Choosing Between Flexibility and Convenience in Online Teaching Solutions

In this LMScast, Chris and Jason talk about how LMS technology has advanced and how LifterLMS revolutionized online learning by fusing course administration and content production in a seamless manner. In the past, educators had to produce structured material using independent e-learning authoring tools, which they then had to export and import into an LMS.

The platform’s inception may be traced back to their agency work, when they observed a notable requirement from customers who required a single solution to handle marketing automation and course management and delivery. Because of this necessity, they created LifterLMS, a system that not only makes creating courses easier but also changes to meet the changing demands of education entrepreneurs.

They also go over the more general trend of technology bundling and unbundling, in which software solutions either specialize in certain tasks or combine several functionalities onto a single platform.

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Episode Transcript

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

Welcome back to the Education Entrepreneur Mentor Series. Where we go over the five critical hats that you need to wear or find skills within your team members to become a successful education entrepreneur teaching online. Those five hats are becoming the expert, the entrepreneur, the teacher, the technologist, and the community builder.

Today in my conversation with my business partner at LifterLMS, Jason Coleman, we’re going to get into Becoming the technologist. Enjoy this session.

So now we’re going to get into the becoming a technologist and leveraging technology as an education entrepreneur. Let’s start with a conversation around learning management system or LMS technology. The big idea I want to throw out here and how this world has changed with learning management systems. Which technically isn’t a new technology, the internet.

Was created by the United States Defense Department. And then educational institutions started using the internet to share research. So learning and education and research has really been with the internet since the 70s, I believe. But learning management systems sprung up to help people structure content and create learning pathways.

And it’s evolved a lot over the last 40 years where we come into the story is this idea. I actually had a customer at LifterLMS tell me this, who’s been in the e learning space for a long time. He said that, did you know, you don’t have a learning management system, which we call an LMS. He said, you actually have a LCMS and I was like, what is that?

Please educate me about the business. So it’s a learning content management system. So with the old days. What you would do is you would have what was known as a e learning authoring tool. And you would create, your structured content. Your quizzes, and it would at the end be exportable as a package of e learning in a file.

And then you would go look around the world for a learning management system to plug that into. But where we came in with. LifterLMS is we built it on top of an existing content management system. So that the act of creating the content was already baked into the software of the learning management system.

So it took two industries and combined them into one. Which makes our lives easier as technology integrates and becomes a super app of online education. You don’t need as many separate solutions to deliver the end product from idea to. The cool thing about technology, just like with the iPhone, a thousand songs in your pocket. You’ve just simplified a user experience into a more efficiently packaged, better design solution.

So the wild thing about technology is that. You can today there’s been basically over the recent history of technology, a lot of bundling and integration. But also unbundling. If you look at something like marketing software, there’s like these all in one solutions. And then there’s these points solutions like, Oh, this software.

Just does lead capture this software just does this other little piece of a technology stack that you need. So with Lifter LMS as an example at the beginning I was fascinated with this idea of well. Let’s just make it as all in one as we can let’s make it a platform and that’s really what the course creator the educator the entrepreneur wants is. They don’t really want to think about the details of technology. They just want a platform to, take their idea and just plug it into the platform.

But then with Lifter LMS as an example. We wanted it to be all in one. But we also wanted it to be flexible, extendable, customizable and open source. Yes, it’s an all in one, but it’s also exists within the ecosystem of easy other tools.

Technology that you can plug into it so that you can use the tools you’re already using.

So the way this all started back in 2013 as we were building the first version of LifterLMS is. We actually had an agency where we were serving clients and the kind of early days of the online course. The coaching business community at this time, a lot of our agency clients were using a marketing automation software called infusion soft.

And that did a lot of marketing automation stuff, but they actually needed the digital product. They needed a way to deliver the courses, have progress tracking and all that. So we, provided, we kept building actually with open source software, which Infusionsoft wasn’t, but everything else they needed with WordPress.

We kept building these custom early types of learning management systems. And our clients needed it so bad that we’re like, we just need to build a product that meets this need for all of these people to have an integrated learning management system that also included all the tooling you would ever need to create the content as well, all in one place that was both affordable, customizable, and, integrates with tools and technology that people also want to use.

Jason Coleman: Lister LMS is. an awesome platform. Obviously, I think that this one I got involved, I think it strikes that balance of all in one and flexible. It, it hits it in the right spot. It won’t hit it for everybody. I remember being at a conference at the ASAE, the Association of Associations. And it was within reference to the association management software, which is an adjacent type thing.

And but I remember Yeah. Yeah. A few people notice, but one woman in particular is I literally can only, I only want one login and one password and you’re like, Oh, like you still have to have a web host and you’re like, you don’t use it a lot, but you have to log in there once and you still have, or your domain and your email service, like we can automate it, but you still have to log in once it was like our services and one login, but what it is the most important stuff that you work with day to day, That stuff keeps going into the core product and it’s edging.

But if you, it is flexible that you can take out different pieces. If you’re like, I’d rather do email this way, I’d rather do video this way. I’d rather hosted over here. But I don’t know if like how you think about that in terms of where, how do you find the sweet spot or folks, how folks who are thinking about the tools I feel like that when I was like, you’re maybe a little too worried about having logins.

Things like one pass are around now. But yeah, how do you talk people through that? Like thinking about what does all in one really mean?

Chris Badgett: I think about it with if somebody just has an idea and they buy a domain name and a web hosting account. And they want to teach online. If they only had to get one more tool, what would it be?

And but then there’s like these power users, more people who are maybe pretty developed in the technology sector who want all this customizability and flexibility. So there’s this kind of this idea when you create a solution that if you take care of the ends, the middle will take care of your. So if you take care of the person that’s just wants one thing to buy after they get their domain name and their hosting and they’re happy.

And then on the other end, somebody who needs like a developer who has tons of technology and wants to customize the software, it being open source, as long as these two characters are happy we’re the most flexible and good to go.

Jason Coleman: Sometimes folks want the absolute simplest thing. And they’ll go for a fully hosted closed environment.

You can’t take your content with you type place. And it’s hard to tell early on why you need that flexibility. You either have to be creative or like know something. Take our word for it that so often you start out that way. And then when you have traction and success, like there’s going to be something about your, the website or the tool you’re using to host your LMS that you’re going to want to change, tweak, alter.

