LMScast with Chris Badgett

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 According to Emily Middleton, the way she operates WP Course Guide is purposefully distinct from a standard agency or freelancer model since she bases her company on close, intimate connections with her clients.Her early exposure to entrepreneurship through her family and her long-standing relationship with LifterLMS, which provided her with a strong feeling of commu nity, trust, and mentoring from the start of her career, have had a significant impact on her approach. Emily also explains key LMS website-making strategies using WordPress. As a result, she views each project as a part of a greater human tale rather than a straightforward technical assignment, treating clients as partners and frequently as friends, and engaging emotionally in their success. She highlights the value of live collaboration, particularly via Zoom, stating that it enables her to work more quickly, prevent misunderstandings, and gain a deeper understanding of the tactical and emotional difficulties her customers are having. Emily sees her work as both a technical problem-solver and a soothing presence, and many of the individuals she assists come to her during stressful times when a website is faulty, a launch is failing, or a business choice feels overwhelming. Face-to-face communication allows her to pick up on tone, impatience, reluctance, or doubt, all of which might disclose deeper business issues that would not come out through email alone. Emily also talks about how her work is greatly impacted by ADHD. Instead of viewing it as a drawback, she characterizes it as a strength that enables her to think fast, adjust rapidly, pick up on minute details, and maintain a high level of engagement when working with 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 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 today. Her name is Emily Middleton. She’s from WP Course Guide. You can find that@wpcourseguide.com. Emily runs an agency. She specializes in a lot of LMS related work. She’s been around the block for about a decade, maybe more. I don’t know. It’s been a long time. So there’s tons of experience here. One of the things that Emily does differently is how she runs her agency and how she works with clients. We’re gonna start with that. But first, welcome back on the show. Emily.  Emily Middleton: Thank you for having me, Chris. I’m happy to be here. Chris Badgett: Let’s start with WP Course Guide. I’ve always been impressed with how you work with clients. For example, we, Emily also does some work directly with LifterLMS and some of our. Live calls, like the Office Hours Mastermind that universe bundle and hire people get access to for a weekly office hours mastermind as well as our ask us anything calls, which happened weekly. But one, one time we were getting together for a Zoom meeting and you were actually at one of your agency clients. Place, which was really interesting, and I’ve seen that before where you’d pop up on the radar and you’re like, hanging out with LifterLMS users and clients of WP Course Guide. Tell us your approach to working with people and how you’re, you perhaps approach it a little differently than other freelancers or agencies when they work with clients. Emily Middleton: Thank you. That’s a really good question. I, think it’s a funny thing that. That I do, that’s bleeding my personality into my business and part of how I run things. I do business on a very personal level, and I think the way I was intro to business was on a very personal level, so my. Mother did some work with lifterLMSlong time ago, like accounting work and client management work when LifterLMS was an agency Right. Doing code box stuff and then the LifterLMS product launch. My mom was around at the time and I think Chris, you might have found her on Hire my mom.com which is funny ’cause you hired my mom there. And there was a little bit of nepotism, but I feel like I’ve proved myself because I really embraced Lifter and you as a mentor helped me with like my entrepreneurial journey. Growing up through LifterLMS was like a family to me. And my granddad who inspired me to be an entrepreneur in the first place was a family member. And having that sense of family in business from the beginning, as I was a kid, being influenced by my entrepreneurial grandfather who was bringing me in on his projects and his random apps and his ideas, integrating me however he could. And then. Having this sort of freelancer culture with my mother as a peer who is like recommending work to me. And I remember that I started with LifterLMS on the LMS cast. So I would this podcast we’re on now, I would write the summaries and the tweets and all the kind of summative text that went along with the episode. And that was like my integration was as a young person. I had that opportunity to engage with Lifter as a form of online education, but I was also educating myself at the same time. And there was a sense of familial nature because you were my mentor and my mom did some work with the business. And so I treat that family culture carrying forward into the clients I have today. I friends with most of my clients. I just had a client die. The first client. Who’s ever died and it really struck me. I remember seeing the email and then falling apart in the car. I take all the work I do super personally, and that’s why you’ll find me popping up at clients’ houses, going out doing, cool stuff, partying whatever we do. Building LMSs.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s important to remember the humans on the internet, behind the website, behind the companies, behind the support tech, support. A client may have goals and dreams and it’s like challenging the project you’re working on, but there’s still a human there and with emotions and hopes and dreams and all that stuff. So you it’s like holistic medicine. You gotta treat the whole thing, not just one part. There’s lots of different ways to run a agency and it can be very transactional with like minimal communication, but. That’s not very holistic and, the way you do it adds a lot of the humanity back into the types of work we do online, which is part of what gets lost, which is part of what we try to do at LifterLMS in terms of how we build the software. We’re trying to connect the humans, not just facilitate transactions and content delivery things like the community aspects of lifter or the coaching aspects of the software. And things like that. So that’s, super cool. The other thing you do, which I find super fascinating, and it’s the way I would wanna be treated as a client, I don’t want to just be treated as a client. I wanna be treated as a collaborator or, and I don’t just want to delegate work to an agency or a freelancer. I want to collaborate with them. Because like I may have my expertise, you have yours, let’s mash ’em together and see what happens. And if all that happens is you sign a contract and then you ask for the content and then you deliver the website, there’s very little collaboration there. So tell us about the way you like to collaborate. And I’ve also seen you do it at speed. A lot of freelancers and agencies don’t like to get on the phone or the Zoom with clients because. It can feel time consuming, but when you get on a Zoom with a client, you’re actually creating work product at the same time, working way faster than a bunch of emails back and forth and time delays. So tell us about that.  Emily Middleton: Yeah, I do a lot of work with clients on Zoom. I created this system somewhat out of necessity, and for me it works really well because I have a DHD. I struggle with reading things. I’m dyslexic and so when I’m hit with an email that’s multiple paragraphs, I honestly get overwhelmed. And so I, if I’m gonna be handling emails, I might need someone to help me on my team, or I might need to take longer amounts of time to read it. So for me, it’s much faster to have a conversation over Zoom. I think you, as the audience members might get an impression. I talk and think like very quickly. I’m just like, my mind’s all over the place. And I liked what you said about a holistic approach. That’s what I say in my business all the time, is that. We might be dealing with a problem, but that problem could be a symptom of a larger issue. And so when we’re on Zoom, when we’re communicating, we can sense more about what people are seeing, the confidence in their voice. Maybe they’re frustrated about a certain issue. I can pick up more on tone. I can pick up more on what people are going through as a business challenge. I think a lot of business owners. Especially the ones who are stressed enough to hire someone to help them in the capacity. I often help people like a medical, like a firefighter or a coming in to be a medic on a website. That’s often my role at projects and that can be really stressful when you’re like, when you need a firefighter to come help fix your WordPress website. You are probably stressed because something has blown up, or you wanna implement something for your business, you need to make something work. It can sometimes be stressful. And so when we’re stressed, we often lock in on problems that might not be exactly the right solution. And when we communicate over Zoom, when we can get online, not only does it help me with my process of understanding and helping people and showing kind of the love that I have for my business, my clients, and the whole ecosystem that comes across. But I can also get the light in the client’s eyes. Like we can figure out like what’s going on in the business? Like where are you struggling? Where are you successful? I have gotten so much help created for clients when in passing they make a sigh or a comment about, oh God, I gotta do all this marketing stuff now. Or I am really dreading doing this. They just make like a passing comment about something and then that opens up a whole door where we can say like, why are you dreading this issue? What specifically about it are you stuck with? How long have you been stuck with this problem? And what support do you feel like if you could just press a magic button and have support in this area, what would that support look like? We can ask questions like that if we’re live on, Zoom, and it, really makes like a friends and family kind of vibe, which is my, thing.  Chris Badgett: Yeah, I totally get it. And let’s park for a second on a DHD.  Emily Middleton: Yeah,  Chris Badgett: I think it’s actually since we’re talking so much about family here, my grandfather once said it takes all kinds to make a world, right? And he was like a manager, executive guy running a mill. But he that, that comment always stuck with me. So when you think about. There, there’s actually a ton of people that have a DHD. It’s very common and if you don’t have a DHD it may feel like different or uncomfortable to work with somebody with A DHD as an example. But with everything as in life, it’s a double-edged sword. There’s also strengths to it. So one of the things I’ve noticed with working with you is you’re super. Fast and you’re very in the present moment, right? Which is super powerful. So we could be having a conversation, I could have a conversation with you while another part of your brain is like working on some project that we’re working on together. And then this other thing comes up and you’re just able to adapt like so fast. And you’re also in tune with, like you said, the nuances of I just know in collaborating with you that. You don’t miss much like a DHD doesn’t mean I’m not paying attention, it just means I spread my attention around to lots of places. And by the way, my attention is very open and like receptive, which creates like really strong collaboration, particularly when you’re working with a client and you don’t live in their and breathe their industry. But you’re open and you’re listening and you want to combine your skills with their industry and their goals and stuff. It’s pretty cool. See, I’ve seen that in action. So good on you for that.  Emily Middleton: Thank you.  Chris Badgett: Since it comes up a lot, it’s just, I have to ask what’s your current approach to using AI in the work you do, you’re, you write code, you create content. You have to communicate with people and do emails and stuff. There’s graphic design, which you do a lot of. What’s, what are your, what’s your AI tips or things you do these days?  Emily Middleton: That’s a good question and I appreciate, I wanna thank you for what you said. About the holistic approach and how the A DHD can be a superpower. I think a lot of, times people feel like they’re at a detriment for it, but it can work for you. But ai, that’s another good use of A DHD if you struggle to focus, if you struggle to make task lists, whatever you specifically struggle with. AI can be a consultant in your business. Obviously the information AI is. Giving back to you has come back with questionable quality at 80% at, best with like accuracies and stuff. So you wanna use AI in intelligent ways. But I did create a video and one of my most popular videos as of late was how to code with ai. And I’ve, taken the approach recently of I can’t stop people from coding with ai. I can just help them be safe about how they’re coding with ai. It’s it would be great if we’re like, Hey, code that AI writes. It could potentially have issues, it could break other parts of your website, and at worst it could potentially have malware style practices on your own website. It can be bad to create code with AI and just slap it onto your website, but people are gonna be doing it anyway there. It’s an efficient solution, it’s an efficient tool, but with great power comes great responsibility, and at present it feels a little bit dangerous, so let’s make it safer. And so a lot of what I’ve been doing with AI is educating my clients on prompting. Specifically, how can we tell AI what its role is? How can we tell AI what its limits are? How can we help AI help us understand our own problem? So when it comes to coding with ai, when it comes to developing marketing messages with ai, sometimes I will ask AI for copy because it’s, really easy for AI to help inspire getting the juices flowing and saying, give me 10 to 20. Calls to action. I’m creating a button for my homepage, and this is my business. This is the product that we’re offering. We have a free lead magnet option for people to get involved with our organization with just an email, but we also have a paid offering. I want you to give me 10 options for what calls to action on my homepage could be, and I really want them to be compelling, to get people to click that button and I will generate you a list of 10 things. You can tell it, Hey, this is. My favorite one of the lists that you had, can you gimme 10 more like it with just that kind of prompting around copywriting, you can already improve the process if you’re just trying to come up with copy out of your own mind. Oftentimes, people who are using LMSs or coming online are technical experts in their field, and sometimes they’re even teachers. But when you’re online, you’re in this crazy ecosystem of. So many options for people to learn. They could go to YouTube, they could buy someone else’s course. Maybe your course doesn’t even come up page one on Google. So when we are fortunate enough to have someone land on our page, we really need to sell them on taking some action at that point. AI can help you make copy. AI can help you with code, but you gotta make sure your copy’s not bland. You gotta make sure your code doesn’t blow up your website. You have to be able to structure the conversation with AI as if it’s like a super powerful child. It’s it doesn’t really know what it’s gonna break or how not to do things, but what it does know is a very powerful, like distillation tool of what information it can feed back to you. So I, it was a little bit of a rambling answer, but does that answer your question?  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And just to reinforce what Emily’s saying, if you go look at the title of this episode. That was written by ai. I, will choose it. I will give it some ideas, and I do exactly what you said. I’m like, okay, we talked about this, and this. I need some podcast, some engaging podcast titles that would make somebody interested about the content to click and listen to the episode on Spotify or wherever. And it’ll give me 10 and oftentimes. I still have to tweak like, oh, this is 95% perfect, but I’m changing this word to that word. It’s good to go. And it’s good. It’s better than what I would’ve done by myself, but I’m not just saying, Hey, just choose one for me and that sort of thing. Let’s talk about web hosting a little bit. As an agency as a freelancer, when you work with clients, a lot of times you hit like hosting problems. We run into that at LifterLMS because it’s it’s a more heavy, complex piece of software, requires decent resources. Successful LMS sites require really good hosting for a lot of different reasons, and over time you start seeing patterns of oh, this person’s on this host and we’re having problems. But anyways, I know you’ve run into that as an agency, like what are the. Web hosts that you really love these days. And I’m, I know it’s not an exhaustive list. There’s so many web hosts out there, there’s a lot of great ones, but which ones do you love working with? If you had a client who doesn’t already have something yet, and let’s say they already have a functioning business and they’re not worried about managed WordPress pricing, which is more than like the bargain basement. Where would you send them to host their web, their LMS website? 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. Emily Middleton: That’s a great question. I usually send my clients to Tan. For different size projects, I’ll recommend different hosting. A lot of clients I’ve been sending to tangible XP lately because Gabriel. Shows up on our office hours calls. And so when you have a CEO of a hosting company who regularly comes to the LifterLMS office hours call, you know that LifterLMS is gonna be supported as a host there. And Gabriel’s been featured on the LMS cast, but so has Tom Fanelli from Conveo, right? And so there’s a lot of other great hosts on the LifterLMS recommended host list, and I wouldn’t blame you for going with any of them. I have some posts on my website about my experiences with certain web hosts and which ones are often more difficult. I can say a avoid host Gator. I can say that don’t, if you’re on Host Gator, you wanna probably get off Host Gator if you’re doing LMS specifically. Like it’s a complicated, type of plugin that requires a lot of resources. People are logging in, content’s changing based on whether you’re logged in, logged out, there’s access restriction, there’s purchases happening. One second, you’re just a prospect who’s on the checkout page the next second. You’re a student who’s logged in and taking a course. We need a web host that can support this more fluid functionality that LifterLMS wants to offer on the website. And that’s essential for us. And so I’ve been sending people the tangible XP WP Engine or the LifterLMS recommended host list because that list does change. And you can’t really go wrong in that area. I’ve just noticed that my customers on tangible xpe, I’ve never had a single complaint and that it’s like LifterLMS specific hosting. It’s not WordPress managed hosting. It’s like LifterLMS. And I know there’s different levels of hosting, like WP Tonic does is Kurt and Jonathan, who you may have seen in the podcast ecosystem. If you’re watching this, they do a concierge hosting very hands on, but a lot of options out there.  Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about WordPress itself. WordPress has a challenge of younger people coming in. I’m of the belief that the websites and WordPress is not dead. It’s literally 50% of the web websites on the internet and people use websites all the time, even ai. Yeah, it’s cool. Where it’s trained on a lot of websites, many of them, WordPress it reminds me of the early days of internet marketing when people would say email is dead. Email has never died. It is still alive and it’s changed. It’s evolved. People use it differently. It’s harder to get people to open. People are overwhelmed in their inbox and things like that. So the changes. Email will never die, at least not anytime soon. I would say the same thing about websites and WordPress as an example. It is sad to me that I don’t see as many younger people getting into building websites and to their credit, there’s social media has exploded. TikTok didn’t exist like five years ago or four years ago, whatever. It was like a lot of people spend a lot of time on TikTok, but when they need to go buy something, they’re still gonna end up on a website. There’s the TikTok shop, but they’re either gonna be on the TikTok shop, amazon.com, a Shopify store, or a WooCommerce or some other lifter has e-commerce, like people use websites all the time. But for a vibrant WordPress ecosystem it’s good for younger folks to get in. You’re a little bit older, I think, than half my age, and you’re very much involved in WordPress, partially because of your family, so you just got, you just got into it very early on and stayed with it, which I commend you for a lot of great things happen by just staying the course. You know what I mean? Yeah. And it’s easy. There’s also a question in there, like, how does somebody with a DHD stay the course for a decade? Like, why is it, so I’m, painting a lot of broad questions, but what do you particularly love about WordPress and why have you stayed the course? And how what, are some young people, younger people I’m thinking like. Back in my day or whatever. Now I’m sounding like an old person, but there 15 year olds were like building websites and like having fun and writing HTML and CSS and stuff like that. Or maybe it’s a thing where you’re a little bit older, like you’re getting into your career and you’re like, you start realizing you need a website for yourself and then somebody else is like, Hey, can you build me one of those and stuff like that. But. Tell. Tell me about your take on WordPress and staying with it.  