to help support support our content marketing. Chris Badgett: One of the challenges of LMS websites is there’s a lot of content that’s not visible to the search engine,  Lindsay Halsey: right?  Chris Badgett: So what, because it’s behind the login and that kind of thing. What? Should a, how should a course creator structure their website today to, with SEO and AI discoverability in mind? Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, that’s a tricky one. And that is to say you need to give away some of that expertise and content [00:15:00] for free not being behind a paywall so that you are part of the conversation, whether it is the conversation on Google or chat, GPT, et cetera. You wanna contribute to training the AI in your subject matter, and you wanna get known as an authority in that space. And and so to do that, you have to strategically decide what content, is free and on the blog, and what content is paid and behind a paywall. And there’s no one solution to that in my mind’s eye. But one of the biggest things I like to do is think about if I do give this content away for free, right? Like it’s on a blog post and it starts to get traction. What’s the bridge between getting them, if you’re selling a course or a membership or whatever the purchase now is, what’s the little intermediate step? That’s more of a call to action in the middle, where I’m gonna also get a little something in return. So a lot of times if I publish a blog post that’s educational, et cetera, I’ll embed a YouTube video in it. Like I’ll really try to make it great, right? Add value, share, teach, et [00:16:00] cetera. But then the in content CTA won’t just be the buy the thing, buy the course, or buy the membership. It’ll be the next step in something for free where it can still trade that email address and trade for a download or an email series or whatever it is tied to the topic at hand. So if I’m gonna give something away in the blog post, I wanna make sure that my conversion rate on that blog post to picking up an email address is somewhere in the 5% range. I find if I tie the call to action directly to the topic at hand, so it’s like the next thing you would want on this, and I’m willing to give away just like one ounce more for free then I get a lot of value out of that. And if I just stick a call to action on their sign up for a newsletter, it gets less than a 1% conversion rate. And then you start to say was creating that traffic and giving it away that content away for free worthwhile. It’s harder to measure.  Chris Badgett: I learned this from you all that like original research [00:17:00]is really valuable. Lindsay Halsey: Really valuable.  Chris Badgett: What are, expand on that, let’s say we’re we have a subject matter expertise in X, Y, z. How do we do that original research or publish it in a way that it’s beneficial to AI and SEO?  Lindsay Halsey: Yeah. So that’s always been something that’s been beneficial to SEO. ’cause one it shows your expertise, right? You did original research and you’re publishing it, in a scientific type format, in a blog post, sharing that research it gets quoted, it gets linked to more often. Other people might come back and look at that original research and then wanna link to it. So it does a lot of high value work. In this era, it’s even more valuable because it is that original type research that the AI would like to be trained on and then is more likely to cite you, et cetera. And to showcase your expertise. Anywhere where you can publish that original research it’s tricky. Like in the field of SEO it’s really hard. Most of the kind of big original research is [00:18:00] coming out of big SEO software companies that have access to massive amounts of data, et cetera. So you have to think about like where is your place? But that being said, even if you can’t get like original research in your space, one of the things you may be able to do is genuine storytelling, et cetera. And so weaving that in is something that I know we did in our, some of our blog posts last year, and it really made a big difference. Basically taking the whole intro and starting with a story in the first person and making it relatable and talking about something that happened. And so it’s not research like a comp, compilation of lots of data, but it’s this like singular point in time. And that’s helped our content resonate more with sort of Google’s helpful content algorithms that are really looking at that sort of expertise, authority, and trust behind a post. Chris Badgett: Related to research is doing like charts and graphs and tables and gifs and all that stuff like, [00:19:00] like visualizing data. And that’s so easy to do now and even in Canva you can, it’s give it some numbers and it gives you a nice looking. Chart branded to your brand.  