And if you’re in a closed environment. That may not be the case. And even worse things happen sometimes. I think like medium is like a blogging platform and they changed like their business model. And then all of a sudden you had to think about that with, you can’t have free content on there anymore because they’re trying to make money selling subscriptions and you’re like, wait, I was just using this as a free blogging tool and it’s now it’s not for you anymore.

And that’s like a risky run when you go with a fully hosted service, if they. Think, Oh, we’re going to become like masterclass and only focus on like the top tier celebrities and you’re not there yet. You slowly become less important to them. And, but if you use an open system, like Lifter LMS, on top of WordPress on, general hosting, you have that flexibility of, it’s something, it’s a little more complicated, but if something changes, then you can take your content with you.

Export it and move to something totally different, or more than likely, you can just customize what’s already there, swap in a component that you need.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s there’s this idea of owning versus, versus renting. So on a hosted solution, you’re literally renting space on somebody else’s website.

But when you own it with a tool like Lifter LMS or Pavement Resources Pro, it’s your website, right? That’s a really big difference that people don’t realize they. Perhaps made the wrong decision earlier and they’re like, you know what, I do want to own my website and I want to own my data.

I want more flexibility. I want control over the future and the business decisions made about the software. That’s the power of

Jason Coleman: owning your website. The kind of flip side of using an LMS which has a lot of functionality, we’ve talked about various forms of it you can keep it simple. So I, and I see folks who want to get started and they feel like.

They have to organize it, into modules and courses and lessons and chapters and sections and or they, they need quizzes and assignments and tools and that they don’t have that stuff and they might have something simpler. And I always encourage folks definitely initially go lo fi like you can do something simple.

There’s. A lot of successful courses that made a lot of money and the course is like a single page or post on a website and you just have to pay for access to it, or it’s a single PDFs or like a PowerPoint is really popular. That might be a tool that you’ve already used to like in your, consulting work or like you’re giving a demonstration.

It’s just make that an even better PD PowerPoint or Google docs presentation and sell access that. So I definitely have paid like a hundred dollars for a marketing course. It was literally like a a PowerPoint presentation. That’s an awesome way, like to, you don’t have to use all that technology or a whole platform to get started.

You can sell something simple. And that said, like it’s sometimes it’s a start. So I’ve recommended, a paid memberships pro is a membership platform. And I remember I went to the podcast movement conference cause we had some podcasts as customers and I was talking to those folks and I was like I was thinking of ways of we could, have a premium version of your podcast and pay for the old episodes or the new episodes early or like an extra episode.

I was like, what are you guys trying to do? Let’s make a membership site. And like 99 percent of folks were like, it’s going to be a free podcast and I’m going to monetize through courses. I was like, Oh, so it was like the first time I was like, let’s do courses. And they’re like, how do you do it? And I gave them the spiel of you could be simple, right?

Your course could be a PowerPoint. And and I stayed there for a while, like as a business, like facilitating that and people would integrate paymericious pro with Lifter LMS and other LMS tools. That’s like part of the beauty of an open platform for WordPress. You can even take two platforms and make them work together and use the best parts.

But when I started publishing my own courses in that way, that started out as simple. Like pretty much single posts organized into sections. I realized, Oh, here’s the value of the LMS. I didn’t know if people were finishing the course I wanted to use some of those courses for like certification to make sure. Like I was training development partners to make sure they knew how to use our tool can help our customers.

I probably would want to write a quiz to force them. To both prove that they read the content and then also prove that they understood the content. And like piece by piece, I’m I started learning cause I got into it like, Oh yeah, all these things make sense. This is why we need video as well.

Like it should be multimodal and that kind of thing.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Keeping it simple is it’s a great place to start. Like I see a lot of folks these days, like pre selling a course that doesn’t exist. They create a Google document, like this is what’s going to be in the program. They’re making sure they get people and, but I think it’s important to, I’m a big fan of that.

Super simple, super manual. Hey, here’s my PayPal email address, send us much money if you want access. It starts in a month but also think about your iterative cycle. All right, first I’m just going to deliver it potentially as a live coaching program. All they’re going to get is like a calendar invite to a recurring zoom event for several weeks.

That’s the first version. And then, cool, we’re going to record those videos, and then that’s going to become the first version of the course. The, essentially replays of the coaching session. Then as you go further down the line, I think I’m going to re-shoot those lessons based on all the feedback I’ve gotten from my learners.

Maybe put in some knowledge checks like quizzes. Oh, I think I’m gonna add a certification program So it’s important to think like how far are you willing to go or do you want to go? you always just want to do like a Virtual meeting coaching or do you want to end up with something more robust in the end?

I think about that issue with web hosting a lot It’s great to save money and keep it low tech and get the cheap low cost web hosting But if you really think your thing is going to get traction, at least choose a web host that’s going to be able to scale with you and provide more features without this massive like infrastructure change later.

Let’s talk about e commerce. It’s never been easier to sell digital products and programs on the internet to essentially make money online. One of, one of my favorite stories about you, Jason, is you were one of the first, if not the first person to create an e commerce transaction on a WordPress website.

I’m sure it was a lot harder then than it is now. What’s happened, since that time, like 15 years later, is that your website, there’s there’s like a mindset change and kind of a reality changes. Websites used to just be like. A marketing info content. We call this like web 1.

0. They’re just, it’s like a brochure for a business as an example, but you still had to go to this different thing, like the actual business. And then we added web 2. 0, which introduced interaction, like social media, commenting systems, forums, and so on. And then that’s continued to evolve and we’re on the cusp.

Some might argue we’re at web 3. 0, which is the internet of value, which is like a totally kind of new thing. But e commerce has never been easier. You can create digital products and programs and services on your website. Accepting the money and offloading all the details of how somebody, the computer across the world and there’s a credit card and you get paid into your bank account and they get access to content or events or anything is now quite easy once you have a base level.

understanding of technology. And then the software, not only does it simplify like the actual selling process, but also the access. This is the beauty of like membership software and LMS software is the access. Do they get a free trial, do they get a paid trial? And do they get everything?