Emily Middleton: I like your comparison to social media. I think there’s a lot of opportunities out there, especially for young people to get engaged with social media and then get engaged with Wix or Shopify, which are doing like a lot of marketing on social media, a lot of marketing paying. YouTubers to talk about WS or Squarespace. So when I talk to young people, WS and Squarespace are the ones that come up as far as CMSs. WordPress doesn’t really come up for younger people, and Shopify, of course. But I would say WordPress not doing the level of entry level marketing. I don’t quite know how to categorize what Wix Brand awareness.  Chris Badgett: Like brand,  Emily Middleton: brand awareness.  Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Emily Middleton: Yeah. It’s like brand awareness. But even when you open the product, if you like open the box, so when you open your WordPress website for the first time, which everyone listening to this podcast has probably opened a WordPress website for the first time. And if they haven’t yet, they’re going too soon. And what they’re gonna see is like a blog platform. Hey, this is what you’re gonna create. It’s look, we got a first blog post for you. That’s awesome. It’s like where do you go from there? If you’re not trying to create a blog platform, if you’re trying to go with an LMS, if you’re trying to create an e-commerce store, you are gonna have to go out of your way to find WooCommerce. You’re gonna have to go outta way your way to find Fluent cart. You’re gonna have to find Lyft. You’re gonna have to find your LMS tool, or you’re gonna have to be looking up, how do I build an online course? Then you’re gonna think about teachable versus like LifterLMS, and it’s oh, if I get lifter LMS, I’m gonna have to use whatever WordPress is, and then you’re gonna learn about WordPress that way. So there’s multiple ways to come into this, but I specifically started my WordPress experience with LifterLMS in WooCommerce. I didn’t really learn WordPress before Learning Lifter. I didn’t learn WordPress before learning WooCommerce. I learned them. At the same time, I was thinking, how do I create a fully customizable online course platform and I’m using LifterLMS, how do I do wild eCommerce websites? I’m using WooCommerce and car flows. That was what was available at the time. And so that was my experience coming in and that’s why I think a lot of younger people are not coming in to the WordPress ecosystem, but I think a lot of younger people. Who are 25 to 30, they are getting jobs, building Wix sites, Squarespace websites, and then realizing that the capabilities they have in those areas are limited. And they’re migrating to, like creating Figma websites as designers. And then things like. The bricks builder or etch, enticed them in using their CSS designer knowledge into WordPress. So many ways that you could come into WordPress, but you probably didn’t start at WordPress unless your mother was like working for a WordPress business. Sorry. I that’s why I think it takes younger people a little bit longer to get into it. And A DHD and staying the course I.  Chris Badgett: A DHD is good in WordPress because there’s like tens of thousands of plugins and themes and infinite customizability. You can, spend an eternity exploring WordPress ’cause it’s so vast, right? Emily Middleton: Yes. You can spend an eternity exploring WordPress and there’s a lot of noise coming your way and so you have to figure out what to exactly to focus on and. So with a DHD, it can be a superpower in that you lock in on certain things. Like I’ve used a lot of other LMSs other than Lifter, but I’ve used LifterLMS more than I’ve used every other LMS combined. So I’ve really doubled down and I’ve been fortunate to double down on LifterLMS because it’s just got so much customizability, so many features, Chris. A founder and a owner. And that’s something that’s so rare to find in any business online, especially ones that have been around for over a decade. A lot of people get into online business and it’s like super dry and super boring, and it’s super hard. And so basically they’re trying to be like, Hey, in three to five years we’re gonna sell this thing. We’re gonna take it from the ground and we’re gonna sell it for $10 million. But when you have like a lifestyle brand, when you have founders and passionate community and people behind the products. And you, specifically find the products people put their lives into. There’s a level of interest and intrigue and fun that comes with that. And so I think part of staying the course is you’re a passion, Chris. I imagine if you were to sell your company and leave WordPress, I might too. I’m literally following you. You’re like actually like a leader to me to be in the industry and have your life in this. We talk about all kinds of things that aren’t WordPress, like investing and personal stuff, and. I see you as a leader in this industry. So literally if you’re gonna sell out of the industry, I will too. I’m like but I’m following your pilot light here.  Chris Badgett: I appreciate that. And that’s the that’s the power of personal brand. And again, like the humanity on the internet, like choosing software isn’t just choosing software. You’re choosing the people behind the software. And if you take an interest in that. Even from afar, like if you’re not gonna work at the company or anything, but you get into the people behind the company it’s, that’s the future. I shouldn’t say that’s the future, but in, in a world of ai. There’s a, that whole human crafted thing of hey, check out this cool LMSI vibe coded over the weekend. And then you’re, getting clients and then you find this LMS that has like a bunch of passionate people and community that have been there forever. That’s a decision point. And yeah, it’s, and it is super interesting and you made some excellent points about younger people getting into WordPress. I think first of all, there’s so much more. So many more options. Like young kids want to be YouTubers when they grow up. My daughter included. And even me to agree. I, I still wanna be a YouTuber when I grow up. But the and now there’s TikTok and Instagram and and even WordPress got a lot of new users by writing, like having a public blog. But people tend to write less now or write less depth. They become podcasters or the people that do right, they wanna do like a substack or beehive newsletter and sell ad spots on it or, sponsor spots and stuff. So there’s just so much more competition that I think you’re right, is like there is no easy way. People find it when they need to find it in their life, when whatever they have is not serving them. Smart and how to market that. Especially like as WordPress, which doesn’t have a centralized marketing department. It’s, just an interesting challenge. I don’t have the exact solution, otherwise I would’ve put it out there already. Let’s land the plane on WP Course Guide. Tell us about the ideal types of clients you work with and how they can get in touch with you.  Emily Middleton: The ideal types of clients I work with are. A wide range of people, but specifically people who are stuck, frustrated, and confused. And ready to get unstuck. I have a lot of expertise because I devote my life to this is like a marketing tech strategy and. Really just getting people unblocked. If you’re blocked in copywriting, if you’re blocked and you need a custom plugin. If you’re blocked and you don’t even know where to start with WordPress or how to put LifterLMS together. Or how to choose your host, or how to connect your domain name to your host, you could be struggling with any of these things. I’ve spent a decade working on this stuff almost every single day, and so I can help you with a vast, array of things. So those are the people I work with, and you can reach out to me on wp course guide.com. You can Google it. You can Google Magic Emily Middleton. You’ll find me one of those ways. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Go check wp course guide.com. There’s a contact link right at the top. And I wanna thank you for coming back on the show, Emily, and thank you for being part of the Lifter Mess story. Really appreciate it. 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 Making LMS Website Magic With Emily Middleton 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 a comprehensive overview to the top WordPress plugins in this episode for creating and expanding an LMS website that goes beyond the LifterLMS core. He begins by emphasizing that LifterLMS itself handles almost all of the fundamental LMS features, such as creating courses, student dashboards, user accounts, memberships, e-commerce with PayPal or credit card payments, group sales, and engagement tools like achievement badges, certificates, gamification, and behavior-based emails. He does, however, stress that extra plugins are frequently required to operate a completely effective and user-friendly LMS site. He suggests the free User Switching plugin, which enables administrators to swap identities to solve difficulties as a student or instructor, and WP Mail Log, which records all transactional emails received from the site, including enrollment notices and password resets, for site administration and user experience. He suggests the free User Switching plugin, which enables administrators to swap identities to solve difficulties as a student or instructor, and WP Mail Log, which records all transactional emails received from the site, including enrollment notices and password resets, for site administration and user experience. He emphasizes Document Library Pro, a commercial plugin for organizing and graphically displaying files while managing member access, and Embed Any Document, which can be used to display PowerPoint, Keynote, or PDF files within classes. Loco Translate is crucial for modifying the site’s language and material. He recommends Popup Maker for interesting popups and WP Fusion to sync users with automation solutions for marketing, CRM, and revenue management. He suggests utilizing Gravity View in conjunction with a form plugin like as Gravity Forms to gather and present user-submitted data for forms and data management. Additionally, SEO is crucial, and plugins like Rank Math and Yoast SEO may assist increase the exposure of a website. 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 today I’m doing a solo episode on the best plugins, the best WordPress plugins for your learning management system website. Besides, of course, LifterLMS, we’re gonna go over free plugins that I use on every LMS site that I build. Also some paid ones that are my top recommendations for the best plugins. Now, an LMS site is not just courses and memberships and e-commerce and student dashboards. It’s also a fully functioning website that needs, you know, things from marketing, things for operations, things for user experience, and things for scaling for when your website gets really successful. So think about lifter LMS as the best all-in-one learning management system solution for WordPress. It covers all the LMS features. Everything from courses, student dashboards, user accounts, reporting, uh, gamification, engagement, all that stuff, all that LMS stuff is there. All the membership stuff is there for course, bundles. For locking down access to other parts of your site, outside of the courses. And, uh, also lifter LMS covers the e-commerce piece. So whether you’re selling with, with taking credit card payments or PayPal payments, or you’re using WooCommerce or you want to do group sales where somebody buys a bunch of seats for a group of people, that’s all covered within the lifter LMS E-commerce. Then all the engagement features for gamification, like achievement badges, certificates, behavior-based emails that are triggered based on actions in the LMS. This is all included in lifter LMS. So just about everything you need for a learning management system website is covered by or LMS, however. Lifter. LMS also plays nice in the sandbox with thousands and thousands of other WordPress plugins that do very specific things, some of which have specific integrations for lifter LMS built into their plugin. So I’m gonna go over my top ones today. I do recommend that. You know, you take a minimalist approach to plugins, even when you install lifter LMS, if you have the LifterLMS Infinity bundle, our top plan, I don’t necessarily recommend that you install every single thing we make and turn it on unless you’re gonna use all those features. ’cause LifterLMS has a suite of about 25 different plugins that do different things, but you likely don’t need every single one of those. The main part of this. Podcast is gonna be about the top non lifter LMS plugins that I recommend. So let’s start with some sort of utility plugins for site management and user experience. So these are two free plugins that I put on every site, and you may not have heard of them. So the first one, which is probably the first plugin I put on any LMS website besides lifter LMS plugins, is called user switching. That’s a free plugin. You can just do a search for it. It’s made by somebody named John Blackborn, and I absolutely love this plugin. All you do is you install it and what happens is. When you go to the users on your website, if you have this plugin installed and activated, you can switch to that user, which is super helpful for experiencing your website as somebody else on your website. So when somebody tells you, like if you’re doing support for your website, your LMS website, and they say something like, I can’t find X, or I can’t do X, or This thing isn’t working. The first thing I’ll do is I’ll go to the users on my website. I’ll switch to that user, which is powered by the user switching plugin, and then try to recreate what they’re saying is not working or they can’t find, and I can literally just experience the website as them in the role that they are usually as a student or a teacher on the website. So that’s super helpful. I use that plugin literally every single day. The next one is called WP Mail Log. Now what that does is it captures all the emails that are sent from your website so that you can look at them. And what I mean by that is we have a whole article on the Lit LMS website about the five different types of emails. I definitely recommend you check that out. There’s a type of email called transactional email. So these are the most simple example of a transactional email is when somebody forgets their password and they click the for forgot password link. Uh, they enter their email, the website sends them an email, uh, to click a link can choose their new password. That email communication is transactional email that is not a broadcast email or a marketing email. When Lifter LMS sends email notifications, and there’s many of these, many of these, like a purchase receipt or uh, an enrollment notification or, one of our premium add-ons like private areas, tells a user a new private post is ready for them to look at. These are all transactional emails. So if you ever want to see all the emails that your website is sending, not from your CRM or your marketing automation tool, but from the website itself, WP Mail log, which is made by a company called WP Vibes, is fantastic for that. So it’s really helpful for just, if you, if someone ever says like, I didn’t get the email, you can go look and you can see like, oh, yep, here it is. It was timestamped, it was sent. At this time, I can see the content of the email and so on. So, WP Mail log, I highly recommend and that is also free. The next is. Content delivery and learning assets related plugins. So WordPress is a content management system. You can stick anything you’ve seen on the internet. You can stick on a WordPress website or specifically an LMS website inside of lessons or on course pages or anywhere on your site. Really. So there’s a plugin called Embed any document that I absolutely love. The creator of that is a wsm. There’s a free version I use. They may have a pro version, but the reason I use this is WordPress is great at content management, but sometimes. It needs a little boost for certain specialized types of documents. So if I ever wanna put, say, a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation or a Apple keynote presentation inside of a lesson and I just want to put that PowerPoint file or that keynote file as the content, I can do that with embed any document and I’m just using the free plugin for that. Which is also great with when you have that document in your WordPress media library using LifterLMS’s features to protect that content and make that media private so the public can never find that document. Only the people that are supposed to find it can find it. It’s pretty awesome. But anyways, go get yourself the embed, any document plugin. Another one, which is a premium plugin made by Barn two is called Document Library Pro. This is awesome. What this allows you to do if your LMS website. Your courses, or your coaching programs have a lot of files like templates, document, PDF documents, cheat sheets. And spreadsheets, certain images, maybe CSV files, tons of different files are part of your membership or your LMS document. Library Pro allows you to easily organize those, present those in a beautiful visual way, even inside of a table and stuff. Stuff like that. So, for example, the easiest way to think about it is if you have a coaching program, and let’s say you have 20 courses in there. It’s all sold through one membership. They get the courses, but they also get this resource library. You can organize all those files using document Library Pro. And present them in a very visual way. LifterLMS will then kind of come on top of that and protect access to those files for your members. So go check out Document Library Pro, which is made by Barn two plugins. The next thing I wanna talk about is just internationalization and customizing text and language on your website. The top plugin we recommend for that, which is also free is called Loco Translate. That has over a million installs. It has, it’s made by somebody named Tim W and. So basically you can translate a lifter LMS website without custom development. Personally, I use loco translate in a little bit of a different way where. Let’s say I want to customize something that LifterLMS does or another plugin does. There’s the text and the content you put on your site. But there’s all these words and language all over your site. That are kind of automatically generated that you can’t edit. So an example of that would be at the bottom of every LifterLMS lesson is a mark complete button. And you can’t edit that the words mark complete. But if you’re using loco translate, let’s say your site’s still in English, but you want it to say finish class instead of Mark complete. You could just load up loco translate, find the mark complete string, and change it to finish class. Super fast, super easy. That’s using the Free Loco Translate plugin. The next area of of plugins. I want to talk about is marketing, CRM and revenue operations. So a top pick in the LifterLMS community is WP Fusion. That’s made by, very good plugins. So what WP Fusion does, they do have a free version, but I definitely recommend the paid version is it basically syncs your site with your CRM or marketing automation platform. So, for example, LifterLMS has integration directly with Kit previously ConvertKit and MailChimp. Back when we were building those, there were many others we wanted to build. But then WP Fusion showed up and built integration with LifterLMS. Which means that whenever somebody enrolls in a course or becomes a user on your site, they’re automatically synced to your marketing automation or CRM tool. And there’s many companies, many CRM marketing automation platforms, most of them are integrated with WP Fusion. So, besides Kit and MailChimp, there are many other popular ones like ActiveCampaign. Keep HubSpot, Zoho, CRM, Salesforce. All of these can be, are easily integrated using. WP Fusion. So when things happen on your WordPress LMS website, a user is created. 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. 