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 Chris Badgett speaks with Robert Lunte and Dana Sleeper from CourseCREEK, a full-service eLearning provider that assists people and businesses in making money out of their knowledge through excellent online courses, in this episode of LMScast. According to Robert, CourseCREEK offers each customer a customized, high-touch experience by delivering everything from marketing and LMS creation to consultancy and instructional design. He tells the tale of a customer who constructs horse arenas and wishes to instruct others on how to make horse footing correctly. The customer used CourseCREEK’s assistance to transform their specialized knowledge into a SCORM-compliant course that was posted on an LMS, creating new revenue streams and chances to expand their knowledge. According to Robert, every firm may turn into an educational enterprise since online courses not only produce semi-passive income but also establish credibility, establish client interactions, and leave a lasting impression. Since the majority of their clients are subject matter experts without teaching experience, Dana continues, it is her responsibility as an instructional designer to turn their knowledge into interesting and useful learning opportunities. Dana discusses their process from exploration and identifying learning objectives to storyboarding, generating multimedia material, assuring accessibility, and keeping the client’s distinctive brand voice. In order to create courses that both successfully teach and represent the creator’s personality, Dana says that the process of creating courses is collaborative and iterative, combining the client’s vision with instructional design principles. Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. Today I’m joined by two special guests from CourseCREEK. That’s course creek.com. We have Robert Luty and Dana Sleeper from CourseCREEK, which is a full stack e-learning, production, implementation, instructional design, all the things. And I’m really excited to dive into it with you guys. But first, welcome to the show.  Robert Lunte: Thanks for having us. This is Looks fun. I like your setup. Yeah.  Chris Badgett: Awesome.  Robert Lunte: Great. Great to be here. Chris Badgett: Let’s just start with the big question of what is Course Creek? What are you, what are your services? What do you guys do? When I saw you pop up on the radar, I’m like, oh yeah, these are guys that are big picture, but can also zoom out on the components. But tell us about the offering at CourseCREEK.  Robert Lunte: That’s true. We’re not only guys, we wrestle get, we’re ladies as well. CourseCREEK is a full service e-learning firm. What we do is we help anybody that wants to monetize their expertise be it e-commerce executive coach types or large l and d departments that need to create content for their staff and their partners. As we were talking before. The cameras went live. There’s really no project that we’ll say no to. So we’re gonna develop course content and e-learning programs for really anybody that needs a world class job. We’re a boutique company. We don’t have great gobs of people. When you come on board and after we have our needs analysis meetings, the people that you meet in those meetings, such as Dana, will be the people working on your project. So it’s very high touch. We provide consulting. World class instructional design, which Dana will elaborate on a bit. Development on all the learning man, the learning the leading learning management systems such as LifterLMS, and marketing. So anything that you need, we can provide a full stack or we can do a la carte. Chris Badgett: Awesome. Tell us a like a client story, just as an example.  Robert Lunte: Okay. Let’s see. How about, gosh, this, all of our clients are super happy. Which one would be really good, which would be a great story. Okay. How about the the horse arena folks? So the horse arena folks, so they came to us and they make, this is an example of how we won’t say no to anything. They build large. Horse arenas for fluent folks that have horses. So that’s these big shelters. And when you’re doing these horse arenas, a big part of it is what they call the footing, right? So the footing is what the horses run on, all right? So that footing has to be done properly. It’s a science, it’s an art form. And if it’s not done properly, then you’ll hurt these, very expensive animals. They came on board and knew absolutely were clueless on how to make a course. They just had a budget and they realized they wanted to scale and leverage their expertise and get a course out there, and they wanted to offer something for people that. Can’t afford them to fly in and provide a hands-on consultation. They needed something that could take care of other folks on how to get the footing right. So off we went to build the, build those courses and we’re doing a really beautiful SCORM development program. And we’re putting them on a, one of these brilliant learning management systems. So I guess the story is they didn’t know anything except horse arenas. And we took them on our wing and now they’re super happy. We got a five star review from them. That’s great.  Chris Badgett: I think that’s awesome. I have this belief that every company is a, could be an education company, and particularly what you said with Downselling, if you can’t afford our services, we’ll see, still teach you how to do what you know we do. That’s much cheaper than hiring us. But it’s the do it yourself model and so many companies could be doing that. That’s awesome.  Robert Lunte: It’s so true. An online course opens up doors not only to some. Semi-passive revenue, which is a great thing. Maybe we’ll start there, but it opens up all kinds of opportunities. It’s a, it’s an introduction before you go on a speaking tour. It’s a leave behind. After you do a public speaking tour. It opens up opportunities and the customer journey. It opens up opportunities for the customer to potentially, if they want more of you and more information, you could do like a VIP retreat. So it sits in that, it sits in that purchase journey. Somewhere in the middle, which is super important. It it opens doors and it makes you an authority in the space. The other thing I like to mention is that people don’t mention very often is for a lot of folks, like the thought leader types, it also leaves a legacy. All right? So when all is said and done your teachings go on and people can continue to learn from you. And it can do a lot for folks.  Chris Badgett: I love the legacy aspect. There’s a concept we talk about a lot on this show that you have to wear five hats to really make it in this industry. Whether you could be a unique unicorn that can do all these things, or you can hire a team or hire an organization like Course Creek to fill in the gaps. But the five hats problem, as I describe it, is you have to be like a subject matter expertise. Whether that’s like. Horse running surface. That’s the expertise. You have to be able to teach effectively or coach or design instruction. You have to be an entrepreneur. Like you have to build a education company, you gotta do marketing, you gotta do sales, you gotta do operations. You have to be a community builder. Who are all these people that have, horse tracks? Like how do we reach these people? How do we, I mesh in their community or. Find them to begin with. And then you gotta be a technologist. We’re talking video, cameras, websites marketing automation, CRMs, LMS, all these things. And that’s a tall order for one person to be able to do. Yep. But since Dana is here, I want to really dig in on instructional design. ’cause this is such a huge problem because there are so many. People who have expertise, but they’re not trained as teachers. Even college professors, many of them did not go to teaching school or in private education. So it’s a much needed thing that’s not very well understood of how to create engaging e-learning content and to pass along information without overwhelming people. But Dana, take us to school on some top tips of instructional design and how you think about it, particularly with a subject matter expert without a teaching background. Dana Sleeper: Yeah, sure. Happy to. And I’d say that’s predominantly who we work with, right? Is me subject matter experts who don’t have teaching backgrounds, but they know something, whether it’s about horse arenas or it’s about. Running a restaurant or a youth mentorship program and anything and everything in between, they have some knowledge that would be beneficial for other folks to have. And so what we do is we sit down with those knees and we try to better understand the content. That’s our first step, right? Is this discovery and analysis phase. We identify what knowledge they have. How it might be useful to other folks, what our objectives are to get that information across. So essentially, what do we want the learners to walk away with? Once we understand what we want them to take away or what we want them to be able to do once they’ve completed a course then we can go into the design and storyboarding aspect. And that’s where we map the flow of the learning. We think about interactions, engagement. Assessments to ensure that there’s instructional strategy alignment as well as brand voice integrated, because that’s also something that’s very important in this is making sure that whoever that creator is, whoever that me, is their voice and the unique way that they tell the story comes across. And that can be something as simple as having their brand colors in there, but it could also be the tone of the course. Some folks really like to interject. Humor into their courses and be really playful Other folks, like more of a corporate serious tone. It just depends on who they are and who their audience is. So we have a lot of conversations around that. We iterate a lot on different versions of content in order to ensure that we are ultimately developing something that reflects for them and for their audience. And then we go into that development and production phase. So we use tools like Articulate, rise, storyline Beyond and other tools in order to bring the courses to life. So we integrate multimedia animation. We also think about accessibility best practices. So if we’re acknowledging that our audiences may need to use e-readers or things of that nature, we need to think about those aspects to ensure that they’re SCORM compliant ready for the learning management system. And then there’s a whole review and iterations process where we share that draft with them, get their feedback. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes they’re like, this is exactly what I wanted. And other times they say oh no, this is so far from what we were expecting. And then we just. Keep going. It is a creative process and I do think that’s something that a lot of me, the first time they go through this process, they don’t realize that they really need to lean in and be a partner, especially for that first course we developed together. There’s a lot of time investment on both sides to figure out. What that brand voice is, what they like, what they don’t like, what resonates with them. Because as much as I can provide expertise on adult learning and, interactions and what I think will be most effective, ultimately they are also a client. And if their expectation isn’t met we’re not gonna end up with a product they’re happy with. So we need to find a good balance to that before we reach the end of our development process.  Chris Badgett: Let’s talk about tools a little bit, and I’m really fascinated by this challenge of understanding between sort of instructional design and e-learning authoring tools versus using something like WordPress, which is a content management system. And you can put all kinds of different things, not just videos and lessons. How do you think about the tools for the job, and let’s just leave the LMS off the table, but there’s so many, there’s 500 LMSs out there. There’s tons of different ways to make e-learning content. How do you choose without getting overwhelmed what your tech stack’s gonna be to create effective training? Dana Sleeper: It’s a good question. So a lot of times when we’re thinking about that end audience in those ver very first phases, that’s what we will figure that out. Because if we ask them, Hey, are you yours? Yours gonna be on a mobile device, right? That is one item that’ll help us determine what software is gonna be best articulate. Rise is mobile responsive. There’s a reason why folks use it for courses that they know folks are gonna be looking at on their phones. In contrast, storyline. Higher interactivity, but designing it for mobile use can be much more challenging, particularly for S who wanna put all the content on screen and folks don’t wanna see things in size eight font on their phones. So we can think through what the right tool will be and then provide those recommendations. Oftentimes we do a compilation, so we’ll say, okay, we think the best option for you is articulate, rise with. Custom beyond animations and storyline blocks integrated for enhanced interactivity. So that way we’re actually using three tools to develop their course, but ultimately delivering something that’s best for say, mobile experience. Other times, we need to take a look at their existing. Catalog of content. So they might say, we need to match our other courses, and maybe they work with a developer who did exclusive storyline work previously, and that would make more sense than to use Storyline. Or maybe they need a really complex branching scenario that would lead us to storyline as opposed to rise. So it’s in those discovery conversations when we’re helping them map out their content that we can identify what tools you need to use  Chris Badgett: our instructional design. Question for you, Dana, when. Subject matter expert has the expert’s curse and they’re like, I have 40 years of experience, but I don’t, I’m trying to create this one course, and they’re just overwhelmed and they’ve lost touch with beginner’s mind. Like, how would you help that person? Get focused and become an essentialist basically, and teach effectively. You mentioned storyboarding and like kind of milestones and stuff, but how does, how do you work with an expert who’s really lost in a sea of experience?  Dana Sleeper: Yeah, so a lot of times what I will default to in that case is talking to them about learner attention span. How much time do we reasonably think someone can sit down? Go through their course and digest and then retain that information and maybe we’re looking at 15 minutes. So what fif, what can we teach in 15 minutes effectively that will really change what they do on a day-to-day basis, or help them accomplish those learning objectives we talked about earlier? Another great visualization of this, which is helpful for some folks is to describe folks’ brains as buckets, right? And we say, you have this much water. In your barrel, right? This is all your expertise, but your learner’s bucket is only this big, so we can only pour in this much water. So what is it that’s essential needs to go in there. The rest of it is just gonna overflow, and it’s not gonna stay in there. It’s not gonna stay in their cup or in their bucket. So I quite literally have drawn that during calls before, just on a PowerPoint slide to help them understand that. I also have an animation of it that sometimes I send to folks to remind them. So there’s all sorts of little kind of tips and tools on how I help folks understand that. But generally speaking, thinking about learner attention span is really one important way too. Coalesce and limit the amount of content that we’re putting into that first course, acknowledging that they could have a whole series. That’s a great opportunity. You have all that expertise. We won’t lose it, but we are gonna make it so the learners can actually digest and retain that information.  Robert Lunte: That’s Chris. Chris, I wanna add to that real quick, and this, she’s great. I told you we had great instructional designers. From a management perspective, while Dana’s working all on all that, on my end I’m getting the tough job of, but I’ve been doing this for 40 years. Nobody knows this better than me. And how is Dana, I know she’s great and we enjoy working with her and our but how are they gonna get it? How are they gonna know how to do this? And so the customers oftentimes as the reality of, oh, I invested in this. Oh, this is what’s really gonna happen. As that reality begins to seep in, they begin to, sometimes they begin to panic a little bit. I’m like, oh my God, what did I sign up for? How are they gonna ever get this done? But one of the things that they need to know that I help with sometimes is it’s not about you. Really, it is, you’re the subject matter expert, but the course is about somebody else, a different ICP. We’re not making a course to sell to you. Okay? If we made a course to sell to you, the storyboard would be completely different. It’d be more advanced and that sort of thing. We’re making a course to sell to who you may have been 20 years ago, so let’s get that straight. The other thing is this is what we do. We do this five days a week. Eight hours a day for 20 years, and I myself have nine courses and five languages in another life. So we’ve done this before. Trust, trust me, trust Dana. Trust our platform people. We will give you everything that you need. We’ll capture everything that has to be said. And more. And if it’s one thing that these instructional designers are really good at is picking up on business models real quick and removing, that’s not necessary with, that’s necessary and they know what they’re doing. So the customers have to be, the clients need to be managed sometimes in that regard. They need to let go and let I call. It’s a joke with my clients. I say, just let go. Let Uncle Bob take care of it. Uncle Bob and his superhero team will take care of it. And we get done. That’s why this is a plug. We have nothing but a hundred percent, five star reviews on trusts pilot. So that’s awesome.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Robert, you mentioned nine courses in some in different languages. I always find people’s path into the course space or the e-learning industry is always interesting. Tell us about the genesis Of Course Creek. Where did it come from? How’d it start? Why’d you do it? Robert Lunte: I’m gonna make a long story very short because I’m, because we wanna get back to instructional design in Course Creek, but in another life I’m a recognized voice coach, father-in-law, sing a song.  Chris Badgett: Okay.  Robert Lunte: All right. So I’ve been doing that for 30 years. A company’s called the Vocalist Studio. We’re sitting on Kajabi, which is a great platform for that kind of teaching. And, I wrote a book and have nine courses in five languages that teaches people a methodology for physically training the voice to build the motor skills and the strength and endurance of the voice so that you can sing amazing, and it tends to lean into rockers and heavy metal people so they can scream notes without hurting themselves and that sort of thing. Lots of fun, really great. Still sell the courses. Don’t do the one-on-ones anymore because it’s not scalable. I took that business as far as I can possibly go, that industry can sustain. The industry just in itself doesn’t have a lot of money. So there’s not a lot to trip down, even if you’re one of the best in the business. So I just, one day I went through a lot of misery for about six years as a voice coach thinking, what the hell am I gonna do when I grow up? What else can I do? And I realized the only other thing I can do is make courses and help people make courses. So off we went. We created Course Creek seven years ago. And and and it’s really mostly about people like Dana. It’s about the talent that I surround myself with. Yeah, I just got tired of working with musicians. They don’t have any money. Awesome. And they’re flaky. Chris Badgett: This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. I love our industry. We’ve talked about horse running surfaces and voice coaches. Which is awesome. But in, in terms of the perfect customer for course Creek, like what are some of the qualities they have? Because you mentioned that thing where they have to be open and trust the process and some people just kinda wanna steamroll through and go alone. But how do you really identify or seek out a perfect fit client? Robert Lunte: The client that does his homework and follows that lead that point that I made earlier, the client that signs up and says. I’m ready to go to work and joins the team and follows our lead and gets their stuff in on time. We do a Slack, a client Slack channel and Dana and the rest of the team will engage with them. So that’s active, involved, removes their ego and just lets us lead and lets us get it done. That’s the best kind of client and, clients that are. When we execute and we always execute great. When they’re happy about that they share that with us and they share that with the world. And so that’s big part of our payback is that we like to know that they’re happy and we like, and we want people to know about that. Dana probably has a, an instructional design perspective on that. No doubt Dana.  Dana Sleeper: I would say that clients who are communicative, so using the Slack channel and, making sure that they stay up to date with those communications as well as responding to us. Probably the most important thing. Everything else we can work through if you at least talk to us, right? It’s really hard to make progress on a course if you can’t get client input or you can’t get them to review a course. So that engagement that Robert mentioned in the Slack channel is really key. And it also streamlines things so that all of our communications are in one place. Shs, who works on the manages, all of the LMS platform work for clients on our end. He can see my communications. Client, I can tag him and let him know, Hey, there’s four courses that are gonna be coming your way soon to upload to the LMS. Or, I had this conversation with the client and they mentioned gamification, and I wanna make sure you’re thinking about that when you do the LMS setup. So it keeps the entire team really engaged and informed throughout the process. Besides that, in terms of clientele, I think, I would say communication’s number one. And number two is, like Robert said, doing your homework, right? Some folks show up and they have no content, like they haven’t actually written anything down. And so we then have to have the conversation about okay, you need to do your homework to take your expertise and put it on paper, or put it in PowerPoint slides or put it on something. Or literally voice record yourself. I don’t care what format it is, but give me your knowledge. Yeah. And so that’s really important because if we. Don’t have that information, then all we can do is Google search, right? Or use AI to try to generate content and that’s not gonna result in the same end product as something that’s coming from a subject matter expert. So those two things are really what I look for. Again, everything else I can work with  Chris Badgett: you guys also help with, or I’m sorry you guys and gals also help with marketing automation or marketing funnels. So like one of the main questions we wanna solve with this podcast. Is helping people get clients like we want their courses and membership sites and e-learning projects to be successful. And of course there’s other kinds of courses, like internal trainings at companies, but if we think about the subject matter expert selling expertise. What kind of marketing funnels or marketing advice do you have? I know Robert, you had your own experience with being a voice coach and finding leads for that, but how do you, how did you do that and how do you help clients set up, a lead system or get their own clients? Robert Lunte: So we have four phases in the client journey, consulting, instructional design LMS, working with your platform and marketing. So it’s like phase four in this journey. We have. An inbound director, an inbound marketing director, and an outbound marketing director. Inbound is paid media, social media, writing blogs, that sort of thing. So the traditional stuff, and the outbound director does outreach sequencing on LinkedIn where it applies, and outreach sequencing on email, cold and warm email campaigns. Now, the cold and warm email campaigns is interesting in that. In order to do that properly, you have to have somebody who is an expert in commercial class. Outbound email tech stack, which is stuff that I’m still learning about, and we happen to have a fellow like that. His name is Matt Armstrong. He’s a total geek. He just, he builds on clay and Apollo and instantly, and all these systems that are all designed to make sure you don’t go in the spam folders and don’t get in trouble, that sort of thing. Personally, I prefer the outbound stuff because you get the most return for the investment. It’s a great value. Now, if I had more money than God and I don’t, I’d probably do paid media, right? So paid media can be very effective, but it’s a rich man’s luxury. All right? So if you’re not one of those folks, and we got a great guy that handled that for you, but if that’s not you, I lean towards outbound initially to try to get leads in. Now, the other thing that you should do is go to work. That means get in front of a camera. So as far as the vocalist studio is concerned, it’s, it is 15, 20 years of YouTube. I think I was the very first voice coach to do a singing technique video on YouTube before Google even bought them. So you gotta do that if you, if it’s relevant to your business. I understand that l and d departments at a hospital might not be doing that, but if you’re like, a thought leader Filipino kind of dude, you need to get in front of the camera. Then the underlying point in that is just because you have the beautiful product and we’ve delivered you beautiful product, that’s when the sounds cliche, but that’s when the work really starts. You gotta get involved. You gotta make a little bit of investment in marketing. We’re talking about e-commerce people and you gotta get in front of a camera if you can make noise.  Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Robert Lunte: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Just  Robert Lunte: What you’re doing, Chris. You gotta do what you’re doing right now. You gotta make content. Chris Badgett: I appreciate that. I think my first YouTube video was in 2007, something like that. But anyways I’m just guessing, but some, sometimes, like migrations are super important in this industry because, and I’m guessing that you guys deal with a lot of. Migrations, there’s this perfect client’s, open-minded subject matter expert, coachable, blank slate, canvas, and you just go with all the best practices. But a lot of times you’ll probably get somebody they don’t like their LMS, their course isn’t working and it’s current form and you’re, they wanna move somewhere else on the tech stack side point or the content creations point and. They’re just, they need to migrate, they need to go to version two or version three or version four. Robert Lunte: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: What’s your experience and advice for people that are in that migration or reset mindset? I.  Robert Lunte: I’m gonna, I wanna give Dana some airtime on this. I’ll start with that. And then Dana. I’d like to get the instructional designer’s perspective on that as well. I, compatibility and that sort of thing. Early on at the agency, we recognized that migrations was heavy lifting, dirty, no fun work that no, that our competitors didn’t want do. All right. They waived those opportunities down the path, but we stepped up and embraced it and wrote SOPs for it. So in fact it’s a piece of work. It’s a kind of work that we do enough that it’s made our main nav bar to go out our websites is migrations is right at the top. And we’re real good at it. Your question is, we typically are migrating to, to best class WordPress platforms. Okay. And SaaS platforms. The way we do it is we migrate content. We’re focusing on content and data, client data. This is a great question for Shaban. Chattery, our senior director of platforms, but it’s a lot about SOPs and being really super tight on those SOPs, bringing stuff over. It’s gotta be really super organized. I’ll mention this, then we’ll pass it off to Dana. If you’re gonna migrate, you gotta get, you’ll get all of your content and your data in nicely, neatly titled folders and ready for us to migrate. Okay. One thing we can’t do is go in and go into a big, huge mess and figure out how to do it. You gotta work with us and you, so you gotta prepare for it.