Lindsay Halsey: Exactly. And so you can put that together with so much more ease now. And that also makes it easier to create downloads and things like that where somebody might be willing to like, Hey, I read through it, but download the. The paper version or the PDF version and you’re going to email it to a colleague or something like that. So it is a lot easier to create that high value and to just push yourself to take your content a little further. And so one thing I. Often think about that I think really applies to the folks listening to this podcast is that a lot of times we take our expertise, right? And you go and you create something with it, like a course or training module or whatever it might be, but you have an area of expertise and you create this thing and then you’re like, okay, the next thing I’m gonna do is a blog post. And then what we tend to do if you’re anything like me, is like move to the next topic, right? You’re like, I did the [00:20:00] blog posts, I did the thing, right? That was the marketing piece and the creation of whatever, the training material that was like the sales piece or the product piece. But really I try to make myself. Fit in that space for a lot longer than I ever wanted to. So a while back, Google Analytics launched GA four, right? And it was a topic I really didn’t wanna be an expert in, but became one. And I just decided to sit in that space for three months. And that meant I wrote a blog post. I created a YouTube video. I created social posts. We added paid social behind the paid social posts. I reached out to six. Podcast, webinars, things beyond like our brand. And I was a guest on them talking about GA four, what’s changing, how to handle it. Then I self-hosted a couple of webinars. By the time those three months were over, I was totally exhausted. But the value is that I built up a cloud of expertise and authority in that space that Google could pick up on it. So all the content I created and that’s. Space was performing really [00:21:00] well at the time because I was doing all these other things. And so that’s one area that I think once you decide, hey, this is something I’m gonna, be an expert, this is like a little facet of my expertise that I’m gonna go down a rabbit hole in, make yourself stay in that for a little bit longer so that you really exhaust like all avenues. And to me, that’s. It’s not just SEO, but it is all of those actions were things that helped us build domain authority, trust all these other signals that then help our other content, and it’s the snowball effect, if that makes sense. Chris Badgett: I didn’t entirely get off the content treadmill, but I started going back and instead of doing a new post, make an old one better.  Lindsay Halsey: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: Like the really important pillar posts like. Coming back to him week after week, and that’s how. Really able to move up to top ranking. It wasn’t about like continually pumping out new content. Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, exactly. So a content revision with something new, like an infographic or [00:22:00] some kind of new visual. And one of the, other areas of SEO that we know that Google’s looking at is when you do win the click and traffic comes to your website from Google, Google is looking to signals around things like engagement. Rate engagement time. If people are like hitting the buy now button, going to other web pages, etc. They’re looking at that user experience because what Google wants to see is oh, this is, this query led to this click, and then they had a really great experience over here that has a positive reflection on Google. So that those are dwell signals in like SEO terms. And so when you take an existing blog post and you add a YouTube and embed video in it, or you add a cool image or you update the intro so it’s a little catchier, or you add some kind of a call to action that maps to the topic, any of those things is gonna be a rising tide because it’s gonna lead to a little bit better. Like incrementally better user experience, which then trains up Google’s algorithms and its machine learning to send more [00:23:00] traffic your way. And that was one of the things that we’ve really seen over the last year or two is like a certain number of posts are just taking off because they get that self-fulfilling prophecy. Whereas other posts that we think are really great, totally fall flat. And I look at it a little bit like baseball, even the best hitters train a ton and they think they are gonna get to the plate and they’re gonna be able to hit a home run. When it comes to content marketing, you just have to keep your at bats going and know that you’re gonna hit a couple of singles and a couple of doubles, and then a home run from time to time. And it’s even for experts, it can be a little hard to predict which ones are really gonna go the farthest, but it’s all about getting back up to the plate and getting a new piece of content or trying again, revising something, et cetera.  