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. Or you know, they enroll in a certain course and you want something to happen in the CRM or the marketing automation platform, or you want your users segmented by course so that they can be emailed as groups or cohorts separately based on their enrollment. That’s all possible with WP Fusion. It has some more fancy stuff. It does. I definitely recommend you get a license to WP Fusion. The next one is Popup Maker by Code Atlantic, which is an awesome tool. Popup Maker has actually sponsored this podcast, so you might be seeing a popup maker, spot in this episode. But Popup Maker is incredible. I use it on all my sites. I use it on lifter lms.com. I use it on Academy dot Lifterlms.com and many other sites that we have, and popup Maker has super deep integration to Lifter LMS, so Popup Maker allows you to use popups. Now, we have done a webinar with Popup Maker recently, where we go over all the details and how it works and what it does. But there’s a lot of reasons to have tasteful, ethical, fun, engaging popups on your site. There’s things like exit intent. If somebody’s gonna leave and you want to pop a message before they go, or let’s say somebody clicks a button and you want something to pop up for them to enter their email to download a resource. Or let’s say somebody’s abandoning a cart on a LifterLMS checkout and you want to throw a pop-up up with a discount code or remind them the value of what they’re purchasing or whatever. That’s all possible with popup maker and the integration is super deep with lifter LMS. It will really blow your mind once you start looking at all the things you can do with popup maker and lifter LMS together. The next area I want to talk about is, using data forms and building custom experiences. Now Lifter, LMS has integration with four form plugins, gravity forms, ninja Forms, formidable forms, and WP Forms, OS form or, what’s it called? Mark West Guard’s form. WS form is also another great one. So every WordPress website needs a form plugin. I recommend one of those five. I’m gonna use Gravity Forms as an example, simply because that’s what I’ve used for a long time on lifter lms.com. So all my form stuff is really done with Gravity forms because I’ve been using it forever. And the next tool I’m gonna tell you about, requires gravity forms to work. But, yeah, you, you, you have a contact page on your site. Maybe you want to do an application process before people can join your coaching program or your membership. Maybe you wanna register people for something, or you want to collect email addresses so people can get a lead magnet or a resource to add value to them while growing your email list. And again, WP Fusion, which I mentioned earlier, integrates with all these forms. So when people fill out these forms, it can pass the data to your marketing automation tool as well. So if you’re using Gravity Forms, I highly recommend you get Gravity View, which is made by Gravity Kit. This is a premium plugin that has deep integration with lifter LMS, and it kind of, we, we have episodes on this podcast with Zach Katz that you can check out. If you want to go deep into gravity view and gravity kit and what all that does, but essentially, what gravity view allows you to do is take form data through a form and then display that data on your website wherever you want, however you want, as a view. So to give you a simple example, you could have a gravity form. That people leave testimonials for your website. They fill out, like, let’s say the last lesson in your course. Ask people to leave a testimonial. They fill out the form, you know, they add their picture, they add their message, you know, they put in their website name all the pieces we need for an effective testimonial. And then they submit it and it can either publish instantly to, to the front end or go through a moderation step where you, as the site owner would review it before it goes live, but it basically automates collection of data and displaying that data publicly. There’s all kinds of fancy stuff you can do with Gravity View too, inside of courses, like where, let’s say you have a course that helps somebody build a business. And they are building a business plan as they go through the course, through the various lessons and they keep submitting their information one lesson at a time. All that form data is, collecting into a. What ultimately becomes a business plan, PDF and complete business plan. But you’re collecting that data and you get this visual view that only that user can see of their business plan. So there’s so much you can do with Gravity View, check that out. The other area is SEO plugins, which are really helpful for getting traffic and building your. Reach in your audience and the amount of people that discover you over time. SEO still matters even in a world of ai. So there’s, there’s very specific, SEO is even more important for LMS websites than more of a regular marketing site because so much content is behind a login. So to get found organically through something like a Google search. You really want to have some public content on your site, like a blog, you know, informational pages and so on. And what SEO plugins do is they kind of make sure your site is in the right structure so search engines can read it. It gives you opportunity to modify things like meta descriptions. To work with your writing to make sure you’re using your keywords effectively. If you want to be found when somebody types a specific search into a search engine. So there’s many great SEO plugins out there. I’ve been using Yost SEO for a long time. I know folks also like rank math or all-in-one SEL. Definitely any website. If it’s a business and you want help getting found on the internet, I do recommend installing an SEO plugin. Installing an SEO plugin and activating it doesn’t instantly mean that you have great SEO. Now. It just means you have the infrastructure to work on your SEO and improve things so. You know, those are my top plugins. I’m not making this like my favorite 100 plugins ’cause there’s literally hundreds of plugins that. I love that do very specific things. But if I boil it all down into a plugin set that I would put on literally every LMS website I would build. Number one is LifterLMS and whatever lifter LMS add-ons I need. But I would also put on user switching. WP Mail Log, embed any document, Loco Translate, WP Fusion, popup Maker Gravity View Document Library Pro, a form plugin, and an SEO plugin. And that’s it. That’s my minimalist approach to the best plugins for a WordPress. Learning management system website. So LifterLMS is all about helping you succeed. This podcast, we normally talk about topics, to help you grow, not just about how lifter LMS works and how software works and stuff like that, but I wanted to do a technology focused e episode because we get this question all the time. Particularly if you’re newer to WordPress. Go check out all the resources I mentioned. It’s about eight different plugins. Try and take a minimalist approach. But just know that the eight or so that I’ve recommended here are the top WordPress plugins. Most of them are free or have a free version that I put on every learning management system website that I build, and you would get incredible benefit from using as well. That’s it for this episode. Reach out to LifterLMS with any questions. If you have tech questions or tools, drop comments below this. If you have tech questions and are trying to figure out plugins, we also have a dedicated page on our website. Just do a Google search for LifterLMS recommended resources. In there, we’ll have a more expansive list of the top plugins that we recommend and web hosting and all kinds of stuff. For other software and hardware tools that you need for a learning management system website. I’m Chris from LifterLMS, and I hope you enjoyed this episode. 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 Best WordPress Plugins for LMS Websites Besides LifterLMS 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, Chris Badgett clarifies that “profiting from pain” refers to generating enormous value via the resolution of significant issues rather than exploiting people. Because conventional educational systems concentrate on teaching knowledge (mechanisms) rather than addressing why someone urgently needs that information, pain is frequently misinterpreted in the classroom. In actuality, they purchase pain alleviation and a clear route to a better result rather than classes, coaching, or memberships. He presents Dane Maxwell’s client-Result-Mechanism structure, stressing that everything must begin with a single client rather than a product. The course or coaching program is only the means by which the client transitions from suffering to relief. The client has a problem they wish to avoid and a goal they wish to achieve. The majority of course designers fail because they don’t fully get the suffering that generates actual market demand and instead think like experts, creating material first. Chris distinguishes clearly between severe pain and mild discomfort. An instigating event, such as a divorce, the birth of a child, sleeplessness, slowed company development, or an impending deadline like retirement or a lease expiration, can cause acute pain. People actively seek out answers and are prepared to spend since these difficulties are urgent, time-bound, and emotionally taxing. For this reason, pain-relieving offerings perform better than proactive but non-urgent “vitamin” courses. 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. Today I’m gonna be doing a solo episode with you about how to profit from pain. So pain is very misunderstood in the education space. We’re gonna get into that. When I talk about profit, I’m not talking about exploitation, I’m talking about value creation. So having a clear offer with clear conversions and more impact by solving pain, how to think about pain differently. By the way, we have a whole lesson in the Lifter LMS Academy course called the Perfect Offer Playbook, where we go even deeper on pain than what we’re gonna talk about today here. But I wanted to loop you in to start thinking differently about pain. Either in a new online course or coaching program or even business that you’re creating and how does leverage that to your advantage so that you can create much more impact, make more profit, have more fun, have a lot less friction, and doing the hard work of education entrepreneurship. So there’s a great old episode on this podcast that I did with Dane Maxwell. He dropped this solution from his book Start From Zero. He says that the holy grail of business is three things, a customer, a result, and a mechanism. And once I heard that framework and started using it and what I do, everything just started clicking for me. And we’re gonna. Unpack that, but basically you have to have a clear customer. I’m a big fan of putting a customer at the center of your business, not your product or your service, or your course, your membership or your offer. So a clear customer, the mechanism is how you do what you do. Ideally, it’s a unique mechanism. Now your mechanism will be unique no matter what, because there’s only one you, which doesn’t mean you can’t borrow. Pieces and parts from other folks, just like I just did with Dane Maxwell’s framework of the customer result mechanism. But the mechanism is basically how you do what you do when you create a course and it’s teaching somebody something. Maybe there’s quizzes, assignments, action items, and so on. The course is really the mechanism to create a result for the person. The result is the third piece of customer result or customer mechanism result. A clear customer has a specific pain they want solved. They want the result, which is to move away from that pain towards pleasure. And the way that you do that is through your unique mechanism. So that’s the framework we’re operating under, but we’re gonna talk almost exclusively on the customer aspect and within the customer aspect, we’re gonna talk about the pain. So the cost of mechanism first thinking, which is actually what most course creators do, and it’s not their fault. And I’ll tell you why in a second, is I’m a subject matter expert. I know all these things. Let me just give you my mechanism. Whether that’s getting in shape, starting a business, finding the love of your life, whatever it is, I have a mechanism for that, and my course just teaches you exactly what to do with all of that. But the cost of mechanism first thinking is that you’re starting to build features of a product, a course in this case, or a coaching program without really understanding the pain deeply. So you’re giving either too many ideas or cool ideas versus really following the market pull that is generated by pain. So this is a very common trap in course creator businesses, membership sites, any kind of e-learning or coaching co company. Is we as subject matter experts become mechanism first thinkers. Or we are basically, ’cause we’re in love with all these cool mechanisms that we found that can help somebody. But the challenge is a lot of people don’t start with the most important question. When they’re creating an online education offer, which is who? Who is this for? And we’ve all heard about the customer avatar, the ideal customer profile. All of these things, but so you need to have a specific who to make your course targeted, but within that, who is the actual pain that all, everything that we’re doing bubbles up from When you understand the pain deeply, it makes it much easier to sell. It makes it much easier to create content and so on. And the truth is that. An audience or a market does not buy a mechanism. They want a solution to their pain. Now that pain might just be boredom and they want entertainment. That’s what movies do as an example. So there’s different types of pain. There’s what I would call big T trauma or little T trauma or, just a, there’s all kinds of flavors of how severe is the pain, how important is this pain? How much will this pain make the person want to take action, or is it a pain that they can just ignore? There’s a lot of details in the pain, but my recommendation to you is to find what’s known as an acute pain. So what makes an acute pain different from vague discomfort? Acute pain often has something like what we call in copywriting, an inciting incident, and what that means is it says place in time where something happens and it generates a lot of pain and it’s very like time bound like this happens, then this pain happens. And once we target that, we get really specific. With our acute pain. So just to give some examples of acute pain, there are so many out there, but I’ll just give you some off the top of my head. One example might be a relationship has ended, whether that’s a divorce or breakup, that’s an acute pain. So back in the day when I used to study affiliate marketing exam as an example. On the affiliate marketplace called ClickBank, where you could find affiliate offers to promote the top selling information product on that platform was called. How to Get Your X Back. Okay, which is a very specific customer result mechanism, clear, plain pain point. Clear result, all in the name of the information product, which was like a course or an ebook, something like that. So getting dumped by a partner or a spouse. Or even in your dating years is very painful. And so this offer. How to get your ex back is tying into the pain that comes when a breakup happens in a relationship. And that is a very acute pain when you have a new baby especially as a first time parent. It creates pain now. Pain, having a child can be a beautiful, wonderful thing. It makes your heart grow bigger. I love my children, but when they come, new pains emerge. Like impact on sleep, impact on, let’s say the husband and wife relationship impact on your work. ’cause now you have this other full-time job called being a parent. Okay? So there’s a lot of pain here. I remember watching someone launch a course and coaching program on sleep training for first time parents for their new babies. This person was basically a sleep coach. So that is a mechanism like I’m gonna, I’m gonna help give you the tools and tips and strategies and tactics to help set your child off on a good foundation of sleep. And for you, the parents. But it’s very specific. Another example, if we’re talking about sleep there’s a lifter LMS user that does very well who works on the pain of insomnia. So insomnia is very painful if you’ve ever experienced it. I’ve been there. I’m not, I’ve always struggled with sleep, and that is a pain that I would be willing to invest in to get a solution or IE the result. So that I can live in the world like a normal, well-rested human being. So, insomnia is an obvious great pain. There are all kinds of medical conditions or psychological conditions that create pain. When we think about pain, we’re often thinking about physical pain. Some of the examples I’m talking about are obvious, but there’s a lot less. Obvious kinds of pain. For example, in business you might not have any physical pain. But let’s say you’ve created your product and nobody’s buying it. That’s very painful. Let’s say you have a successful business and you’ve been growing every year, and all of a sudden that growth stops, that’s called a growth ceiling. A growth ceiling, even though you’re doing well, but you stop growing is a painful event. So that stalled growth. Creates pain. That was the I stalled. Growth is the inciting incident, if you will. Next, let’s talk about the difference between a painkiller and a vitamin. So a, let’s call it a course that is a painkiller will definitely remove and solve the pain. S a vitamin is more like a proactive solution that maybe is a good idea, but there’s no clear, obvious pain underneath it. For example, if you look at something online like the biohacking community or the longevity community. These are people who want to get in the best shape of their lives, even when they’re older. They may want to try and live forever. That’s the longevity community. And these people do a lot of proactive things and they, they actually take a lot of vitamins and supplements and things, but the biohacking community is super small compared to the global population because biohackers. By design are very proactive and maybe some of their motivation is driven by an acute pain as well. But it’s a smaller market within the broader market because a lot of biohacking things are proactive and the reality is. A lot of the population is reactive. So an incident happens, they experience a lot of pain, and they they go looking for solutions. So finding an acute pain it’s really obvious when you find one. So if you’ve ever experienced a challenge like it could be anything like, let’s say you’re a. Looking to buy your very first house. Alright, there’s some pain there because you don’t know what to do. You don’t know how to negotiate the price. You don’t know. You wanna make sure you’re picking the right house for the largest financial transaction of your life. And let’s say your lease is up for your apartment in four months and you need to figure this thing out. So we have a deadline. This creates a lot of urgency around that pain of needing to find a place to sleep at night that you can afford 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 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 I also wanted to come back to what I said earlier about the reason a lot of us don’t focus a lot on pain is. Because we were raised in a traditional school system. Where almost all of that is just teaching you mechanism after mechanism. So if you remember yourself or you have a child who said a certain subject matter was not very interesting, and they’re not into it and they don’t like it, it’s because they’re being given a mechanism for a pain. They do not feel. So it’s the concept of. Just in case information versus just in time. So if you create a course, like just in case when you’re ready for it, you may want to learn these investing strategies and financial planning strategies so that you can retire one day. That’s very different from creating an investing course for people who are, let’s say. 10 years away from retirement and have no savings or investments. You have a mechanism to help them get them to a retirement-ready financial position. They’re feeling the pain of retirement approaching and having zero nest egg. That’s very painful. If I was required in school to take a class on financial or investing literacy, but I’m not feeling that pain, I would be a lot less motivated to do that. Let’s talk about finding the right pain for you. You wanna find the overlap of the pain that your niche or your target market feels. You want to think about your lived experience. And how you have credibility and interest in this specific pain. This is why we often give the advice if you’re looking to create a course or coaching program or membership site, to focus on a earlier version of yourself. Because number one, you’ve walked the journey, you were the customer, you figured out the mechanism somehow, and then you got the result. You remember that earlier version of yourself where there was so much pain, whether it was wanting to become an entrepreneur and start your own business, or to find the love of your life, or make some kind of health and fitness improvement, if you have walked those miles yourself, you’ll understand the pain. You will also understand the inefficiencies. The mechanisms that you tried to put together to solve that pain. If you think you can solve that better and faster, it can work out well to create a truly unique and great training course. And remember, people pay for four things, speed, certainty, insight, and the fourth, which is to stay out of jail. So if we. Look at something like an example we’ve already used, let’s say about the insomnia when we’re buying a course or a coaching program, if we’re the target market, the customer, we want either speed, like we want this insomnia to stop fast. We want certainty that it’s gonna stop and we’re gonna transform and transcend this challenge. We want insight into why is this happening? How does this insomnia thing work? And we also wanna stay outta jail because if we keep going through life, sleep deprived, we might make bad decisions that could land us in a bad place. And usually one of those four things is primary. You don’t necessarily hit all four. But I bring that up to say there will be one. That is primary to the pain that you solve. It could be speed getting away from pain. It could be certainty that you definitely can get out of the pain and that the, this program is gonna work. Or it could be insight. Just like really understand what’s really going on here. That’s part of what psychology and psychological health is. Is, it’s all of those things, but it’s also includes a lot of insight into understanding what’s really going on, trying to get closer to base reality. So insight is very powerful too. And when you’re finding your pain, you basically have to marry the pain and really just devote yourself and your product and your program to it. And it needs to have a strong course creator. Market fit, like you may see a pain out there, but if it’s not a pain you’ve experienced before or you only want to go after it because it’s