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. One quick question before Dana goes. In terms of migration, there’s a lot of noise in the space. And what I mean is like some LMS companies have slick good marketing, and the client may be saying, Hey, I really want to go to Brand X. But you all, you guys also do LMS recommendations where you’re like, based on you, you might disagree, you might think oh, this person is a great fit for. Kajabi or a WordPress solution or talent, LMS or something else based on their unique needs. Indeed. So how do you let’s say you had a client who’s sold on brand y, but you really think Brand Z is a better fit for them? Robert Lunte: We are the trusted advisors. So we’ll go back to the other point that I made. If you’re. Gonna hire us to do the business, let us do our work. So we’re gonna make sure you get on the right platform. And frankly the first most critical decision is that platform is that LMS. So we do work with a lot of LMS platforms, and they’re all brilliant. They’re all brilliant. They all do something a little different, a little better than the next guy. And they got strengths and weaknesses, but they’re all pretty much mostly brilliant, including yours. It just, we take a look at their needs and we just align the needs to the platform and make a recommendation. That’s pretty straightforward, but they have to trust us on that. Dana?  Dana Sleeper: Yeah. I would say on the content migration side, there can be a. There’s a whole slew of reasons why folks come to us and say, Hey, we did version one and we’re looking to make some changes. It could be that their content was developed internally by someone who maybe doesn’t have learning design expertise. Maybe they don’t have software to make it interactive. So it could be something that’s pretty bland, like PowerPoint deck, or it could literally be PDFs with texts and image. And so they’re not seeing a lot of engagement in their content. Maybe if they’re selling it. They’re not selling a lot of courses because folks aren’t giving them rave reviews. Whatever the reason might be. They wanna upgrade their content. And so in those instances, we’re often looking from converting from those base files into SCORM compliant content, in articulate, rise, or articulate storyline to increase engagement. I would also say that one of the other areas that we see some desire. Is when we need to use squirm content because they’re looking to expand their reach. So having items packaged in as squirm files makes it easier for them to sell across multiple platforms, right? If that’s something they’re interested in doing, but their content is currently is set up in some format where they cannot do that easily and they would have to manually recreate the content in another system. That can be another reason for folks coming and saying, Hey, we’ve decided we’re gonna go full S score so we can package our content and sell it. We need you to migrate it. We’ve had a lot of clients do that. And I would say, Robert thinking recently of Boss Academy, they actually set up all of their content in their LMS and it’s YouTube videos, text and images, and now we’re moving it into Squirm compliant content and articulate rise and storyline and using beyond animations and the video elements that they provided. So that’s one where we’ve really repackaged it in a way that’s much more engaging. And frankly, like it looks prettier, right? So there’s the marketing element there. And other folks in similar cases, maybe they provide us a PowerPoint deck, something that they’ve been training folks with for, years in person. And now they’re saying, okay, we need global reach to do this training. Let’s take this PowerPoint deck and turn it into something in the e-learning space. All sorts of reasons to migrate content from one format to another. And we’ve certainly found the gamut on doing that.  Chris Badgett: You folks have been in the industry for a long time. It’s a funny industry because some things never change. Like the internet was literally invented in the seventies or whatever for college professors to communicate in military or whatever. But like online education has been around forever and some things don’t change, but sometimes things do change the market, the industry, the macroeconomics change.  What do you, when you two look into the future, what do you see as like emerging trends or opportunities or how to think about e-learning in an AI world? Or what do you see when you look into your crystal ball of what’s coming or what’s here and maybe not readily recognized? Dana,  Dana Sleeper: yeah. Happy to start on the content side there. So I would say you mentioned ai, right? So that obviously has a big role, assuming that AI stays around and there’s not some like global worldwide crash like AWS services going out yesterday. Thank you very much for that, my friends. Yeah, my software not work. But using AI tools as a way to really make our processes more efficient. So I think that a lot of learning designers are headed in this direction, and it’s only going to happen more where basically ai co-pilots are going to handle 70, 80% of the build work in e-learning, meaning that. They are going to develop the storyboards, they’re going to do the initial drafting of narration content. And that really allows instructional designers to focus on strategy and pedagogy, creativity with the interactions, because that’s something that the AI can’t build, right? Those are individual triggers and JavaScripts and things that we’re doing on the backend. So AI definitely has a big role. I would also say that AI is going to help in terms of personalization. So something we’re seeing, particularly for larger corporate clients is that adaptive learning paths or real-time feedback maybe some automated content generation is really gonna redefine how quickly training can be created and tailored to an individual learner based off of the assessment information we’re getting back from a course. I would also say there’s a shift in general, we’ve seen this over time, but I think it’s still occurring from these larger courses that are hours long to continuous learning ecosystems. So moving away from one-off training to more of an integrated learning experience embedded in your daily workflows. So let’s say on teams, you have an AI copilot who’s also reading your email, and they see that you are having. An issue with a coworker on one topic or you’re struggling in one area, they might suggest to you, Hey, take this five minute micro learning on X, Y, z, maybe very timely, very flexible, mobile compatible and really support the learner where they’re at in that moment of time. So I see AI and those changes occurring in terms of how folks are structuring their learning content. I think most of the other. Shifts are not new items, right? We’re in a hybrid workforce environment, so we need more e-learning, more distributed learning. Up-skilling and re-skilling is important as generations age out in the workforce and retaining information. That’s been a struggle for a long time. Storytelling scenario-based and experiential learning has for a long time been something that folks have focused on, but integrating that into e-learning format has obviously been more of a challenge and more possible as we advance our tools. So I’ll pause there ’cause I could talk about this for a long time. Robert, what do you wanna add?  Robert Lunte: That’s brilliant. I’m not sure I can best that, but from my perspective where we’re recommending tech stacks, that sort of thing on the early on and say AI for the heavy lifting, micro learning, multi-tenancy, continuous gamification, adaptive learning, and copilots. That’s awesome.  Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s I love what you said about, I’ve heard it called just in time learning versus just in case, and that AI can help. Hey, you might be ready right now for this one, micro training on this one topic. That’s really cool. Let’s talk about Course Creek. If somebody’s watching this or listening to this and they’re like, these guys and gals sound pretty awesome. How like what’s it like to get started working with you? What should they do? Yeah, like how do they get in touch and how, what is the beginning of the process? Pretty simple.  Robert Lunte: Thanks for asking. Go to course creek.com course as an online course Creek as an little river one word, course creek.com. Go to the top left, top right corner of our website. You see the happy button? It says Book a meeting and we will meet with you. And it won’t just be me, it’ll be me, Dana, shebang Chow, our platform expert. We, one of the things I’m really proud of and that I think is super helpful for clients is we team consult. And so when the client comes in, it’s not just Robert it’s me with my. Talented specialists and they’re diving deep on answering, asking the questions they need to ask all the content we’ve talked about here today. And and we get it done. So after that, I then get scope documents from my team. I put a bow on it, send it out to the client in about four eight hours. And we’ll go back and forth a little bit perhaps if we need to. And we bring ’em on board. And we’ll create a client channel or a Slack channel and we’ll get to work everybody.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. And just to highlight some of the kind of niche specialties you mentioned LMS migration. There’s healthcare is like an industry you’re interested in.  There’s all kinds of subject matter experts who do a million different things, which you guys have or have experience in any other just really sweet spots that you love. And really enjoy those clients in terms of niche or industry or type of platform or whatever  Robert Lunte: the migration work is a big strength for us. And that includes the instructional design that goes into that as well. Taking a look at old content and doing an audit and improving with the instructional design, which is something that Dana had referred to verticals, healthcare, FinTech, executive coaches. And don’t be shy if it seems a little bit out of the box. I think we’re probably the company for you as well on that as well. ’cause as I said, we’ll try anything from cowboy hat to horse arenas. If we can get it done and on demand support. I have a popular service called On Demand Support. It’s basically prepaid development, instructional design hours, every 30 days. And it’s a way to chill out the cash flow if you’re kinda low on cash flow and don’t need to pay prepay for four to 70 hours every 30 days. We can work that way. So that is something that is been popular and and useful for the clients.  Chris Badgett: Awesome. Robert and Dana, thank you for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Go check out Course Creek, that’s course creek.com. Reach out to these guys, book a meeting and thank you so much for coming on the show and thank you for sharing what you do and the passion, the shared passion for this industry. We really appreciate it.  Robert Lunte: Thanks for the opportunity. Chris Badgett: We look forward to sending clients your way. Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Building Full-Stack eLearning Solutions with Robert and Dana from CourseCREEK appeared first on LMScast.

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 very personal tale in this LMScast episode that relates endurance running to entrepreneurship and personal development. He ran 100 miles from Vermont via New Hampshire to his home in Maine at the age of 47, completing a significant objective for which he had been preparing for more than two years. This self-sponsored ultra run. Which was encouraged by friends, his business partner Jason Coleman, and his wife, was more of a personal challenge than a competition. The fact that Chris had battled persistent back pain for the most of his adult life. Which was entirely resolved by regular fitness and strength training, adds even more significance to the accomplishment. Chris worked with a running coach to progressively increase his endurance with strenuous runs, such as a 30-mile mountain run in New Hampshire and a 50-mile walk across the Grand Canyon. For Chris, the objective was to become the type of guy who could accomplish something amazing, not to get recognition or ego. He highlights that success, like endurance, results from persistent work, resiliency, and a strong commitment to personal development by drawing a comparison between this experience and the path taken by course developers and education entrepreneurs. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett and this is gonna be a solo episode. This one’s gonna be a little bit different. This podcast is all about you, but I’m gonna talk a little bit about me and this one and tie it in to your journey as an education entrepreneur, as an LMS website building person. So I just accomplished something last weekend. A big goal. I’ve been working on kind of for two years, so I’m 47 years old and I just completed a 100 mile run. I started on Saturday morning, and then I finished on Sunday, early afternoon. So I ran a hundred miles all the way from the state of Vermont across the entire state of New Hampshire. To Maine where I live and it was a hundred miles. There was actually a kind of a route that people do that was 80 miles. From Vermont to Maine. I wanted to do a full 100. So I actually ran an extra 20 miles before I got to the starting of the journey that I did. From Vermont all the way to to Maine. So that was a hundred mile run straight. I did take two 20 minute naps around mile 80 and mile 90, somewhere in there just because my body was giving out and I had to reset the brain and stuff. But it’s pretty much a straight run. This was not a race, it was self-supported. Which means there was no like official race event or anything. It was just me and the trails and the back roads that I was on. I did have a couple of awesome people who supported me in the process who would meet me at road crossings for resupplying water and food and that sort of thing. So I was joined by my business partner at Lifter LMS, Jason Coleman. And a good friend Adam Silver. And Adam actually ran a section of it with me near the end, but for the most part it was a, I was out there by myself in the woods on trails and on back roads running all the way through the night. And some of it is in a very remote part of Vermont. So this, any distance over a marathon is known as an ultra. So this was definitely an ultra run. It was a hundred miles. And ultra is, it’s pretty much what I did is running four marathons back to back all in a row. Now I was, didn’t start training until about two years ago. I’ve always been active. I’ve always been an outdoors person. I started training and getting into shape. But I was in a bad place because for most of my adult life, like from age 20 onwards, I’ve dealt with chronic back pain. So whenever I would wake up in the morning, the first conscious thing in my awareness is my back hurts. And I was still very active and I did physical jobs and things, but I always had. Struggles with my back and it was very painful for a lot of my life and a lot of my waking time. And the crazy thing is through this run is that not just the ultra at the end, but about a year ago, my chronic back pain completely disappeared from all the training and just getting in the right shape with the right muscles and all of that. That to me is the biggest win of all this process. The a hundred mile run was fantastic. I had a great experience. Really appreciated the support of Jason and Adam and my wife Samantha, who came out to support at various parts. But I also hired a running coach two years ago named Kevin, who had worked with me over the past two years to really design the. Running training and strength training program that I did. So that is I consider it a great accomplishment. I’m really proud of what I accomplished. The first 80 miles of the a hundred mile run was actually pretty smooth, but the last 20 were brutal. I was moving very slow. I wasn’t feeling well. My stomach was upset. And it was very challenging, but I was able to complete the a hundred miles so that’s the a hundred mile run just happened. I have no idea, what my next goal is gonna be. But like I said, I’ve been working on it for two years with the Running Coach. About eight months ago I had done a 50 mile run that was very challenging with my wife, where we. Went down one side of the Grand Canyon, down the river, up the other side and back, which is a very hardcore 50 mile ultra run that we did. So that was a touch point in that training. I also did a 30 mile, very strenuous mountain run over the tops of six mountains in a mountain chain in the White mountains of New Hampshire. That was also an ultra event that I did on my own, on this journey. But in all that, there was lots of training runs, walks, fast runs, strength training, all kinds of different training. And I want to tie this into you, the listener. I appreciate it if you’re celebrating with me and proud of the accomplishment, it means the world to me. I wanted to share a lot of the things that I’ve learned just with developing endurance, setting big goals, doing training. And the first thing is really about the foundation and motivation. So why did I decide to do a hundred mile run at 47 years old? Really I’m not motivated by the. Kind of reputation or ego of having done that. I’m happy that I’ve accomplished that, but mostly what I wanted to do is just become the person that could do that. So there was a transformation there. Yes, I’m getting older, but I believe I’d like to, age gracefully and becoming in the kind of shape that you could do something like a hundred mile run. Was very appealing to me just because of the person that I would become in the process. You could call that an athlete and there’s lots of different types of athletes, like for you, maybe it’s some other sport or some kind of physical physique thing or whatever it is for you, but not just like an event, but the person that you become in the process is really the main motivation for me. I also like to challenge myself and that was quite the challenge and to do that successfully. I’m proud of that, but also I like the example that sets for, particularly my children who saw their dad work really hard and train in training, but also accomplish something that sounds impossible at any age. So that was a big part of that. And when I was training first starting out, I’ve always been active, would go on morning walks and little runs here and there, but usually not more than three or five miles. But in the early days of training, particularly with my back pain challenges, I would have a lot of setbacks. When you first start training for something like that with a big goal, whether you’re trying to lose weight, get big muscles, or develop endurance or whatever, you’re not gonna see results like every day at all. It takes a while. So in the early days, I stayed motivated by trusting the process and just putting one foot in front of the oth other. It’s like I mentioned with the back pain where. Eventually I woke up one morning and it just never returned. But over the, those two years, I could see the impact of the back pain getting less and less. But it is all like in the rear view mirror where you look back and you notice, oh wow I’ve made some significant change or transformation here. And that’s motivating even when. Day to day you’re not really noticing any results or immediate, huge wins. I particularly like endurance because I feel like you get a lot more out of it. Particularly as an entrepreneur, I’ve been an entrepreneur for something like 15 years, building my own business. Building a company doing all the things, hiring people, building a team, charting a vision doing a lot of the day-to-day work of running and implementing and growing a business. And that requires a lot of endurance. No matter who you are, where you are, there’s a lot of seduction with the idea of. This episode of LMScast is brought to you by Popup Maker. The most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. 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Get rich quick or overnight success and that’s just not the reality. The whole passive income thing, it’s a lot of active, a lot of active work. And part of that is just staying mentally healthy. So one of the ways I do that, ’cause I spend a lot of time at the computer, is I like to get outside and exercise, spend time in nature, spend time with my family, be out, be around my house outdoors. That’s helps create a lot of balance in my life. And in terms of like small incremental improvements, when I first started training, I was doing a lot of walk run combinations, very short distances, variety. So maybe one day there’s like a short run, another day there’s a longer walk and run combination. Another day there’s some strength training. Another day. There’s some really short hill running uphill speed work, cardio things going on. And business is a lot like that because we have to wear a lot of hats. One day we’re doing marketing stuff, another day we’re doing sales stuff. Another day we’re building product like our courses or our website another day we’re doing other technology stuff like. Doing marketing automation or more website stuff. Another day we might be doing research or talking to potential customers or reviewing competition and things like that. And to do all those things. The trick is not just to do all things and wear all the hats, but also to do those things over time. So one of the ways I do that in business. Is I have a lot of time blocks on my calendar so that an essential function of business does not get left behind. So I have dedicated content creation time blocks on my calendar. I have dedicated time blocks to work with my team and support them. I have dedicated time blocks to do management type activities. So those time blocking, that time blocking approach is really effective. And I like to work in systems and routines over projects. So instead of just being like, I’m all in and I’m focusing on this one and only thing right now, until it’s finished. I will have multiple projects going simultaneously and through my routines. I am slowly working away at all those projects which work together with each other to grow the business or further whatever initiative or goal is in place. And when I can try to systematize those things so I’m not constantly trying to invent the way of doing things. Whatever it is we’re focused on. It’s also important, when you run a hundred miles, you learn the value of patience and you have to be patient, right? So yes, you could create and launch a course in one day. You really could do that. I’ve done that, but. It’s better to be patient and build an education company, or if you’re an agency building a website. Building agency it’s something that’s built brick by brick over time and all those things compound and help each other. Another part that comes up during. A long run or a long decade. Building a company is setbacks, so it could be pain or fatigue when you’re running. It could be injury, but there’s business equivalence of that. You could not like what you’re doing at the moment, and as an entrepreneur. It’s really easy to get distracted and just focus on the things that you want to do or you’re excited about doing. I call it sweeping the floor. Sometimes you have to sweep the floor. Just do something that is either uncomfortable or that you’re not that excited about. That was one of the great things about working with a coach is. I used to think that I didn’t need accountability, and I also trusted maybe too much in my ability to, come up with a plan. But when you work with an expert like a coach. That created a lot of accountability. I didn’t have to plan my workouts. They were in an app. I knew what I had to do. And knowing that, my watch, my GPS data and heart rate stuff and everything is gonna end up on my coach’s computer, it’s very motivated to get the work done. So if it’s raining, if it’s snowing, if it’s cold, I’m still going, I’m still getting the work done, and businesses like that. Sometimes you just gotta keep going and just do it. And having that accountability and particularly that guidance from an expert can be very helpful and motivating. And I also just want to note on my a hundred mile run, I mentioned Jason and Adam and my wife Sam, who. Supported me in the process. They didn’t run for me, but they were there. Smoothing over the gaps, making sure I had enough water, making sure my bag was resupplied, making sure I had enough batteries that were charged for my headlamps and stuff like that because I was running through the night. So not doing it alone, even if most of what you do as a loan, but not entirely alone is really helpful. And having a coach, a mentor, or a guide of some kind to help you in the process, either for the whole big picture or maybe just a piece. Maybe you just need like a marketing coach, or maybe you just need an instructional design coach, or maybe you just need a business coach that’s gonna help you better manage a team. Or maybe you need like a mindset coach or some kind of psychological assistance. To help you keep your head screwed on straight and have a solid mindset. The power of coaching is very powerful and it’s easy to look at like the successful course launch or the successful business. But really a lot of the coaching and the personal development that happens, it’s all about the process leading up to those milestone events like a course launch. A hundred mile run, or a company that makes X amount of dollars a year or has been in business five, 10 years and those sort of things. Those are just blips of time where the whole journey is really what it’s all about, and getting support in that process is really important. Another interesting thing happened to me on my a hundred mile run as I got into it. I normally, when I run, I listen to a lot of podcasts and audio books. It’s one of the things that motivates me to run because people laugh. I’m thinking of a guy named Nathan. I ran into at a conference in England and I was telling ’em about my upcoming run and I said. He said, you sound like you must really like to run. And I said to him, I actually hate running. Which is true in the sense that it’s painful. A lot of times I’m doing it and not the best weather. Maybe it’s raining, maybe it’s super cold and windy, or the snow is blowing, or I have something else I’d rather be doing with that time. But what I love is the, the way I feel after and the mental health benefits and the person I’m becoming in the process. That’s something that’s interesting. And then the other thing I mentioned about the, not listening to podcasts or audio books on my a [00:20:00] hundred mile run, I normally do that, but in this case. I did not, and it was just an intuitive sense I had. Once I got into it for one there was a lot of navigation. There were a lot of turns in the trail intersections, road crossings, and I just had to make sure not to get lost. Cause you can get lost easily on a hundred mile run through the woods and back roads and all this stuff. But more importantly, I just had this intuitive sense that I should really stay grounded in the moment. So the run took me just over 30 hours, and that’s a long time. But also when you consume information, it actually burns calories. And I know that’s true because when you study professional chess players like Magnus Carlson or whoever, when they’re in a chess match, they will actually burn an insane amount of calories when they’re playing a game of chess just sitting in a chair. So [00:21:00] energy conservation is really important, especially when you’re doing a Himalayan effort, and I just intuitively felt that I needed to let my brain only focus on the essentials of running survival navigation and that kind of thing. But businesses like that, particularly on the internet, because there are so many distractions. You’re at your computer, there’s infinite content on YouTube or social media. You could have a movie playing a tv, going you could be having side conversations with people around you at a coffee shop or whatever. And focus is extremely important as an entrepreneur. Sometimes the key factor that limits the success of somebody. Is there inability to focus or stay focused? So removing distractions is really important. That’s why I’m a big believer if you’re a work from home entrepreneur, that it’s really important to set up your home office or workstation environment so that it’s very productive. There’s not a lot of distractions. So for example, right now I can just walk up to my computer and start recording or making a video at any time. Everything’s all set up. The microphone, the camera. I can just go. So it’s set up for productivity. That was just an interesting fact about limiting the mind. And I mentioned I took a couple of 20 minute naps. And it was like I was at the point of exhaustion, but my muscles were doing pretty good. It was more mentally I needed a reset. So just laying down under a sleeping bag on the ground and, with