Does it drip out over time? What if they miss a payment on a recurring plan? Is this a course cohort that’s only for six months? All that are just, is just settings and software now. So if you can think of it, it’s now easily possible with tools like Lifter LMS and PayMemberships Pro. The other thing you can do is sometimes I think people when it comes to e commerce think a little too small in the sense that like you can, this is what made me fall in love with teaching online and what continues to motivate me today is that this idea that you could publish something on your website and then anybody anywhere in the world with an internet connection and a browser basically on a smartphone, computer or tablet.

Can access your content or, and potentially buy stuff from you. But when it comes to e commerce we love Stripe as an example. But PayPal is a way of also exchanging and buying things on the internet is accepted in more countries in the world, and that may change. So you can actually offer people different ways to pay you through your website.

There’s even crypto payment gateways and all kinds of payment gateways that you can use Stripe and PayPal are probably the most popular. So pro tip is if you’re doing the e commerce offer those two, and you might actually make more money, help more people because you’re. Giving people access to, to buy from you based on the country they live in and so on.

And one thing I just want to acknowledge, and I’ve seen this with every digital entrepreneur I know, is that it never gets old seeing a payment notification, however you get that. Like for me, I have a thing in our company Slack, a channel where I see the payments that have come in and I look at it every day.

And, while I was asleep. These people bought the software, this person paid with PayPal, this person paid with Stripe, and it just never gets old. It literally like, when is this going to get old? It’s been over a decade. And my very first one, just to tell the story I created an online gardening and permaculture course with my wife.

And and I started blogging about that too, like how I built the site, which is how I started, starting to form ideas about Lifter LMS. This, cause this was before it existed, but anyways. That first sale, I, published the course, went to sleep, woke up the next morning, somebody in New Zealand named Ron, who I’ve never met, never heard of had purchased the course overnight and here we are, this is like 12 years or 13 years later from.

Waking up and seeing that purchase notification from New Zealand.

Jason Coleman: I remember I used to get text messages every time there was a sale and we were having like five sales a day. It wasn’t that big a deal, but we ran our first really big sale in like 2017 when we digging in the pay mergers pro and we dropped the price and ran a sale.

And I think we had 150 sales that day. So my, my phone was. Buzzing every few minutes. I remember my son was younger at the time and he asked me he’s what is that? And I explained, sometimes I over communicate to the kids when they were younger and I was like, Oh, we had a sale. So he was like 47.

I just got 47 and we were grocery shopping. And then he wanted to get something at checkout and he’s you just got 47. You can afford this. And I was like, Oh, he’s getting lippy with me. And yeah, I turned the thing off my phone cause it’s too annoying. But yeah it’s awesome.

And I think of the person on the other end, it’s like, it’s a whole human being doing something awesome and launching something, building stuff and trusting. Yeah. Yeah. It’s amazing. And you thought about like all around the world. Yeah. So it’s this is related to e commerce. But I want to touch on that point.

To help motivate folks. That the internet is so huge. Like our user base is around the world. And I think of I forget exact statistics, but like every McDonald’s has like serves 20, 000 people or maybe it’s 40, 000 people in the United States. And you can think of like the McDonald’s and roughly only the people near it can go and get served by that McDonald’s.

But if you’re building, so if you built course content and people had to come get it from you in person, you can only serve the people like that you can touch on the, and no matter how niche your subject matter is I think you have. One of your early customers or successful customer teaches folks how to make balloon animals and stuff.

Yeah. And you’re like, it’s there’s a few balloon animal clowns and service folks. And there’s but it’s in the, the 20 mile radius that the McDonald’s serves here. There’s maybe one or two, like you can’t make a lot of money selling that course by hand. But on the internet, there’s thousands and thousands of these folks.

So that’s the same story for every single niche. And that gets me excited about like we serve folks in that same way through software and education we do, but every topic, no matter how small, has like a worldwide audience. And it’s pretty awesome.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And just to put a number to the balloon artist guy, his name is Ziv Raviv.

In his first year, I think he sold over, I think it was like 237, 000 for his balloon artists Academy. And a micro niche, this isn’t a major niche. I just want to add, there’s this social science concept called Dunbar’s number, which if you think before internet, before social media, just regular old flesh and blood human, we can only keep in contact.

Or keep up relationships with 140 people. Otherwise our brain just can’t handle that many relationships. So when you think about if you can do something at scale with an online education program, you get past that human limit. Like you said, like a teacher typically has 20, 30 kids in the classroom, but you can now have 3000, 300, 000 and it’s just wild, but the human mind isn’t really designed to even comprehend the scale of the internet.

It’s just too big. It’s like the number of stars in the sky. Like usually you can’t comprehend it.

Jason Coleman: We also, we’re talking about gateways for e commerce. So the gateway is that. Service that helps you collect credit card payments or crypto payments or bank ACH payments sometimes. And I think the big idea and my advice here is to use the very best payment gateway.

It’s such a core important piece of your business. I’ve been working in e commerce for 20 years now and early with WordPress e commerce, like you said, and did it myself and watched the tooling get better and better. Have watched some of these gateways come and go and popularity and service and deal with the changing tide of different rules and taxing across the world.

Stripe does it best, like ever since they launched until now, they’ve done it best and without calling out other gateways, like they’re so good that the other gateways are partnering with Stripe to use Stripe technology and their own platforms or like part, be hosted on by Stripe or bundled up with Stripe’s tools.

And you mentioned like offering multiple payment solutions. I think Stripe itself will do that in particular. There’s a few different ways to use Stripe, but if you use it, they’re offsite, they call it Stripe Checkout, so that when someone clicks the pay, they actually go to the Stripe window where it pops up on the screen, and the checkout experience is on the Stripe website, especially if you do that, you can enable all kinds of payment methods, and I think there’s literally like 150 across the world for your customers that way, and they’re, experimenting with crypto now, and some places are even wrapping PayPal through that method, but it’s weird business.

Thanks. I think so allow as many payment methods as possible also make use of their tax services and subscription services if you can they, if you’re only using stripe, it makes taxes a little bit easier because then you you have one source to send to your, your accountant of where the money goes and how to do it.