Chris Badgett: Question if you do a major rewrite or revision first, is it okay to change the publish date to today. Or should you not do that or does that even matter? Lindsay Halsey: I do change it, [00:24:00] and recency really does matter in SEO and all of the AI getting found in ai. So yeah, recency matters. I do change the published state as long as I actually add new value to the post. If I fix a typo, that doesn’t count. Chris Badgett: This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding [00:25:00] users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Popup Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. Related to that, like it I see a lot of people, and I’m guilting myself of doing this, if you have a best of X, Y, Z in 2023, but it’s [00:26:00] 2025 now if all you’re gonna do is just change the date, it’s, that, does that help or not really? Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, so those posts can be really at least they were really hard to write. Like I remember years ago writing best SEO plugins for WordPress and like how much time and resource our team put into we already used all the plugins, but figuring out who had what feature, what price point, all this stuff, like creating charts and diagrams, it was a massive amount of work. To create a post like that. And so then, yeah, before you know it, 2023 becomes 2025 in this case, and it is okay to put the new publish date. I think as a end user, I wouldn’t respond very well to the best whatever of 2025 and then see a 2023 publish date. I’d probably hit the back button and be like, that doesn’t align. There’s just a quick like cork in the system. But in terms of refining that content, it’d be a great thing to be able to just drop in the chat GPT and say, here’s this post I wrote, like on the best of what should I consider updating what’s out [00:27:00] of date, et cetera. And and go through some prompts to try to help you modernize the content enough so that you feel good about putting the new date stamp on. Chris Badgett: Same question I get. And I’m sure a lot of people get like all these emails requesting back links that aren’t very good besides creating great content and being a guest on somebody else’s platforms. Is there any other way to think about getting back links that if you want to put some effort into it and just come off well in your efforts? Lindsay Halsey: Good question. So yeah, you still like SEO in some ways has evolved a lot and hasn’t evolved at all in other ways, right? So there’s still people sending you these random emails. Will you link to me da, hit delete on all of those. There’s still people trying to sell you link building at scale, et cetera. Or even link building, not at scale, right? So paid link placement. You can go and buy a backlink in like blogger outreach [00:28:00] and things like that. But at the end of the day, what I always like to do back is take a step back from my overall like online presence and think about my real world. Like how your business does business, right? Who do you do business with? Not necessarily who are your customers? ’cause it’s pretty unusual for customers to link back to your website. But more like who are your partners in an ecosystem, et cetera. So as an example, if you were an interior designer, you would probably get referrals from other architects, general contractors, et cetera, and you would probably also refer business to them, right? You work in an ecosystem and there’s all these adjacent people that anyone who’s building a house needs more than just an interior designer. They probably have five to 10 other professionals like working in their ecosystem space. So most interior designers have all these relationships in the real world, but almost none of them are actually modeling that for Google, right? So if I were to chat with you over coffee, you could tell me about all [00:29:00]these pals and people that you do business with and refer. But if I looked on your website and if I looked on their websites, I’d never know that there was any kind of real world integration. And so in the spaces that we’re all in, we can think of those types of counterparts, like who’s in your ecosystem. And you don’t always have to do a webinar or a podcast, which takes a lot of time and effort to be able to leverage those relationships in a positive way. So it still works to have get links from people in more static ways. If you have a, our partners page and they have an our partners page, you might link to those types of things. You can also give a testimonial away, right? So we have a web, like an agency that helps us with our marketing and our web design. We could give that agency a testimonial of what it’s been like to be a client of theirs and they could put that on their website and then link back from where it says my name to my website, right? So I can do smaller ways of showing like the ways that we do business. You could do something like that for your accountant or a tax advisor like [00:30:00]anybody where you have like real world professional relationship. You can go out and come up with creative ways to show Google and model for Google what’s going on there. Other businesses, like a really generous, or maybe you’re on a board of director you could be generous in your community by supporting nonprofits. You could be a board on a member of a board of directors, et cetera, like related or not related to your