trending in society or on social media or online or whatever, that’s not a good motivation. It really needs to fit you to have that founder market fit in. When you’ve walked those miles, if you’re solving a pain through a course that you’re creating and launching that you have solved for yourself in your own life, that gives you a lot more credibility. You’re basically teaching from scars your own personal life scars and trauma that you’ve transcended than just putting theories out there and ideas and research and. When you fall in love with an acute pain that’s right for you it creates long-term sustainability and motivation. For example, the pain that we truly solve at lifter LMS is that I see all this value trapped inside of people where they could go help lots of other people with pain in the world. It’s a Buddhist thing in terms of reducing suffering. That’s really motivating to me. I love being in the pain removal business. We’re doing that with software, we’re doing that with content. But I love solving the pains of education entrepreneurs, which is, there’s three results they’re going for, which is income. Impact in the world and creative freedom. Creative freedom is just designing the life and the way you work, the way you wanna work. So that’s super motivating to me and that’s why I’ve been doing this for over 15 years at this point. So it’s important to remember the nobility of solving pain. Pain is a signal, it’s not a weakness. There’s a reason the human body. Experiences pain, whether in the body or in the mind, because it’s a signal something needs to be addressed. And when you find a pain and you build a solution to help solve pain, it becomes much easier to sell because you’re in the business of helping reduce the suffering, if not solve it for other people. That is the most ethical, moral, human thing you can do as a human. So when you know you can help somebody solve pain, it’s, it makes selling easy ’cause you’re just trying to help people. So the next thing I want to talk about is the practical application and how you can look at this with your online course or membership site. Now, there’s two ways to look at it. If you’re already moving and things are going pretty well and you’re making in income impact and creative freedom in your life, that’s great, but maybe you can jump in and just reexamine the pain that you solve. Study it more. See if you can articulate better in your messaging, in your copywriting. Weave the pain into what you do. You’re not trying to manipulate people. You’re just trying to throw the signal out that this is exactly the pain that we work on for these types of people. This is how we do it, which is the mechanism. And I would like to invite you to, for me to come, help bring this information, this education, this coaching, this content into your life to help solve the pain. If you’re newer and you’re just getting started with like your first course or your first coaching program, you are in a great opportunity to do the reflection, to audit your own life, to look at the all the pains and challenges that you’ve overcome. Look at your skills, your life experience, your knowledge, the knowledge of others. Look at the research, do competitive analysis, and really find those pains. And also look for pain that is urgent. So when you have a new baby come into your home, it creates urgency. When you, let’s say enter a new relationship, it creates urgency. If you really hate your job and you’re trying to find something else to do with your career and your life, there’s urgency there. And there’s also opportunity costs. Like what happens if they do nothing? They don’t move forward. Like, how, what will the pain do? Will it just keep remaining chronic? Will it get worse? What opportunity costs are lost by doing nothing and so on. So think about this, even beyond software as an example. So if and courses and coaching and online communities. How can we work with this pain in a way that where we’re just a catalyst for reducing the suffering out in the world? And what do we want to commit our education entrepreneurship work to? So when you have a clear pain, you get better students and you get better outcomes. The mechanism or your course content, or your coaching or your online communities, it all gets so much better when you’re, you really start with a clear customer with a clear, very specific pain. It happens to me in my life. It’s happened many times where I have an acute pain and then I go online and I start looking and I start finding. A hundred books on the topic or in these courses and these Facebook groups and Reddit threads and be a pain anthropologist because there’s, once you really isolate the pain and look at it just like when I was getting ready to have my first baby, I went into the the books and the websites and the content and the courses. Because it’s urgent, like you only have nine months, probably less to once you’ve realize what’s happening, to get ready to solve the pain of not being ready to have a kid. And then you’ll see giant communities around these core pains of having your first child or starting your first business or, dropping weight if you’re, you’ve been struggling with weight as an example, or whatever the physical or the fitness goal is. So Lifter, LMS is an enabler in this process to help you solve pain for your people. Lifter LMS is not the hero. You’re the hero in your niche ending suffering for. Whatever your core customer’s main what their main pain is. So if you’re already moving, I want to encourage you to just revisit, even if you think your business is pretty good and pretty solid, really dial into the pain. There’s a concept in entrepreneurship called a pivot. Let’s say your business is doing well, but it’s not, it hasn’t replaced your day job or anything like that. A lot of times when that’s happening and you have some traction, either you’re not clear enough on the pain or there’s another pain adjacent that is, would be much better that your same person has at the same time. So you’re focusing on the wrong pain. So for example, in business coaching or in entrepreneurship, let’s say you’re focused on a specific mechanism about, how to sell more as an example. So you’re a sales coach, but you’re a full stack entrepreneur and you really understand all the stuff. But then you realize, a lot of my people, they’re taking my sales training and they’re doing all right, but they’re not doing great. Let’s revisit. Maybe I should also add some coaching or another course on developing the product that we sell, which happens before you sell. Because maybe they’re trying, they’re selling too hard on the wrong product and then that, product aspect of your training takes off because you found an even hotter pain. So it’s okay to pivot or add on or even just try something new. So the best thing you can do as an education entrepreneur is listen to the market and. A lot of times we stand around with our fingers in our ears, not listening to the market, just making what we wanna make, making assumptions about pain and results and who our customers are. But I call this, the ground game. You gotta get out from behind your computer. You gotta go hang out with the people that are having this pain. You gotta talk to ’em. You gotta ask them what have they tried, what’s worked, what hasn’t worked? What provided temporary relief, but not lasting relief. Get dig into the pain is my point. So that’s it on this episode of how to Profit From Pain. Again, we’re not profiting to exploit, we’re profiting because we’re creating extreme value because we understand the pain, the nuances of the pain, and, pain is something we want to heal, so it’s not like we’re profiting from people in pain. We’re actually profiting from helping people heal. 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 Profit From Pain 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 a comprehensive guide on how to strategically plan your online education business for 2026 in this LMScast episode. He emphasizes that planning is about developing clarity, focus, and adaptability to maximize the probability of success rather than forecasting the future. He starts out by emphasizing how crucial it is to determine your main audience, or the “who,” and comprehend their requirements, goals, and frustrations. Chris clarifies that many business owners erroneously concentrate on their product or method rather than the results that their clients need, and he advocates delving deeply into details like quickness, assurance, understanding, or preventing unfavorable outcomes. Chris presents a multi-layered strategy for planning.In order to create ambitious long-term goals, he suggests beginning with a 10-year vision, reducing it to a 3-year vision for more achievable milestones, and finally creating a comprehensive 1-year plan. From there, weekly and daily execution guarantees momentum and advancement, while quarterly themes aid in prioritizing focal areas, important projects, and initiatives. He highlights the significance of “anti-goals,” or things you consciously choose not to pursue in order to stay focused and avoid distractions. He also emphasizes how important it is to link your company with its goal, vision, and values. Values influence your decision-making and corporate culture, vision reflects the long-term effect you wish to generate for your audience, and mission outlines how you will do it. Chris demonstrates how these components influence hiring, team duties, and leadership choices using examples from LifterLMS. Chris delves into operational planning, outlining how to view your company as a “product” made up of people, procedures, and technology. Even for solopreneurs, he advises creating a basic organizational chart to clearly define roles and duties and to choose where to assign or employ staff. 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 LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett, and today I’m doing a solo episode about how to plan for an entire year as I’m recording this. It’s the tail end of 2025, and we have a resource on the Lifter LMS website in the lifter LMS Academy called the Annual Planning System. I’m gonna go over some of the highest level. Concepts in that, but I would encourage you to go check out the annual planning system. I happen to actually be a very big planner and believer in plans and there’s so much going on in our space in terms of. Change and disruption and the economy and geopolitics and everything that having a plan, an intentional plan, but more importantly than a plan, is the system you use to create the plan can really increase your odds of success as a course creator, a coach, a membership site owner as a WordPress professional who builds learning management system websites for clients. I’m gonna give you all the secret sauce on planning. And, we’re in this interesting stage where the education market is maturing. We have artificial intelligence accelerating in the world, in the economy, in tech. But keep in mind that planning doesn’t equal prediction, but what a plan gives you is a much higher odd of success. So there’s a famous quote that Mike Tyson says that everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face. But what I wanna say is the act of planning and coming up with a strong plan is super important and makes you far more robust and capable and clear. A better leader and just an easier way of being in the world in terms of business and even life. So this is for the course creators, coaches, membership site owners and agencies out there. And we’re gonna go over, the planning stack because it all cascades down from the plan. And the problem with entrepreneurship is a lot of us. I have to constantly zoom in and zoom out. We may zoom out and work on a strategic thing, and then we have to get in the weeds and work on a very small technical issue or work with a specific customer or work with a team member. But what I encourage you to do is to create the space to actually stay zoomed out and create a really high level plan, but then also start taking step functions down. From a big vision to a annual plan, to a quarterly plan and, down to a monthly plan, down to a weekly plan, down to your daily action and project management and things like that. The annual plan basically, which is what we’re primarily focused on today, is gonna set the direction the quarterly plan creates focus. The weekly execution creates the momentum of executing on the plan. But the common failure points are that plans are too vague or not committed to, or there literally is no plan. I’m often shocked when I see. Entrepreneurs of all kinds, not just education entrepreneurs, literally with zero plan in 100% reactive mode. And it’s sad because life and business could be so much better with some planning. That doesn’t mean you’re not gonna get setbacks or some kind of macro shift from the global economy or whatever, and things are just gonna change in your plan. Kind of gets outdated, but it’s the active planning that is super important. And it’s important to mention that even if your plan gets hit hit off track by some event, it doesn’t mean you can’t pivot the plan, edit the plan, change the plan, re or reprioritize what’s in the plan. The first thing we’re gonna talk about is really your core focus when it comes to a plan. You’ve heard me mention if you’ve listened to this podcast, I think Dane Maxwell, who we interviewed on this podcast a while ago, said it best that a business is really only three things, a customer, a result, and a mechanism. So the customers who you serve, the result is the outcome that they want, usually pleasure, pain, or transformation based, and the mechanism is how you facilitate. The result for the core customer. That’s literally all businesses. And we have a challenge in our industry where a lot of folks are super focused on their mechanism, like what we do, how we do it. I sell to people who want what I know how to do. It’s very vague, but the first part of creating an annual plan. Is to really drill in on that core focus and find the signal and the noise. The first part I just wanna say, and I, the, I’ve been in this industry for almost two decades and I realize that the number one thing missing from most businesses that hold them back from successes online education companies is the who you should always start with. The who. Who are we helping? Who is it? Who is the customer? Some people call that the customer avatar, the ideal customer persona. But what in reality happens is a lot of people are not very clear on the who, and they’re just saying I help anybody who wants what I do. So that’s not a WHO statement, that’s a mechanism first thinking statement. So we gotta get clear on who we serve. As you create your plan, the number one thing I would recommend you do is to figure out and even challenge yourself if you think you’re clear on who it is that you help. So you gotta develop that. You gotta question even if you think you’re already doing it and you’ve got a clear. Target market and customer avatar and stuff. I want to challenge you to keep drilling in on the who do you help? What are their pains, what are their frustrations? What do they want? What results do they want? I heard I think it was Dev Basu who said that customers only want four things to save time. What was the other one? Sorry. Save time. Oh, here we go. Sorry. Lemme back that up. What he said is, customers are looking for four things, speed, certainty, and insight. And the fourth one, which is funny, but not really, is to stay outta jail. So when you are creating an offer for a specific person. They’re either looking for speed, certainty or insight or to stay outta jail. So when you’re really clear on your who is, and you figure out which one of those like primaries are between speed, certainty, and sight stay outta jail, you’re starting to get much more crystallized around who it is you help, how you help them, and the benefit that they see in you, which now are tied into the result or the transformation. So let’s assume that you have figured out who you help. ’cause your plan, if you make it about you and what you want oh, I wanna make more money. I want, I don’t want as many obligations on my time. I want to create passive income and automation and all these things. That’s not really a plan, that’s just what you want personally. A great plan is built around. The people that you serve, the people that you help. So I’m a big believer in that you should put your customer at the center of your business, not your product. So let’s, when it comes to annual planning, let’s put our customer at the center, not our product. So we’ve got the who in the center of our business. We know what they want we know we have the unique mechanism to help them get what they want. Now we need to come up with a plan to actually make this happen. So in order to make that plan happen, what we also need to do is work on ourselves and our company culture, and we need to do the mission, vision, values work. So to go over it briefly, there’s a lot we could do on mission, vision, and values. We have a whole training on this and the perfect offer playbook in the lifter LMS Academy. But just to, put the basic ideas out there. A vision is the world that you want to create for your who, for your avatar, for the customer that’s literally at the center of your business. One way to think about vision if you’re a little stuck when it comes to your subject matter expertise. Is to think about what wrong do you wanna right in the world? So that’s, you can back into your vision by doing an anti vision of the world you don’t wanna live in or you don’t wanna see. Keep persisting and fix that for a specific type of person because you have the skills, experience, and knowledge to do that. This is the territory of vision. Mission is how you do it, what success looks like, or what the opposite of failure looks like. Lifter, LMS is an example. Our vision is to, in the broadest sense, lift up others through online education. I believe that education entrepreneurs are some of the most powerful, impactful. Positive outcome generating people in the world. So I throw out a stone with my software lifter, LMS, an education entrepreneur, picks that up and then throws out a stone to help their ideal learner get the results that they’re looking for, that which then helps more people. So it’s like a stone in the water that has multiple. Outward ripples of positive impact in the world while also creating financial impact and creative freedom. So this is the vision territory where I live, but the mission is to help, a million education entrepreneurs change the world through online education by launching successful courses, coaching programs, education companies. Internal training resources for inside companies and so on. That’s the mission. The values are how you do what you do. So Lifter, LMS has seven core values and when the first time I heard about values, I think of it as being cheesy. So for example there are cheesy values like. Integrity, honesty synergy collaboration. Now, those aren’t bad, if you, if those align with you. But to really create strong values, I think you have to get way more specific and not just come up with a name, but actually explain what it means for you. For example, the lifter, LMS company values are community focused. Reduce friction, continuous improvement. Learner results First, extreme ownership, clear communication, and fulfill potential. Now, I’m not gonna go into a big thing about what each of these mean, but these are values that I embody as a leader in the company and I hire and fire against those values. Whenever I have a difficult decision as a company, I go to those values. They’re super important and a lot of what we do is about reducing friction. That’s, if I had to pick one, that was our primary, that’s what we do. We reduce friction through software and also content like you’re watching right now, like this content is a, I’m trying to reduce friction in your life by sharing with you. An annual planning system that I’ve used for a very long time. That really works. So that’s mission, vision, and values. So the next thing you wanna do is comes from the personal development world in terms of developing a a vision that’s more. Like a vision board, something that you can see and basically, even if you have a hard time thinking about that, like I know as a parent, when I ask my kids, where do you see yourself in five years or 10 years? They have no idea. And you might be listening to this and be like I’m an adult. I don’t have any idea where I’m gonna be in 10 years, but I’ll encourage you to slow down, press pause. And Dan Martel says, dream a little bit. Think about, what do, where do I want to be in 10 years? I wanna see, a lot of people creating online training platforms. ’cause I personally believe that there’s a course inside all of us learning and teaching is part of the human experience. And I see all I’ve always seen this, I see all this value trapped in. People where they’re not sharing it, they’re not helping other people. I call it hoarding all the value. So in 10 years, I want to see a million people using lifter LMS, making money, changing the world and creating like ideal, extremely creative lives that they’re super happy with and proud of. But we can get specific. In constructing a 10 year vision, so what do you want your annual revenue to be? As an example lifter as an example, we’ve already achieved this where we have customers in every country. I don’t think we have a customer in Antarctica, but we have a customer in almost probably 99% of every single country. And that was on division on the plan a long time ago, and we’ve achieved that. What do you wanna be recognized as a leader of how many employees do you want? Do you want a big company? Do you want a small company? Do you want to be a solopreneur? Do you want to be a micro business, a big business? 