And they also can calculate sales tax with every rule around the world. And their subscription services like. Because at the scale they’re at, they have relationships with banks. This is a good thing and a bad thing. Sometimes people get surprised by it. When someone’s credit card expires, Stripe somehow automatically has relationships with the banks, where they’re like, oh, I got your new number, and you didn’t even have to update.

And it’s almost like a weird privacy thing. I think some people, when they get a new card, they assume hey, this is cool, all my subscriptions are gonna cancel. But Stripe is no, I got you, I already gave them your new number. So you gotta be careful as a consumer if you think, just cause you got a new number stuff isn’t gonna charge you.

But that’s the kind of thing that like other gateways and at the software level, we don’t have relationships with the banks to automatically get someone’s credit card number and update it. So using their tooling and their services around it are all really good. And, they increase sales, they reduce friction and the checkout in particular.

So got sold on the Kool Aid at the Stripe conference last year, Stripe sessions. Also because I deal with this right as a developer who builds the tooling around these things. I firsthand feel the challenge of handling credit cards and spam. Privacy and subscriptions with and even something as simple as. It’s called a zip code here, it’s called a post code and postal code in the UK or something. The whole country of India, I forget the exact details, I’m probably misrepresenting it, but they outlawed subscription recurring payments. And they’re like, oh, what do we do now?

So like, all these different rules, and Stripe had a presentation or slide where they showed all those, and then they demoed their offsite Stripe checkout. Automatically adjust. So if you’re buying from a certain country and Stripe knows you, this is how you usually pay. You usually, they remember, cause there’s at such a big scale, they call it link.

Some like I used you, even people may have run into it. You’re on a website, you say bye. And it’s I sent you a number. Is this it? Does your phone cool? I got you. And so the checkout is really fast. So all these tools make it easy to like both, serve to as much of the world that Stripe supports.

And also like they’re a huge company that’s optimizing and using like artificial intelligence to optimize the checkout form. And so some folks when they build a website and in many ways, including the checkout, like they, they want, like the experience to be part of their brand and the feel unique and special.

I think checkout, there are ways to like make, get your colors and your logo and make sure it’s clear this is your website, that branding is important. But the kind of feeling unique, you don’t want your checkout to be unique. You want your checkout to be as common as possible. Like they do this all the time as fast as possible.

You can do that with Stripe. There’s that’s my Stripe commercial.

Chris Badgett: And on that note, I think it’s really important not to overcomplicate it. For example, if you’re using Lifter LMS to power your learning management system, you don’t need to become a developer and learn about. The PHP and react code and everything that makes it work e commerce with all its nuance, like PCI compliance and fraud and everything, you get to a level where the software is so good that you just have to trust it.

Literally like with Lyft or LMS, install the Lyft or LMS Stripe connector plugin, press connect to Stripe, let it know which bank account you want the money to go in, and you’re good to go. But if you really want to learn the nuances of e commerce, you can, but the tools have never been easier and more approachable.

And you mentioned recurring payments and challenges in India. It just got me thinking about recurring payments in general. There’s this idea that a lot of us want. Recurring revenue wouldn’t it be nice to have recurring revenue? Of course it would be, but if you’re going to do that, you really need to have recurring value.

So just to, take a look back to what’s the easiest way to get recurring value in a topic we discussed in the last session. Is you may have a self study DIY online course, but if you just add one monthly office hours hour where you interact with people in a virtual meeting and support them, now you have recurring value.

That’s probably the easiest way to do that. So just think about that with your pricing and if you can do recurring revenue or not. Let’s look at kind of design technology. So in this world of online education, there’s three, three layers, I like to think about it. There is software, hardware, and what I call wetware, which is like human beings.

And we’re going to talk about that in the community aspect that’s coming in a little bit. But in terms of. Some people are really good at software, but then there’s also all this hardware, like your computer itself cameras, microphones, like we’re in a pro setup right now making this with some of the best hardware, but this can all be overwhelming. If you’re going to create multimedia content, what are the essentials? And the way I think about it is if you’re going to become an online education entrepreneur, you do need to become essentially a personal media company. And this is, has gone mainstream. What’s the number one thing a kid says they want to be when they grow up?

It’s a YouTuber. Yeah. A YouTuber. So video producer. And you used to have to be in Hollywood and have the set and the crew and all the stuff to make that happen. But now everybody can do it from their phone or their computer. So mastering, I say mastering, but just getting started with video production, editing, and publishing.

That the video content is a skill that every creator needs to have. I’ve coached many video content creators in the LMS niche. And if somebody is like super beginner, like what’s the absolute easiest solution, the place to start is you open up a virtual meeting, like zoom with yourself by yourself.

You hit the record button in zoom. You do your presentation, talking head or slides, slideshow and all that. Do zero editing and then take the video file and publish it to your video hosting. And you’ve got it. So that’s like the simple entry into video editing. And it’s an infinite well that you just work on upgrading your video over time.

I’ve been working with video. I’m 46 years old. I started working with video probably around the age of 16 and even still like we’re in a professional video studio that can do way better than what I could do as my own personal media company. High quality audio also matters. If I had to pick one, I would go for good audio before I went for good video.

And often, what’s the level one of that. is use earbuds that have a mic on it. If you’re recording, let’s say on your phone or on your computer so that you’re not using the stock computer microphone, which is typically not as good quality, although that’s also getting better and better.

There’s also so many great USB microphones that are higher quality, let’s say in the 50 to 200 price range that you just plug it into your computer. You’re good to go with like superior than most audio or audio quality. Then when it comes to visual communication, one of the things you want to think about too is branding and consistency.

So like when you’re creating images or you’re getting fancy on your videos and you’re putting your name under your talking head, it’s called your lower thirds or whatever. You got to develop your brand, like use the same colors, your brand colors, use the same font, don’t change the font, use the same typography, like just be consistent and nobody’s great at branding on day one.

I often recommend hiring a some branding service to help you come up with your brand guide to get you started, particularly if you’re not a strong designer. But designers are design is funny because everybody has an opinion and kind of thinks they’re above average, but it’s not the case. Even the LifterLMS logo, which you can see on the screen here, that was outsourced to a company called 99 designs.