business, but part of you who you are, right? So things that we do beyond it. I know my business partner, she’s on the board of the skating club for her daughter. So she has a little bio on the Skating Club website and somewhere in the bio it mentions our businesses and it links to them, right? That’s pretty low hanging fruit. You’re just already doing those things. But sometimes you just need a little bit of follow up to go pick up those links. So there’s not one way to build a backlink network. And I think the biggest way to be successful is to weave it into your real world marketing. So it’s not something you do because I’m sitting down to do link building. It’s something I do. Cause I’m thinking about marketing and partnerships. And trying to add value on the internet and and all of these ways and showcase partners, et cetera,  Chris Badgett: related to authority. I feel like the author page, like on a WordPress site. Or a social media bio or the about page on a business website. Like what can we do just to best practice, explain who we are, what we do, what our expertise is, because that stuff really matters. I think  Lindsay Halsey: it matters a ton. It’s actually one of the things I’m working on our own website right now is like making sure the who shines through behind your content. I think a lot of times as marketers, our initial inclination is I’m building a business website, so I need to look like a business, right? And so you almost take the human out of it. Now you wanna be putting the human back into everything, right? So if you have a blog post, under the blog post, it should have the publish date. Who the author was. And then that little like part where it says your name, it should link to your authorship page. And ideally you have a great authorship page. That could be you talking in the first person, hi, I am so and and then there could be a section there like also seen as, or here’s some blog posts I’ve written. So we invest a lot of time into creating both the individuals. Then also the about page could be depending on how your team is structured. Could be more about the business, but it could also just be about you. If you are a one person business then you need one killer page all about you, which always feels a little uncomfortable, but once you start putting it together, it’s not so bad. And if you have a team, then you wanna try to create something similar for each team member and really make sure you’re connecting the dots and showcasing the humans behind the business.  Chris Badgett: How does social media impact SEO and ai discoverability?  Lindsay Halsey: Good question. In general, I’ve always said social media has overlap. But not nearly as powerful as like backlinks or Google Maps, reviews, etc. Because a lot of that is behind a paywall and Google struggles to get trained up on all of those social conversations. Social has so much paid space right now too it’s just, it’s very complicated. The search engines never really wove social very well into its algorithm directly. So that’s still the case. Like social still only plays some overlap, but I think now we’re in this like massive period of change in evolution and technology has gotten obviously so much smarter and so I think we’re gonna see a little bit more change there. I think of social as standing on its own two legs. It’s its own marketing channel, but it helps me with SEO. Because if you put, say a social post out about a blog post you wrote and then it gets picked up and seen by your colleagues, your friends, the people that follow your business. It gets more likely to then pick up a back link because someone’s oh, you remember I saw like Chris wrote this cool thing on this topic, and then I remember it and I drop it in a blog post, or I drop it in an email. I send like news from the web and things like that. So yeah, social is weaving in more and more. I haven’t spent a lot of time studying how well AI like chat, GPT itself is able to like pull from the social sphere. But right now there’s a big push for making sure your website content is training up the AI as effectively as possible. And that rests a little more on things like technical SEO. And there’s a new-ish file called an L-L-M-S-T-X-T, which is a file that gives directions on how to crawl the website and index it for a learning language models. So there are so many parallels right now between getting found and included in conversations on Google and then chat GPT Gemini Perplexity. It’s not really like a comparison of are you gonna invest in SEO or invest in some of these emerging marketing? Areas, but more of a convergence that the fundamentals work across the board [00:35:00] Chris Badgett: related to the lls dot txt file. Yeah. Some of the SEO plugins now just create this for you. I’ve I’ve looked at it and what I realize is it’s pretty good and it’s probably my own fault for having an old site and what it’s pulling from. It’s, I, it’s not the best. So I realize I need to create my own LLMs txt file, but use that structure.  Lindsay Halsey: Yep.  