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. Do you want to go out on the stock market and have an IPO? What do you want? What kind of like sales motion do you want? What kind of conversion rate do you want? What do you, if you saw yourself on a stage 10 years from now, not from an egocentric way, but just from a celebration of success, what award would you be receiving an award for? Is it a, like some kind of YouTube award? Is it a humanitarian award? Is it a Nobel Prize? What is it? Dream a little bit. So come up with your 10 year target. And the other thing to create a plan around is like, what’s your main marketing strategy? Marketing is attracting customers. So what does that look like? How do you close sales after you’ve got the lead? Where what is your, go to market marketing strategy? Are you growing through partnerships? Are you growing through content? Are you growing through ads? So basically condense your marketing strategy down to your ideal customer competitive advantage, proven process and results g guarantee. For example, at LifterLMS, our ideal customer. Is a a WordPress website freelancer or agency, or do it yourself site builder with at least two years of WordPress experience. Ideally they have four plus years of WordPress experience. They’re polite, they’re successful with their courses or their clients are very successful. Then what’s your competitive advantage? What makes you unique? We’re entering a world of AI disruption, and I can’t impress upon you enough how important it is to know what your competitive advantage is as a human and not just the information. Because artificial intelligence is making information more of a commodity, in that light, for example, coaching, like going beyond the content and helping people when they’re stuck in their unique personal situation. Having that human connection even through the internet is an extreme competitive example. And then what’s your proven process? Do you like how do you get customers, how well, how do you get leads? How do you get customers? After they become a customer, how do you make them successful so that they love what you do and refer their friends? And then what’s your guarantee? See, this is part of the benefit of planning. Some people get nervous about a guarantee when they have an offer because it feels I can’t really offer a really strong guarantee because it’s up to the student or the customer to do the work and get the results. If you’re really good at what you do and you’re really good at qualifying the people that come in that you allow to purchase from you, you can put out a really strong guarantee, like I’m talking about a hundred percent of your money back after X amount of time, like Dr. Dream a little bit. A guarantee can be a very strong sales tool, but more importantly than helping with conversions, when you think about a guarantee and construct it. What you’re doing is really putting your money where your mouth is in terms of what your online education is all about, and your confidence in the offer that you’re offering. And then, you’ve done the 10 year vision, you’re exploring your unique mechanism, which is where we’ve been about how you do, what you do, how it works, what’s the process, but dial it back to three years. What’s your three year vision? 10 years feels really hard. But in three years that should be easier. Do you wanna be making a million dollars, $10 million? Do you wanna have a thousand customers? 10,000, a hundred thousand customers or clients? What is your vision for three years? What do you want to have ac have accomplished in three years? Do you wanna have a signature course that just sells like hotcakes that you make better and better year after year. Do you wanna have a huge membership library of training? Do you wanna have this really strong coaching model with other coaches working inside your education company, helping people get results? What do you want? What are dream a little bit, think about those three year desired outcomes and accomplishments. Then dial it back again to your one year plan. So now this should feel more approachable. One of the reasons we do the 10 year and the three year is we wanna dial it back to think. All right, cool. I have these big goals. ’cause what you don’t want to do is you don’t wanna put a 10 year goal and a one year plan. Everything is just, all of it is unreasonable and unlikely. Unlikely to be accomplished, but it’s important to dream big at the multi-year, 10 year, three year level, so that you can come up with a reasonable and strategic one year vision. So think about that. What are the revenue targets in one year? What are the key projects? Now we’re getting more into tactics. What constraints do you wanna remove? What friction do you wanna remove? And more importantly than anything is what are you not gonna do, even if it’s considered good advice? What are you just not gonna focus on the first year? Like your anti goal list, even if you want to get to it to achieve your 10 year vision, but not this year? Think about that. So once we get past, 10 year, three year, one year, we start getting into quarterly planning, and this is where this should feel relaxing. The more tighter the focus gets because you get more control, the closer in time you are to what’s coming up. So when you do an annual plan, in this case for 2026. We’re ultimately gonna end up looking really hard at quarter one of 2026. So I like to do themes per quarter. So what theme do you want to focus on to achieve your one year goal in quarter one? So in your accomplishments from your one year plan, let’s say you wanted to, you had four goals like. Get over a hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube, launch five courses develop like a coaching system. And the other one was to come up with a template library. So it’s not just about content, it’s also about this awesome value packed resource library you have that’s part of your membership. I’m just making these up as an example. The cool thing about quarterly planning is you don’t have to do all those all at once and multitask and simul simultaneously work on them. So let’s prioritize like what is the theme for the quarter? Maybe you have a theme of we’re going all in on YouTube, or we’re gonna go all in on AI to accelerate our business, or we’re gonna focus on our website. Conversions in quarter one. So you can, you don’t have to do ’em all at once. In fact, it’s super dangerous to try to do too much all at once. So like within the theme, like what are the key projects? So if we choose the YouTube theme as an example for quarter one, that can mean a lot of things. That can mean. We’re gonna start a weekly live stream to attract new clients. We’re gonna hire a designer to improve our YouTube thumbnails. We’re going to upgrade our video and audio and editing equipment. We’re going to do brand collaborations with other YouTubers. So you start figuring out your key projects. Which is super important. And then once you’re in your key projects it’s important to think of not always just doing brand new things. What do we want to amplify that’s already working? Let’s say we already have a YouTube channel and we see that, content about this. Subtopic within our niche does really well. Let’s do more of that and get more exposure on YouTube as a, and then, like if we haven’t done live streaming before, that’s like a new project. So I recommend actually amplifying what you’re already doing well at a greater percentage to adding new projects. So if I had to pick three things for YouTube as an example, I might remake. Some of our oldest top performing content for modern times, that would be a project. Another one would be doing collaborations with other YouTubers, which we’ve been doing, but do more of that. So those are amplifications, whereas like doing YouTube ads, that’s a new thing. So I might do that as like a new project. The other thing that is part of planning is removing problems or constraints. So what’s constraining you in your business and how can you remove that bottleneck? So sometimes projects are not about necessarily brand new things. It’s about removing things that aren’t serving you anymore. So if we keep going with this YouTube example, let’s say you don’t have a strong home office set up for creating videos and audios and things like that. So you wanna remove the constraint of always having to do all this setup to make a decent video so that you can just step into your office. I can turn everything on and I’m ready to roll to make a high quality video. So you’re removing a constraint of. Time to create a high quality video, which then furthers furthers your goal. And then what do you wanna stop doing or not do? So maybe you’ve been, let’s say, blogging every day and doing a ton of social media every day. But in order to do more YouTube. You might need to reduce those things. So let’s say you move your blogging to once a week or once every two weeks. And in terms of social media, maybe you just take a temporary break from one of your social media channels or find somebody to help so that you don’t have to do it as much, or, just choose to discontinue a social media channel that you’ve been working for a long time that is not yielding any results. So turning things off is just as important as turning things on. So another part of annual planning is developing the business. So I like to say we’re really making two products. There’s like our education company offer, whether that’s a course, a coaching program, a membership site, or whatever it is. But the other product we’re making is our business and our business product is comprised of people and processes and technology. So that whole like business product. What do we want to do there? And particularly what I want to focus on is the people aspect. So maybe you’re listening to this and you’re a solopreneur, but maybe you have, you occasionally work with freelancers or maybe you have a team or even have a giant team. So even if you’re a solopreneur. Creating your organizational chart is a very important part of the annual planning system. And this doesn’t need to be fancy. You don’t need like a org chart software or have to even create something fancy and Google Sheets or Excel or whatever. But put down like the key functions of the business. The way I divide up an organizational chart is. It comes with seven areas. So those seven areas are product, marketing, sales, engineering, operations, and admin customer success. And then we have the CEO or the leadership role under those, each of those. So if you’re doing it low tech, you can literally do it on a Google document with each of those, and then you put bullet points under those. And the bullet points are like breaking out the functions. So as an example, like under engineering or tech as an example, we might have who’s in charge of the website? Who’s in charge of customizing lifter LMS to meet the needs. Who’s in charge of the hosting, who’s in charge of the marketing automation as an example, and if, and then you put people’s names by it. You really, you just build out your org charts so that each key function and functions within that function has one name next to it. If you’re a solopreneur. Your name will be everywhere. But the reason it’s an important exercise to do this even as a solopreneur, is that you can start seeing where you want to get help first. Like perhaps it’s under the CEO role. Perhaps you wanna hire a virtual assistant to help you first. That could be, but when you do that, you’ll start to see I like being a CEO. I like being a leader. I’m spending a lot of time here, but I also need to spend time over here in marketing or in sales, or on product, or on engineering or customer success, all these things. And you can start to see where there’s a gap. So part of your annual quarterly planning or 10 year vision, it’s about people. It’s about the business product. What kind of organization do you want to have? What seats need to be filled? What are, what is the personality of those people that you want in those places? So that’s a accountability chart. The next thing is to develop a conscious artificial intelligence plan. We’re being. Disrupted as a society, just like when the internet became a thing by artificial intelligence. So think about that. When you’re doing your 10 year vision or your three year vision, or setting your annually plan, annual plan, or working on a quarter, start thinking about how will AI be involved? How do we wanna leverage ai? Even if you don’t know like the tool you want or whatever. If we go back to our YouTube example. We might wanna figure out how to do better video editing using ai. I’ll tell you the answer right now. Get the script. Script is an awesome AI powered video editing tool. It can make shorts for you. If you’re watching a clip of this on YouTube. It was made with the script very quickly. It can remove filler words and gaps and all kinds of stuff, what’s your plan for ai, for content creation, for coaching, for marketing, for developing ads, for making your videos better for doing research? What’s your plan like or what do you need? And even if you don’t know the answer, that’s fine but come up with the question, how can I use artificial intelligence to help me? Be a better YouTuber. Bring that question to ai. Dream a little bit, talk to AI a little bit and think about that one. And the final thing I’ll mention, and by the way, I’ll say it again, I mentioned it earlier, the annual planning system that I use is free on the Lifter LMS Academy. If you go to academy dot lifter lms.com and look for the annual planning system course. Enroll in that you can get the template I use that I use every year to work on my annual plan. And the cool thing is once you’ve done it once and you come back to do it again the next year, you might have a few updates to your 10 year vision. Maybe you’re moving faster or slower in certain areas, so this gets easier the more you use an annual planning system. The last most important part is that you are a human in business. So what personal development goals do you wanna set for yourself? Maybe it has to do around your productivity or when you wake up, or how stressed you are, or your work life balance or your ability to communicate public speaking your personal relationships outside of work, whatever it is. Doing an annual plan, I highly encourage you to incorporate personal development so that you become a better person in the process, not just have a better, more profitable, impactful business. ’cause those things work really well together. So planning is a practice, it’s not an event. It’s all about progress over perfection. And. When you really commit to annual planning and give yourself permission to not be perfect, and sometimes you won’t hit your targets. Sometimes you will overshoot your targets and that’s great, but it’s a work in progress. It’s a way of being in the world of operating with a plan. It’s like the military. If you think about an elite operating unit, the Navy Seals or the Army Rangers they have plans all the time. They’re really good at planning, but then when they hit the ground and the stuff goes off, they have to adapt on the fly. And you have to do that in business and in life as well. But planning is really important. And the process of planning, the act planning even if the world doesn’t go exactly according to plan. Your odds of success are gonna be so much higher. You’re gonna be so much more clear, less stressed, adaptable. So I would encourage you to develop your annual plan. Head on over to the lifter LMS Academy, find the free annual planning system course. Fill out the document. You copy it, you put it into your. If Google Drive or download it and upload it to whatever WordPress processor you use and work on your annual plan, it will change your life. 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. 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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 Marcus Carter from Carter School of English returns in this episode of LMScast to provide a detailed look at how he turned decades of conventional English instruction into a scalable online learning company driven by LifterLMS and WordPress. Marcus, who has taught for more than 30 years, describes how the COVID epidemic compelled him to switch from traditional language schools to virtual ones. His tentative TikTok videos and lack of camera confidence eventually developed into a powerful social media presence, which helped him see the possibilities of digital courses as a long-term business strategy. He distinguished himself in a competitive market by concentrating on his proficiency in phonetics and multilingual instruction for Spanish speakers. Marcus also discusses how, after months of trial and error and sluggish early development, YouTube turned out to be his most successful growth and sales channel. One little alteration to a thumbnail served as the catalyst for a breakout video that has already amassed millions of views after more than 160 films were uploaded before gaining significant popularity. From there, he was able to create a devoted worldwide audience by using YouTube to easily integrate content with course sales through straightforward links and weekly live sessions. Marcus highlights his open, trust-first approach to marketing throughout the discussion, providing prospective students with thorough walkthroughs of his courses rather than depending only on exaggerated claims. He talks on how producing top-notch courses takes a lot of time and effort often nearly a year each course and why having several revenue streams such as YouTube, teaching, sponsors, and digital goods is crucial for long-term viability. Marcus concludes by discussing how he is now utilizing AI to make language learning more dynamic and interesting, continuing to push the limits of LifterLMS’s capabilities while producing significant results for students worldwide. 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. He’s back on the show. It’s Marcus Carter. He’s from Carter’s school of english.com, the Carter Method. And Marcus, what this episode is primarily gonna be about is how he’s figured out to make online language learning more engaging, more effective, more interactive, how to push the boundaries with WordPress Lifter LMS using AI to help. This is gonna be super fascinating, but first, welcome to the show, Marcus.  Marcus Carter: Thanks very much, Chris. It’s a pleasure to be here. Be here.  Chris Badgett: I’m real excited you’re here. And for those of you who are listening via podcast a little later in the show where Marcus is actually gonna get into screen sharing. So if you wanna see what we’re talking about, go to the lifter, LMS YouTube channel. And find this episode. If you type in LMS cast Marcus Carter, you’ll find it. And if you have the ability to switch over to the YouTube while you’re listening right now, I’d recommend doing that. But first, Marcus, let’s give a little context. Tell us about the Carter School of english.com. Just bring us up to speed on what it is, how long it’s been running, and your brand and your approach, and what your mission is and what’s going on. Marcus Carter: Okay I’ve been teaching English for the last 30 years and up until COVID the Pandemic I had my own language schools and we were all obviously, in different places and in different towns. And then COVID hit and that all went to pot, basically. And we had to diversify a little bit, although we did continue online a little bit with our students for a couple of years, but I could see that it was going downhill pretty quickly. And so I. My wife convinced me to start uploading TikTok videos and super embarrassed at the beginning. I had no camera confidence at all, or even though I’ve spent years and years in front of people, I couldn’t speak to a camera. In fact, my first videos was like with a cartoon head you couldn’t even see my face. And anyway, I kept going and eventually got a bit of traction on TikTok and managed to get lots of followers there. And trying to work out how I could monetize all of these people that were following me. I started opening telegram groups for people for free, but most people were on it for like the free ride. There wasn’t much conversion there, and I didn’t actually have anything to sell. I was trying to get people into the online courses, that we were doing. And that was the time when I started thinking about, Hey, maybe a digital course would be something that I could sell to these people. That’s when I discovered lifter LMS and that’s when I set up my first course, which was within the. The context of English teaching. I’m also a writer. I’ve written like nine or 10 textbooks but I’m also very focused on phonetics. I consider myself an expert in phonetics. I’m also bilingual in Spanish. I’ve got certain things going for me on social media that maybe other teachers don’t necessarily have, and that gave me a niche that I managed to fill and became quite popular. And I transitioned from TikTok over to Instagram, still trying to work it out how I could sell courses. It was pretty slow at the beginning because I, it was, it was, everything was new to me and I didn’t really know how to, bring the people to the courses to do webinars and those kind of things. That all was a kind of learning curve for me. And then from there, I always had in the back of my mind, I loved watching videos on YouTube and I always thought, I’d love to be a YouTuber, but I didn’t wanna transition over to YouTube because I knew that the editing process was gonna be so much more laborious than what it was on these social media platforms. But I thought, I decided one day, that I was gonna be a YouTuber and started uploading to YouTube and took me 164 videos before I got one of my videos. And it was actually very funny because it was one of my videos that I uploaded, I had uploaded eight months previously. And I was just looking through my videos and I thought, I’m gonna change the background in that video in the little thumbnail. I literally changed the background and even today, like three years later, it’s still my best performing video. It’s crazy how something like that can completely change your life, because from there, obviously it’s so much easier. In YouTube, you’ve got your links for your digital course into your website. Under the videos, people just start clicking in and you’ve got hundreds of, that’s, that video’s got over 2 million views now. And that’s where I transitioned into then starting to earn money from the platform of YouTube and starting to sell my digital courses. And I started with the phonetics course, which was my original one. Then I did a basic course for beginners, and then a year ago I launched an intermediate course, and just a couple of weeks ago I launched my Between basic and intermediate, which is my latest product, which is based on ai.  