That was about 300 or as a design competition. We picked the one we liked the most. And they came up with our typography and we’ve continued to iterate on our brand and you can always do a rebrand over time, but. And in terms of your visual presentation, consistency is really important.

Also being consistent with your quality of video and audio, but you can always upgrade and experiment with upgrading over time. Just get on the train, get the fundamentals and get started.

Jason Coleman: I didn’t realize that it was a 99 designs logo. That’s one of the best 99 designs logos. Yeah. And it’s in logo tournament and some of those, I don’t know what the popular ones are now.

You can get good stuff out of there. And, you often can take that and then take that to a designer, like they, the process is useful. They help you think about your brand and your logo. That’s a really cool tool. I I also, like you were talking about uploading video kind of rough edits on doing the zoom webinar and then just uploading as is.

I, it’s funny we’ve been doing some YouTube content for the past few years and I found we’ve been trying to produce and sometimes we’re just like, whatever, just record it live and push it. And it’s like a longer piece. And sometimes that content does better. So I don’t know what it is about the YouTube algorithm or like the YouTube viewer that, they appreciate that long form content.

And then another tool suggestion for someone like me who thinks more like a writer and also just a good video editor itself and has other useful features is Descript and we use that lifter and paid memberships pro and Descript basically what they do is you import the video and they create a real time transcription.

It can do cool things like remove ums and ahs and likes for you automatically and automatically edit. But that same process, then you can rewrite the transcript or delete things from the transcript and it will automatically delete parts of the video. Video editing is like splicing and you gotta find the spot and figure out, I’m like, was I really talking about this and play, pause and scrub?

But if you see the transcript, you’re just like, I don’t want to say that you delete the sentence and the video that corresponds to that sentence disappears and they have all this awesome technology to make it still sound natural and they have a good they also have a good studio sound which is like a filter on your voice, which is this kind of magic filter that makes bad microphone sound better.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, we’re in a, we’re in a professional studio right now. I, but I’ve been blown away with my amateur setup at home. And I just clicked the studio sound button, wait 30 seconds. It’s sounds similar to this. I tend to do a lot of ums and ahs and it it just cleans it right up. And it’s important to think about like the pace of technology change.

When I first started editing videos, I was using iMovie and this is back in around 2006 to even cut a clip, cut a piece out and then move it. It would then need 30 seconds to process and now they’re, it just, everything has gotten exponentially faster and it’s just getting easier and easier. You just need to start. It’s all about starting.

Jason Coleman: So we also can talk about some of the, design aspects of writing. I think it’s very useful to develop what we call like content briefs, a template every time you write something and publish something, try to stick to this format. We also have a writing guide, and that’s especially important if you have a team. Where you want to keep a consistent voice across all the content that you’re doing.

But it’s also important as a reminder for yourself if you’re small. I think I’ll find the ones we use at Paid Memberships Pro and open them up and share them somehow with this. But like the important aspects of the content brief. So it’s before you start writing you actually like before I say, if you like have a a moment of clarity and it’s like the writing is pouring out of you or the video is pouring out of you, lean into that.

That’s like number one, like you’re the, you’ve become an expert. And now you’re using technology to deliver stuff to the world don’t slow yourself down or if you typically operate like a faucet, and even if you don’t people have these bursts of inspiration, so lean into that when you have it, but a lot of the time you’ll have writer’s block, you won’t have inspiration, you’ll be like, I know I have to write about this, but I don’t know where to begin, I don’t know where to start, and having the content brief helps, we do them for blog posts, and it has reminders, so before you start to write, you’re like, who is the audience of this?

What are you telling them? What’s like the basic information? We have a sales funnel, so sales funnel is a huge topic we could talk about a lot, but basically at the top, you’re like reaching new people and getting their attention. And at the bottom you’re converting them into a sale.

And and in the middle there’s a couple steps depending on which kind of sales funnel you’re using. Knowing which part of the funnel they’re at changes the writing. Cause if The, you’re writing something that’s near the conversion stage of the funnel, that it’s like the bottom of your, what you’re writing should be like now buy it, or you should talk more about buying and the features.

And if you’re writing something at the top where you’re just trying to get attention you can’t, you need, you want to be more current topical, there’s a different form format and think different way that you’ll go about writing. We also talk about use case and we also think about SEO. Here, I’ll talk a little bit about SEO too, but in our brief, we say that keywords that we’re targeting and then we also have a writing guide, which is a separate document that just talks about style and I’ll find that so we can share it.

But basically parts of our writing guide is to be shorter, clear sentences like no contractions. So instead of saying doesn’t say does not and this is right, cause we’re a technical writing often and we have an international audience. We found that. Stuff that’s clear, fewer contractions translates easier, or if you’re a non native speaker, it’s easier to read.

 It’s weird like that, something as simple as a contraction, which like is meant to speed up how you type and speak, it actually slows down how you read. If you take doesn’t and turn it into does not. I think typically the typical reader, especially non native English reader, like reads it faster.

And so it’s this weird counterintuitive thing. And then another rule we have is like no exclamation points or as few as possible. It’s I think maybe I used to say no. And the marketing team has said can we have one? And you’re like, that’s it. Like per post per email, you get one. Cause it loses its effectiveness after the first one.

If everything is exciting and oh my God and Russian free save ship click. It doesn’t work. And I think you’ll find about exclamation points. Oftentimes you write them with the exclamation point. Cool. You were excited when you wrote that down. If you take it out, like periods are strong too. It’s like a stronger statement.

You’re not like, we’re running a sale. It’s you take it out of we’re running a sale period. Gotcha. And another point on search engine optimization, SEO, people often think about this when writing. There’s all agencies that write and they’re like SEO focused. They’re like, Oh, we do it like, they start with SEO.

That’s how they think about the writing process that can be useful. Some of them do good work, but I think it’s better to just the tactics and search engine optimization are always changing. There was a Google update yesterday and we’re waiting to see how does our search engine ranking change now that Google updated things, but what’s always true.

And Google says this, and you just have to trust them that they’re actually trying to get the best content in front of their users is just be as useful as possible. And a very clear way to make sure you’re doing that is to search for something that you would like to land on. We’re talking about, yeah, I don’t know, how to write a content brief and you want to teach people how to write content briefs, search for how to write a content brief, find the top result, maybe go past the ads, or maybe there’s a weird Reddit thread that’s not a real page, find that.