my eyes closed, allowed my brain just to take a moment and reset and get ready for the next 5,10, 20 miles. That was important. So there’s an ultra runner named David Goggins who says, when you think you’re at the end of your ability, like you’re outta gas, like there’s nothing more you can do physically. You’re actually only at 40%, which is, if you think about it, that’s what a lot of ultra is about. It’s getting past barriers, a lot of which are mental. So if you do the training and you’re, you have the condition to be able to do something or you do your business and you’ve been doing, putting the reps in, learning marketing, doing marketing, learning sales, doing sales, creating content, learning about creating better content, making more content, making products like courses coaching people one-on-one, learning how to be a better coach and, practicing coaching. With clients and so on. Building websites, you just keep going. And if you’ve put in the reps, you’re often capable of much more than where you think your limits are. So one of the biggest challenges is not that we aim to high with our goals, it’s actually that we aim too low. Think about that and really keep putting one foot in front of the other when it comes to your business and adopt the ultra mindset. Even if you’re not like a hardcore athlete or anything like that you can develop, you can become mentally strong and mentally endure and mentally carry on and do the work of building a business. Helping people and becoming a better person in the process. So my biggest wall I hit was around around 80 miles and that’s when I knew I could finish, but it was gonna be very difficult. So I felt great going to, to about mile 80, and then things started to fall apart. But I knew I could continue on. I would have to walk a bunch. I would have to slow down. I would have to take some stops. And even in those moments, that’s when my support team was the most there for me to help me carry on, to help me keep moving forward. And that’s the power of having a vision, having a mission, having people with you on the journey. That’s what motivates me at Lifter LMS. You’ll often see me sign off in my emails. It’s great to be with you on the journey, and I mean that because I see myself, our team, the lifter LMS product, we are part of your journey and we’re here to support you. We’re here for you at mile 80 when you have a question and or you have a challenge or you’re trying to launch and you’re trying to figure these things out. We have our live calls where we help people, not just with the software, but with other ideas and strategy and things like that. So we are part of your support crew at Lifter LMS on your business, ultra Endurance Marathon, and I would just encourage you to consider, if you’re not already there, adopting an ultra mindset, which means going far. Putting in the reps expanding your limits, expanding your comfort zone expanding your goals, aim a little higher. Do some planning. Surround yourself with people and processes and systems that can support you, whether that’s team members or coaches or standard operating procedures, or documenting how you do what you do. All of these things come together to create the ultra mindset and to build an education company and a website and an online business that can stand the test of time. Some of the, best lifter LMS sites I love have been around for over a decade, and I see those entrepreneurs continue to learn, take forward, imperfect actions, have setbacks or challenges, but carry on. Grow their teams become better versions of themselves, help others on the journey. It’s really awesome to see. In, in hiking I’ve done a lot of hiking and backpacking and stuff, and there’s this, there’s something we all know for those of us that do long distance hiking, which is, it’s not very crowded. One mile from the trailhead. And what that means is if you really get out there. There’s a lot of activity and buzz around the start, but when you get out far and you get up the mountain a little bit there’s just the people out there that are going the distance and then you get really out there and you barely see many people. That’s the ultra people and businesses like that. Whether, you’re building an agency or you’re building a product, or you’re building courses, coaching program, education company. It is fun and energizing to get out there with the people that are really doing it, that are really going the distance. And of course we want beginners and people with goals and dreams to get started and all of that, but strap on the ultra long-term distance mindset and it’s amazing what you can accomplish. So thank you for checking out this episode, letting me tell my story of my a hundred mile run from the state of Vermont to Maine in New Hampshire, and pulling out some lessons of that are related to entrepreneurship and education and building an online company because it definitely takes a lot of endurance and, going big and going far. I’m in your corner. I’m a champion for you and champion your goals and dreams, and it’s great to be with you on the journey. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Entrepreneurship Lessons from Running 100 Miles appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett shares about marketing automation. According to Chris Badgett, marketing automation is the foundation of a scalable online education company. Its role is to generate leads, cultivate relationships over time, and turn those leads into paying students for coaching, academies, memberships, or courses. In order to automatically offer value and engage users in follow-up sequences, he suggests first creating an email list using straightforward registration forms or integrated platform code, followed by helpful automations like RSS-driven newsletters and lead-magnet distribution (PDFs, checklists, or free mini-courses). Chris recommends concentrating on three lists instead of dozens of them: prospects, free users, and paying customers. Then, using tags and custom fields, audiences can be segmented and focused nurturing sequences that mostly deliver value and occasionally present offers are sent. He identifies the main conversion tools (webinars, one-on-one calls/trials, and sales pages) and describes how automations may promote various conversion channels to boost sales while scheduling calls, reminding participants, and rerouting signups to buy sites. In order for automation to build connections rather than come off as spam, he emphasizes pace (drip/timed campaigns), reasonable segmentation (by course, use case, or behavior), and consistently favoring beneficial material. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. Episode Transcript You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. Today I’m back with another solo episode. I’m Chris Badgett, CEO, and co-founder of Lifter LMS. And in this episode, we’re gonna go over the fundamentals of marketing automation for course creators. So what is marketing automation? The purpose of marketing is to get and keep a customer basically, but primarily to create a lead and then send that lead down a path where that person eventually buys a course, a membership, a coaching program, access to your academy or your school. So let’s talk about the fundamentals of marketing automation. What are the jobs to be done? With marketing that we can figure out how to automate. That’s what we’re gonna go over in this episode. At the very beginning of a lead or a prospect’s journey it, we want to capture the lead in our marketing automation system, also known as an email list, A CRM, which stands for Customer Relationship Management. There are many great CRMs out there. There’s tools like MailChimp, which has a free plan. ConvertKit LifterLMS, by the way, integrates directly with both of those, but there’s literally 50, even a hundred out there, about 60 of the marketing automation platforms you can connect directly to your WordPress site that’s powered by things like LifterLMS or WooCommerce or other tools in the space using an awesome tool called WP Fusion. So I’m gonna mention a lot of tools in this episode. If you wanna find the best software tools, the recommended list for course creators, just do a Google search for LifterLMS, recommended resources and you’ll find a page on our website, which has all the tools I’m gonna talk about so that you can easily find them. But this episode mostly isn’t about talking about tools and saying you should get certain tools. But I will mention some tools as we get into it because there’s WordPress, the content management system, and then there’s tools like Lifter, LMS, which adds the learning management system. But then the whole CRM or marketing automation piece is a third leg of that stool to make an online education company. I also wanna mention there are CRMs and marketing automation tools. That work directly inside WordPress that integrate with tools like LifterLMS, for example. Groundhog and Fluent CRM are really popular for that. But let’s go back to marketing automation. So if I was just getting started, what are some of the first things that I would automate in my marketing on my WordPress website? One of the first things I would automate is building my email list. So the absolute most simple way to do this is to basically build a newsletter email list. So in order to do that, what I would do is I would put a form on my site to sign up for my newsletter. You can use one of the popular WordPress form tools like Gravity Forms or WSForm, or. Ninja forms, WP forms, formidable forms, et cetera, and capture an email when someone signs up for your newsletter. And then one of the things you can do from there is it just automates the population of your email list. If you ever want to send out a newsletter your list is growing over time as people sign up by filling out the form that’s on your blog sidebar. Or maybe you have a dedicated page on your site or a form like in the footer of your site to sign up for your newsletter. And by a form, I just mean like a headline sign up for my newsletter, a place for people to enter their name and email and a sign up button. That’s it. You can also embed the signup form code directly from your email marketing platform. They, they can give you. Like a form code that you copy and paste on your website to create the form. Or you can use one of the WordPress form solutions that makes it easy to just build the form right there in WordPress. But just to get a little bit fancy, one of the things you can automate for your newsletter, let’s say you write regular blog posts or articles, you can do what’s called an RSS Driven campaign, which just means that, you can set that up directly inside your email list platform, where anytime you publish a new blog post, the content gets put into an email and automatically sent to your subscribers. So that is the easiest way to do an automated newsletter that automatically grows without your involvement. Automatically sends new content that you put on your blog directly to your subscribers. And that might be the entire article content, or it could be an excerpt, like a little like the title in the first, 200 words or so that people then click on in the email, go to your website and read the full article. So that’s the most basic form of marketing automation. And a way to help you grow your email list by creating an RSS driven campaign. As we expand from there, there’s a concept called lead magnets. So what a lead magnet is it’s something that you offer for free that somebody puts in their name and email and they get the lead magnet which we’ll talk about the different types in a second. That gets emailed to them or downloadable or whatever it is at that time, they’re gonna get added to your email list and you can then do follow up campaigns based on that lead magnet. So the earliest been around for a long time version of a lead magnet is called an ebook. So some people get fancy and call that a white paper. Basically any kind of PDF resource you can create that helps your ideal learner for free that’s ideally not too big to consume. Like we’re not trying to send somebody a 150 page real book, but just something of value that they would appreciate and be happy to give you their email address for. That is the basic ebook lead magnet. The concept of a white paper is basically just something that’s a little bit more formalized, in depth, scientific researched, but it’s still just an ebook or information. Essentially. It’s a PDF. There’s other things like cheat sheets or checklists. These are like templates or resources you can provide. In PDF format that your audience would like. So for example, if I was doing a course or coaching program around health and fitness, I might do a lead magnet about a shopping list of what you need to get ready for the program. Could be a certain type of running shoes or certain type of workout gear. So on. So that would be, my lead magnet, PDF, if you will, in a pro tip about PDFs. You can also put those inside of your WordPress media library on your website. So when somebody signs up, you create the marketing automation. I use a naming convention when I construct things like. Tags or automations. In my CRMI call this stage lead magnet delivery. So if I was doing the shopping list for my workout program. I would make a tag or automation called lead magnet delivery shopping list. When somebody signed up through that form to get that lead magnet, it would. Send an email. Hey, thanks for signing up. Here’s a link to download your free shopping list. Please let me know if you have any questions about that. And then the link, I would actually just link them to the media file in my WordPress media library so they could download it directly from that email. So that’s how I would actually deliver the PDF. So that’s like a one step. Or two step marketing automation where somebody enters their name and email clicks, submit. That’s step one. Step two, they get an email with a link to download the resource. So that’s the, that’s like the basics of email marketing and how that works. There’s other type of lead magnets you can get fancy, like you can do free courses on your website if you’re using a learning management system like Lifter, LMS. That is also a lead, lead magnet. A free course or a free mini course, in my opinion, is one of the best lead magnets, particularly if someone is already somewhat interested and they’re willing to invest a little more time. Then a one to five page PDF and wants to get some free information from you to make sure you’re a good fit for their goals. So you can set all that up in LifterLMS also has. An email system built in so that when somebody enrolls in a certain course, lifter can send a certain email instantly, then again on day two, day four, day five, and so on. So you can create what’s known as a follow-up sequence. So the cool thing about marketing and marketing automation is that it allows you to time travel. This episode of LMScast is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my LifterLMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. And what I mean by that is. It’s important to think about your customer journey through time, so it’s not like everything is instant and everything happens all at once. It doesn’t. So one day they might sign up for your email newsletter and then a month later they might decide to get one of your lead magnets, and then a month later they may want to jump on a sales call with you about signing up for the membership. So when you think about these things through time, when you set up these marketing automations, they can, trigger sequential sequentially at the right time, not all at once. Some people call that drip campaigns or, time delay campaigns. So it’s all about thinking about your customer journey from, when they first hit your website. To where they might be in six months. There’s all kinds of opportunities to create automation to help communicate some of the communications that you would have to do manually if you don’t set up any marketing automation. And then, once somebody is on your email list, usually when people first get started with marketing. They will over complicate it and build all these different lists. But in my opinion, in my experience, I would recommend only having three email lists. So everything else you can do with what’s known as tags in custom fields, which we’ll talk about in a little bit. But the three email lists that I find most education companies need. Is a prospect email list. So this is somebody who’s never signed up for any of your free things or been a customer. They’re literally prospective possible future users or customers. Then I like to do a, what I call the users list or free user. So most education companies have some free training available so that free training is valuable. It’s they’re still a free user. They haven’t given you any money, and that’s okay. And maybe that’s all they’ll ever be. They won’t graduate to being a paying customer, and that’s okay, but they’re a little bit more invested than a prospect who maybe just signed up for your newsletter on a whim or downloaded a PDF report from you. So the free user is like the second email list that I like to have. And then the third email list are your customers. These are your paying customers. Maybe they spent a little bit of money, maybe they spent a lot of money but these are your. Your customers. And in each of these email lists, you can set up what’s known as a nurture sequence. So again, we’re gonna start thinking through time and the way I like to do it is when somebody joins, say the prospect email list if you get fancy, you can have I don’t know, like 30 emails that go out, spread out over an entire year. Or you could do less. You could only do let’s say three follow ups and if they don’t move from prospect to free user, you’re just done and you stop emailing them in an automatic automated fashion through your marketing automation, that is completely fine as well. I like to nurture the email list. So what that means is I like to add value and not just pitch products or pitch becoming a free user or pitch my most expensive thing. I like to just add value Hey, I see you signed up for my newsletter. You might also like this specific free article I published five years ago. That’s the most popular. Blog post on my website about X, Y, and Z. That could be an email. And then the next email I could just, go for a personal connection and say something like, Hey I helped this type of person achieve this type of result. Do me a favor and hit reply to this email with your biggest challenge, and I’ll see if I can just help you or point you to the right place on my website where we have some free content that will help with your particular challenge. And then I might send ’em another email. Hey, by the way, did you know we have a YouTube channel or a podcast or this other thing that you might also like? I’m not trying to sell them at all. And then on the next email, I might actually try to pitch something. It could be a recommendation for the free course on our website, or one of our sales presentations or one of our paid products. But when you’re nurturing somebody through email, it’s important not to just constantly hit them up with pitches to quote, buy my stuff. That’s the, that’s what you wanna avoid so that you’re actively developing a relationship where you’re giving way more value than what you’re asking from them, which is something you can do with marketing automation. And I do recommend spacing those out when somebody first joins your email list. In my experience, it’s Ty typically okay to send them with a little more frequency, like day one, day two, day four, day six. But if somebody’s, if you have a long nurture sequence I recommend spreading things out so that you can as their excitement about first joining, maybe they’re turning into more of a long-term sales cycle, as we call it. You’re not just like hitting ’em every single day with something new. So space, those out. And, free users, it’s the same thing. Nurture free users, add value. And then on, the fourth email, recommend one of your paid products. Then go back to adding value. Adding value, and so on. And then when it comes to customer nurture sequences. I like to do the same thing Hey, you’re a customer. I’m not just gonna instantly start pitching you my next expensive thing, or to buy more quantity of X, Y, and Z. I’m gonna add value and be like, Hey, did you know you could get help in this way? Reach out to us here if you’re stuck. Hey, did you know we have these five resources for customers only? I wanna make sure you saw that and so on. And then as you get through the. Add value. You get to the point where you can send a, an email about, Hey, you might wanna upgrade. We have this other thing over here. Or you might, I also like this other product or program course or membership that we have. So those are nurture sequences. And important thing about nurture sequences is you set these up to create an automated follow up. Create touch points where you’re primarily adding value and building a strong, healthy relationship with the people that have entrusted you with their email address. That’s what nurture sequences are. But around all that, you still have an email list and can do dedicated one-off broadcast email campaigns. So as an example, you may have nurture sequences running. You get to, let’s say the New Year’s holiday of the year and you’re doing a January 1st. It’s a brand new year sale. You can still email your list, either just the prospects, just the free people, just the customers or all of them together about your January 1st New Year sale. So just because you do marketing automation, you can also do. Broadcast emails on top of that. And the key to email is that email gets a bad rap. Oh, people are just gonna spam me and all this stuff. But if you’re genuinely care about your people and you’re genuinely adding value through your nurture sequences and your lead magnets, and when you do make an offer for something paid or to move a customer further along in the journey. It’s a good fit for them. It could really help them in their life. That’s a really good thing. So just keep that in mind. And then the other great place for marketing automation is what I call conversion tools. So this is where you move from like you’ve generated the lead, you’re nurturing the lead, and now there’s this step before somebody becomes a customer where they can, go through a sales process basically. And I learned a framework here I’d like to share with you, which is there’s really only three conversion tools. So the first one is a sales call, also known as a demo, a trial, or a proof of concept as it’s also known. And a webinar, which is a group sales presentation. Now, depending upon your price point, a different one of those conversion tools makes more sense for your offer. And I’ll just add that there is one more conversion tool, which is primary above all of this, which is the sales page for a course and membership. So even if you’re, you don’t have a conversion tool like the other three I mentioned previously. You probably have a course description or a membership or a coaching program description or a page. That sales page is a type of conversion tool. So that’s this. This is one area where you can create marketing automation. You can create marketing automation around scheduling sales calls where people you know say, yes, I’d like to have a 30 minute strategy call. You can go through a calendar booking link, and automatically. Set all that up there. There’ll be follow up emails out of the calendar system to capture those signups, and then send reminders about the future sales call. You can automate webinars as well, particularly if you do a prerecorded webinar. So if somebody signs up and then they get redirected to a page that has a presentation, from there, there can be a call to action. To purchase your program. And the other important piece of marketing automation is to do what’s called segmentation. So segmentation is where when people are signing up, you’re creating, you’re adding tags or what’s known as custom fields to segment your audience so that later. You can do marketing automation or broadcast emails based on the unique characteristics of this segment. So there’s different types of segments, like with Lifter, whether you’re using our MailChimp or ConvertKit integration, or you’re using WP Fusion to get to other tools like ActiveCampaign and HubSpot and Salesforce, you can segment based on which course they’re in. So if you ever just need to do marketing automation or nurture sequence based on course. Membership specifically, you can do that. The other thing you can do is use cases. So maybe you have a couple different types of customers. Maybe you work with individuals and you also work with companies. That would be another way that you can segment and have different kind of micro campaigns for your different use cases. And just a pro tip for you here, one of my favorite ways when you’re trying to increase sales, if you have multiple conversion tools, if somebody comes in through one of them, let’s say they sign up for a free course or they sign up for a sales call, or they watch your webinar and you have all these things available, if they sign up for one and they signed up for this one, but they haven’t seen these other two and they haven’t become a customer yet. You can, send future resources to send them to your other conversion tools, which will help increase your sales and give them more time to consider your product, learn about it, and buy. And of course, with our existing customers, we can create expansion revenue by creating marketing automation that lets people know about other opportunities, future opportunities that you release. How to upgrade and upsell through various offers. So that is a high level overview about how to do marketing automation for course creators. If you have any questions, comments, ideas, just let me know. I’m happy to hear what you’re doing for marketing automation. And if there’s any questions you have or you want me to go deeper on a specific topic, just let me know. Thank you. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Marketing Automation For Course Creators appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now Chris Badgett argues that in-person interactions are a powerful tool for internet businesses. Get away of your computer and spend time with your consumers where they already congregate. At Retain, a conference for membership-site owners (creators and instructors using technologies ranging from LifterLMS to Kajabi), he presents a new example from England. Instead of sponsoring or pitching, he just turned up to listen, which resulted in more in-depth discussions with devoted clients like Funk Roberts and KPC (Slick Business) as well as open discussions with potential clients who were fed up with inflexible, expensive systems. He emphasizes that WordCamps contribute similarly to the WordPress ecosystem by providing insights on users, partners, and products. In addition to attending, he suggests including an offline component into your service, such as quarterly meetups or an annual user summit, and then recording the conversations to utilize in your membership library or course. He uses SaaS Academy as an example: a membership that includes group coaching, a community, and three annual in-person events in major cities (he names San Diego and Atlanta), where the conversations in the hallways, at the table, and over meals foster momentum, ideas, and trust that are impossible to duplicate online. