When to Get Offline For Online Business

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.

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.

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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 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.

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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.

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