The first real piece of content, that’s a result and then copy what they did or copy it and make it better. Like you want to do everything they did. You want to make a better version of that resource. It’s if I was searching for this, what would I need? And we’ve found success that way.

So there’s a lot of like tactics and SEO strategy and there’s little things that you should do. It’s, and I won’t get into it. It’s it’s easy and you should just do it. If you’re actually like, I’m trying to rank for this, the best way I’ve seen to do that is to just find the number one result and make a better version of that page.

They have a video, you need a video, they have an outline, you need an outline. And they have this, you probably need that. But a better one, and sometimes you can do it it can feel overwhelming, but, you’re exceptional, and they’re probably sitting on their laurels And maybe not necessarily focused on your market or your target, niche.

Chris Badgett: That’s great. There’s so much in here. I have three three things to tie in here. One is that when it comes to templates, there’s this idea of thinking in systems. And we talked earlier in another session about having a teaching framework. Like key ideas, strategies, tactics, action items, case studies.

There’s lots of different teaching frameworks, but templates make your life so much easier. A content brief gives you a templated structure on how to approach a writing project. If you use a tool like Canva and you do designs, let’s say you’re doing YouTube thumbnails or video thumbnails for inside your course or whatever.

Do you have a template in Canva that’s on brand that you can modify and make different? Think about creating these systems that makes your life so much better. And then instead of always improving individual pieces, improve your system. And then the future just gets better faster. You mentioned funnels and we could probably have a whole section on that, but we’ve talked a lot in this, these sessions that about thinking through time and not delivering.

Just, Hey, here’s my knowledge. Here’s my library. Good luck. Now you can know what I know, but actually thinking about a user journey through time. So once I learned this concept, it really changed how I thought about education and marketing and helping customers and clients get the result that they want.

So I’m just going to lay out what a funnel is in the, from the stages standpoint. Whatever your course is about, I’ll use an example to make it so I’ll use a case study or an example to make the concepts more useful. So let’s say I was teaching people how to create their first online course.

The first stage is called unaware. So this is where someone doesn’t know the problem they have. This is the hardest stage to market to, but you can, if you think about it. So let’s say somebody’s in a job, they don’t like it. They feel creative, they don’t know what, what’s missing. And they feel like there’s something more, they want to make more money, but they’re unaware of what the core problem is.

But then the next stage is problem where it’s like, you know what? I want to work on line or I want to create a digital product. So they’ve become problem aware of I want to quit my job, I want to do this other thing, or I want to get a side hustle going in the experiment over here.

And then they become solution aware, where alright, there’s a lot of different ways to do online businesses. Maybe I think I want to do a course. So now they’re aware of a particular solution. And then they become product aware. Okay, what is, what are the tools, how can I create an online course?

And they come up with five or 10, Oh, there’s this company and that company and this company and that company. And then they become most aware, like they’ve made a selection. I want to move forward with this tool. And this is where like sales starts kicking in. You’re getting close to that conversion point.

And the conversion happens. So that’s like the top of the funnel all the way down to the conversion point. And then what a lot of people miss is like the inverse other side that happens, which is okay. In my hypothetical example of I want to create an online course. I’ve got the software, I’ve got somebody who’s going to coach me through it, help me through it and everything.

Then the other side, or the customer success side happens, which is onboarding. Alright, welcome to my program about how to build an online course. Here’s the community, go introduce yourself here’s how to get started with the tool that you’re using and so on that’s the onboarding to keep your learner, like the orientation, if you will.

And then there’s what’s called activation, which is, what’s that level that if I can just get them past here, they’re going to stick, and they’re, they’re making good progress, and they’re definitely not going to refund or have remorse for choosing this training. And then there’s retention, like what if it’s an annual program and we’re getting up to you’ve been with us a year, what’s it going to take to stay with us another year?

Or a lot of things are monthly. You have those monthly like retention and if they don’t stay, that’s called churn. And then there’s expansion where, okay, they’ve stayed, they’re staying. And now you have premium offers. Maybe it’s like private coaching. It’s an upsell. So there’s a whole timeline that, that happened right there.

So that’s the marketing funnel and the customer success funnel.

Jason Coleman: I think we need like one of those animated, of course things. Yeah, we’ll fund that.

Chris Badgett: They might upsell us at this recording studio to put that together. It might be a service they have here. And then SEO is also cool. I just wanted to throw in a quick pro tip.

I’ve been a student of SEO for a long time. Stands for search engine optimization. Like doing actual work to get your webpage, your content to rank at the number one for a search term. And I had a particular piece of content that I really wanted to rank number one. It was ranked 27 for a phrase. I worked with a great team that helped put together another piece.

It got to 23 or 17 in the search result. It was very competitive. And then I got some coaching, which we talked about earlier about being a lifelong learner about so I could study SEO and get better. And the coach made one comment, which was like, there’s this one article that if you just go read it and do everything in the article, I’m 99 percent sure you’ll get to number one.

So I did that. I went to that article, it’s by Brian Dean, the website is called Backlinko, and it’s called Google’s 200 ranking factors, the complete list. Then over the course of six months, I slowly implemented everything in that article. Now for the past year, this piece that I was trying to rank stays at number one.

It’s almost always at number one. I still continuously improve and tweak it. But just wanted to give a pro tip out there and that’s advanced SEO to like, go do all these 200 things. And like I said, I’ve been in it for a while, but it’s a, it’s definitely a nice skill to learn, or at least learn how to think that way.

So

Let’s turn the page in technology to one of the coolest parts, which is automation. So if you think about it one of the things that makes us human is our ability to use tools, right? Helped us invent. Agriculture, the industrial revolution, the information age, and it just keeps going on and on.

And now we have these tools that allow us to automate repetitive tasks or one off tasks that we no longer have to deal with our own inputs or reduce the amount of inputs. Automation is how you get leverage. So not only can you publish a course or membership. Online and reach the whole world. You can automate a lot of the processes involved in running that kind of initiative or business.