Chris Badgett: Wow, this is cool. And before we get into what you figured out with your recent courses on how to make them more effective a couple quick clarifying questions. Do you do any like instructor led training on Zoom or it’s all kind of self-paced within the LMS?  Marcus Carter: I had, I’ve had everything. I had cohort, I had a, like a Saturday group, but there were like 40, 50 people coming every Saturday. It’s pretty difficult with English because everybody’s at a different level. So I always had to invent like global concepts that I could teach to people. That’s where phonetics is great because phonetics is, there is no level in phonetics of in English. It’s not like the vocabulary or the grammar that you have to be a bit more advanced. So I was focusing heavily on, on phonetics and just putting sort of global vocabulary. And so I did have the cohort, I was using my lifter LMS platform for that every Saturday for three years straight. And that was very successful. Had lots of students in those classes. That went very well. I do still teach online too. Now I, because I’ve got more limited time, I only teach private classes to high level executives for for those reasons that I don’t have much time and to do groups and things. I still have a couple of teachers that work for me, two or three teachers. And, but my main focus is now on, I just love creating digital courses. I just, it’s just so much fun doing that. And obviously the YouTube channel, I have to keep that going. So I’m live every Saturday at seven o’clock, always on, on YouTube, and I always have a good community of people that come there expecting my classes. And it’s really nice to, they’re all there before me, chatting to each other and, things. And yeah, I’ve tried to create a nice community in YouTube, which that’s what I use to, to boost, the sales and to promote the courses while I’m live or in my videos.  Chris Badgett: Quick question just tactically, like what’s your advice to somebody who’s, using YouTube as a marketing channel? You got like a link below the video and the description, but how do you, how does the actual conversion to sale happen? Is it pretty straightforward and that they click on the link and they’re like, yep, that looks good. Price looks good. I’m in. Is there any other kind of sales motion involved there? Marcus Carter: Yeah, basically I’m probably not the, I’m, I could probably sell a lot more than I actually do, but basically all I have under my videos, whenever I’m live, the first thing I do when I’m live on YouTube is just say, before we jump into the class, just remember that the links are below to all my courses and I always have the one, the most recent course at the top. And another thing I have is a a WhatsApp number as well, business WhatsApp number. So people can click on that and directly send a WhatsApp. And I personally answer those those messages. So that’s a kind of good way to get some more, personal engagement from from me. People are quite shocked sometimes when I answer with an audio and I say, it’s you. And I said, yeah, it’s me. Don’t worry. And so yeah, I think that’s a good, and I also have a little WhatsApp logo on my website too. WhatsApp, I can’t remember what it’s called. It’s a plugin for WordPress where people can just click that on any of the pages and they directly send me a WhatsApp and I answer that too. So I think that’s that’s important because people always have a lot of questions about, when they’re gonna buy a digital course. And another thing I’ve done for the last two courses that I launched, so a lot of people are selling digital courses online. Obviously when you go onto their landing pages, it’s full of promises and you’re gonna learn this, you’re gonna do that, blah, blah, blah. This is what’s inside the course, click to buy, but. You are, you’ve just gotta trust what that person is saying is true on that website. And I’m probably not a very good salesman, but I am a very transparent, honest person. And so what I did in my previous, not this latest course, this latest course too, but the previous one is I filmed a, I had a webinar where I brought everybody in to launch this course and I showed them everything that’s inside the course. Every little detail about what it was all about. And you click here and these are the audio, and then you listen to this and these are the videos and blah, blah, blah. And then that’s on my website. So anybody that goes to my, to the page to buy that course, it’s like a 45 minute video. You know exactly what you’re buying before you buy it. And I did exactly the same thing with this course that I just launched as well. So I’ve got that, and I think that’s important because a lot of people have said to me in comments that it, things don’t live up to their expectations. That a lot of people are sending courses. I’ve tried to do this one, I’ve tried to do that one, and then, I’m so pleased that I can actually see what I’m buying before I actually get it. And if you are, if you’re a quality content creator and your course is quality, why not? Don’t be afraid, in my opinion, that your competitors are gonna be looking at your courses and thinking, oh, that’s a good idea. Fair enough. It’s worth the comp. Probably not many competitors are looking at my courses anyway, but I would prefer to be so open and to say I’ve created something that I know is quality. There it is. Have a look and if you’re interested, you just buy it.  Chris Badgett: I love that approach. The, it’s, I would call it like in marketing, I’d call it like a video sales letter, but it’s not a bunch of promises in this. It’s Hey, here’s what’s in the box. Here’s how this works. This is exactly what you’re gonna see. Like we’re removing all the mystery. Come on in. If this sounds like a good fit to you, it’s awesome. Marcus Carter: You go and buy an iPhone and you’re standing there in the i in the iPhone store, and you’re testing it before you know what it’s all about before you buy it.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s brilliant. That’s my approach. Can you get into just a little bit of if we take a snapshot of today just the impact you’re having, like things like whatever you’re comfortable sharing, number of students you’ve mentioned it’s become like your full-time income stream. Now you’ve mentioned, I’m curious like when you’re teaching English to Spanish speakers, like what parts of the world are you hitting and who’s, and also. Do you have any stories about how people have gone through the Carter method and got some job or some outcome? I’m sure you have all that stuff, but can you just tell us, inspire us a little bit with the impact of the site? Marcus Carter: Yeah. Obviously when you, the digital, the last digital course I just created, it took me 11 months to create this course, and the previous one before that, it took me a year to, to create that. So you’re I’m it’s not my full source of all income. Obviously I’m, I’m teaching and I had sponsors also on the website, and YouTube obviously pays me. So I’ve got, MSI, multiple sources of income. I think that’s important for any kind of content creator to, open your. Possible sort of income sources so that if one isn’t doing too well, you’ve got another one. And you can more or less keep going. And so I know it’s difficult to spend a year creating a course, and not have any income at all for that course. And you don’t even know if you’re gonna sell it when you get to the end of it. ’cause you are, you’re reaching a stage. You’re gonna try and do a webinar, you’re gonna try and bring people in, and then hopefully you’re gonna buy it. And then obviously from that moment onwards, it’s just a passive income that you are getting. And I don’t know how many students I have, hundreds of students that have bought my digital courses. Definitely, maybe, probably 300, 400 I dunno how many exactly. I’ve sold. But the important thing for me is to always be have, they all have their separate telegram groups. I’m in all those groups. I answer everything as. Quickly and as detailed as possible, anything they need to know, because they’re asking me questions about English. And what about, how do you pronounce this word? Audio message is to have a lot of close contact with the students after they have bought the courses, which then brings them into, a close field of contact with me to build up trust. Because at the end of the day, when people, a lot of people come into the, to the webinar one thing I must say, when I do my webinars to sell the courses, the launches, I’ve actually only done about three or four launches. The last two were the most successful ones. The typical webinar that people are advertising come to the webinar and we’re gonna teach you this and blah, blah, blah. So a lot of the time it’s using Facebook ads or YouTube ads or something, and you click on that and you sign up for the webinar. You might not even know that person. So what I did is I. Told people in the, I did YouTube ads in the last one, but I told people in the ad, I said, Hey, are you interested in seeing a new English course that I’m just about to launch? It’s this kind of level or whatever. I didn’t say come to the webinar, which is another strategy I tried three years ago where people came, I gave them this webinar about phonetics. I was teaching them things and that, you’re gonna get a load of value and then here comes the sting in the tail. I wanna sell you something at the end of it. And that is the typical pattern of webinars that me as a, not as a salesman I don’t feel comfortable hooking people in and then trying to, get that sale at the end and say, I’ve given you that value. You owe me, some of you owe me a sale now at the end, so everybody that came to that webinar, they knew why they were coming. They were coming to see the presentation of a new course and. Almost all of them knew who I was. ‘Cause I’ve got, I dunno, 300,000 followers on, on, on YouTube. If they didn’t know me, they probably would’ve clicked on and seen my videos and things anyway. So I don’t have to prove that I’m an authority, which is what a lot of people have to do in these webinars. Say, look, I’m this person. These are all the testimonials I have from other people that have bought my courses. Look how great I am. I just said, look, this is who I am and this is why you are here. And so whoever was there to see a presentation of a course and they knew that I was gonna sell it that day. And that makes me feel super comfortable when I’m in these webinars. And I don’t have to like, start getting a lump in my throat when the sale’s coming up and then, all of a sudden come out with a price. But it’s a bit lower today because, and all of these things. I was just very comfortable. So I’ve probably sidetracked a bit from your original question.  Chris Badgett: Oh, I love that. Yeah. Just the piece I was looking for on the reach which. Spanish speaking countries. If you have 300,000 views on YouTube, you’re probably hitting all of them, I’m guessing, but Totally.  Marcus Carter: Yeah. It’s primarily Spain USA, Mexico, Columbia, but it’s just all of them, everywhere really. And I got a lot of people in, Australia and things because they’re just, Spanish speakers who have, gone to other countries to live and they need to brush up on their English. So yeah, it’s just wherever the algorithm takes me.  Chris Badgett: And just one more question before we get into our screen share. I’ve noticed I’ve seen patterns, ’cause I’ve worked with a lot of course creators and ones like you that are just crushing it and moving it multi-year in. I noticed three things. One of ’em is they’ve already got some experience with WordPress, like maybe a couple years before they get into it. The big one is. They’ve already been making money with this expertise probably in the offline world. Like for you, you said you’ve been teaching English for 30 years, so you’ve been in the space a while. And then the most interesting one is you people take forward imperfect action and just keep going. You’ve played around and experimented across social media. You’ve gotten better, better at tech. You’re implementing with ai. You get in the weeds sometimes and you get tech support or get help from AI or just mess around until you figure it out. You try a lot of tools. I’ve just seen this movie before, but is there anything else you would add to even if it’s motivation related, like why do you think you’ve been successful here, besides those factors that I mentioned? Marcus Carter: Yeah. Don’t have a plan B. That’s probably number one thing I would say. When I, yeah, when I closed the academies, all like the furniture, I had three schools all that furniture went into storage. And I still had, receptionists that was still working for me, but they didn’t really have anything to do. And I, we had five at the beginning, we had to get rid of some of them. There was just two left at the end and they were like, okay, Marcus, what are we gonna do? We’re gonna reopen the schools and take all that stuff out. And I was like. No, we’re not gonna do that. I was like, Hernan te, like I’m burning the boats and I donated all the furniture to some local schools, and I said, we’re going digital 100%. And I, and it was just like, there is no plan B. These digital courses have to work. Yeah. And when you’re, when you find yourself in that corner, you’ve got no other option than to make it work. And that is when, you kick into overdrive. And I love what I do. I love my studio. I love coming in here. I love creating content. I love tech. I’ve always loved tech since I had my, Zi X Spectrum, 81 in my bedroom, when I was a kid and things. So I’ve always loved that side of things. What was difficult for me was the camera confidence, and being natural on camera. But, it’s just press record, just keep going. It just, and just, there is no. Escape. You just gotta keep going in that direction and eventually you will get there. And if you are, if you’re struggling, and it’s you’re in a specialist niche, keep learning all the time. Just keep learning and learning, looking at other creators and try taking something from there. Put your spin on it and just keep, because you can have the best course in the world, but the biggest problem, or the best I, telephone in the world or whatever product the number one pro problem for every creator or any kind of product or service is, how do I put that product in front of the people that are gonna buy it? I could have a physical shop, that’s one way of doing it. But if you’re online, like most of us now. How do you get it in front of those people? And so you can pay your Facebook ads, your YouTube ads, but then you are somebody that isn’t, you don’t have an authority channel where people can say, oh, okay, this guy, all right, let’s click on here. Okay, he’s, he must be good ’cause you’ve got 300,000 followers or something like that. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re good just ’cause you’ve got that. But and so organic reach for me has been the number one way to, to reach people and to create that authority and that community by just keep going and going. And, as I say, 164 videos on YouTube before, I remember my first check from YouTube was like $2 36 cents, like two years in. But for me, it was like I said to my wife, I said, I’m just so happy that I’ve monetized the channel. Finally people are coming to the channel. But it, because it was just, I’m like that kind of terminator mentality. It’s just, I will not stop.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Marcus has already dropped a ton of gold and he’s got a YouTube play button behind him. I don’t have a YouTube play button. I’m looking I’m taking notes on these YouTube tips. But another thing about the great course creators is this not just about having a great website and making the sale and figuring out your marketing channel. You actually have to deliver, quality, engaging, effective learning content. And Marcus is gonna take us on a tour, some of the stuff he is done with his latest course to inspire. If you’re listening, go find the YouTube version of this LMS cast with Marcus Carter. I’m gonna pop your screen up here, Marcus, and just. Can’t wait to see the show and tell here. So it’s it’s up in the window.  Marcus Carter: All right. Okay. So what you were saying just then about having a great website. I don’t have a great website. That’s one of the things I gotta work on a bit more. I’ll actually show you my my, I was just like fiddling it. It’s not a great website, it’s just a basic elemental website that I’ve created here. It’s nothing special at all. And I need to improve it. I know I do. ’cause that’s my son keeps telling me, dad, you gotta get this website sorted out. But even that doesn’t matter because at the end of the day, it’s not about, I don’t think it’s about the website, it’s about the landing page. It’s the link that goes from wherever you are. If you’re in TikTok, in Instagram, YouTube, whatever, that people land on that page and that page is well explained. I’ll just show you for example, what I was explaining before, so this is Genesis is the name of the new course, and this is the landing page for Genesis that I just recently created. Here is the video where I explain the course in detail inside, I streamed it on YouTube live at the same time. I was doing it on Zoom. And so that’s the first thing people find. And it’s just a basic basic web, a basic page that goes down here with your buttons. One thing I’ve created here is I’ve got four courses now. A lot of people like to buy bundles, and that’s when I use the memberships obviously in lifter MS. And so here you can say, okay, I want the basic course, gives you the price there, and I want to add it to Genesis. It’s telling me this is in Spanish, but it’s telling me how much I’m saving down here and I want to add this one too. Or I can have all four. So making things easy, as easy as possible for people to be able to upsell very easily. I always, whatever, this is my, my phonetics course is the one on the right here, pro Speech, so that’s 249 euros, about $280. But if you buy that course with any of the others, it’s only a hundred dollars more. So I always, when people contact me, I say, buy the phonetics course. You need to add that to any of the others. And it’s just, it’s almost standard now that people buy the package of Genesis Plus Pro speech or Intermediate plus Pro speech or Basic plus Pro speech. Yeah. As I say, my website’s nothing, nothing special at all. It’s just a basic thing that I throw together and I keep every course seems to have a different theme. So as you can see, this one here is kinda like purple, I dunno why. But the other ones are like orange and green and things like that. So I show you that now how I’ve changed the colors and that’s one of the problems because really my logo is blue and white and my, sun keeps telling me that I should keep the same colors and things like that. But let’s go into my area where my courses are. So what I just wanna  Chris Badgett: add while you’re pulling that up, I’ve seen this movie before too, where it’s the offer and the training. Like we can get really obsessed with web design, but when you have the right offer for the right people and you’re good at what you do, like the design, while important and a website can always be improved. It’s the offer that matters. And you nailed it. And I think, by the way, that’s a beautiful landing page that you were just showing us. Marcus Carter: Okay, thanks. Yeah, but even looking here, my courses, like the basic course doesn’t have a background, the intermediate course, that was, I’m looking at it now, I’m thinking, why didn’t you just do them the same? But these are just things that I overlook, as a creator or genesis. I just threw this together ’cause I didn’t have a featured image for the Genesis course, but I’ll show you, for example the intermediate course, which is the course that I launched a year ago. And this is when I started going a little bit higher in my technological skills as far as the course is concerned. So I’ve got all my modules here. There’s 63 lessons in this course 10 modules, and they all have like evaluations at the end of every module. So if I just click into to lesson one. Each. Listen all my videos are based on videos and this is why this course took so, so long. ’cause there’s 63 videos that I had to edit, which took me an eternity to do that. And I’ll explain the way I changed it in the next in the next. The way I teach English basically is I have this is what the counter method is based on, is that there’s a set of vocabulary there and I introduce a word and then I immediately ask a question to the student. As you can see at the bottom here, it says, do you play chess? And what I do is I leave a gap here. So yes, I play chess, play. Do you play chess? So as you can see here, I ask a question, students are supposed to answer out loud, and then they compare their answer with mine. Yes, I play chess, or no, I. I don’t play chess. And so there are always what we call closed questions, which is a yes or no answer. They say it out loud, there’s no real interaction. I’m just hoping that students are actually saying these answers out loud. Okay. That has worked very well up until now, but I wanted to change things for my new course. So after this part here there’s another series of audios. I’m keen  AI: on going camping in summer  Marcus Carter: for people to  AI: camping  Marcus Carter: people to listen to the audios here. And then I used this is a plugin that I used here for some different kinds of exercises. You can put the cursor down here, see the translations. No. Okay. This is a pretty basic lesson. This is the first one. I actually got better as I was going along with this course. If I go into one of the more advanced lessons, I can show you how I advance, and let’s go up to here or something. Chris Badgett: It’s funny how things. You start making something and you’re, that’s that continuous improvement. You just keep getting better. And it’s you can’t, you don’t always have time to go back. I’m not gonna reshoot everything. Marcus Carter: Yeah, you could, you just gotta keep going here. I learned how to do these audios and put these in. So that happened after about less than six or seven, but I didn’t go back to change the first ones ’cause there was a lot of work done there already. These, this, the one thing I should say for everybody listening, I’m not a coder, I know. Ha I just know like super basic things, like the and I could not write code myself at all. Everything that you’re seeing here, all of this has been the help of chat GPT to be able to do these things. And so what you do need to, what I would definitely advise anybody is to become an expert on using chat GT on a daily basis or whatever AI you want to use. So I started putting, different kinds of, exercises in dragon drops and things like that you could do here. These are audios that you can play. She  AI: looked at herself in the mirror and realized she had forgotten her glasses.  