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. Today we’re joined by a special guest today. It’s just me, it’s Chris. I’m here for another solo episode, and today we’re gonna talk about when and how to get offline for your online business. This is a topic that is often very overlooked in terms of getting away from your computer. Going out into the world and meeting people, doing things, and how that can affect your online business. Now, the first and most important reason to get on offline is to actually go out and spend time around your customers or perspective customers. So me personally, I recently just got back from England. I was at a conference called Retain, which was put on for membership site owners, and these are mostly course creators and coaches who run membership sites. Some of the folks at the conference we’re running LifterLMS. Other WordPress tools as well as hosted platforms like Kajabi and so on. But I went there because I wanted to hang out with some of my customers and, possibly future potential customers. Though I wasn’t there like hard selling, I didn’t even sponsor the event or do any kinds of sales pitch or anything like that. I just wanted to go out and hang out with education entrepreneurs. Who are aspiring to or who already are creating and building an online business around a membership site. Now at this conference, retain, I was lucky enough to hang out with a couple of my customers. Just to give a few examples KPC who runs Slick Business, which is a marketing automation education platform powered by LifterLMS. It was awesome. I’ve known Kay for eight years, but I have never shook her hand or had a meal together, and we did both those things and it was wonderful and had many conversations. I also got to hang out with a customer named Funk Roberts, who does online fitness education for men over 40. I’ve known funk for a long time. It was awesome to finally shake his hand, have some conversation, and just be together in person. I also met like a lot of other people who, are maybe frustrated with other learning platforms and they want something more powerful, customizable, affordable, and all that. So of course the conversation drifted towards LifterLMS, but this all comes from just getting outside of the building. And hanging out with your customers or prospective CU customers. And a great way to do that is at a conference that is on a topic that is either exactly about what your topic is or very related. Another example of that just using LifterLMS is an example, is there’s these conferences called Word Camps, which is where WordPress agencies, product people, and users go. To spend time together to learn to hang out and just enjoy each other’s company and have conversations. I’ve been to many Word camps over the years and I’ve met a lot of customers there. I’ve met a lot of industry partners and I’ve met many prospective customers who were, perhaps looking for an LMS. So regardless of what you do, whether it’s courses coaching. You build sites for clients, I can’t stress the value of getting out from behind your computer and going out into the world and, running in to humans, pressing the flesh as they say, like shaking hands, meeting people talking, breaking bread, sharing conversations. Also getting out from behind the computer. One of the coolest things you can do is actually make your offer or your product, your online education opportunity to have an offline component. So that could be a live event, maybe once a year, three times a year, something like that, four times a year. I was in a coaching program called SaaS Academy for software entrepreneurs, and it was a membership site. There was group coaching there was a bunch of resources in the membership site and so on. There was an online community, but there was also three live events at a major city every year. So I would travel to places like San Diego or Atlanta and go hang out at the. The in-person, get together and there would be, several hundred people there who were just like me building the same kind of business. There would be presentations, which would also be recorded and put into the membership site, but there were also all these great conversations that all the tables, going out to meals with your. Fellow people doing the same thing, and that was just a phenomenal experience. There’s a saying in membership sites or information products or online, learning programs that people come for the content, but they stay for the community. So my experience with SaaS Academy was the content was amazing, it was phenomenal. But the relationships I developed, the partnerships, the co-promotion, the people who were running a different type of business but needed LMS, so they thought of lifter LMS. It was a very powerful formative experience. If you can and dream a little big, you can bring people from off their home computer and their phones and get them. Part of your offer is actually an in-person community. Now there’s a concept called a popup event, so this is really cool. So for example, if you sell a membership site and it’s mostly full of passive online learning content like courses. You want to create some recurring value, even if you just run one event per year that creates recurring value. And if your community is small, it could start as small as just like an Airbnb with five bedrooms and five people come. And then when more people sign up to your program, you need to expand and do maybe a block of hotel rooms, hotel has a conference room, maybe it expands more and you get a bigger and bigger venue. That is a really powerful way to think about making your membership or your courses have recurring revenue by offering this recurring annual in-person get together. And the cool thing about online education companies and platforms. I’ll just say entrepreneurship in general is there is a lot of isolation, loneliness, feeling misunderstood. Feeling like you haven’t found your tribe, if you will. You may be doing this like crazy online thing and nobody in your home community or family even has any idea what you’re really doing. They don’t understand it. They’re not that interested in it. But then you get out into the world at one of these events. And you meet people just like you that are doing the similar thing and they’re like, oh my gosh, I feel so isolated. So nice to finally meet you and all that. That is a great experience. The other thing you can do to get offline is to go to an industry event. So for me, I’m in the WordPress space, so I go to Word camps. These are agencies and product people. People there aren’t necessarily looking for what I offer because they’re they have their own products. But some of the agencies may be looking to develop LMS sites for clients and so on. But I act, I’ve actually been to some smaller events, smaller industry events, like independent events. One of the favorite ones I went to that was really, in many ways life changing for me is called Cabo Press. So this was in Cabo, Mexico, and I remember when I first saw a blog post about it, it was an event put on by somebody named Chris Lima, who’s a awesome guy, and it was for WordPress product people and agency entrepreneurs. You had to apply and go. And at the time when I did it, the sales page that I read for the event was just really speaking to me and I’m like, we gotta do this. We can’t really afford it. Our business is really new. I went and I hung out with other WordPress product people and agencies and it was so good. I actually went, I think seven times. So I went year after year for I think seven years. And there are so many relationships that I developed from that conference. And it was a small pop-up conference at a hotel. It was usually somewhere around 30 people, maybe 35, maybe 40 at its biggest. But I met all these amazing entrepreneurs trying to do similar stuff to me. I made affiliate partnerships. I created co-marketing opportunities. I’ve got agencies excited about Lifter, LMS, I got a lot of guests for my podcast. I did so many things and some of the most mind blowing part of the whole thing with the Cabo Press. My current business partners I met at Cabo Press the current lead developer at Lifter LMS, I’m met at Cabo Press and these are very important relationships. In my business journey. But that all came from me getting out from behind my computer, going out into the world, and being somewhat uncomfortable, getting outta my shell and just going to this event where I don’t know anybody and start forming these relationships. And what’s cool about it is when you find an online event like that, that you really love and resonate with. If you keep going back to the same event over time, it starts feeling more comfortable. People who are gonna be there, it gets easier. Ideally, your business is growing over time and you can share and help other people, not as far along in the journey and so on. And those kind of industry events are very powerful for. Furthering your business, your career. But it’s all about relationships. And yes, you can form relationships online, in Facebook groups, over social media, by email and so on, but there is a place. To get out from behind the computer and actually go talk to people, strangers, and it’s a really powerful thing. Another great thing, and I’m a huge fan of this in terms of getting out from behind your computer, is to do a concept that I call masterminding. So this is not a new idea. This came from a guy who named Napoleon Hill, who wrote a book called Think and Grow Rich. It’s a very old book. I highly recommend you read it because it’s very powerful in some of the core ideas, even though it’s old and dated our really true, and there’s this concept. Of the Mastermind and the mastermind concept is essentially that when some people that are on a similar journey kind of put their heads together and share their challenges, give value, ask for help. When these mines come together, the sum of the mines is greater than. The individuals, or even if you were to add up the potential of the individuals individually, the mastermind of this group of minds is exponentially powerful. I’ve been a big masterminder. I’m in three or four masterminds right now, which is a lot, and I’ve been that way for a long time. I’ve gone to popup masterminds like the Cabo Press event. And I went to one in Canada once with some entrepreneurs in the online education space, and I just get so much value out of that. Now, there are online masterminds, right? You can create masterminds within your course or your membership site if you like, and pair people together to create their own masterminds. You can also form them informally. And that’s what I’ve done for the most part. I’ve gone to some official mastermind events, but the best masterminds I’ve been a part of have formed organically where, a group of people decides to meet on a regular basis, like monthly, as an example, and just share, ask for help, give value, potentially have a. Asynchronous slack community or other way, other ways to connect asynchronous asynchronously. But masterminds are very powerful. And what’s really cool is I’m in a mastermind of people who run a similar business to mine and occasionally, usually a couple times a year. Some or all of us will meet up in person around some other conference somewhere in the world. It’s been a far as far away for me as like Taiwan as an example, or Greece or in the United States. And we spend a lot of time masterminding online in formats like Zoom or, asynchronous, asynchronously through. Email or Slack, something like that. But actually getting together in person is so fantastic and you really build, not just lifelong friendships, but also business partnerships and relationships. It’s super powerful and it’s hard to do that if you don’t get out from behind your computer. You can have a virtual mastermind, but, and those are great and I’m in many of those. Almost every mastermind I’ve ever been in there has been at some point, some in-person component to that. The other great thing to do to get out from behind your computer is to actually sponsor an event. So this is an event that your customers would be at and some sponsorships are not that expensive. Now you can just attend the event and meet people. And I like doing that personally. The last event I went to, I did not sponsor. If they run it again, I would like to sponsor it. But if you do sponsor, you get your logo all over the place. You potentially have a table where you can give away swag items, like t-shirts or. Notebooks or some kind of branded merchandise, and this is a great way to just get your brand out there. So getting out from behind your computer and sponsoring event can, put you in front of customers. Now the t-shirts and the branded swag are great. But the real value of a sponsorship is all the conversations that you have while you’re at the event. And the cool thing about sponsoring an event, a lot of the times you will get a table where you can sit. Like when I sponsor a Word camp as an example, I’ll have a computer monitor up with a looping video showing lifter LMS. This episode of LMScast is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my LifterLMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. Ideally, there’s me and some team members there, and we’ll be at a table. And people are just shuffling through the sponsor area constantly throughout the event. And just stopping is friendly. We have conversations. Sometimes existing customers will walk up, people who are interested, people who are just curious, and you never know where all those conversations will go. So there’s just a lot of opportunity. Sponsorships and it’s something that I recommend you try at some point. Now, the funny thing is that people will often ask, what is the ROI or return on investment for a sponsorship? Most of the time when I’ve done sponsorships. You can’t track it. You can’t track the ROI. You could give out a business card that has a coupon code on it or a special promotion link or something like that, but it’s more of a long game strategy. It’s humans talking to humans. Over time, relationships evolve. They may not use your coupon code. You may not be aware that someone said Hey, I met this person. At an event and refer your product to a friend or something like that. So I just encourage you, if you do go down the sponsorship route, don’t get all wrapped up in tracking the return on investment. But what I will guarantee you is if you pick a good event to sponsor that has a lot of industry partners, and more importantly your customers and ideal customers, it will pay off. And if you do it again another year and another year. It really spreads your brand around, and you’d be surprised how many events are out there looking for sponsorship and sometimes these sponsorships are really not that expensive. Now, another benefit of getting out from behind your computer is what I call the value of travel. So I don’t know if you’re anything like me. But when I travel, when I get outside of my daily, weekly kind of normal routine and I’m flying on planes or driving in my car somewhere, I normally don’t go and, meeting a bunch of strangers, it shakes up my brain and gets me outta my patterns and I will make new connections, new ideas. I might be a little jet lagged or on a plane without wifi, just thinking. And it’s like those shower thoughts you have where an inside will just drop to you because when you’re just sitting behind a computer doing the same thing you do every day, your brain goes on autopilot and just start cycling the routine. But traveling can really open up your mind. Your brain has to be more aware ’cause you’re in a novel environment and you’re just not on autopilot. ’cause this is all different. You’re trying to figure out where to go and logistics and talking to strangers and it just shakes up your brain and that just stimulates, in my experience, a lot of creativity. The other great thing about traveling is that people. Will ask you if you’re meeting a lot of strangers Hey, what do you do? Or, what’s your business? It forces you to get really good at your elevator pitch. And for me, I like to do for an elevator pitch is I help X achieve Y without Z. I help course creators create, launch and scale online learning platforms without spending a ton of time or money. That’s an example, really short elevator pitch for me. And then what happens when you give your elevator pitch is one of two things. One route or fork in the road is that’s awesome. And then you ask them what they do and they do something completely different. And it’s cool you made a nice friend or had a great conversation, but you guys are on different paths. But sometimes when you give your elevator pitch, someone will double click on that and say, tell me more. What is that exactly? Or How do you do that? And then you give a more expanded elevator pitch and maybe it stops there or there’s another fork in the road like. You know what? I’ve always wanted to create an online course coaching program or membership site. Tell me more, like how could I get started and stuff like that. So there’s all these opportunities where, you never know where it’s gonna go, and it’s fine if somebody’s cool. I do courses around organic gardening and another person’s oh I sell real estate. Cool. You met somebody, it’s awesome. Great connection. They might know somebody who wants to get into gardening, but then you might also meet your perfect prospective customer who’s oh, that’s awesome. I’m awesome into gardening, or I’m into music and I want to figure out how to take my hobby and turn it into an online business, and so on. And it can just evolve. So talking to people in person forces you to get good at describing what it is you do, and you’d be surprised how challenged a lot of people are at clearly articulating what they do. And particularly talking to strangers is a great way to refine that craft and also get good at. Taking it a step further if somebody shows interest without being a pushy salesperson or anything like that. But those conversations are fantastic. The other great thing about getting out from behind your computer is it’s an opportunity to meet future team members in your organization. So I’ve met people who have become developers in my country, at my company. I’ve met. People that became business partners, investors in my company, you never know who you’re gonna meet when you get out into the world, and it’s has a different feel than when you’re just meeting people online or discussing something on a LinkedIn direct message as an example, or over email when you actually shake hands and build relationships. Even the people you meet may not be the best employee for you, but you might also meet somebody who’s not a great employee for you, but they could know somebody who would be a perfect fit. So a great example of this is if you’re looking for a virtual assistant and you meet somebody. They’re like, they do something completely different, but they’re like, you know what? I hear you’re looking for a virtual assistant. My wife recently retired or is in a job transition, wants to work from home. She has this background in, X, Y, and z. I think she could be a perfect fit for what you’re looking for. Would you like me to connect you? That kind of thing. There, there’s just a lot of magic and serendipity that happens through those offline connections. And the other great thing too, that this is more out of the box thinking by getting out from behind your computer and going to a conference or an industry event that is not directly related to your main business. You’re still gonna learn things. So one of my favorite cheat codes in business is to learn something from a totally different industry and translate that over to mine. So for example, if you can probably relate, you probably are a lot like me. If you go to a restaurant and you’re an entrepreneur and great service or like a experiences that’s designed for some fun experience. And you see the gears behind the scenes of oh, this person’s doing this. They structured this. This is the user experience. Then you can take what you’ve learned and apply that to your business, even from a completely different industry. And that’s just another kind of pro tip. Around getting out from behind your computer and getting out into the world and just learning. Maybe you have some hobby, it could be investing or gardening or robotics, anything, and go out into those industries and see what you could bring back to your own. A lot of education entrepreneurs and technology professionals and website builders can get a little bit isolated, so I just wanted to encourage you to get out from behind your computer because some of the best things I’ve ever done in terms of attracting talent, recruiting great customers, deepening the relationships with existing customers or team members or industry partners. All of that happened from getting out from behind my computer. So even if you’re an introvert just like me and you spend a lot of time solo, you like your privacy, make it a little fun, comfortable, and get uncomfortable. Go out into the world and meet a lot of strangers, and I guarantee you it will pay off. And especially if you do that. Over an extended period of time, and I don’t mean like a lot, like maybe twice a year for five years, you’ll be really impressed at the results you get from that. It’s not just about clicks or online business, it’s also about bricks. So clicks and bricks. Bricks, clicks is the online world. Buildings in the real world are made of bricks. People are inside. Online communities and have email and stuff like that’s all clicks, but people are also out in the world inside brick buildings and other types of buildings or outside. So it’s clicks and bricks, not just clicks. That’s it for this episode of LMScast. I love to hear the value you’ve gotten. From getting out into the world, and I hope one day to meet you in person. If you’re listening to this podcast, take care. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post When to Get Offline For Online Business appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett highlights how each model works for various kinds of entrepreneurs as he compares the benefits and drawbacks of membership sites against stand-alone online courses. With a one-time payment structure, a standalone course usually provides students with access to a specific collection of learning resources, such as videos, tests, PDFs, and occasionally certifications. Recurring revenue is not automatically supported by it, despite the fact that it is simpler to build and maintain great for focused entrepreneurs that wish to improve one major service. To maintain revenue, creators could have to rely on marketing campaigns, relaunches, or extras like community access and mentoring. A membership site, on the other hand, is more adaptable and sophisticated, frequently combining many courses with recurring advantages like private blogs, resource libraries, group coaching, or community access. Although memberships enable ongoing value creation and support recurrent revenue, they also come with a higher workload and more regular content delivery requirements. Serial entrepreneurs that thrive on creating and overseeing a variety of offers would be more suited to this strategy. According to Harris, whether you want the concentration and simplicity of a single course or the scalability and continuous engagement of a membership site, success relies on your personal style and company strategy. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. Episode Transcript: Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett, and this is another solo episode, and today we’re gonna be discussing the pros and cons, the differences between membership sites and standalone courses. There’s a very important decision you need to make either in the beginning or as you’re getting started and figuring out how you’re gonna build an online education company. As to which path you’re gonna take. Either I’m gonna build a membership site or a standalone course, or multiple standalone courses or potentially a hybrid model that is, I offer standalone courses and I offer memberships. So first, let’s talk about the difference and come to agreement on terms. So what is a standalone online course? A standalone online course typically has a one-time payment. The student gets access to the training. Could be a series of videos, other resources, PDFs, maybe quizzes and assignments, perhaps get a certificate. Now it is possible to add recurring revenue to a standalone. Online course in a couple of ways. One simple way, which isn’t real recurring revenue, is to actually add a payment plan. So if it’s expensive, let’s say it’s a $1,000 online course, you could have a price tag of $1,000 or four payments monthly for $250. That’s not necessarily a recurring revenue situation. It’s more of a payment plan. But you can add a recurring revenue to standalone online course by simply offering things like group coaching every month, or an online community so that they can cancel any time. Say your goal is to still make $1,000 and you charge a hundred dollars a month for access to the course and the coaching and the community. Most people who join your program end up staying for approximately 10 months. So there you get your $1,000 as an example, through mostly really just a standalone online course that has that added benefit. Now, what is a membership site? Memberships, the word is often used in many different ways, so I want to tell you how I think about it particularly at lifter LMS. And how membership sites can be different from online courses. So if you’re building an education company, you’re probably gonna have a courses aspect to your site. But in a membership site, there’s probably gonna be a lot of other things going on outside of courses that people get access to by enrolling in your membership. So one way to think about a membership site. Is that it can grant access to an online course or multiple online courses or future online courses you have not even created yet, but plan on creating over time. It can also include aspects, access to other parts of your website. Like private content that exists outside of courses. A simple example might be. A members only blog or newsletter or resource library of digital downloads. It could be parts of pages or expanded content beyond what’s freely available on your site. With a tool like Lifter, LMS, you can control access. Outside of courses via memberships to other parts or pieces of your website or other benefits like access to a community calendar, which is, has access to coaching calls or community events and that sort of thing. So the most simple way to think about it is that a standalone course is just one course. Usually those are sold for one-time payment. And a membership site is much more complex. It can be a bundle of courses and other benefits or access to other parts of your website. Now, a tool, a learning management system like Lifter, LMS is infinitely flexible. So however you want to do it, whether it’s a simple standalone online course. Or a multi instructor online school with fancy membership benefits as well. Both are possible with lifter LMS. So just to get into the pros and cons, the benefits and drawbacks of either option, standalone online courses, if it’s particularly just access to the content, maybe a certification. There’s really no way to get. Recurring revenue because it’s pretty straightforward. There’s a limited scope course. People go in, they take the course, they learn the knowledge, they create skills, maybe get a certificate, and they’re done. That’s not really a recurring revenue situation. One of the benefits of a standalone online course is that it is a lot less work for the course creator. So once you’ve created it. You’re done and it’s up there. But a drawback to that is you may have to do continuous marketing to get new people over and enrolling in your course. Now, there’s a lot of great education entrepreneurs out there that all they have ever done is they have one standalone online course and every year or every six months, they make it better and better. They do a launch or a marketing launch of their course multiple times a year, and that’s the launch model and there’s nothing wrong with that. So one thing I’d like to highlight here is some of this depends on your personality. So in all my time as an entrepreneur and working with other entrepreneurs. I found that there’s a spectrum, two ends to the spectrum of different kinds of entrepreneurs. One I call the focused entrepreneur and the other I call the serial entrepreneur. So a serial entrepreneur creates like many different businesses and many pro products or, they’re constantly creating and ideating and doing a lot of new things. Now, there’s. Pros and cons to being a focused entrepreneur like I have my one thing, I’m actually more of a focused entrepreneur. I am super focused on lifter LMS. I’ve been doing it for over a decade. I am a focused entrepreneur, but a serial entrepreneur, would. Create many different software products and many other businesses and just have this portfolio, if you will, of businesses and neither is better or worse. And a pro tip for you right here is it if a focused entrepreneur teams up with a serial entrepreneur and they have good chemistry and they can work together is really a beautiful thing. They’re just the different ways they see the world and operate when they’re in partnership. It is super powerful and unstoppable in that way. So that’s just a pro tip. I know there’s a lot of like husband wife teams as an example, creating education companies or business partners and if one, if they’re different in that focused versus serial aspect. They can be really powerful. But a standalone online course is more of a focused approach. But if you’re gonna be like, okay, I really want a membership site and I have ideas for 20 different courses and the coaching program and online community. You can do. You’re more of a serial entrepreneur in that way, and that is very cool. But it is also a lot more work. Focus is more scattered, in my opinion. Success is less likely because focus is spread out. So it really depends on your approach and who you are and what your personality is. The big benefit of a membership site is that you’re going to get multiple options for recurring revenue. You can keep adding new