Chris Badgett: But related to that you’ve got that TXT file let’s say at the end of a blog post, you put FAQ questions that either Google instant answers or AI mode. I forget what overview mode or whatever. Like how’s it, how. How exact does it, does the keyword phrase have to match? And is the AI just gonna spit out exactly what you said or is it gonna modify it or quote it? Or how do we think about that? Because it, you can get lost in the details of the wording and.  Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, you really can. You can go. So at the end of the day, I [00:36:00] think whether you’re thinking about the AI or thinking about Google, you really should be thinking about the end user, right? So if you add an FAQ, you should be thinking about like, how do I resonate with the actual human audience that is reading this content? And then when you do that, you will. As a default, be playing well into these like marketing channels you’re caring about and getting found in those places. And so that being said, sometimes we get too comfortable and we don’t say who the audience is or put the keyword in, et cetera. So I do sometimes like just look at my content through both lenses. Like on the one hand I can overdo it and shove keywords everywhere, and then it doesn’t read well, it screams SEO, or and answer engine optimization now and things like that. And on the other side of it, I can give like no context, right? So you can’t even tell like a business I am. And so that also doesn’t work. So you wanna make sure, if you add an F, A Q, you don’t have to overdo the questions like crazy, who do you think the best, WordPress, like plug, you don’t have to go crazy, but [00:37:00] you do wanna make sure there’s context behind, your FAQ questions, your headers and things like that. So that if you were to take I like a tool called Detailed. It’s like a Chrome extension and you can play around with it where you can just look at like the headers on your page and you don’t see the content behind it. So you see the outline, and I should be able to get like the concept of your entire webpage from that outline. Meaning I should know who you are, what you do. Like I, I should get the meet, whether it’s a blog post or whatever the topic is of the page. That’s for me, a gut check of if I can’t get the meat of the topic, I probably didn’t use those keywords enough in those pertinent places. And if I just see the keyword weaving down the whole list of all the headers, then I probably overdid it. Right.  Chris Badgett: That’s cool. Speaking of headers, I feel like this is something that writers for SEO learn gradually in terms of heading structure. So yeah. What’s, this also gets [00:38:00] into the word count question. If, how long does a post need to be, but also like H twos and h threes and all this stuff, like what’s a good average if we’re gonna do an authoritative piece about something what would an example post look like? Lindsay Halsey: Yeah. So even though it’s a little bit like still old school SEO to think in terms of word count, I still do when I create content on my site, on client sites, et cetera, and I typically in this kind of era, am aiming around a thousand words. And I know that I’ve picked a topic that is specific enough when I can cover it in a thousand words. So if I need way more words to cover the topic than a thousand, then I probably pick something too much like a definitive guide. And it’s gonna come out being too generic, right? And not go deep enough into that subject matter expertise. And if I can’t write about a thousand words about it, I probably went too specific or I glossed over something, et cetera. So that somewhere 800 to 1200 words thousand-ish words [00:39:00] tends to, in my minds, I be like a good amount of content. Then within that you’ve gotta break it up. ’cause a thousand words is still a lot for people to read. And so you wanna break it up into sections with headers. And it depends on what the format of the post is. If it’s five best whatever you’ll probably have a header above, the list. And then each item in the list will be like an H three. So the title of your post is the H one, some title or header above the list. And then you’re gonna hit on h threes down below it. But again, you see all sorts of exceptions. You wanna keep the structure, but if you decide to use h fours instead of h threes, ’cause it looks a little bit better on the, in the blog post formatting, it’s probably not gonna be a, the deal breaker. Like it’ll still have its form. It’ll just violate some smaller SEO principles.  Chris Badgett: Our SEO checklist is probably about 50 items long. Is there anything we can stop doing in SEO or, oh,  Lindsay Halsey: good [00:40:00] question.  Chris Badgett: Or long, it’s not as relevant as it used to be thing.  