In the early days of LifterLMS, we had a saying that we wanted to scale the human touch with robotics. So what that means is use automation, use technology, but don’t forget about the human in the system. There’s this idea that, Oh, I make my online business, my course, and I’m on the beach and my, with my laptop for our work week, you can get there, but there’s nothing there’s passive income is a myth in my opinion.

But there’s so much you can do to do the work of five people, 10 people, a hundred people through automation and, reduce that demand on your. Individual human contribution. So I like to think about email automation as a good place to start. You can run an entire online business with just like a Gmail account, just manually reaching out to people, responding to people, sending them things that they asked for, but you can automate all of that, which the place to start, like we’ve talked in these sessions about.

Seeing patterns and frequently asked questions. So there’s two main places to start when you see those frequently asked questions, tying that this into the sales funnel or the customer success funnel side of the funnel. If you’re getting repetitive questions that like a lot of people have, you can create an email automation campaign.

Let’s say there they haven’t bought yet. So they’re in the prospect part of your funnel. Where you’re addressing this question in advance, even if they haven’t asked and email automations, you spread out over hours or days or weeks. So it’s like this drip campaign that just keeps running.

And same with onboarding Oh, anytime somebody starts this program, they always ask us. So after they buy maybe four hours later or the next day, there’s this email. Welcome to the program. Here are the next three things you should do next. Introduce yourself in the community, start with the intro course, and reply to this email with your biggest challenge so we can point you to the resource that would be most helpful for you.

That’s an example, by the way, of scaling the human touch with robotics, that last piece. Cause I didn’t try to automate that interaction away. I also said, reply to this email, which means a human is going to personal moment and like help that person in a unique way. So I definitely don’t recommend automating everything.

And then when it comes to e learning, the learning management system actually automates a ton of stuff like progress, tracking curriculum, delivery. You can get advanced with certifications, gamification, like achievement badges. Think about all the grading that teachers do in a traditional classroom, like on paper, like when we were kids, multiple choice quiz or test.

You can now have that be 100 percent automated. Just the website will do all the grading to instantly deliver the result. And the last thing I’ll just say tactically about not never is to never stop automating. It’s not that I’m obsessed with it, but I’m always looking for new opportunities to automate and get a little more leverage, a little more time back.

And when I have more time back, then I can be the human in the machine and be like, how can I create more value than anybody else for my avatar and deliver that really unique human aspect? And one of my favorite forms of automation, I’ve always been really big into video. When I was a high schooler, I was that guy in the friend group who had the video camera and take it with us, like rock climbing or hanging out and just filming stuff.

So I’ve been around video for a long time. I fell in love with the idea of video marketing. And so I see video as automation. I think of when you put yourself on YouTube as an example. And you’re just being authentically you and you’re just trying to help people. Maybe you’re marketing, content marketing.

Maybe you’re trying to help your customers, whatever you’re trying to do. You’re literally creating a digital twin of yourself that multiple people can be watching at once. So as Lifter LMS started to grow, as an example, I look at our YouTube channel as like multiple team members.

There’s a metric I follow called watch time. Not, likes and views are cool, but the actual amount of time somebody spent consuming your video content has far surpassed what I could do in real time without ever sleeping. So there’s like these, this group of team members are just constantly talking and created.

Over a thousand videos. And that’s how you get leverage.

Jason Coleman: Yeah. Yeah, every 40 hours of watch time is like a full time job, full time person. Yeah. Like just selling your stuff. It’s awesome. A couple of points on, when you’re, you said automate everything, which I agree with, and I think it’s related to a topic we talked about earlier about standard operating procedures and systems documentation for building a business.

And I always feel like an early version of like full automation, where like a human isn’t involved at all, it handles it, is like you write down the steps for a human to do that. And so these things are very related to me where you, I like starting with you write the SOP, here’s how I, as a human, do this thing, and now you have the guide, and are there steps in there that you can just automate a step, or you can, you learn how you can automate the whole thing.

But all you could also automate by outsourcing. So like another human can do this so you can hand over that SOP to someone and it’s as good as automated. So yeah it’s interesting thing how those two things are related. And then, we talked about email marketing and different kinds of sending emails in different forms and specifically answering like FAQ type questions by email.

I know when we do this in what we call email series of certain aspects. I generally tend folks as I’m working with them to email more than they feel comfortable with. It’s it’s almost always there because I spent like the FAQ is a great example because. If you say you had five really big questions people are thinking about before they convert about your course.

So that’s really five emails is probably best. It’s not, do you have any questions? Cause everybody just ignores it. But if the subject line is like, are you worried about X? You’re like, yeah, I am. Click and read. So each of those FAQs has to be a separate email. Say everyone only has one of those issues.

Those emails have a 20 percent open rate, which may or may not be good. But four out of those five emails won’t get opened. For the other one. And so if people are metric minded and they’re looking, they’re like, we send these five females, it feels inefficient. Most people aren’t even reading them.

It’s oh, but everyone who reads the one, focus on the conversions, and I think that’s good in general for a lot of the even YouTube stats is if you’re comparing yourself to like Mr. Beast, you’re like, you want like millions and millions of views. You’re like, nah, like hundreds of views, hundreds thinking of it and watch time.

But by email and most, anyway, so back to email, emailing, you should email more than you really feel comfortable with. People will get off your list. And Jared, I like to say, if someone’s like seeing your content and they want to get off the list, like they probably weren’t like a customer or they weren’t in your target market.

You, you can overdo it and be open to that feedback when you feel it and feel out if they’re actually a customer when they say you’re emailing too much. And you’re like, wait, is this like a real customer or my target market? Maybe I can combine some emails. But yeah, probably email more than you’re comfortable with.

Something else that, so when I think about automation, another thing I think about is artificial intelligence, AI, and that’s a big movement, it’s a big way. The end game of that is it’s automating almost everything a human can do. The tooling like the large language model chat, GPT, like tools are so good right now that you really have to be using these tools.

And I know some folks have like ethical concerns about the tools and how they scrape data from, artists and musicians and writers and. Who owns that content. I think there’s issues. It’s just like the MP3s where like it becomes so easy to share music that it’s just going to happen.