courses, you can add other resources to a digital library. You can keep creating a private blog, private newsletter. Keep delivering online coaching, keep developing your community. This episode of LMScast is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells in guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. So the trade off between a standalone online course and a membership is the membership is a lot more work. The demand on you to create content and the surface area that you have to manage is a lot more with a membership site. Now I’m actually a big fan of what I call the hybrid model. So the most simple version of a hybrid model is to do a standalone online course and then just add a coaching or community aspect to it. That allows you to get recurring revenue while also having a focus on one main course and a lifter LMS. You don’t even have to create a membership to do that. You can use. What we call access plans to, let’s say you have one plan that’s like just the course for $500 or another access plan in the pricing table that says you get the course plus these ongoing coaching and community benefits, and this plan costs a hundred dollars a month. So you can literally offer both options. You’re opening up the world to recurring revenue. So that’s a very simple example of how to create a hybrid model. One of the ways to also do hybrid is to have a standalone course, but then also a membership that has way more stuff in it. So if you think about your Buyer’ss journey, let’s say. Earlier in the journey, you have a $500 starter course that helps people get started and get going. That’s your standalone course, and it’s like your 1 0 1, like you have to start here. You have to start with the course to get oriented and really become a perfect fit for the membership, the 2 0 1, which is available later, so the. The membership, then, let’s say it includes three advanced level courses. Also additional benefits like community or coaching as well. So in that way, if you look at your ideal learners journey, you’re asking them to, Hey, start here in the jv. Or the junior varsity, the level one, the freshmen using traditional university language. And then if when you’re ready, you can jump into the bigger membership. Which is more exp, more expensive, more benefits and recurring there’s a recurring cost to that. So that’s a hybrid model. I’m also a big fan of free courses, so like free standalone courses. So maybe even before they’re ready to be a freshman or jv, you have a free course to get people ready to even be ready for the standalone course. So free course, then standalone paid course, and then membership. And when it comes to offers, I like to only offer. Three, a maximum of three choices like that. ’cause once you get more complicated than that, you start to really confuse buyers. And there’s a saying that the confused mind doesn’t buy, which is very true. So think about that and how you and how you construct your model. And just some examples of this, like KPC, who does. Slick Business is the name of her platform and she does active campaign and marketing automation training. And she’s very membership site focused. So I’m just pulling up KPCs website. You can find that at slick business.co. And if I go to her active campaign academy. There’s basically two options. There is the Essential Academy, which is $97 per month at the time of this recording, and there’s the Advanced Academy. That’s $187 per month. And within this, she has training, she has office hours. She has community, she has, the entry level course for the first option, the Essential Academy. And then she has extra courses with, more information for the advanced people in the advanced Academy plan. And this is Kay is doing a classic. Membership site and that’s awesome. But Kay is going to have to deliver ongoing, office hours, what she does weekly, and continue to support her other member bonuses. So that’s like a classic membership site. Kay’s done very well with her platform and she’s such a great. Example of building a membership site. But then if you think about a standalone course creator, we have people that have, let’s say they were a Udemy instructor and they had a course on this topic. It sold for 50 bucks on you, Demi, and they want more ownership, power, control, and customizability over their course. I’m thinking of someone like Frank Kane who has made over $2 million in revenue with over 600,000 students in his standalone courses. So he does several standalone courses and Frank does a lot of education in the tech sector helping, engineers level up on certain things like how AWS, Amazon’s. Platform works and so on. So that’s just a, another great example of a standalone membership, or sorry, a standalone online course, and Frank is a serial creator, so technology is constantly changing. So he’s creating new courses that help with a particular tech skill to help people get good jobs or do their job well. That sort of thing. So that’s a example of a standalone online course and we talked about free courses. So one of lifter, LMS’s most popular course is a free course called the Official Quick Start Course for the lifter LMS community. That’s awesome. And that is free. It’s only about an hour of content and we’ve had something like 40,000 people enroll in that. So it’s a very strong, like lead magnet and gets people ready for the software. Which technically is a membership, by the way, an annual recurring subscription unless you get a lifetime license. And the course, the free course gets people really ready for the ongoing. Membership to the software that learn how to use the tool, make sure it’s a good fit for them, and then it’ll also help them get started once they become a customer, to learn the essential 5% of the software so that they can launch their education company as quickly as possible. So that’s an example of a standalone free course. So it’s really up to you which path. You choose to move forward with in terms of standalone courses versus memberships and you can just have a standalone course with no coaching and no community. One-time payment, lifetime access. These, this is the quote, least amount of work. It’s still really hard to create like a great standalone online course, but when you commit to a membership site, you are committing to a much bigger ongoing commitment that’s gonna have a lot of demand on your time and your the need for you to create content. So if you’re gonna create. Recurring revenue, you have to create recurring value, which means you’re either going to have to continually be creating new courses and other content to drop into the membership or have ongoing benefits like office hours, group or private coaching, or a helpful, supportive online community. So different ways to think about that. We also have a lot of continuing education or professional development creators using lifter LMS. So this is also a great niche. This is more like a standalone course approach. So if someone needs to get, let’s say, two hours of continuing EDU education credits to keep their license in the medical system or. Some business niche or legal or real estate or whatever it is, they need to get their continuing education credits by taking standalone courses. Now you can introduce a membership using left or LMS where you get a bundle of courses so you can get all, say, 20 hours for the next year or two years for to keep your license and so on. So there’s a lot of people doing. Hybrid approaches. But the main point is if you’re gonna do recurring revenue, you have to do, find a way to create recurring value. So I’d love to hear from you any questions or comments around the decision to do standalone courses or the membership site model. I would encourage you just to do some soul searching. Really decide if you are a focused entrepreneur or a serial entrepreneur. Serial creatorand again, neither one of these is better than the other is super powerful. If you know within the same education company you can combine. Both the focus and the the serial creator aspect. It’s a dynamic duo, if you will. So that’s it for this episode of LMS Cast. I hope you’d enjoyed that. I wish you all the best with your standalone online courses and or membership site or hybrid model. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Membership vs Standalone Courses Which One Wins appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now Chris Badgett stresses in this LMScast solo episode that producing a successful online course involves more than simply developing a website, marketing strategies, or technology; it also involves effectively instructing the students. Many instructors suffer from the “expert’s curse,” in which they possess important knowledge but find it difficult to communicate it effectively, leaving students feeling overloaded or disinterested. Chris explains the importance of using a teaching framework, a repeatable structure for each lesson that keeps students engaged, makes the content easier to create, and ensures clarity. He describes how he utilizes mind mapping to generate ideas at the beginning of each lecture and then arranges them into an organized spreadsheet template. Course designers may provide lessons that are both powerful and simple to understand by shifting from abstract concepts to tangible examples and adjusting the framework to the requirements of students. In the end, Chris emphasizes that although course designers have many responsibilities, honing teaching abilities through a framework is frequently the most important and disregarded phase in creating revolutionary online programs. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. Episode Transcript You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m Chris, and today I’m joined by a special guest, and that’s me. This is another solo episode, and in this episode I’m gonna go over how to become a teacher without going to teaching school so that you can make a fortune, make impact in the world, and create freedom in your life. So there’s a lot of talk about marketing online courses, selling online courses, the technology like Lifter, LMS, which people build use to build online courses. But in this episode, we’re actually gonna talk about actually teaching in the product, like delivering the online course and how to do that. I’m gonna give you one of the biggest unlocks. To help you remove what’s known as the experts curse. See, the challenge that happens in our industry is that a lot of aspiring education entrepreneurs, course creators and coaches, they get all excited. They buy some software, they look for marketing tactics and strategies. They started thinking about ads. They start building the website and, maybe starting some content marketing and putting all the LMS pieces together. But at the end of the day, let’s not forget about the actual product, the online course, which is comprised of lessons. So in this podcast episode, we’re gonna dive into how to remove all the chaos and craziness. That comes with taking your expertise out of your head and actually packaging it and delivering that in an online course. So the solution here is to actually have a teaching framework and I figured this out on my own and watching other people teach and learning frameworks for business. But in this episode. I want to really zero in on the lesson content, particularly on video content. Though this is bigger than just video content. It can expand to things like text and on the lesson and quizzes and assignments and things like that. But for the most part, I’m gonna be talking about the teaching framework that you can use to make lesson videos. And not just to make them, but to make them high quality and effective. So the magic trick here is to go from the abstract to the concrete. And what I mean by that is as a subject matter expert you have all this experience and ideas and theories and tactics and things you want to talk about, stories you want to tell. Examples, you want to give processes to lay out systems and structures and all these things to teach, but it’s so overwhelming if you’ve never learned how to actually be a teacher or a coach. So part of our whole thing at Lifter LMS is that you have to wear five hats simultaneously, either within yourself or at a team. We call this the five hats problem of being an education entrepreneur. You have to be a subject matter expert. You have to be a teacher, which is what we’re gonna talk about today. You have to be a technologist. You have to be an entrepreneur, and you have to be a community builder. And the reality is, a lot of those skills and tactics are learnable, but teaching is also learnable, but often overlooked when it shouldn’t be. What happens if you don’t develop a teaching framework? You’re gonna end up just creating some giant course. You’re gonna ramble. Your students are not going to stay engaged or complete the lesson content. They’re gonna get confused, they’re gonna have lots of questions. So let’s like slow down and back up and talk about it at a high level first, like what is a teaching framework? It’s basically a structure or an outline of how you deliver your lessons. And this can work if you’re teaching business concepts or you’re teaching health and fitness workouts, or you’re teaching parenting strategies and advice or challenges in that niche anywhere. You can develop your own teaching framework. And the cool thing is it’s not one size fits all. What you need to do is create your custom teaching framework that works for you and your niche, your market, your personality, your ideal learner style, and what happens when you have a systematic way that you teach each individual lesson. Is that it makes your students relax ’cause they know how to, how it rolls with you, what class is gonna be like, what the lesson is gonna be like. They’re gonna know your flow, if you will. It also makes your life a million times easier when it comes to creating content. ’cause this is where you marry your expertise, subject matter expert brain with a system that’s designed to pull that out of you in a structured way that’s easy to make. And in a way that your students will love. So at the highest level, the way I think about it is as a subject matter expert, you know you have your ideal learner, you have their challenge or their problem, and at the end you have the solution, the learning objective, the transformation that your course promises to create if they go through your course. And we’re not gonna get into the high levels of curriculum design. That could be a whole other topic. If you want to hear about that, let me know. What we’re gonna talk about is, let’s assume you have a course outline and you figured out who your ideal learner is, and you have the sections and lesson names for your course, but you’re staring at your computer. Now it’s time to create the lesson content. And this is where a lot of people get stuck. I’ve seen it a million times, and what’s missing in this scenario is a teaching framework. So enough of the buildup I’m gonna go into describing what it looks like and how it works, and how I make one and use one. So first thing I do is I’m a, visual thinker. So I’ll just start mind mapping and drawing bubbles. If I have a lesson about a certain topic, I’ll start just throwing bubbles and making connections and just getting it outta my brain and getting it on paper in a very disorganized fashion. But the beauty happens when you go from brainstorm to. Spreadsheet and I’ll explain what I mean in a second. And so I get my brainstorm going oh, stories, I want to tell an example, maybe a worksheet idea. Maybe some challenges people have when they’re in this part of the training and things like that. And I just get it all out there on paper. Even just short words that will jog my brain so I can quickly access that part. Of what I was gonna talk about. But the teaching framework is essentially an outline for the lesson. It’s a template that you can use over and over again in every lesson. So that you’re efficient and effective. I personally like to do teaching frameworks in a spreadsheet. So I create a te a template for how I deliver my lessons, which we’re gonna talk about in a second. Then every time I do a new lesson, I just add a tab to the spreadsheet. I copy the template and I do lesson one content. Then I do lesson two content. But before we get into that, what is the actual lesson template? And this is where the magic happens. Like before we get into actual creating content we need to come up with a teaching framework that works for you and your market. I’m just looking at one I have over here. I’m recently actually as of this recording, tomorrow I’m recording the last lesson in a course I’ve been teaching live called the Perfect Offer Playbook, and I’m on lesson 11, which is the final lesson. And every single lesson I have the same teaching framework, but the content is very different. So the teaching framework, it just starts with welcome. So this is where I just say hi. And welcome everybody in. I’m doing it live. But if I was doing a prerecorded course. I would do the same thing. Hey, welcome to this lesson on X, Y, and Z. We’re gonna get into this subject matter today. Remind people of the support systems. If you have questions, feel free to reach out in this way and so on. Then I start with the problem. I get there pretty quick and some people call it a hook. The problem statement is really about getting people interested and also identifying what kind of mini problem within the greater problem of the course are we gonna solve today. And the hook part of it is making it interesting. So I even did it in the title of this podcast episode. How to become a teacher without going to teaching school. That’s an example of a hook. And the problem we’re solving today is learning how to teach without being a teacher so that you and your students aren’t overwhelmed and everybody’s effective and having fun. The next thing I like to do is drop into a story. Part of teaching is teaching through stories, examples, case studies. If you look at a famous business school like Harvard Business School, most of the coursework is looking at case studies of examples of things that happened before in big businesses and small businesses and things like that. So story teaching through example is very powerful. So for you, it could look like this. Like I had this client named Jane. Jane had all this back pain from X, Y, and z. We implemented this protocol. Here’s what happened in week one, week two, week three, so on. I’m like providing an example that’s demonstrating the problem and outcome and the process. The next thing I like to do is go into the challenge. So here’s the, and then I do three challenges and three promises. This is a challenge I know because I’ve recently overcome it, which was two decades of chronic back pain. So the challenge with chronic back pain is that challenge number one you’ve tried all these things like chiropractor, massage, going to the doctor, stretching, yoga, and nothing provides a permanent solution. Challenge number two. The first thing you think about when you wake up is My back hurts. And that’s just really sad. And then the third challenge is, you’re willing to do the work, but you just need to know what actually works. So I’ve created my challenge problem statements, and now what I’m gonna do in my lesson is I’m gonna go into the promise and basically do the inverse of things. I’m gonna show you what actually works to heal chronic back pain permanently and forever. I’m gonna show you how to wake up to get to a place where you wake up and the first thought in your brain is in your conscious mind is not my back hurts. And promise number three is I’m gonna show you what actually works. And it’s even a lot. Think you is, it is even a lot easier than you think. It will be easier to commit to. You are gonna have to do ongoing work, but I promise you it will work. So as a recap, where we are right now in our lesson about chronic back pain relief is we did a welcome statement, a high level problem statement, a story three challenges, and then three promises in copywriting or marketing. The challenge part is called agitating the pain in instructional design. This is called enrollment. We are enrolling people and getting them motivated. We want them to see, understand, feel the pain. But also see, feel, and understand the solution and the promise that we’re driving towards. Then the next part is the main meat of the lesson. Which I call the learning or key principles. Now this is gonna vary wildly about what you call these things, depending upon what niche you’re in, but the key principles, and I like to do five and props to Dan Martel. I learned this trick from Dan. He called them hot principles, and I like Dan’s approach to this. He essentially said that. The key principles are all about teaching people how to think, not necessarily exactly telling them what to do. However. I’m a big fan of actually telling people exactly what to do as well, which we’ll get to in a little bit. But part of learning is just helping people, change how they think about something or, discover a strategy or have a mindset shift. So the key principles I like to do five, and then within each principle I get into like subpoints to reinforce it. And I’m not gonna do five principles about back pain relief. But we’ll do one here. So one key principle is that. You have to strengthen your back. So it’s not about stretching, it’s not about massage. It’s not about cracking and popping. And chiropractic, you’ve been like your body. Connections are all messed up and you’ve been like favoring this back problem and you’ve really got a weak core. So we need to address the strength in your back and your core. And I would get into a bunch of sub principles about that and teaching about how strength and flexibility are different and how to build up strength slowly and so on. And then my next principle might be around recovery. After exercise. My next principle might be about multi strength, endurance and flexibility and something else like multimodal exercise. My next one. Might be about dealing with setbacks and flare ups. So that would be like my fourth or fifth principle, and you can see how I’m getting my body of work together around how I cured for myself chronic back pain, and that those are, that creates my learning principles. This is the main meat of teaching people how to think. And then I like to do something called expert story positioning, which is. Where you share your personal story. Like in the beginning, I like to share like a customer story or a client story like Jane and her chronic back pain, but then in the expert story positioning, I’m gonna go into a two to five minute story about my own journey with chronic back pain since I was 19 years old till finally solving it at age 46. And I’m gonna tell that story, and the reason I’m doing that is, one, to provide another example, but two, I’m also just showing that I know what I’m talking about. This is part of my personal brand. This is part of who I am and a struggle I’ve had. And I’m just showing my leadership and authority in that. I’m not just regurg regurgitating about some topic that I thought would be very successful or. Going after because it is trending. So this is my expert story positioning. And then the next part is myths. I love this part. So I usually do one to three myths. And a myth is where people go down the wrong rabbit holes. So to stick with our back pain example a myth I might do is that that curing that back pain, chronic back pain is uncurable. That’s a myth, right? Another myth, which I’ve personally been told by chiropractors is you should really stop running. You should never run again. And I’m, I like running. I’m, and now with my cured back pain, I’m actually an ultra runner. I just ran. 30 miles on Saturday and eight miles on Sunday with zero back pain. So the myth that the doctor is always right, ’cause sometimes you will get bad advice. So these are myths which is, this is also a part of teaching is uncovering a faulty view or taking a counter view on a topic or challenging common knowledge. The next section is one of my favorites. So after myths I go to pro tips. So pro tips are like, let’s say somebody’s like really doing well in your course or they’re advanced, like maybe they’re already on the strength training journey or training smartly and so on for their back pain. I might drop a pro tip. Which would be, Hey, you need to go way lighter than you are capable of when, if you do any weight training, which is something I learned. And I would get into how I had to learn how to train much with much lighter weights than what I was physically capable of picking up and particularly certain motions like bending over to pick something off the ground or anything with a arch back. I had to. Learn, and even still to this day, do those exercises, body weight only to avoid flaring up my back. So that’s an example of a pro tip. Another pro tip is, Hey, I got back into running, but I got the thickest fattest cushions on my shoes to limit the pounding on my back and it, that’s worked for me. So those, these are examples of pro tips. The next part is probably my absolute favorite part of the teaching framework, which is the model. So the model is, this is a unique to Chris thing and there’s other people that do it on the internet, but I actually go off video and share my iPad screen with an Apple pencil and actually create a visual model to teach some core ideas or concepts. Now, this is hard to explain in a podcast episode. If you ever go check out the perfect offer playbook. I have a whole training on visual communication and how to do models and how they work and all the shapes and all the stuff to do. But think of it in the traditional classroom as a teacher’s aide. It depends how old you are. People. You used to see teachers draw a Venn diagram on the chalkboard or on the overhead projector. Or you’d get a worksheet with an a diagram or a model, A visual representation of an idea or a concept. Models are really powerful teaching tools, especially for visual learners, of which I am, I’m particularly strong and visual learning and auditory learning. The other, by the way, from the. The theory of multiple learning styles is kinesthetic, which we’re actually gonna get into in a second. So part of this teaching framework is to give all, make all learning styles happy because people are not robots and different people learn in different ways. So I do a visual model and I actually draw in front of the person. One of the best people in the world of visual models is a guy in Australia named Simon Bowen. So go check that guy out. He’s where once I learned this visual communication and models from Simon Bowen, my brain just exploded. And the reason it exploded was because I learned how to take. Abstract concepts are just my head, swimming in information and data and put it into a visual model that makes sense. And there’s a lot of cool things about visual communication, which we’re not gonna get into in this episode. But having a diagram, like if you think about it this way there’s a famous productivity book called Good to Great, but jim Allen, I believe his name is, and the whole thing is built on one Eisenhower Matrix or four box model where, on one line is importance and the other is urgency. So there’s four boxes, like important, urgent, important, not urgent not important. Urgent not important. Not urgent. Anyways, he built a whole like empire off of one model. That’s how powerful these are. The next thing I personally like to do is a worksheet. So this is for the kinesthetic learners, the doers, and even if you’re teaching ideas like you’re not teaching worksheets, like if I was a fitness instructor, I would be this part. We would go into the workout, like here is the workout. But I like to use worksheets to further deify everything I’ve been teaching in the lesson. And I love to create worksheets in a spreadsheet like Google Sheets. The reason I like to do this is because of the challenge of there’s no abstraction. There’s like a label and a cell or a box or a checkbox or something to write in or fill out. And what this does is it takes the training like the key principles, the stories and everything, and helps the learner apply it to their life and their situation. In the perfect offer, playbook. I just actually before recording this, I completed the last worksheet, which was about how to launch a brand new offer and we talked about all kinds of like efficient early course marketing, launching and how to do it, and examples and stories and the whole framework I’ve just told you. But then I created a worksheet. I’m like, this is exactly what to do. Like these, put in these three things here. Build this list of people right here. Contact them with this message. You need to write about X, Y, and Z. Here’s a checkbox to check when it’s done, and so on. So that’s worksheets are all about getting learners taking action. So that’s a worksheet. And then the