Lindsay Halsey: Good question. Without looking at the checklist it’s hard for me to like necessarily answer what’s less relevant? I’d say one area people debate about how important it is customizing the page title and meta description. Because Google so often creates its own text there, I’m still like a big fan of customizing it. ’cause it’s just to put your best foot forward and market the page how you would wanna market it by customizing those fields knowing that Google may choose to do its own thing. So that’s one area where some people I think are putting less emphasis. But I still I still like to have that sort of. Control knowing I have no control with what they do. I’m trying to think of some other ones. Alt text I would say is more important. Web accessibility and good image naming, et cetera. I would add like extra time and attention to, I still see a lot of people just skip over things related to images, whether it’s file name, the alternative [00:41:00] text, the file size, et cetera. Yeah, those are the big ones that people tend to either skip or kind of debate. Its fa their value.  Chris Badgett: Is there any SEO AI tools that you recommend? For example, sometimes I get frustrated with chat GBT when I’m like, Hey, here’s the whole article. I need a meta description. This is the phrase I’m targeting. These are, this is the content brief, this is everything, and it still gives me something that’s way too long and generic and doesn’t fit in the box.  Lindsay Halsey: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong or or if there’s other tools that are just more A or SEO friendly for it for.  Lindsay Halsey: So I think there, there are so many tools out there right now. You could just do nothing but play with these ai, SEO overlapping tools, et cetera. And so I like to keep things pretty simple. So I find myself using chat g PT the most, but then relying on the built-in AI functionality of things I already use [00:42:00] in a WordPress site for an example. So Yost with the premium version, you get some AI based. Tooling right directly in there. And so I, I personally am a fan of if you’re writing a page title in meta description and you’re like copying and pasting and then not really liking the output from the ai, you can turn to you can turn to the AI built into WordPress in that plugin. And rely on it. And it is accelerating things like, there are plugins that can help you generate that alternative text on images and help you keep that up to date, et cetera. So there are a lot of tools, I think in the words press space that have been really helpful in terms of, and then you don’t have to go and pay for some other third party SEO, powered or AI powered SEO tool. Yeah that’s what’s been working best for me. Chris Badgett: Niche, SEO question. I see some people and myself included sometimes struggle with keyword research in the sense of okay, now we have all these [00:43:00] keywords and we have these clusters of keywords around this keyword and all this stuff. What’s, how do you think about keywords these days?  Lindsay Halsey: So I think about keywords every time in the same way and use the same framework when I’m getting started. And it’s the customer acquisition funnel. So I think about basically this funnel where at the bottom I have the conversion, right? So it’s people generally speaking for like searching for keywords that are your brand name, your name, et cetera. So that’s at the bottom of the funnel. And then in the middle of the funnel, you’re talking about the consideration phase. Those are like those best of right, or just they’re looking for your product. They’re looking for your offering. They’re looking for course, could be in their keyword search or something like that, right? So they’re in like a, in a shopping state of mind, but they’re looking for the thing that you sell. That’s the middle of the funnel that usually maps on a website to pages or collection pages, [00:44:00] taxonomy pages, things that are like at, in your main navigation. And then at the top of your funnel you have the awareness building and that’s where you’re like thinking about how do I get out there and share that expertise? Or how do I get out there and get in front of somebody? One or two steps before they’re ready for the thing I do. So if you were that interior designer and you wrote a blog post of like best architects in your city, that would be an example of reaching that upper funnel because you’re getting in front of the right audience. Just like they’re not quite ready for what you do, but they will be in a little bit. So you’re building brand awareness. So whenever I do keyword research, I think in this like real world model. And then I think about where am I today and what’s realistic? So I don’t have to go and do a ton of research for my upper funnel, like audience building campaign. If I’m just building my first website and getting started, I should just start with the bottom of the funnel and showing up for my own name, my brand, et cetera. And then start to build from there. On the other hand. If you play in a really [00:45:00] competitive space, you might just put your best foot forward in that middle section of the funnel. But realistically, it might be like, lifter does well in the best queries and has a lot of trust and authority and reviews and has put a lot of effort in if you were just entering that space. There’s not reason