Marcus Carter: Or I can play it at N 0.5 speed if that’s a little bit too fast. I put my cursor over here and this come, this pops up. So this was a great course, and a lot of people bought this course. They really liked it. It’s got lots of listening vocabulary, it’s got the videos and yeah, great success. This was the intermediate course,  Chris Badgett: but lemme ask a quick question here. How do you go from getting custom functionality and chat GBT to your website? Are you. Like building an A custom plugin with chat GBT or are you, is there something on this page that it’s just unique for this page that has an HTML block in it or something?  Marcus Carter: Yeah, that’s all it is. All I’m doing is, I’ve got Elementor, I’ve got the Elementor Pro plugin. You could do this in Cadence as well. Cadence is my website theme, but I always use Elementor Pro for building everything. And so these are just nothing more than HTML blocks, that’s all they are. Then once you are, once you wanna design what you wanna do, you just chill. Tell chat, GPT, I wanna do this. You’ve gotta go back and forth loads of times with chat, GPT sometimes, for, to get the buttons right and to do this. But he will just basically design it for you and explain, paste this. And if you don’t, if you’ve got the paid version of chat G tbt, which is 20 euros, $20 a month or something, just screenshot and just say, oh, this button’s over there, why is that? And then he’ll just do it again until you get it, and then once you’ve got it, it’s just copy and paste. And I’ve got all of these blocks here are in templates. So all I do is I just paste a template into a new lesson, change that vocabulary, and I’m ready to go for another one. So I’ve got a, and Chris Badgett: Are the audio files living in your WordPress media library? Marcus Carter: No, the, I use bunny.net. Yeah. As a content delivery network. That’s where I have my audio files and sometimes PNGs and those kind of things, rather than clog up my WordPress site with with too much audios and things. And to, and also because I think Bunny is a better content delivery network. Yeah. All over the world, they’re everywhere. They’re super fast and they’re super cheap as well.  Yeah. Anyway, so these kind of exercises I’ve got, I dunno, about eight different kinds of exercise. And every lesson there’s two or three, two or three, and I just rotate them and they’re just different and yeah. So that worked very well. So let’s go back to where we were and where were we, sorry. So when I designed the new course, this one Genesis is a course that, it was my original course before I even did my phonetics course. That was the name of it. And I did three or four lessons and then I left it. So I thought I’m gonna, give it birth again to Genesis. And my intention was the only thing that was missing from the intermediate course was the interactivity. And because students just speak out loud, but they’re not actually using their microphones. It does have a, at the end of every module, it has a, pronunciation recognition lesson where students listen to sentences and then they record themselves and it gives you a scoring on your pronunciation. So I’m connecting to APIs. Nobody knows what these are basically their, chat. GPT in my new Genesis course is connected to my Genesis course through what we call an API. So it’s just basically a little let’s say a wire or a bridge or something that connects chat, GBT, the brain of chat GBT to my course. I’m connected to another two or three more APIs. One of them is this pronunciation scoring API. Another one is 11 labs, which is the the voices. And can’t remember which other one I had. Anyway, those are the three main ones. So now I’ll show you the course. The basic course is very similar to the intermediate course although it was the first course I did after the phonetics course, I revamped all the exercises and made them very similar to the intermediate course, but at the basic level. But Genesis is a different concept. So this is the course page. Obviously what you’ll see here is a league they people win g coins. And I was actually watching one of your one of your guests just recently who was talking about gamification and things like that and saying and she was saying, you can do more than just a league and and streaks and things like that. I was thinking, oh, I only had leagues and things. But anyway this is just this first concept that I put in. The other a PII have is with telegram. So the telegram group is connected. To the course. And when people are on the course for an hour, there’s a power hour, message in the telegram group that Peter is on the course for an hour. It’s a power hour. If they’re three days, they get a streak message into the Telegram group. If they reach 5,000 G coins or 10,000 g coins. For Genesis coins 10,000 or whatever, that these messages are popping up in the Telegram group. So one of my, one of the big problems, I would say, the biggest problem for creators of courses that, have students on their courses is getting the students to finish the courses. It’s a real I know that students would learn a lot of English if they finished the course, but if you just buy the course in the heat of the moment and you don’t finish it, you’re not gonna learn English. And it might be the best course in the world, but you’re not gonna, you’re not gonna get there. So one of my, missions with this new course was actually to try to hold students’ hands as much as possible in the telegram chat. And putting these things in for motivation. Students dunno this yet, and I can say this ’cause none of my students are gonna be watching this podcast, but I also have with print full. I dunno, that’s a merchandising thing that I used to have on my website, on my YouTube channel. I still have all my products on there, so I have the phonetic table on a mouse pad or a cup with some expressions on it or something like that. I will be sending those when that guy, Luis. When he gets to 30,000 G coins, he doesn’t know this yet. He will be receiving through the post, his mouse pad with the phonetic table on it. Yeah. So that, just to take it a little step further, what does it cost me $20 to do that, and to be able to reward somebody who’s got 30,000, this guy’s doing really well. So I thought that was important. Anyway. As you can see here, I’ve changed the lifter LMS. This took me a lot of work, Chris, it looks like it. To get in here and to get this to look like this. Yeah, it was not me, it took chat, GPTA lot of work, let’s say, because it’s, you’ve gotta go into the little source code details of lift drill MS to be able to change the colors. And it was really difficult to do this, but I just wanted it to look a bit more futuristic than the basic courses that I had before, which were all just a white background, with the normal squares and things. There’s 50 lessons in this course, and instead of it being on video, it’s all through ai. So I’ll just click here on lesson one. I. Okay, I’ve got five monitors and my Mac Mini is a little bit slow at showing these things on the screen. So this is just like an automatic popup that you get on the first lesson of every new module. So the first lesson is all about the present simple. This is the grammar that is in this first part. It pops up on the first one but it doesn’t pop up on lesson two for students to read through that and they just click off here. For my course, because I’ve got people all over the world, it’s important that they have the option of British or American accents. So I’m British, let’s go for British. And also they can choose, masculine or feminine voices or masculine. 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. That’s coming from 11 labs, right?  Marcus Carter: The voices are coming from 11 labs. Yeah.  Chris Badgett: Yep.  Marcus Carter: So this is what I wanted, instead of it being a scrollable course where students go down, as I was showing in my previous course what I wanted to is to have the sensation of a web app where you are, on this screen. This part here substitutes the video part where I, had to edit all those 63 videos. Now I don’t have to do that. Now I’ve got a CSV, which is on Google Sheets, and I’m pulling from that CSV and it automatically fills in all of this vocabulary, and it’s connected to 11 labs. And 11 labs has given me the word. So when I click on the word, always, do your parents always visit you on holidays? I’m also using cashed audio because it, it turned out a little bit expensive to be continuously generating. That’s why it was so fast the way it gave it to me. And basically here, I just, these are the yes no questions. The same as before, but I’m gonna actually say it. Yes, my parents always visit me on holidays and it will give me a correct answer if I said it correctly. I can check my pronunciation here. And that’s the other API that I’ve got connected there. It also comes out this API in other parts of the course. So cut me off if you want me to make this shorter. No, you’re  Chris Badgett: good. Keep going. My mind is being blown here, so keep doing it. I’m so impressed. And as a especially as a non-developer, I think that’s just incredible.  Marcus Carter: Yeah. You don’t have to be a developer nowadays to do these things. So some of the problems I’ve had, for example, where if you look down here, it says back to the Genesis course, just to get rid of that button that lifter LMS had at the top there, which was interfering because it, I had to put that in there. So this now works, and I can go back to straight back here. Let me just click back in. Go to lesson two this time. So it’s slow loading because of all these lemme just close Google that I have somewhere else. Yeah. So as I say, so the good thing about this for me is that I didn’t have to create 50 lessons. I just had to create A-C-A-C-S-V with all the vocabulary. And the AI does the rest for me. Basically. You can, I can click on, if I click on this rest word here. Do you often rest when you travel? I can also click here and, it gives me the translation. So I’ve got, I’m using I’m deployed on the courses up on GitHub, which is the repository, which is then connected to render, which is what deploys it all over the world. And that’s where all my nodes are of like, for the translations and the speaks and all of those things which are connecting to the APIs. So as I was saying before, what I wanted is like an app. So you’re looking at like a web app. So when you want to go to the next part, or lemme just show you this, if I wanna bring up that grammar part again, I just click here and I can, I. Have a look of any of the grammar that I want that will bring that popup back up. That was another thing that I added. I try to think of everything that a student might need while they’re in the course. Oh, they don’t ans understand that question. You can translate it. Don’t worry. Oh, what was that grammar? You can look at the grammar. Wherever you are in the course, you can check it, you can change the accent again, if you want to, you can start the lesson again. Once you’ve answered one question, then it graze out so that you remember which ones you actually answered. You can repeat the question. You’ve got your progress bar. You can let’s, it’s too fast for me, so let’s put it down here. And, ask another question. Relax. Do you think recycling helps the environment a bit slow? Or if that’s too slow for me, and I want it asked fast early. Do you wake up early to enjoy your hobbies? So I’m trying to think of everything that a student might find challenging and to help them out so that they can calibrate the course to their liking along the way. So when I click next, this is what I call the training section where they’re learning the vocabulary. They’re just using close questions. Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. If I make a mistake, for example, if I say yes, I wake up late to enjoy my hobbies is it will detect that as a mistake and it will tell me the, what I should have said there. Yes, I wake up. Early to enjoy. So just to, and then you just say it again and then it’ll update the progress bar. So go to the next part here, which is practicing with the ai. So you’ve done the training, you’ve learned those 10 words. Now the AI is gonna converse with me and induce me to use that vocabulary. So I start the lesson. Hello Marcus. Let’s practice the words you learned in the training section. Our first word is wake up. What time do you usually wake up in the morning? So it says, hello Marcus. It’s pulling from the lifter LMS ID of my name to say that it says that in a couple of different places in the course. And now I can basically converse in this part with whatever I want. I don’t have to answer his ques, I can say whatever I want. So I can say I wake up at three o’clock in the morning because I’m a fireman and I have to go and rescue people from houses. That’s quite early. I see you have an important job. How often do you wake up at that time for work? Yeah, this is quite a long conversation. So he’s using how often he’s using the vocabulary from the first part. He also tries to interact a little bit and say, oh, that’s an important job, to acknowledge what I just said. It’s not just a cold next question that he’s saying. If I make a mistake and I say, wake up me every day, I noticed a small mistake change. You said, wake up me every day. The correct way to say it is I wake up every day, please repeat this sentence. I wake up every day. Well done, Marcus. That’s much better. Now let’s practice, get dressed. What do you usually do after you get dressed? Okay if I didn’t understand that, I can also, see the translation here and it’ll show me in Spanish. And if I dunno what to say, I can also click on this here and it will give me a a suggested answer. I usually have breakfast after I get dressed and they automatically disappear those things. Okay, so then that’s the part where you put into practice everything that you’ve learned in the training section. And then you go over here and this is the exercise area which substitutes what I had in my other course, the part where those audio things were and things. So I wanted to go to town with this. And you start off with just the basic flashcard exercise, which is, pretty basic here, where you just got flashcards and if the idea is to get a streak here. So if you knew it, you just say, I knew it. I knew it. And you get a diamond for the first ones there. Get another one here and then that’s it. And you go back. So that’s just to, to start off the exercises. What I didn’t say before on the AI conversation is when you finish the conversation, it analyzes everything you said with your mistakes. And a popup comes up and it tells you all the words that you used. It gives you recommendations on the mistakes that you made if you might need to revise the present. Simple or something like that. Do you want me to go through all these exercises, Chris?  Chris Badgett: Yeah, let’s see. ’em, my mind is completely blown. And also, you’re doing all this in chat, GPT, right? And the APIs to the various tools like 11 Labs and the per. Pronunciation checker or the grammar checker or whatever.  Marcus Carter: Yep. Everything. Sometimes I have to go to Gemini or gr if I don’t get it right with with chat. But yeah, basically I’m just 90% on chatGPT.  Chris Badgett: Awesome. Yeah. Let’s see these other interactive learning tools, I think this is fascinating. Marcus Carter: Ooh, that’s not good. Could not load. Breathe. Refresh your paste. That’s not good. Something’s happening here. These are the, I’ve been like literally the last two weeks just ironing out all the bugs that people keep telling me. Should have loaded. Why is that? Failed to load exercises. Okay, that’s not looking good. Forget that part. We’ll edit that out. Let’s go to a different one here. Okay, this one here is like a bit of a game that I decided to a bit of a stressful thing here where you get 30 seconds to answer the question and I’ll show you what you can do here. There are different kinds of questions, so you’ve gotta fill in the blank here. You, I’m just gonna reveal the answer here. Finish, and then I just press and it gives me the right answer. I can ask for a little tip if I don’t know. It says, oh, it’s one word and it begins with an S. Okay. So it’s gonna be some here because it, I’ve gotta use one of these words here. If I’m get stressed out with the time, I can freeze it.  Chris Badgett: Wow. You do think about your students like and their experience?  Marcus Carter: Yeah, a lot of my students are actually very senior. I’ve got 75 year olds, quite a few, over 60. A lot of students. Yeah. This is just a multiple choice here which is, pretty basic. Nothing interesting going on here. You can translate here if you click the translations on, then when you hover over it, you get a tool tip pop out. So that’s that one there. Fill in the audio one here so they gray out, because I’ve obviously been testing with this course whoops. So you listen, we will arrive at the station by noon. So here, I’d have to write, arrive, and then go to the next one. Nothing. This one’s a pretty cool exercise where you, this is a pronunciation exercise, so students have to listen to the sentence. I wake up early every morning for work and then record themselves. I wake up early every morning for work, so it gives me a a rating for my pronunciation here. And if I do it, let’s just go to the next one. If I make a mistake, the new telephone costs less than my old one. So what I do is I click on these and then it opens up another little modal here, and I just say this word. So more. Okay, now I can continue. Now that one will be. Green more. I dunno why that shifted down a bit there. But anyway, shouldn’t have done that. Then I have a listening exercise here where basically students listen to a dialogue.  AI: I usually wake up early on weekdays. How,  Marcus Carter: If I don’t understand that dialogue, I can flip it out here and you can’t see. ’cause I’ve got my toolbar at the top, but that’s not normally there. And I can translate everything that’s there and it will translate it into yellow text, which should do. There you go. And the good thing is if I what times I wake up early? I usually wake up early. I’m gonna, I’m gonna make a mistake here. If I make a mistake,  AI: I usually wake up early on. Weekdays  Marcus Carter: it, how  AI: about you? It  Marcus Carter: actually. Plays the part of the dialogue where the correct answer is. And when I get it right, it just continues. So that’s my listening exercise. And then writing here is the final one. There is when you finish the writing here you’ve got different kinds of writings. You can do a story, a diary, an opinion, a description, an email, for example. And it would generate your prompt, write an email to your manager about your late arrival. And you have to use five of these words at the top here, not all 10 of them. And when I use one, if I say I wake up as I write the word, my progress bar highlights and it shows me that I’ve done that word, but I’m not gonna write it. But you’ve gotta write a over a hundred words to finish the writing as it says down there. It doesn’t go green until you get to a hundred. And then you click check. And then the I AI gives you all the feedback, the mistakes. How could you could improve it. Yeah. So that’s, Chris Badgett: that’s basically it. I’m gonna pull your screen down and just say I’m completely blown away. This is this is incredible, Marcus. And I know, ’cause I also like you, you’re like, I know my students need to freeze. Like I know what the people listening or watching this are gonna ask. Could you just re rehash the tech setup there? Like the APIs chat, GBT, WordPress Lifter and also, yeah, I guess let’s start with that. Just, so if somebody’s interested in this, can you describe your, the tools you use and the workflow you use to create a new lesson?  