last part is a review. All that, all the review is I like to just go really quickly through the five key learning principles again, and that’s it. And then at the end of a lesson is your call to action. So this is where you can thank people for coming and spending their time with you today, but more importantly, you can tell them like, now go do the worksheet. If you need help, use this support system to reach out. And it’s also an opportunity to drop in like what’s coming next. If you wanna keep the anticipation high, particularly in cohort-based courses where you need people or want people to show up next week so you can plant the seed for what’s coming next. So that’s the call to action, close to a lesson. Now think about how awesome that template is. So when you go through your lessons, if you use the same template over and over again, as the learner is progressing through the learner journey, it gets very comfortable and efficient for you as the course creator. It’s also very comfortable and efficient for the learner to they know what to expect. They know your flow. They’re like, okay, we’re gonna do the principles now. Okay, we’re gonna do the worksheet now. Okay, here’s the model. Let me pay attention. ’cause this is really important if the instructor created a model around this and it seers the model in your brain. So that’s an example. Now not all teaching frameworks are need to be exactly the same, but that’s just an example of one I’ve just used to create an awesome 11 lesson course called the Perfect Offer Playbook. Which one of the benefits of all this here’s a pro tip for you is when you create a new online course project and you do the work and you figure out your offer and you get the course outlined together, but you haven’t created anything yet, you can pre-sell that. Give it a start date one month from now and start selling it and people can look at it. They can see your well-written sales page and they can see the course outline. Okay, this looks interesting. I know where this guy’s going. But then you give yourself permission, if you create one lesson a week, with a live cohort that you deliver it to and record it, turn it into an evergreen course, that’s a really efficient, fun way of doing things. When you are a subject matter expert on the topic, once you have a teaching framework, creating the content goes pretty fast. So for me, it probably takes at, for this course as an example it would take me about three hours to put together a, one of those lesson outlines that I would use to teach from on camera. And also another pro tip for you is once you have the your template, you can also create a slide template that follows the flow. So in our case welcome problem story, challenge, promises, learning principles. Expert story myth, pro tips model worksheet review, and then the call to action. So you have a slide template. So if you’re gonna teach from slides or talking head, you can structure all these and templatize all these things. And so anyways, like for me, it took about probably about four hours to prepare a lesson. One hour to deliver it, 30 minutes to turn it into evergreen asset, put it in lifter LMS in a course, the video link up the worksheet for download and so on. And then it’s done. And just keep in mind, this is not new. Teachers have been doing this forever. So new teachers’ lives are harder because they don’t necessarily have the curriculum yet. Or they’re using some curriculum that they just obtained from somewhere else, but they haven’t really internalized it and taught it, so it’s harder. But then what happens over time is a classroom teacher will deliver the same curriculum semester after semester, year after year, decade after decade and so on. Hopefully improving it some along the way. But the beauty of online courses is you can. You can evergreen it and automate everything with a online course and LMS website powered by lifter LMSI am a fan though of if you can like at least the first time teach it live, you don’t have to do that, but you can. And I’m also another pro tip as I am a really big fan of revisiting your course, making it better over time. Maybe reshooting the videos, update the worksheets. Maybe insert some new, more relevant stories and so on. But that is how you keep, you create a teaching framework for your lessons. And I hope you found this helpful. One final thing that I just want to tell you that’ll blow your mind, hopefully you can do this too with marketing content. You come up with a content template for the content marketing you do, it’s likely gonna be a slim down version of what you would do in an actual lesson. If you get really advanced, and I’ve done this before, you can actually structure your teaching template for your actual paid course in such a way that it’s perfectly set up, so that when you’re done with the recording video. There’s a piece of it that you can cut out and move right over to your marketing. If you have a YouTube channel as an example where you’re not giving away everything, but let’s say you’re doing the problems, the challenges and the principles, but you’re not getting into like the model and the worksheet and the action steps and all the support and everything that’s offered in your paid training. So you, you can actually double dip and do marketing and education at the same time. That’s next level pro stuff. That’s it for this episode of LMS Cast on how to create your teaching framework. Smash the like button. Tell your friends, lemme know. If you like this video, drop a comment down below and I wish you all the best on creating impact, income, and freedom in your life with online courses. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Become A Teacher Without Going To Teaching School And Make A Fortune With Online Courses appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now Chris Badgett offers his advice on creating and running an email list that now has over 100,000 subscribers in this episode of LMScast. He makes the case that, when compared to social media, email is the most reliable and efficient marketing medium since it is used by everyone and can be utilized for prospecting, nurturing, sales, and customer support. Chris emphasizes that although having a larger list frequently results in higher revenue, the caliber of members is significantly more significant than the number. Chris emphasizes that if the proper individuals are on them, even tiny, focused lists may provide meaningful commercial outcomes. Additionally, he outlines the fundamental procedures for configuring email systems, selecting the best platform, and connecting LifterLMS with CRMs like ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, or ConvertKit. He also provides helpful advice on how to handle corporate email accounts, such as utilizing shared inbox systems like Help Scout to expedite communication and use role-based addresses (support@, ceo@) rather than personal ones. In order to maintain professional, scalable, and well-organized message, he concludes by advising every company to set up a minimum of three email addresses: one for personal correspondence, one for marketing/sales, and one for customer service. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m Chris Badgett, and today I am not joined by a special guest. It’s just me, and we’re gonna be talking all about everything I’ve learned in building an email list over a hundred thousand people. Last time I checked, 115,000 people have. Join my email list and I’ve learned a lot about building an email list, email marketing. I’m gonna share all of that with you today. So welcome. The first thing I just want to talk about is why I love email. Why email is, in my opinion, the most important channel for marketing, but also just supporting your customers. Email is an essential platform. For, doing prospecting sales, warming up an audience, making offers, adding value, delivering your product or service. There’s so much you can do with email. And the neat thing about email is that everybody uses it. It’s not like social media where some people are on Twitter, some people are on Facebook, some people are on TikTok. Yeah, everybody on all those different social media accounts has a most likely a primary email address. Maybe they have one or two, maybe a business email, maybe a personal email. But in terms of building an email list, like this is the most important thing for a course creator, a coach or education entrepreneur, to be doing, ideally, even before. They have launched their course or their membership site. And even if you’re an agency building LMS sites for clients, it’s really important to also do email marketing, to also build your email list. So today I’m gonna go over. So several of the ways I think about email, and I know you’re gonna find some gems to help you create more income, impact and freedom in your life. An email list is a very important piece of your business. There’s an old saying that the quote money is in the list and it’s very true. I’m trying to remember the exact formula, but there’s this equation. Where based on the size of your email list you probably make somewhere between three to $5 for every email subscriber you have in your business. And I’ve seen this across multiple businesses when I’m, hear about their revenue numbers and how big their email list is. It’s very much a part. Of just the math or the physics of business. And that the bigger email list you have in general, the more money you’re gonna make. Now, of course, you want to have a high quality email list. Quality is more important than quantity. There’s plenty of people that have built great businesses with a very small email list, as a related example. I forget the exact number, but the lifter, LMS YouTube channel is very small in terms of subscribers, but we actually do a lot of revenue with a very small subscriber base. Now, there’s YouTube channels with a million subscribers who make far less money than us. So the lesson there is that it’s all about quality, not necessarily quantity. So don’t get too wrapped up, if you only have an email list of a hundred people. 50 people, if those are 50 or a hundred really awesome, qualified, perfect fit people. That’s great. So it’s not just about getting, a thousand subscribers, 10,000, a hundred thousand, a million, and so on. So the foundations, before you start building an email list, this is one of the, these are some key ideas that people don’t really think about. The first thing I would say is you need to pick. A tool to gather all your emails into. So the CRM, the email marketing, the email broadcasting platform, there’s a lot of great ones out there. I’ve, and many of you may have used MailChimp over the years. That’s a great place. They have a free option. I personally currently use something called ActiveCampaign. I’ve been on ActiveCampaign for probably about eight years. We switched at lifter LMS to ActiveCampaign from Infusionsoft eight years ago. And really I got my start in kind of the integration between WordPress and marketing automation with Infusionsoft. That’s actually where I began as a agency owner and where we focused our agency. And later we ended up building lifter LMS and focusing on the education entrepreneurs. My technical expertise has always been around marketing automation, WordPress, website building email marketing and so on, and combining all those things. But going back to platforms, there’s so many great email platforms out there. Like a lot of people are happy with Kit, formally known as ConvertKit. There’s a lot of great solutions in WordPress for email like fluid, CRM or groundhog. And there’s many other, email platforms. Some people love HubSpot and so on. If you’re using Lifter LMS we have a native integration with MailChimp and Kit. Also, there’s a great tool called WP Fusion. There’s a WordPress plugin that can connect your WordPress website to 50 of the most popular CRMs. So definitely check out WP Fusion. It’s a great tool. Now, the simple way this works is that when you get a new user on your site, like in a learning management system or a membership site, you just take that person their name and their email address and pass it over to the email platform, so it creates a user over there as well. If you’re not using one of the. WordPress solutions like fluent CRM or Groundhog that you could have on the exact same website. But if you’re using something like lifters integration with MailChimp or ConvertKit, you can do fancier things like add them to different lists based on which course they enrolled in, or which membership they enrolled in, rolled in. You can add tags, trigger automations, and things like that. WP Fusion does that. As well. And again, it allows you to integrate with tons of other email marketing platforms besides MailChimp and ConvertKit. Another pro tip and just when you’re getting started with email, go easy on yourself. I wish people knew how important this was to figure out the naming convention of your. Email accounts. So more than likely you’re gonna have multiple email addresses in your business. This kind of thing is a hard thing to change later. So it was probably 15 years ago where I was listening to a podcast about organization design, and it was a really smart thing this person said. They said, when you build an org chart for your company, think instead of. Names or job titles, do email addresses. So an example of this would be ceo@lifterlms.com or cto@lifterlms.com, customer support@lifterlms.com. So that’s just a way to think about it. ’cause sometimes people create like way too many email addresses. Or they attach something to a name like robert@lifterlms.com and then Robert leaves the company. But now all this stuff was set up with Robert’s email. Another pro tip like we do at lifter LMS, if you start getting at scale and you’re doing a lot of things like pre-sales and supporting existing customers, is we actually use one email inbox for the entire company. It’s called Help Scout. It’s a great tool, and basically the way it works is the public is only interacting with one email address, but inside that help Scout, there’s multiple users who have their own unique email address, like their Google Company workspace, email address, and, they can be assigned to conversations and past conversations around and so on. But that makes it really easy for the public to just have one email to communicate with. And then it also allows you to work as a team with multiple people just interacting in one inbox. So that’s just a pro tip there. But so there’s like your personal email, your business email, but then you’re gonna be sending email broadcasts. Or maybe when students sign up for a course and they get a welcome email, it’s important to think about what email address we’re going to use for those services. As an example I, if I could wave a magic wand for you, I would just give you, for your entire company, three email addresses. And the first one is just for you. So if your name is. Susan, it would be susan@mywebsite.com and create that inside of Google apps or whatever. That’s your primary one-on-one email address. But then what you wanna do is you want to set up two more email addresses that are gonna be used as scale for things like mass communications and stuff. The first one is more sales oriented. Oh, and marketing oriented. The second one is for customer support. The sales one and the marketing one I do not recommend naming that email address something like marketing@mywebsite.com. Nobody get, gets excited when they see an email from marketing at something. So for that email address I would do something like, hello, at. Your company name.com. So that’s an example. So that’s like the pre-sales one where you’re doing like mass marketing, you’re doing marketing automations, you’re doing newsletters, things of that nature. And then on the support side for your customers. I recommend an email address support at your company, name.com, or help at your company. name.com. Now the reason this is important to have three email addresses, and I should just say you’re gonna have more as you add team members. Like they’ll each get their individual email at your company. But if you’re operating solo you need those three. So sometimes people unsubscribe from emails that are, marketing related. It’s just the nature of doing business and sending emails. That’s why you don’t wanna put your personal email like chris@companyname.com as the email address. You’re gonna be sending, marketing communications from, because somebody out there may want to sign up for your newsletter, they’re loving it, but then they unsubscribe or even they get tired of your emails, your marketing emails, and they mark you as spam. And then. You try to reach out to them one-on-one for something and your email never gets to them, or they try to reach out to you like, Hey I’m done with all these newsletter emails, but I still have a question for Chris. And but they’ve blocked your email. And the same is true for marketing and support. So if you set up your email system correctly, people won’t be on two email lists at one time. If somebody’s, doesn’t want any more of your newsletters and they became a customer and they had you, they have nothing left to buy from you and they unsubscribe from your marketing, you still want them to be able to receive like your customer onboarding and nurture emails. That’s for customers. So that’s why it’s important to have a wall between your prospects and your customers. So different email address. For those two. So that’s a really important piece of setting up your email architecture. And then also keep in mind that emails have a kind of reputation score. So this is why you never want to buy an email list or spam people who don’t want to hear from you is because you’re just gonna get marked as spam a lot, and your reputation for your email is gonna get dinged, which means fewer and fewer of your emails will make it to their inboxes, and even your whole domain name can get tarnished. So always hold email in high regard in terms of ethics. Don’t spam people, don’t add people that shouldn’t be added or didn’t give you permission to add consent is very important. So let’s move on from the foundations and talk about attracting subscribers or email addresses. Like how do we get emails? There’s a lot of different ways to get emails, but. Some of the basics, and we do all of these things at Lifter LMS as an example. We’ve been doing this a long time, so we’ve created a lot of things that generate an email address or a subscriber in our system. So one thing we do is the newsletter, but if all you’re doing is a newsletter you’re just limiting yourself because back in the day, that used to be all you needed. But now people’s inboxes are full. They just may want like one thing from you. They’re happy to give you your e email address, but they don’t want to be emailed every week or twice a week or every month. So give a menu of options for ways for people to join your mailing list. So I’m gonna try to rattle some of the ones we have for Lifter LMS. We do have a newsletter, this podcast that you’re listening to right now. We have a. Subscribe by email and basically what that one does is if you go in, you, the person gives their email, there’s an automated system that adds ’em to the email list saying they’re interested in podcast episodes, and it will automatically email them a link to every new podcast episode and a little summary and even a little graphic. Of the episode and it’s all automated. We set that up an active campaign that’s called an RSS Driven campaign. Now, my favorite ways to get emails are through what’s known as lead magnets, which you may have heard of. But if you go to the lifter LMS blog or the lifter LMS podcast, and you look in the sidebar beside individual posts or podcast episodes. You’ll see about five different things that people can sign up for to that’s gonna give them something of value. And then we’re going to get the email address and permission to send them future communications. So you’ve probably heard of lead magnets, but I want to give you a pro tip about how to create them. 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Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. And there’s this idea that oh, I just need one lead magnet. Maybe it’s a quiz of some kind or an ebook. But the reality is if you wanna gather the most email addresses possible, you have to think about your customer existing through time, and not just your customer, but like your ideal prospect as they find out about you, as they become interested in you and so on. What that means is creating different lead magnets for different stages of the buyer’s journey. So I’m just looking at the Lit LMS podcast sidebar. You can go check that out out@podcast.lifterlms.com. And I’m just gonna walk through the lead magnets. The first one is a pricing calculator that helps people figure out the pricing for their course or membership. And the way this lead magnet works is it’s earlier on in the customer journey, they’re just wondering how much could I money can I make if I create a course or a coaching program? And it’s just a calculator that we created using gravity forms and conditional logic. And there’s an option at the end of the calculator for people to give their email to get, a free course about pricing. But this, because we’re early in the journey, they may not trust us yet, so they can actually use the calculator, get the result, not give us our email and move on. And that’s great. So they’re just getting started. But if they want to go deeper, they can give us their email and get a full course on how to do pricing. Then we have what’s called the Education Entrepreneur Playbook which is a much more substantial ebook. There’s a larger time investment. The person at this stage is committed to creating a course or coaching program. They can enter their email address, but they’re also gonna make a larger investment of time than just completing a pricing calculator through three questions. So this is like a. 40 page ebook and most eBooks it’s recommended that they’re shorter than that. But this one is really in depth. And then we have something called the course organizer. Somebody’s, yeah, they’re definitely doing a course at this point, and now they got gonna get organized. So we created a workbook worksheet for people to fill out, to organize all the chaos in their mind and, organize their course on a simple one page document. And then we have the WordPress LMS Buyers Guide. So this is where people are, what we would call solution aware, product aware stage of the buyer’s journey. They’re trying to decide between options. Okay, I’m gonna build a course, I’m gonna price it this way. I’ve learned everything from Chris and Jason in the masterclass. I’m really ready to move forward with the software. There’s a handful of options. Which one should I choose? That’s where the WordPress LMS Buyers Guide comes in, which is a shorter, like eight page ebook that helps people figure out how to choose the best learning management system software for them. And then the next lead magnet is actually free software. So you sign up and you get the free core lifter, LMS plugin, which is super powerful. Industry leading more powerful than most paid LMS solutions and WordPress and beyond. So that software, somebody enters their email address and then they get redirected on how to access the free software. So now we’re using software as a lead magnet. Then we have a course. Okay, now that you’ve got the software, there’s another lead magnet, which is, hey, here’s the lifter LMS Quickstart course. It’s free to sign up for, and it’s gonna show you the 5% essential parts of the software to, so that you can be successful with the free software. You just download it basically. So that is another lead magnet. Then the next lead magnet is the what we call the WordPress LMS Growth Engine. And what this these are is, these are actual kind of sales presentations, but they’re not just selling. It’s more like a a presentation depending upon your e-learning use case on, what lifter LMS can do for you. Why it’s awesome and essentially go from that free stage to a paid customer. So that’s like another lead magnet or conversion tool. And then the final lead magnet we have here as our prospect is becoming a free user. Getting interested, looking at the sales presentation is a down sell, lead magnet or objection handling lead magnet, which is an opportunity to. A demo site for just a dollar. So when someone buys that, they are added to our email list. So if you look at those lead magnets, there’s many of them, but they’re in boxes alongside our blog and podcast content and embedded within the blog and podcast content in some cases. Those are made for people at different stages of the journey. So not everybody is always at the same place where they just want their ebook or they want your free thing, or they wanna learn how to use your thing, or they need to talk to sales or have a demo. All these stages of the journey are important and you can collect emails at every step at the stage and people will self-select. Where they’re at. Not everybody gets all your lead magnets or comes in at the beginning and comes and takes everything you have. So having that portfolio or quiver of lead magnets is really important. So how else do we get email addresses? We get a ton from what I just showed you the quickstart course. The Lifter, LMS Free Quickstart course is one of our top performing lead magnets. We get I think we’ve gotten about 40,000 people through that one, and that one’s really interesting because it’s both doing marketing and sales and customer success all on autopilot all the time, all day long. So in my opinion, everybody should have a free course lead magnet, which shows the five perc, the most essential 5% of. How to use your thing or get the value out of your course or program because it’s gonna. It’s gonna help prospects get even more interested. It’s gonna be people close to buying from you have the confidence to buy. And It’s gonna make new customers be more successful in getting started without necessarily ha necessarily having to contact you for support. So there’s so much value that goes into that. Also within lifter LMS for your paid courses or memberships. Like in the lifter LMS Academy as an example, we have about 15 courses. Some paid, some free. Whenever somebody enrolls in any of those, all of those email addresses flow into our active campaign email platform. People get tagged and segmented into the different, they bought this course so they’re gonna get this email. The same is true in our WooCommerce store where we sell our products, depending upon which bundle you buy or individual add-ons, the prospect ends up in our active campaign, or not prospect, actually, customer, and they get tagged okay, this person bought the infinity bundle. Then there’s an automation inside our email platform that delivers the onboarding sequence of emails over time for that Infinity bundle customer. And and there’s so many different segments. I’ve been doing this so long, like our system is pretty complex now at this juncture. And you may be on, in this camp if you’re listening to this. Sometimes it’s easy to get in place where you send too many emails, but what’s more dangerous is not sending enough emails. So always try to segment your emails well, your email list, so that people get stuff that they’re most likely relevant to them. And remember, they can unsubscribe at any time. So it’s okay to put it out there. Maybe somebody has been through all your stuff. Maybe they were a customer, they’re happy, they’re good, they’re done, they unsubscribe. No harm, no foul. Maybe somebody comes into your email and realizes your solution is not a fit for them and they unsubscribe, that’s fine. But the more you can segment and divide people up and only send relevant emails, the better. And also make sure that the emails you send are not just constant sales pitches like. Deliver value. Like this is podcast episode number 520 or whatever. So all of our podcast episodes, 99% of them we’re not trying to sell you anything, we’re just adding value. Like I’m adding value to you right now, giving you some pro tips on growing your email list. So deliver value as much as you can. Another pro tip is we have a. Like a tag in our CRM where if somebody’s Hey, I appreciate it, but I’d really, I don’t wanna unsubscribe, but I really don’t want this much email. We have a low volume email system to help get those people more so they don’t lose touch with what we’re up to, but they’re not getting as much of the other stuff. So you can always do that. You can get fancy and at the end of the day though. It’s probably more than likely that you’re not sending enough email, and if people are complaining that you’re sending too much email, you might be sending the wrong emails to the wrong people and you’re, or you’re not doing segmentation and so on. And look, this is hard. Nobody’s perfect. It