really to play very aggressively there. You should probably just skip to the upper funnel. So when it comes to keyword research, I instantly start to think about like how my keywords map into these different parts of the funnel, and then just instantly start thinking along the lines of what’s realistic? And if I were to spend one hour doing something, in which section of the funnel would I have the most impact right now? And that helps me from. Getting overly exhausted with an endless amount of keyword research. The other thing is that you can turn to tools like chat GPT to help you with your keyword research and like export data from the Google search console and help it organize the keywords into a funnel. Pull data from multiple data sources like search console. And if you have like rank tracking software, we use win for example. You can like. Have it do some of this organization and thought process for you which has been a nice accelerator too.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Lindsay, this is like a masterclass in SEO and ai. One quick question, is there the, what is the proper. SEO for ai. Does that have an acronym yet?  Lindsay Halsey: Yeah we just actually published a blog post. ’cause people are starting to do search queries, like SEO versus yeah, we think it’s like SEO and ’cause it’s like all getting pushed under one umbrella. But you’re gonna, you’re gonna see the phrase generative engine optimization, so GEO and then you also see answer engine optimization. It starts to get a lot of acronyms. Like most of the people I talk to, like just keeping PPC from SEO separate. And so the good news is though, again, there’s this convergence, the fundamentals of what you work on in like a holistic SEO. Project are the same things as investing in those other in those other kind of initiatives. There’s just like little extras like the L-L-M-S-T-X-T, et cetera. Yeah. But some of those things don’t really matter till you’re a little bit further down the line anyways. Like lifter is where you have a lot of content, you have a lot of training material out there. And so yeah, just starting with the fundamentals and making sure you have a solid base is really the name of the game. Whether it’s S-E-O-G-E-O or a EO yeah, I’m gonna, I’m gonna be getting it mixed up myself. And so I try not to use any of those, like when I’m in kind of agency mode talking to clients. We talk about getting found on Google, getting found on chat, GPT, things that we can all relate to.  Chris Badgett: Tell us about Pathfinder. If someone wants to go deeper with SEO what do you offer at Pathfinder?  Lindsay Halsey: We call it a guided approach to SEO. And within our guided approach, we have community coaching and [00:48:00] courses all designed to help you take a step-by-step approach that’s backed with with coaching and accountability. So you can come to group office hours as one of our members get your questions answered, get feedback on your work. You can go through our checklists and in our courses to take a step by step approach that’ll help you get from point A to point B. There are discussion threads in there and and a whole lot more. We have a 14 day free trial if you wanna check it out with kind of no risk. And and learn a little bit more about SEO, but more importantly, learn while doing. And that’s a lot of what we try to help people do is. A lot of people will go invest like 10 hours trying to learn SEO, but not do anything that moves the needle forward. We wanna change that around where if you do invest 10 hours in SEO, like an hour is the learning and nine hours is the doing so that you actually see a result. Chris Badgett: Results working with Pathfinder is we had actual hosts we were working on and [00:49:00] getting, feedback and doing training, like looking at a specific project is, it’s a, it’s applied, it’s project-based learning that makes a lot of sense.  Lindsay Halsey: Yeah, it’s a lot more fun. And then there’s a community and and so that’s always just nice to be around others, trying to do the same thing you are and realize it doesn’t have to be confusing, overwhelming, time consuming, expensive that SEO really is real world marketing and and there’s a lot of value in the short and long run when you get going with it. Chris Badgett: This has been great Lindsay. Thank you so much. Go check out pathfinder seo.com. Is there anywhere else people can connect with you or find out more?  Lindsay Halsey: I’m also on some social channels like Facebook and Instagram but yes, our website is the best place and you can always shoot me an email if you have any questions, Lindsay, at Pathfinder seo and and that’s my quickest response. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you Lindsay. We really appreciate it.  Lindsay Halsey: Thanks so much, Chris. Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that [00:50:00] 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. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post AI SEO For WordPress LMS Websites With Lindsay Halsey From Pathfinder SEO appeared first on LMScast.