And you’re like, how do you, the world has to change to do this. It’s I think it was like if a robot is reading the internet faster than I can and learning, it’s just if I read the internet to learn too, it just does it way better than me. But anyway, so I think these tools aren’t going to go away.

So the best performers are people who are doing, doing the best and performing even in educating folks and getting the word out and running businesses are going to be using these tools. And so you should make sure that you, the people who work with the tools are going to benefit. So I think you should strategies to augment yourself with AI.

And so again, I’m talking about chat, GPT cloud, by anthropic perplexity is a good one for research, but these tools, you basically talk to the AI and they help you do things. And for writing in particular a method that you can use with chat, GPT, what I like to do is. This is an example of a good way to use this tool if you’ve only interacted with them sparsely.

So if I’m going to write a course, what I’ll do is I’ll write up my rough notes, really rough. Just dump out of my brain, don’t worry about punctuation, just space. I’ll take random notes from here, random notes from here. A conversation with someone else, so some of it’s my own words. I’ll put links in.

I’m like, I want the feel of this. So it’s very rough and it’s scattered and you almost have to fight it. And now I’m a writer, right? So I almost have to fight it, but the tendency to want to actually start writing and putting the thoughts together at this point, but if you dump that into something like chat GPT and you ask it, Hey, can you write a first draft?

And you even can update that content brief and that writing guide. And it’ll take that into account as well. It’ll write like a decent first draft and depending on what you’re talking about By decent, like it’s legible, it’s real English, and we’ve worked with some of these there’s good writing agencies, and there’s subpar ones, and it’s it’s funny sometimes you have a human write something before these, it’s like it’s it sounds like a robot wrote it, even though it’s a human who’s not actually engaging in the writing process doesn’t do as good of a job as these AI tools do at writing stuff.

So you get a first, a good first draft, then you edit the draft. And make sure and key point here is that you have to double check everything. I say, we also use AI tools for programming and we use AI tools for writing, and I would say every single line has to be checked and made sure it’s truthful.

It’s, if it’s code, it actually runs, it actually does what it says it’s supposed to do. Instead of writing you really have to. Go through and edit that draft a lot. You don’t want to just fix a couple things. Then, actually, after then, when you have a second draft that you wrote based on that first draft, you can ask ChatGPT for advice.

What I try to do is not just give it and say, hey, make it better, but say give it the thing you’ve written and say, can you give me some recommendations? And use your content brief for how I can do this better. Tell me what I should change. And it’ll say, it’ll give you like the advice and also make suggestions and then you can apply the suggestions because if you dump something in and just ask it to make it better it it can make changes you’re not aware of it, like does what’s called a hallucination or if you change things, it was, it gets confused.

But if you just ask it for advice and then you apply the advice at that stage of writing, it’s a good thing to do. And like another example of like how great AI is and like how it’s useful. I really try to, I use it in almost everything I’m doing to help me think. And used AI to help myself write the notes that we’re reading off of and using to guide this video.

So Chris has like a great outline. He went through it in one of the earlier sessions. And you had your talking points in a lot of these ahead of me. And so then I said, Hey, this is what the general topic is. This is the bigger overarching topic. Here’s what Chris said. And then ChachiPD knows about me.

There’s like a system prompt and it has this thing called memory where oh, okay. You run paid memberships pro. Now I know that you’re Jason Coleman. This is and then I can dump a little, and I would, we had, there’s a story part to this and I would write the story and be like, I want to talk about this.

And I’m like, I don’t really know, like what’s the right term for this. What’s this called? Did anyone else talk about this? I forget which website I heard this from first. And then chat GPT would take a stab at those notes. Here’s the topic points. Here’s the tactics. And here’s some information about other people who have talked about this.

And sometimes I’d be like, I actually don’t know anything about what you’re talking about. That’s actually not me. You’re, that’s something else. But sometimes it’ll nail it. It’s Oh yeah, that’s exactly how I operate. I know all about this. And thanks for helping me remember who, where I got that point from.

And it gave me a starting point for the, what is the strategy called? I was like, what’s the best way to phrase this? And I’m rambling about it. Like AI is good about. The zeitgeist and how people phrase things. So a lot of stuff we do, and that’s another way it’s useful for learning is there’s different ways to talk about this.

People use different terms, but that the AI is. Like literally programmed to be like the general, synthesis of everything on the internet. So it’s really good at pulling out this is how most people talk about this. So I used it to write these own notes.

Chris Badgett: We talked in an earlier session about the expert’s curse and not, being really advanced in the subject matter and needing to keep beginner’s mind in mind.

And that would be an excellent use of AI. Hey, I’m PhD in this topic, I’m making a course for beginners, help me, go back to the fundamentals and make sure I don’t get too advanced too quickly. Can you help me like focus? This is the outline I’m thinking, keep in mind is for beginners.

Can you help me like make sure I don’t gloss over any important fundamental information? That would be a great tool or a great way to use AI as an assistant. I also wanted to mention in our course plan challenge. Which kind of helps you figure out what course to make and come up with your course outline.

We use a concept called Ikigai, which is a Japanese term and way of figuring out your reason for being in the world, which is deep, but it essentially combines what you love, which is your passion, what you’re good at, which is your skills. What you can be paid for, like the marketability or financial possibility of this topic and what the world actually needs.

And we actually, Jason developed AI to help you in part of that training, some AI powered tooling to help you find your icky guy, which can then help you pick your course topic, which you can then outline with it. So use AI, just get started. It’s not a replacement. It’s a It’s a co pilot, it’s an assistant.

Let’s talk about productivity. AI makes you more productive, but productivity is an infinite well. I’m a fan of productivity. There is you can actually get too productive and burnout and there is some magic and like open space in your calendar or not having every, minute of your day planned out and stuff like that.

But, when you wear so many hats, it’s important to optimize and get more productive in the world, which we naturally do as humans as we move along in life. And, like for example, if you’re, if you become a parent, all of a sudden you have an entire new job that’s even more than full time and we tend to figure it out, but there’s productivity things that happen within that.

So I like to just continually invest in improving my productivity. I recommend people do the same. But also don’t over optimize there, leave some magic and space in your life. But with course creation and building these types of online businesses, the global theme I think about in terms of productivity is don’t let your brain.

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

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