takes a while to figure it out. And e never forget email is two way street. People can reply to your emails. I can go from one second. Someone’s like replies and they’re like, oh, this is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you so much for this email, and open the next one. And somebody’s oh my gosh, you send too many emails. And you know what I’ll do is I’ll let ’em know they can unsubscribe if they’d like. And also, offer to put them on the low volume email list if they would prefer that, things like that. So you gotta get thick skin, ’cause people will say all kinds of different things when you interact across like a large email list. We talked about using lead magnets. We talked about using courses or memberships and lifter, LMS feeding our emails. We talked about WooCommerce products. Feeding your emails. We also do webinar registrations. So we do informational educational webinars that feeds our emails. And in terms of nurturing, I want to talk a little bit about that. So what do you do once you have an email? I create email automations called lead magnet delivery automations. So if somebody opts in for the LMS Buyer’s guide, they’re only gonna get one email and it’s Hey, thanks for signing up. Click the link below to download the LMS Buyer’s Guide. And that’s it. That automation is done. But then they get moved to the a prospect nurture sequence that goes on for a long time. And the pro tip here is when people are first show interest in you. They’re giving you permission to send a little more frequently. So whenever I’m adding somebody to a nurture sequence, I will give them more information faster in the beginning, but then the space between the emails gets longer and longer till they’re about like a month apart. So I’m not trying to do like daily emails or anything like that forever. But think about it like this, if you’re doing a customer nurture sequence, okay, they just bought your product. They’re really excited about your course or membership. You can hit ’em with even multiple emails in the first day. Awesome. Welcome. Here’s how to get started a little bit later in the day, even Hey you’re probably busy getting started, but here’s this awesome bonus for you to help you get even better results. Day two, Hey, we’re here to help support you. Just so you know, you can just reply to this email with any question and we’ll help you get going. Day three, here’s how to join our community of other people just like you using the same product or service. And then maybe I’d start spacing him out, then a week apart, two weeks apart, and so on. I learned this idea from Gary Vaynerchuk. He calls it jab, right Hook, which just means don’t always pitch something. So the jabs are value and the hook is a pitch or an offer, if you will. So always try to deliver way more value than trying to sell or upsell. Something. So think about that. And there’s all kinds of ways that you can just send in an email where you’re not trying to sell anything but just trying to help people and deliver value. So space those out. There’s also like popups on our website. So you can use a tool like Popup Maker, which is has Lifter LMS integration. And as of the time you’re watching this, they’ve either just released or about to release major Lifter LMS integrations. So popup maker is awesome because you can put an opt-in form inside of the popup, but what triggers the popup? Maybe they click a button on your site. Maybe they’re about to leave. Maybe they’re about to abandon checkout. Maybe they just landed on a confirmation page and you wanna do an upsell. There’s so many different ways you can use popups and collect email addresses in that way. And just a pro tip of around how this technology works is that, your email platform it’s gonna have contacts or users in it, subscribers, whatever your platform calls them. But it’s also gonna have forms, like a form for you to put on your website to generate a subscriber for them to enter their name and email and so on. So you can embed those forms in your popups, on your webpage and so on. But you can also use tools like form plugins, like Gravity Forms, ninja Forms, WP Forms, WS form. Kind of use the form that you’re used to building regular contact forms and things on your website, but to actually build a opt-in form that then passes the subscriber to your email marketing and CRM platform. And that’s so forms are super powerful and you can use ’em everywhere. And the more you think about forms. You’ll realize how much of the internet is powered by form. So like a course enrollment form in lifter LMS is a form. And then you know that data can be automatically passed to the email marketing and CRM tool. A checkout form is a form, and when someone becomes a customer, that data can be passed to the CRM platform. They can be moved from being a prospect to a customer. There’s not just contact forms and comment forms. When you when students submit a quiz or an assignment. And those are forms. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Forms are really everywhere. But what I recommend when it comes to building your email list, it’s just figure out that technical piece of. Making an offer, sticking a form on it. Then getting that data into your email marketing. CRM, whether that’s on your same WordPress website or on an external platform like active campaign. So building an email list is a long term game. Consistency is key. Keep doing the work, keep showing up and keep adding value and always remember. That building an email list is, these aren’t just email addresses. These are real people. These are real human beings with hopes and dreams and pain points and trauma. So treat it with respect, like respect your community, your email subscribers, and when you have an engaged email list, like if you ask people to reply at the end of a newsletter or after receiving a lead magnet. And they do. And then you reply and have a one-on-one conversation with ’em. That’s fantastic. And that kind of engagement is important to be, keep the humanity and all of this automation and emails and all this tech. If you create an engaged email list, you can build a thriving LMS business. Staying in touch with people and caring about them is really what it’s all about. When you believe in your product, whether that’s a course, a membership site, or your an agency and your selling services to clients, keep in touch with your people. Just the very act of. Sending an email, whether it’s one-on-one or through a newsletter or other automation or nurture sequence you’re opening a door of opportunity for human connection and to build real relationships. So that’s it for this conversation around email marketing, email automation, and how to build an email list. If you have any questions about email, drop a. Comment wherever you’re seeing this and feel free to ask. I’d be happy to help you with that. But that’s it for this LMSCast episode. I’m Chris from Lifter lms. Go to podcast dot lifter lms.com and subscribe to the podcast by email, so you never miss another episode. And I hope you have a great rest of your day. Take care. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How to Build A 100,000 Subscriber Email List appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now Ziv Raviv explained how he started his business ten years ago with a podcast, which paved the way for him to pursue coaching and online courses. After learning about LifterLMS, he expanded into creating over 300 courses in a variety of micro-niches, such as balloon art, the floral industry, children’s entertainers, relationships (Generous Marriage), and copywriting (Daily Cookie). Ziv’s first course was just a Google Doc with unlisted YouTube videos. He clarified that by narrowing his focus so much, he was able to establish credibility and trust in close-knit groups, which produced unexpected outcomes, such as generating over $1 million from the balloon art specialty alone, which has just 3,000 members globally. Additionally, he described how his earnings increased from $20k in his first year to $88k in his second, then to $277k, $377k, $430k (when he plateaued for a few years), $475k, and now to at least $540k in 2025. He eventually came to the realization that, although “niching sideways” into several businesses was effective, his greatest innovations came from discovering his area of expertise, which was instructing others. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a friend and one of my favorite people in the lifter LMS community. His name is Ziv Ravi. You can find him@zivravi.com and also K media.co. And we’re gonna get into some really cool stuff you haven’t heard before today, a concept called Super Coaching. Ziv and I were just chatting about it and I’m blown away and fascinated. Ziv is also a master of micro nicheing, and good niching is a big challenge with so many education entrepreneurs, or just entrepreneurs in general. And Ziv is a master at it, but we’re gonna get into all that. But first, welcome back on the show, Ziv. Ziv Raviv: Hello, Chris. It’s such a, an amazing pleasure to connect here and to share this journey of of online business and educational businesses and being a, like an entrepreneur in this space. With you again, like this is the third time I’m here. I’m excited to share some new concept with the listeners. I hope this will bring a lot of value to everyone.  Chris Badgett: Before we get going, Ziv also has a podcast called Beyond Six Figures. So check that out. Add that to your next, listen after this one, let’s let’s just start high level Ziv. If somebody doesn’t know you you’ve done a lot of things and you’re, you’ve, you’re really focused on super coaching now and having a unified vision. But what niches have you been in? What kinds of entrepreneurial activities have you done over, say, the past 10 years?  Ziv Raviv: It’s actually 10 years since I launched my first podcast, and that podcast turned me into a cost creator and into into a coach. I remember my first course that I launched was actually with a Google Doc and a few unlisted videos on YouTube. Later on I found Lifter, LMS and started to create multiple online courses. So I, I remember the second year of operation. As a podcaster, we were launching eight different courses in a very small micro niche of balloon art. There’s are people that are serving as balloon artists, as balloon decorators, as balloon entertainers, and they needed some education about the craft and about their business. And so I launched eight courses on the second year. Since then, we’ve launched through Lyft, LMS. Way over 300 courses in many niches, including in the floral industry, in the kids entertainer industry. We had a bit of work in the relationship niche with a platform called Generous Marriage. We had a round of activities in the niche of copywriting with daily cookie.co. And all of that, like going each time to a different micro niche and serving clients there, serving the niche with with free online courses and paid online courses and later on with coaching. All of that was something I did year after year to get to a point where I start to realize I need to start focusing, I need to start removing some of the activities and understand what is my system, what is my. Where is my zone of genius? Where can I actually bring the biggest transformations? And that’s when I realized just a little bit after chat, GPT was starting, like Che GPT-3 0.5 started to be a thing. Copywriting as a service became something that is not as needed as before because it was just too easy. And I realized in parallel that I wanna focus and that’s where super coaching was born.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s quite the journey. And if you feel like it, maybe just share some revenue numbers of how you’ve grown over the years and also, yeah. Really what people wonder sometimes is, there, especially like if you go back to your early self with the Google Doc and the unlisted videos, you don’t really know you’re gonna make it and you have a lot of self-doubt. And what happened or why do you think it worked out for you?  Ziv Raviv: So first of all I wanna say that. I wanna start with the numbers ’cause it’ll put everything in perspective. So the first year online as a content creator, we did 20, we did 20 k, that’s what we did, 20 2K. The second year we did something like 88 k. Over the years we started to grow dramatically. I was interviewed on your show. The listeners can actually go and listen to it. When I was doing 277 K and then a year later or so, despite the Corona and everything, we were doing 377 K, which was already is a case study where people can listen to the different things we were doing. We then go to 430 k. We got stuck at that for a couple of years and then we grew to 470 5K and this year we’re targeting and nothing can stop us now. Like we will probably do more than that, but at the very least we’re going to do 540 k. In 2025. So we grew over the years dramatically. We had to grow the team as well. We had to change the way we do business. We had to let go of certain ideas like certain focus points that no longer served us to grow and to be impactful. So yeah that, that is like the context of the numbers. And, the idea that always led me in doing business, in attracting clients was the idea of microing. And it’s the idea that people are so busy these days. They see so much content they don’t care about. Other things that are happening. They don’t wanna buy stuff that are not, that are, that is presented by strangers to them and so on and so forth. So it’s almost like the tribes, the different tribes of people are locked inside bubbles. And the bubble is so thick that in order to pierce through the bubble, you need some, someone from within the bubble to introduce you to the tribe. In order to do that, you need to micro niche so that people will listen to you so that collaborations will make sense and people will agree to collaborate with you so that they will agree to be interviewed by you and so on. So on our first micro niche, we just recently reached a total income of $1 million. All from people that are making a living, from taking balloons and putting some air into them and tying them and making, events look good. And we’ve managed to, and it’s such a small micro niche. These are like 3000 people throughout the world. Those 3000 people have like I’m very humbled to say that they have paid us a million dollars, a little bit more than a million dollars over the years. For their education and for their services and for their coaching and so on. And and we are continuing to grow. But in, at the beginning it was micro nicheing sideways, so from one micro niche sideways to another micro niches that is similar. And these days we’re starting to niche up.  Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s awesome. And congrats on the success with the balloon artists. And if, correct me if I’m wrong. But it’s, I know you yourself are a balloon artist, and you also have a niche in florist. Do you, have you been a florist?  Ziv Raviv: Actually I did not I was never a florist. The first few niches that I chose, micro niches that. I chose to do to produce a podcast. Salon online courses. In that micro niche. Those were things related to my passions. Over the years, I started to do this more professionally. I would choose a micro niche. I did this in nine different micro niches, right? So I would choose a micro niche that I think I, I could provide some service to that. I think I have some passion in that condition. Sometimes I found out that I don’t, and I failed and I stopped. Like I turned off the shelters some say on that podcast because I just couldn’t really connect with the people in a way that would yield results fast enough. But on others, I went in professionally, right? So with the floes industry I don’t have any experience with flowers. I actually I don’t know the names of the flowers. It’s really bad. I know marketing and I know business, so I You’re entrepreneurs,  Chris Badgett: right?  Ziv Raviv: Yes.  Chris Badgett: And you’re an entrepreneur and a lot of your current coaching clients are entrepreneurs. Is that right?  Ziv Raviv: Yes. And you know what one client led to another client as, as often that happens. And I started to serve florist people. I had clients that were florist. And they were such cool people. They were really good in business. They didn’t need to kind apologize. When people ask a balloon decorate or What do you do? And they say the in balloons they kind ask you, yeah, but what do you really do? But what? It’s like not a ho it’s a hobby. It’s a hustle. Even though there are people doing a million dollar a year from Baco, but. They always felt like they need to defend themselves. Florists don’t need to defend themselves. They know what they’re doing. They’re running successful businesses with TE teams and with clients and with locations and multiple locations. And so I decided to go into it professionally. And I partnered with another coach that, that I started to serve his business and his school and I even turned his entire school into a lifter LMS school as a part of our work together. And so over the years I had. Niches where I went in and I succeeded to bring myself to a point where I have coaching clients in them and on some I stride. I saw that I didn’t like what I’m seeing and I stepped back.  Chris Badgett: I love seeing your growth and just journey over the years and where you are now, like when somebody kind of compounds and keeps improving and being curious and. Creating value in the world. That’s awesome to see. And now you’re at super coaching as a concept. Can you explain how you came to that and what it is and how you do it?  Ziv Raviv: Super coaching is the concept of coaching plus benefits, which means that you add some value to the client in some way, shape or form. And over the years I have. Added a lot of value to my clients beyond education. I always included a lot of free education for my clients, but I’m talking about something even more than education, which is in the trenches working with the client in order to help them with other problems they have. So one of the first problems I solved for my coaching clients was. Was through a company called Design Picker. They, or even these days, they offer unlimited designs for a flat feed. They’re amazing. I was coached personally by Rasper for a while, and I adore what they do. I, and I used their service to serve my clients, so my clients would get free designs. For quite a while over the years, I started to hire my own graphic designers, and then I needed a lot of website fixes. So I would hire a website developer on WordPress to fix a lot of things. And then they started to fix things for my clients. And then they started to build, websites for my clients from scratch. And then we created a copywriting company and a team. Once I decided I wanna go all in with super coaching the copywriting team became another resource of my coaching clients. So at some point, actually, we actually accidentally turned into a marketing agency where the clients come to me about eight 70% of them, they come to me when they look for a coach and they found out, they find out that they have. Way more than like that. I give, I, I give them way more than just the coaching. So we do all of their designs. We control the websites, we build them, we create sales campaigns, advertising campaigns, everything. And some of them come to me because they heard about the transformations. They don’t care if I will call myself a coach, or I will call myself A-A-C-M-O-A fractional CMO, or if I, they don’t even care if I have a title. All they care about. Is they know someone that I helped them grow by 20 to 50% in a year. And for seven figure business, that’s a lot of money to grow by 20 to 50%. So they heard about that, they came to me and then they received like this concept. So super coaching is. It’s a different type of a relationship, and it’s a very deep relationship. It’s a very close relationship. Some of my clients, I meet them I kid you note, I meet them four to five times a week, so we have a one-on-one session, and then I make myself available for four times a week, sometimes five times a week on a group session level. So pretty much every day almost they have an opportunity to show up and ask a question. And remind me about something they needed and ask me about some design they were waiting for, or some bug they need fixing or some campaign they need me to look at. And the result of it is that I am a little bit of a business coach and a little bit of an implementation coach, and a little bit of a marketing coach, and a little bit of. Of of like a relationship coach and the holistic approach, coach, but I will be whatever the client needs in order to get them to where they wanna go.  Chris Badgett: Wow. That is so cool. What from on the coaching aspect what are some of the common challenges you help people work through to unlock growth? And I, you mentioned a lot of things. It could be a relationship, it could be a marketing challenge, it could be a technical challenge. Do you see any patterns or themes that are common across your clients?  Ziv Raviv: We, the more we work with like over time with our clients, the more we see them get to the point where they have new problems to solve. So I’m actually really interested in this idea where businesses actually have different stages in their in their growth. And a lot of time they struggle with they struggle with identifying what to focus on, right? So they think that they have many problems and many times the first problem that they think they have is we don’t have enough leads, or we don’t have enough sales. That’s what almost all clients think. That is the main problem, but they actually, that the lead problem is not a problem that you need to solve. Like it’s actually a temporary problem. Believe it or not. Your lead problem is a temporary problem. Your growth as a business, that’s an infinite problem. You will always want to worry about that. The difference between infinite problems and finite problems, is it infinite problems. You need to think about them. In an annual level, in a quarter level, you level, you need people responsible for that problem, right? And you need to monitor that problem forever. But if like you have a Jessica and Jessica decided to resign and she’s a part of your team, that’s not an hiring problem. That’s Jessica problem. It’s a very temporary problem that you just need to fix. You just need to replace Jessica. So when you know that the problem is actually temporary, you just need to put in the efforts, you need to trust the process and put in the efforts and fix it. So a lot of people, they will think they have a lead problem or a sales problem, but actually they just need to understand that it’s a fixable problem. And if they put in the efforts, they will be able to solve that problem.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I wanna ask like, how you developed as with your coaching skills, and part of me knows that you’re just a natural, like you’ve been making people smile, laugh, reading the room, big picture, creative problem solving guy your whole life. But how do you beco, how does one or anyone become a better coach?  Ziv Raviv: I think you. You there, there’s a lot of way to improve in coaching and in business and in, and it’s not. First you need to understand that it’s not an easy process. It’s, there’s a lot of skills involved and you need to work on them with the passion. Of a violinist or pianist that, that really practice for hours. So one of the things that truly makes me better as a coach is just the fact that I work a lot. Yeah. I just, I’m putting in the reps, I’ve been doing I’ve been fully booked for many years. I talk about that in my book. I, I’ve been doing this week. I’ve been doing 12 meetings with cl coaching clients, 12 meetings a day every day. It’s just something that I put in that’s a lot of hours of work and I didn’t always do that. I took a couple of years where I only worked for three days a week and I walked, I battled through burnout and I. I’m glad to say I’m now on the other side and I have my energy now back to do like more meetings like that, but but one of the best ways to. Grow as a coach and become better a coach is just to put in the reps. There are many books to list to read about coaching that are amazing. There are many books about business and entrepreneurship that are amazing. There are many podcasts like lifter LMSs, LMS Cast podcasts which is really a great way to, to be open for ideas that way. And to learn about different educational and entrepreneurs. So I think that I’ve done my share of listening to clients of helping them. I’ve done my share of being in business myself and building businesses myself and launching things. I’ve done a lot of webinars and a lot of online courses and a lot of group programs. I launched four different mobile apps so when you put in a lot of work in wraps, you can get better quite fast. Chris Badgett: You mentioned learning from books. You have a book, the Fully Booked Coach. Can you tell us what that’s about and what inspired you? To write it. This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells in guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version. So you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. Ziv Raviv: this is a work of love that took a good two years to fully work on and polish and edit and proof and launch. This year we’ve launched the book and it actually, shares my systems completely, openly how I coach, how I, what type of tools I actually use on, on, on a day-to-day basis. And what’s my philosophy in business in getting coaching clients that will stick around. So it’s all about microing, where you actually get people to listen to you, to hear you, to respect you, to trust you, to work with you. And it’s and in order to do that. You choose a micro niche and you go in and you listen to what they need, and you create some online courses for them for free, and you create some online courses for them for that they can buy. And you do webinars like you do the whole thing and you can do it differently from one micro niche to another. Based on where they congregate and this whole system is detailed in the book. And after doing that so many times it was, it just was clear to me that this is like a system. At some point I got into a new micro niche and I detailed everything. Like I, I did it with transparency with meetings online and whatnot, and within 90 days. I was able to secure a coaching client in a totally new micro niche, right? So it’s actually if you know how to micro niche and you put in the work, you can find clients relatively fast as long as you’re bringing value and into that micro niche. The second concept that I talk about in the book is about super coaching, which is how to. Basically, in order to be fully booked, you just need one thing. You don’t need to be a super coach. You don’t need to provide more than just coaching. They’re purists coaching coaches, and they’re amazing. They’re really good. They provide a lot of value. They solve problems on the call. They listen. I accountability. It’s great to be a purist coach. I’m more in the trenches. Guy, type of a guy I want to be a more meaningful part of a relationship with my client. And I chose super coaching, but either way, the most important part is that they stay around long enough. Yeah. As soon as people stick around long enough with you, you will become fully booked at some point. So the concept of how do you provide coaching services that are so fun? And meaningful and so impactful and so transformational. I wanted to document all of the ways to do that in the book based on my experience. And so the book gives you both of these tools, the microing and the super coaching in order to get you to the point where you’re fully booked. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Yeah. Go check out the fully Booked Coached book. I’m sure that’s on Amazon.  