Marcus Carter: Yeah. Okay. I’ll show you. I can even show you. Do you want me to share again and show you the  Chris Badgett: yeah, I’ll add your, I’ll add your screen back so we, we’ve got the Genesis screen back up here. Marcus Carter: Okay. Yeah. If I go in here, are you not seeing, ah, yeah sorry. There it is. Can you see the backend now?  Yeah. Okay. So this is the template here, and in this template there are different HTML blocks in Elementor. It could be in cadence or whatever theme you’re using. You just add an HTML block. Now, as I say, I’ve been doing this for 11 months now, and there are like 30,000 lines of code for that, for, for what you’ve just seen. So if I click on this one here, this is section two AI conversation, HTML. So that’s where we were doing the AI conversation. This big one here is the the first part, the training. Each one of these is the exercise menu and the different exercises. So it’s just basically. An Elementor page with blocks of HTML stuck into it. Now I’ve learned what, how I should have done this. I should have used global CSS styles and even had those CSS styles on Bunny. I didn’t do that. I didn’t know anything about that at the beginning. Chat GT didn’t tell me that because I started with the training section and I said, Hey, let’s do this next part. Oh, let’s do this. And it wasn’t, I didn’t have the, the experience of the architecture of the way I could have done this much more easily. So it’s given me loads of problems. I had loads of problems with. Making the course responsive to all the different screen sizes. Yes. And realize that was gonna be a problem. And I’ve literally just finished today, two weeks later, getting it to work on iPad, which has been the biggest problem I’ve had. It’s taken me literally three days to get one button working on the iPad because it was receiving, merge files or whatever. Lots of things that I had no idea, I didn’t realize I was gonna have problems. Literally two or three days before the course launch, I was testing with a teacher. I said, just go through the lessons and things she was saying, but I can’t see the screen. It’s all off the screen. I said what are you using? I said, I’m just using my laptop and I’m using a 27 inch monitor and I’ve only ever tested it on this. Yeah. So I didn’t realize I was gonna have all of these problems. But as I say it’s basically just modules of HTML files. And the only reason I put it into different modules is because I was getting really confused in the first one when I was with chat GBT, it was like over 3000 lines of code. And then he said let’s put the next one. And I said can we do it in a different block at least? So I can just scrolling through, be organized and just to get there. Yeah. So basically I have a template in my WordPress site with the, with all of this on. And in lifter LMS in every lesson I have one little HTML block stuck at the top, which calls all of these lessons. That’s all it is in lifter LMS. So I have one template a global template, and then in each lesson, like the 50 lessons, there’s one little HTML block, which calls the CSV and calls the template and that’s all it is. And then That’s very  Chris Badgett: cool.  Marcus Carter: Yeah. And then it’s I can show you if you like.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. And a question I have here when you’re doing this is the how much are you writing, like all the individual like phrases and things you use in all your different blocks? Or is chat GBT like selecting the question about waking up earlier or whatever?  Marcus Carter: Yeah, none of it is hard coded.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. Okay.  Marcus Carter: Everything comes from ai. So what I’m doing is I’m caching the I’m caching the files the audio files because 11 labs. Has turned out to be quite expensive, a bit more than I expected with loads of, it’s like doing loads of things. So I’m caching it onto Bunny. Like different versions. There might be for one word, five different possible questions that they could ask you in the cached file with the different accents so that at least, there’s a variety of five or six different questions they can ask you with the different accents that they might use and different genders. Chris Badgett: So do the students get do they all have the exact same experience or not necess necessarily? No. Yeah, that’s  Marcus Carter: the beauty. Yeah. Nobody does the same course.  Chris Badgett: That’s cool. But driving towards the same outcome of learning that level of language.  Marcus Carter: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. The conversation part, everything’s different. So if I go here to lesson one and I go into Elementor that’s all I have. Yeah. I just have a, that’s all it is. I’m just calling the template.  Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Marcus Carter: In lesson one.  Chris Badgett: Wow.  Marcus Carter: Yeah, that’s it. That, that, that’s what’s in, that’s what’s in lifter.  Chris Badgett: That’s amazing. I’m pulling your screen down again just to Okay. Lay on the plane here. But, and this, especially since this is December 19th, I’m gonna say this is the coolest AI thing I’ve seen all year. And and I am just so impressed because, WordPress, myself included I can’t write code. We have talented engineers on the team, but I understand the whole point of democratizing the web is to make it so anybody can be as creative as your being while leveraging technology. Sure. Maybe you’re a developer or maybe you just want to keep it simple and WordPress, but you’re empowered to just go with WordPress and chat GBT and all the AI tools that integrate in. It’s fascinating. It’s fascinating. And the also notice, like you, you’ve removed yourself as the teacher, like the 11 lives, voices and stuff, but it’s not like you’re not teaching, you’re orchestrating this whole thing like a conductor. And so you’re still teaching, but now you’re just leveraging technology and your body of knowledge together to come up with a wonderful learning experience. It’s amazing.  Marcus Carter: Oh, but the whole idea is scale, yeah. I can’t edit 63 videos, it’s just. Burning out my eyes sitting here, yeah. Doing that. So the whole idea, now I can now create my next level course and just take that template and just change the CSV, maybe update a little bit of the exercises, make them a little bit more difficult. But more or less, in a month or less than a month, I’ve got the next level of the course. I can do three or four courses, and one of my ideas now is to do tailor made courses for, for example, some of the big companies I work for, they don’t know this yet, but I’m gonna give them a presentation and say, look, this is a financial banking course in your corporate colors designed for you. They’ve got the one, one of the things I’m talking about, they’ve got like 35,000 employees. And so I’m like, this is. Designed specifically for you and your employees. How can they not buy it? It’s if they’re gonna be teaching English, why would they go with the normal, these big English teaching companies when they can have something completely tailor made for them. Very easy for, for human resources to see the results of how they’re doing. If you’re using the the groups plugin and things like that for them to pop in and see how they’re getting, the results on their evaluations and things. The good thing about what, AI has given us is your. Only limitation is your imagination. Now there is no excuse for you to say, I dunno how to do it, because knowledge is 100% free now. And so it will be a learning curve, obviously, because you’re gonna have loads of problems. And I’ve had them, I’ve had, I’ve literally, as I just said, I’ve spent three days trying to get a button to work on the iPad, and that is super frustrating. Yeah. But as I say, I don’t have a choice because there’s a woman who bought my course and she and my course is 600, 600 and something dollars. That course is, on offer. It’s actually $800. That course. She only has an iPad, so I have no choice. I have to make it work on the iPad. And I spent the first few days doing some other things, but then there was just one button that I couldn’t get to work and I finally got it working this morning. So Amazing. Yeah, it’s just  Chris Badgett: You’ve gone exponential Marcus. This is impressive to watch. And that’s a, yeah. And as a, I think what’s most important here is developers can write code and, or accelerate with chat GPT and stuff, but you as a subject matter expert in education and language learning, particularly in the English, Spanish you’re just, you can do anything now. It’s it’s amazing.  Marcus Carter: Totally. It’s amazing.  Chris Badgett: I see why you wanted to show this, ’cause I’m proud of you, man. This is so cool. Yeah. And I I just wanna ask the question again, just ’cause I know people watching or listening are gonna be curious. I’ve heard WordPress, I’ve heard lifter, LMS I’ve heard some of the add-ons, like groups and so on. You’ve mentioned chat, GBT, you’ve mentioned 11 labs, some other APIs for niche language learning scenarios. You also mentioned GitHub. And you’ve mentioned Elementor. Is there anything else that kind of fits into this stack that’s like critical for somebody to understand? And particularly, could you touch on the GitHub piece? What, how GitHub gets involved? Yeah. And for a non-engineer to start using GitHub, like I’m sure that was a little intense for you and. Here you are.  Marcus Carter: I still have no idea how GitHub works. I don’t even know what it is really. It’s just basically, I know it’s a place where people put their codes, and they call it a repository, whatever that is, and so I was designing the course for the first 11 months locally. I had it on local server here, on my computer. And then, chat said later we’ve gotta deploy this on on whatever. And I was like, okay, we’ll do that later. And then when it got to the stage, about two weeks before I said, okay, we better start moving this, because I didn’t do it initially because it just takes longer when it’s deployed onto the servers. If you wanna update something, you gotta wait for it to deploy and then come back and I locally, you just press enter and then it’s ready.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. And  Marcus Carter: Literally chat. GPT walked me through every single step. He said, press, you gotta have the screenshot thing, where you pay the $20 so you can screenshot and upload that to him. And he says. Press that button there in the corner that says upload file. And then you know, it you got no excuse for not doing it. And then from there you connect it to render. I still don’t really know what render is and what’s the difference between bunny and render, but I had to do that. He said, you need, he told me you had to choose render or one of the others or something like that. I don’t know if I pay five or $10 a month to render for that. And so he just walked me through it and it was surprisingly easy. It was literally a couple of hours and you are live worldwide. I was like, wow, that was amazing. I also use Python Anywhere, which is another, some kind of server or something like that where you can put Python code, which is what I have no idea, but I’ve got quite a lot of Python code on that thing. And that is what connects everything to my Telegram groups. That’s where all the messages go through there. And yeah as I say, I have no I might have said GitHub, like it’s a repository, but I’ve got no idea what that is really.  Chris Badgett: And in terms of, I’m just, I’m left with this question what do you do when you get stuck? Like I know you’ll email Lifter a support ticket as example. But there’s only so far we can go like in helping with chat GBT and render and all, and Bunny and all this other stuff. Maybe you’ve hit elementary with a message about something. It sounds like predominantly you’ve just figured out how to work with chat GPT as a co-pilot to get you unblocked whenever you get stuck. Marcus Carter: Totally. You will never get stuck with chat GPT because it’s he knows everything, and it’s his language and he speaks all the languages, all the coding languages. He knows everything. He will make mistakes and he, you will do things and he forgets, like what he said two paragraphs ago. And you have to always keep, quite often, I just re I just say, here’s the code again, here’s the code again, just in case, you just have to learn how to work with him, but he will always get you out of the. Out of the wherever you are stuck. And and I have obviously, lift LMS sometimes I need some support from them or something like that if I’m trying to find workout things that are in the plugin. But really no other platforms have I needed to use any kind of support. I had a problem with Elementor. I, when I started trying to save my, because it’s got so many lines of code on the same page, I was getting a server error from SiteGround, which is what hosts my WordPress site, and I had to open up support with them, and they just upped the memory that I needed in my PHP and that was it. Away you go. Yeah.  Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s absolutely amazing. And on that note of like hallucination in chat, GPT, when it says something wrong or it doesn’t work, I would, if I was. Guess, I would think at some point you’d hit a wall, you can’t get over and it’s, you’re just totally stuck. But maybe not Marcus Carter. He’s not giving up. He’s burned the boats. He’s going forward no matter what.  Marcus Carter: Yeah, it literally, sometimes I have been stuck on certain things of code that it didn’t work, and I’ve had to go to Gemini and then I’ve had to go to Grok and then I’ve gone to Deep Seek and I’ve had perplexity open and I’ve had like, all five of them are like, we gotta work this out. Like this block here is halfway down the page. Why can’t we put it, yeah. And it’s taken me different ais to actually find the the problem to solve the problem. But you will always find the solution with the ai because it’s just like having a full stack developer in your pocket. Chris Badgett: I think part of the reason you’re so good at this is that you actually, you have really strong vision. You know where you’re trying to go. You’re continually protecting like the integrity of the learning experience and the learner. Yeah, because it’s easy to get into AI tools and just start messing around and being like, oh, that’s cool. Oh wait, I can do this. But you know the outcome you really wanna have and that’s impressive.  Marcus Carter: It all started with the intermediate course when I started making those exercise and I thought, hang on a sec, I can create any kind of exercise I want to create where you can press a button and something happens on the screen and you listen to an audio. And that’s when I thought maybe I could make like the whole screen a different color and have some kind of UI and where people could actually, and it just went from there, just like I thought, right? I don’t want to be making video courses all the time ’cause it’s just too time consuming. I can’t scale them. And I can now make the course for the big companies. I can, very quickly I can change the CSS, change the colors, put their logo on it, change the vocabulary for this, for their industry, and away we go.  Chris Badgett: And you you do continue to make videos for YouTube, but that’s for YouTube, right? Marcus Carter: Yeah, that’s where the sales come from. So I can’t, YouTube is I haven’t actually uploaded a video for six months to YouTube. Because I’ve been so full on with this course, and one of the problems with the course was when do I launch it? When’s it gonna be ready? And I was like, more or less, I had it done, but I still had a load of things to do in sort of October and I said, November the 30th, that’s the date. And then it was just a massive rush up until then. And literally two hours before the webinar I finished, it wasn’t even working properly. There were bits that weren’t working properly. I finished two hours before, but if I didn’t put that deadline, it would’ve just kept dragging out. So I thought, let’s, and I had, like in the webinar, I had over a thousand people that are supposed to be coming, but you normally get a quarter. So about 250 people came to the webinar and yeah. I just hope this is an inspiration for people to think you can do what you want. Yeah, you can do and build whatever you want. Whatever you can imagine, you can do it and just try, go on an HTML block, go into chat, do say, Hey, can you put a button in the middle of the screen that when I press it explodes and says, hippy hip, hip, hooray, and he’ll do it for you.  Chris Badgett: Do you have an example where you use chat GPT to help with lifter? For example, one of the questions in my mind is okay, if we’re delivering the experience through this interactive content that’s coming from somewhere else, how does lifter know when the lesson is complete?  Marcus Carter: That was another thing I had to hack. I had to hack the listen complete button. Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Marcus Carter: I dunno if you saw that. It says, I finished the lesson, did you see on the exercise menu at the bottom it says, I finished the lesson. Okay. That’s your button. But I had to I had a little bit of a problem with the toggle because you can toggle it on and off in lifter LMS and so at the moment you can just say, I’ve completed the lesson. You can’t re toggle on yet, because when you re toggle on. I get the button pops up at the top of the screen, so I said, okay, I’m just gonna toggle it off at the moment if you’ve completed this. But so basically chat, TT he’ll go into your website and he’ll look down through your documentation and he’ll find out what are the IDs, for that button. But very often he hasn’t been able to do that. I’ve had to go into your plugin myself, and it’s super extensive and there’s just so many things you’ve got there. And I’ve just and I take a screenshot and he says, click on that bit where it says that and open that bit of code and paste it here. Ah, so the student ID is, this is the thing that they use. And and then eventually I find things but, and sometimes I actually go onto your website and I look at the little videos because he can’t read the videos. And so you’ve got videos where it explains how to do something if you wanna, whatever. And so I go in there and I look at the video. So I’ve just seen it in the video. It’s this, and he’s oh, okay. Like it’s just so yeah, he will dig in.  Chris Badgett: That is awesome. I’m serious when I say that is the coolest AI thing I’ve seen this entire year. I’m passionate about online education, so there’s a lot of cool AI things, but this is something else. My, my hat’s off to you. That’s Mark Marcus Carter. You can find it at Carter’s or Carter school of english.com, the Carter Method. If you are a Spanish speaker looking to learn English check out the courses. Yeah. And you have all kinds of different levels and stuff like that, but Marcus, thank you for being a shining example of what I call an education entrepreneur. It is just amazing. You’re obviously really good at both education and entrepreneurship, which includes, marketing and sales and building a product and all that stuff, but it also includes innovation and you are just innovating at a crazy exponential rate. It’s really fun to watch. Thank you for coming on. I really appreciate it. I can’t wait to talk to you from a year from now. ’cause then it’s, I don’t know where we’re gonna be, but thank you so much and keep up the amazing work. Thank you. Thank you. You’re welcome. 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 an AI Teacher With ChatGPT, WordPress, and LifterLMS Online Language Learning With Marcus Carter appeared first on LMScast.

Explore the intriguing differences between cohort-based and self-paced online courses! Self-paced models offer flexibility and scalability but often struggle with completion and community engagement. In contrast, cohort courses boost accountability, foster deeper connections, and command higher prices thanks to enhanced interaction and live coaching. Chris also suggests hybrid models to leverage the strengths of both approaches and shares tech tips for seamless implementation. Tune in to find out which course model best fits your goals!

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-Martin, 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 Cooper-Martin: 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 Cooper-Martin: 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 Cooper-Martin: 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 Cooper-Martin: 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 Cooper-Martin: 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 Cooper-Martin: 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 Cooper-Martin: 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 Cooper-Martin: 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 Cooper-Martin: 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 Cooper-Martin: 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 Cooper-Martin: 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 Cooper-Martin: 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 Cooper-Martin: 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 Cooper-Martin: Yep.  Chris Badgett: So tell us about like that, like creating a whole game that’s part of an exper a learning experience.  Kimba Cooper-Martin: 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 Cooper-Martin: 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 Cooper-Martin: 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 Cooper-Martin: 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 Cooper-Martin: 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 Cooper-Martin appeared first on LMScast.