Ziv Raviv: It  Chris Badgett: is, yeah. Let’s double click again on Micro Nicheing. What do you say to somebody, particularly creative entrepreneur people? They tend to have a lot of different interests and maybe what they get paid for in their day job. There’s some niche they’re in, there’s some hobby niche they love. There’s like maybe a fitness journey they’re on and a certain type of fitness or like they’re into some kind of. Diet nutrition thing or something. How does one choose a micro niche when they’re a polymath or have a lot of different interests and subject matter expertise? Ziv Raviv: A lot of times saying no to some of those ideas is way more important than than which one you chose because you actually. It’s better for you if you start with one and and put in certain amount of work to assess if this is the right one for you. So I have these three tests that I ask myself in advance before I go into a micro niche. I ask myself, how easy will it be to find people for for interviews on a podcast or for collaboration on YouTube or for collaboration of, on an ebook or on a blog? So my, so the first question I ask myself is, how easy will it be to find someone the second and get them to collaborate? The second question is, will they brag about it? So I call this brag ability. And the third question is will they collaborate on helping me sell something? Or will they buy something for me? And they call this the sellability test. So Findability, breakability, and sellability, these three tests initially helped me realize if it’s a good micro niche or not. I can give you an example of where I failed. So I chose to create a podcast called. Plumbing and money Life. Plumbing and money life, yeah. It’s a show for plumbers to help them with their money. And I did some research about how to help them with their Google ads. I did some research about how to help them locally with Facebook ads. I was very proficient with both of these tools. I had a copyright opportunity.  Chris Badgett: I’m getting sold on it right now. There’s plumbers everywhere. They need help. There’s  Ziv Raviv: what they need help. What, so I went in all, all in, and I checked my numbers. There were enough. There were enough plumbers to, there were more plumbers in the world than balloon artists. So good for me. I’m getting into bigger niches now, and I contacted 1000 people and one person agreed to be on the show and it was interviewed on the show. I realized that through the responses as they said no to me, many times, many of them just ignored. But those that said no. Taught me that this is a very shy audience, of course I’m biased. I only talked with a thousand of them. I only was in touch with a thousand of them. I talked with a few of them. Obviously there’s a small number bias, but basically I realized it’s not a good match. When I was under Facebook groups trying to connect, trying to let to get into the head, trying to meet more people, I could not. Ignore the fact that my nose is imagining the smell of what they’re doing because they were sharing pictures or look it, I fixed this and I fixed that, and they were so happy. Yeah. And I started to realize I’m not a good fit for them. I’m not feeling comfortable in, in, in the in, in where they congregate, where they show me those pictures of tulips. So I decided to stop on that. I thought it was easy to find them. I realized they do not wanna be on a show and be featured, right? And I stepped away and on other niches I was able to, get different results and grow. So those three tests are a good starting point. I’ll give you one more. Quick tip for anyone listening, go into sales Navigator on LinkedIn. It’s worth 80 bucks of your money just one month. Do some research with the proper tool and or use the, other tools for research. It doesn’t matter, HPT, whatever, but find a micro niche where you can actually find people and be able to contact them through email or message. And you want a micro niche that has about three to 20,000 people. If there’s more than 20,000 people, it’ll be harder to get them to to actually, respond to you because they’re too busy. Potentially, if there are less than 3000 people, it might be too small to actually make you a living and find enough people. But think about this way. You only need 50 of them to agree to collaborate in a year. 50 people. That’s all want that. 50 people are standing. Be that, that you collaborate with, that you wanna help them and provide them value for free with the podcast interview. That’s all that is standing between you and starting a business that is a serious coaching or educational business. So you want to find a niche that people re, that you will be able to find those 50 people relatively efficiently.  Chris Badgett: What do you, what’s your perspective on like the education entrepreneur niche? I find it somewhat challenging. This is my niche in the sense that we make software in this niche, but yeah. There’s a lot of different types of creators out there. There’s a lot of different types of online education. They’re spread out all over the world. They can’t they’re if you go to LinkedIn, there’s no education entrepreneur like group or as like a job byline. So like within the education entrepreneurs, the creators, like what do you see as a really cool micro niche? Ziv Raviv: That’s a great question. I want, I wanna flip this question just to Yeah. To understand. It’s even better. Would you like to play a game where. We look into lifter LMS as a company that, that micro niches and consider micro niches for you, or would you like me to, would you like to play a game where I, as a coach, I’m thinking about how to find, educational cost creators. Are specific enough that I can maybe go into a micro, like who do you want? Chris Badgett: I, I think the first one. So if you look at lifter LMS, like as an example people like, yeah, let’s talk people like you who are subject matter experts, creators, content creators, coaches niche audience, is an awesome group of people. In many ways, lifter was built like this has always been our core customer, but a lot of other people show up with like different types of e-learning situations and whatnot. And that’s fine. But I’ve always struggled with niching for E-learning or LMS or course creators and coaches and stuff. ’cause I think course creators and coaches is too big. I think I’m outside that 20,000. Guard.  Ziv Raviv: You are. You are, yeah. A lot of time. It’s okay to micro niche by solving one problem. Yeah. Even on a bigger group, right? So when I say three to 20,000, that’s for someone that. Doesn’t know yet, what are they going to solve necessarily. They’re willing to listen and adapt and that’s lift LMS has a proven solution and it’s solves one specific problem. Unfortunately there’s also competition, right? And I think that ai, the AI era. Is forcing you to create a new strategy for Lifter lms? That’s what I think. So it’s almost I don’t remember, was it some Altman said that at some point AI will get to such a level of efficiency of it. It’ll be embedded with so many things in our lives. And that it will be transparent. You will not feel the technology right. You will just experience that everything is easier for you. And to some degree, I think that’s what Lifter LMS has done for me now in my business. We don’t treat lifter. LMS is something that we need to think about. It’s invisible. It’s a tool that we use when we need to train new people, when we need to train. My, our clients teams, when our clients are in the educational world and they need to sell online courses and to sell memberships, right? So it’s a tool that we just assume it’s there for us and we go in and we use it. And it’s like driving a car. You don’t think about the engine, you don’t think about the wheels. You just go in and you drive it, right? So I think that, your approach to selling lifter LMS has to change as well to be to help people see that it’s actually getting more and more transparent. And you see a lot of companies are doing this thing where, for example, Zael you go into Zael, there’s a bot. You tell it what you want to automate, it shows you, oh, so you mean this, and this is the steps of the automation. You go into active campaign. You write an email. You immediately have a chat bot that says, would you like to expand this, like campaign to additional things. You can chat with it and it’ll literally create. Some follow up based on automation and triggers and tags for you. And there’s other platforms that give you like more and more of these feelings where the technology is managing itself to some degree. So obviously I would love it if lift LMSs wins the race and releases a lot of really cool. Features like that and I think that’s very important for people. Back to the question about niching. I think I think that there’s a lot of opportunities, a lot of examples I would consider for for you Chris and for Lyft. The first one is actually business coaches. Yeah. So business coaches often. Need lifting LMS as one of the tools in their tool belt. Some people need a wrench. We need a an LMS. We need it for our clients. We need it for our teams. We need it for our niches, right? For our micro niches. That I’ll give you an example from the Beyond six Figure Podcast. This podcast. It is a podcast for business coaches, right? We contact business coaches, we contact book authors that write books about business and about coaching. We contact podcasters like Johnny Duma and Jo Jordan Harbinger. Were on the show. We contact Walker, right? Like the people that are in the trenches. We were able to get. 45 people and by the end of next week it’ll be 52 people. It’s like very fast. 52 interviews all scheduled. For the most part, they’re already recorded in 12 weeks. Wow. So people are saying, yes, I want to be on your show very fast. And so we’re building relationships with new people. Business coaches, for the most part, they have. Problems that they need to solve. They wanna be featured. And if you look at the numbers, like how many of them say Yes, I wanna be on the show in comparison to those palumbo be before such a completely different experience. Like back then I worked for three months, I got one, an interview, and now with this one in three months, I got a year of content that will be scheduled. For me, and it’s like in the pipelines, and I don’t have to worry about it. And now I’m starting to think about how to collaborate with these people and how to help them. And help them and and ask for the help as well. So I think that if you with Lyft, MS would do something like a secondary podcast maybe, or just leveraging your existing platforms. That could be an example where people are responding very fast. I can imagine a situation where at the end of an interview you tell people. Hey, you are qualified for this package. If you ever choose to try us out, or we have a service where we will migrate your course from this platform to this platform. Some white label thing or whatever. Here’s 90% discount on the white label thing. We’ll move you into Lyft, LMS, literally for free or so on. So that’s just one example of of Microing that will be relatively easy based on my experience. Another way to look at it is to. Go into places where you didn’t go before. So I think that you do need to be on LinkedIn. You need to be loud on LinkedIn. I think you need to even consider the younger generations gen Zs 20 to 27, a type of entrepreneurs. Educate them when they’re young, on TikTok and on vertical videos. So I would definitely put in some work on that type of a front. What do you think how much of this is like stuff that you considered or,  Chris Badgett: I love it. I’ve always loved business coaching. It’s one of the ones that I think resonates the most with me simply because. I’m a business guy, I’m an entrepreneur, so I’m and I’ve been in it a long time and I’ve had business coaches and had amazing experiences and stuff. When you think about the three mega niches like health, wealth, and relationships, so there’s business coaches, there’s life coaches, there’s health coaches, those are all more micro niche and, yeah you’ve triggered like a pa you’ve reminded me the passion I’ve always had for business coaching and I call it, our market, the education entrepreneurs, but the word entrepreneurs in there, which is like business, and a health coach can be an education entrepreneur of their own, but they’re not necessarily helping other entrepreneurs. And I have always probably very similar to you, which is why we resonate, is I like hanging out with other entrepreneurs. We think differently. We’re a small percentage of the population, we’re in that we’re in our bubbles, different entrepreneur bubbles and yeah, it’s, yeah. I appreciate what you’re saying and I see how you’re a great coach. ’cause you’re like lasering in and just on a podcast episode, it’s awesome. Part ano, another question I would ask you where I think people get mixed up, and these are just a bunch of business terms, but there’s like niche. There’s your customer avatar, your ideal customer profile, your target market segments and all this stuff. I think people get a little overwhelmed with all the slicing and dicing. I think you’ve done a good job with saying Hey, just focus on the micro niche, right? And Sure. Within that you probably have the ideal floris shop owner. That’s like a perfect fit. And that’s like your avatar. And like for a lifter, one of the things that’s always a challenge not with you because you’re both, you’re also, you’re an educator, but you’re also an awesome WordPress website builder. But we have a split audience of agencies, I build sites for clients, or I’m building this site for me and my niche and my passion and stuff like that. And some people are both like you. But I don’t know if you have any comments on that. Just like the, I see a lot of people get trapped in who is my customer avatar or what’s my niche? Or those just. The, either create a ational person or somebody you’ve actually worked with or earlier version of yourself. There’s just so much here that I think it gets overwhelming sometimes.  Ziv Raviv: I think that Microing actually helps you make your avatar a, a group of real people. And I think it’s way more efficient. You’re  Chris Badgett: guessing, you’re not guessing. It’s like this is, yeah. Yeah.  Ziv Raviv: It’s a person you met. It’s a person you talked to. Yeah. So instead of having this really fun and clever exercise where you answer questions based on a fix person. You have that perfect person guide you through every decision you make. That’s something I never really resonated with on a personal level. I wanted real people to talk to me. And these days with ai, you get AI to answer the questions for you and then you are trying to convince like to you serve a client and your avatar, which is completely fictious. That was designed by a machine for you based on the stuff that it’s read. There’s zero soul in it. PE people buy things from people. Yeah. From humans. And they buy it based on their own problems, based on things they want. And if you are fixing theoretical problems, you are, it’s going to be very hard to get people to notice you. It’s not going to come up. Authentic. It’s going to be really frustrating. So I think that, I think it’s really important to, to talk with people. And when you micro niche and you start to collaborate with thought leaders in that micro niche you realize what are the problems. And you have to be curious to ask the questions and to find what they want to you to solve. And that over time helps you. Realize what they need and if you really want in desire to serve, if you are in servitude of a group of people, of a tribe, of a micro niche, then you would try to solve all of their problems. Really? Yeah. As I’ll tell you what they  Chris Badgett: are, right? Like you don’t have to guess. Ziv Raviv: Yeah. And then you will try to solve their small problems and you will try to solve their bigger problems and you’ll try to solve the biggest problems. At some point you’ll notice which of those problems actually. Is the most impactful, transformational problem that you are really good at solving, and that’s what you take into the Google ads or the Facebook ads on or to the scaling, bit of, let’s do this on other micro issues and so on. I think if you ask yourself I will ask you instead of saying, who do you think is more influential in their ecosystem, the WordPress developer. That if they know lift LMS, so well then they could refer their clients to lift LMS or the business coaches that that guide clients through decisions including potentially the decision to. Launch online courses or membership sites. So what do you think which one, the developer or the coach, which one do you think is like their world is respected a little bit higher than the other one?  Chris Badgett: That’s a tough question for me. And the reason why it is because it just happened organically where I was like. Just another freelancer building websites for clients. But now, like the whole, like WordPress community and a lot of agencies and stuff, I’m like a, I’m known and like wherever I go, like on social media WordPress is with me, and and it’s like effortless. But for business coaches, I also have a lot of VA value to add and. Just for whatever reason, I would say the website building folks, the technologists, whether they’re a developer or a person like me who just puts plugins and themes together to solve business problems, those type of people have always just resonated easily. But I see the opportunity with, the coaching industry and. All of that as well. So it’s not the right answer, but I feel like both are good. I’m just saying for whatever reason the website builders, I call them WordPress professionals, that tribe I just naturally fit, or I grew up inside the bubble, so I’m like already there, in the micro niche. Yeah, because I’ve been doing this since 2008 with WordPress. But I’ve also been an entrepreneur that whole time and interacting with other entrepreneurs and business coaches and getting help and going to masterminds and taking courses and all that stuff too.  Ziv Raviv: I think in both cases you have a lot of value that you bring to the table. Like with the WordPress WordPress professionals. You speak the language, obviously you. It’s the easier solution in a way. But the business coaches, which is why it’s  Chris Badgett: Like you starting with the balloon artist. ’cause you Yeah, you did a lot of that and you were already in the bubble, right? Yeah. Hey guys. Yeah.  Ziv Raviv: So that’s like the easy solution the low hanging foot in a way, which I think you already. Maybe even exhausted to some degree. ’cause it’s already there. You actually can manage the maintain your reputation with a couple of events a year with so some not. It’s not a lot of efforts to just maintain it so your team can actually maintain that for you in a way. I think that business coaches, you have a lot of value to I’ve learned so much from just connecting with you. I did a strategy session with you a while back, and that strategy session made me a better coach. It just opened me to the way you look at things and it inspired me to dramatically, I actually talk about it in, in the book. Awesome. So it’s really something that you can bring value to other business coaches and I think. I think these days they are, they’re very influential on their clients. So I think that their ward is considered like they, they take their ward, they take the ward a lot they list. So both of them are mavens, right? Yeah. But I think that it’s time to maybe try a new group of mavens. To  Chris Badgett: leave the nest. Yeah, that’s yeah. That’s awesome, Ziv. That’s awesome. I wanted to interview you, but I also got a coaching session.  Ziv Raviv: This was fun.  Chris Badgett: That’s Ziv, Ravi. Go get his book the Fully Booked coach. You can find that on Amazon. So check that out beyond Six Figures podcast. About how many episodes are out as of now?  Ziv Raviv: Right now it is 15. Okay. And they’re going live every week. And and it’s been a tremendous opportunity to create this resource for the industry because if you are a business coach and you’re listening to this, you get. A lot of ideas about different business coaches in different niches and their different hurdles and their different ideas and modalities and the money that they make, the amount of clients like we’re such a group of privileged people. We business coaches is such an amazing business model to be a business coach because you only need about 10 people, or 15 people, or 20 clients, that’s it, 20 clients and you are really doing well. In your life in, like in, in creating results for people in reputation and so on. And if you get there to your fully booked and then you only need to replace maybe three clients a year. As a business owner, how many sales scores and sales you need to bring in every year, every month, every week. A business coach only needs to be active enough to replace three or five clients. If it’s, if they’re good, they’ll need to replace three or five clients a year, and that’s not so hard. So you can actually get to become fully booked. Relatively fast in a year or in 18 months or so. If you follow the process in the book, and I think if you are listening to this and you are a a business coach or an educational entrepreneur that also want to do business coaching, and reach out to me on zero.com or say hi on beyond six figures and we’ll be happy to to interview you. Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s ziv reiv ziv reiv.com. Go get the book. Thanks for coming back on the show, Ziv. We’re gonna have to do this again. Let’s not wait three years. We’re gonna have to increase the cadence maybe once a year. I would love that.  Ziv Raviv: Would love that.  Chris Badgett: But thank you for coming. We really appreciate it. Ziv Raviv: Thank you, Chris. Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Meet Serial Education Entrepreneur And Super Coach Ziv Raviv appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In his LMScast solo episode, Chris Badgett discusses the new safeguards in LifterLMS 9.0 and delves further into the significance of WordPress LMS website security. He describes how tools like Akismet spam detection, sophisticated CAPTCHA integrations with Cloudflare Turnstile and Google reCAPTCHA, and IP blocking for repeatedly unsuccessful checkouts help guard against bots and fraudulent activities. By implementing secured media, Chris also resolves a persistent WordPress problem with the Media Library, guaranteeing that only enrolled students can access course materials and downloads. He highlights effective practices, including employing technologies like Vimeo’s domain limitation for video security, depending on safe hosting with backups, evaluating admin accounts, and enforcing strong passwords. Chris emphasizes that LifterLMS has always placed a high priority on protecting course developers, their users, and their intellectual property going one step further with version 9.0 while understanding the necessity to strike a balance between security and user experience. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. Today I’m joined by a special guest and it’s just me. I haven’t done a solo episode in a while. My name’s Chris Badgett. I’m the CEO and co-founder of Lifter LMS and host of the LMS CAST Podcast. Today we’re gonna do an episode about. WordPress websites and security, particularly in the learning management system niche. So recently Lifter LMS released a new version, a major version, which is called Lifter, LMS 9.0, and it has a lot of new security features in it. And I wanted to discuss security with you because it’s helpful to understand and get into the details. Security, what it is, how it works, what it’s preventing, and so on. So some of the great things about Lifter LMS 9.0 there’s so many things security related, but just to go through them the first is that we now have a setting you can turn on to block IP addresses that have 10 failed checkouts in 15 minutes. And basically what that does. Is that prevents bots on the internet or scammers from essentially trying to create free accounts or use stolen credit cards or fraudulent credit cards to test them on your website to see if they can find one that works. So the reality of the internet is there is a lot of. Scammers, bots that are trying to get access to your website. There’s probably actually a lot more of it going on all the time than you realize. But the truth is WordPress is actually a very secure platform. LifterLMS is known as the most secure learning management system because since day one. Which is over 12 years ago, we’ve always been focused on security. And protecting the users of lifter LMS, but also your users. Users. So we’ve implemented from day one the best security practices and we have continuously improved as time goes on, making things more secure, adapting to new issues of the time. So on. When someone tries to, check out too many times in a row, it’s not a real transaction and lifter LMS will stop that and block their IP address temporarily. So if somebody made a honest to goodness mistake and, entered 10 different credit cards of their own trying to make it work, they are gonna be able to get back in, but they’re gonna be locked out for a while. And most of the stuff that is gonna block is actual fraudulent activity. And if you don’t know what a IP address is, it’s just a location on the internet where somebody is trying to access your website from. So your router, your wifi, has a specific IP address or a location that you are connecting from. So if a spammer is at home. Trying to test credit cards on your website, they’re gonna get blocked. Anybody in that home is not going to be able to keep doing what they’re doing. And the reality is that most of that is actually bots or computer programs that are running and, trying to test hundreds or even thousands or tens of thousands of cards on a schedule. So it will shut those. Fraudsters, scammers, and scammers down in their tracks. The other thing we implemented in lifter LMS 9.0 is the most advanced capture protection currently available. So there’s two types of the main tools that you can integrate with for free to create a kind of a login or checkout. Or registration blocker if somebody is not a legitimate human or real user of your site. Those two integrations that we’ve added natively into the free version of LifterLMS one is called Recapture and the other is called Turnstile by CloudFlare. And basically what these technologies do, you basically sign up for free, you get an API key. You put it on your site and through the lifter LMS settings. And what they’re gonna do is they’re gonna use the advanced capture technology that those companies have to essentially score your user’s behavior on your website. And if anything looks out of line like it’s a bot that’s like clicking on a million things at once. Or, too many like rapid actions all at once. It’s not really a human activity and there’s a lot more that goes into scoring than just that. But just as an example it will stop those people from being able to register or log in or in some way get into your site when they’re not a legitimate user. And it’s likely, again, not a person, it is likely a computer program. That a spammer or a scammer is using to try to get into your website. So LifterLMS is implemented the most advanced capture technology currently available for free to Protect You, and we have resources on our website that show you how to set it up. It’s really just a couple things you have to copy and paste and turn on, and you’re good to go and you have dramatically improved the security and protection of your website. We also did a native deeper integration with Akismet, which is also an anti-spam solution that you can turn on to prevent spammers from registering and commenting and doing things on your website that you don’t want ’em. There to do. So Smit has been around WordPress for a really long time. I highly recommend it. It’s a great tool. You can get started for free with that as well. Again, the integration of that is built for free into the core free version of Lifter LMS. Now, let’s talk about a different aspect of security. Let’s talk about your intellectual property, your content, your media. So lifter, LMS as if you’ve been using our learning management system, you know you have to enroll in a course or a membership, and maybe you have to pay to enroll or maybe it’s free. But either way, you have to become a, a user of the site that is allowed or granted access to specific course content or other membership protected content on your website. That whole user system protects your intellectual property from just being public on the internet. And for a lot of people, they’re charging for access to their courses and memberships with Lyft or LMS, and it might not be lifetime access. Maybe you have to pay a monthly fee or you sign up for an annual membership. There’s a million different pricing models you can implement, but in terms of protecting your intellectual property. WordPress has had a challenge for a long time where the way that it handles media, like in the WordPress Media Library, which you’ve probably heard of those media files are actually public on the internet, and a lot of people don’t realize that. If you’re in a course, if you’re a course creator. And you’re adding a PDF or a PowerPoint presentation, or an audio file or a download of some kind to a lesson that’s actually publicly available in the media library, which ha, which means the way that it’s publicly available, unless you really get into the guts of WordPress. You may not have realized that, but the WordPress Media Library, every file in there, every image. Every PDF, everything has a URL associated with it that is public to the whole internet. So LifterLMS has solved this problem so that if you add media inside of a course. Or membership protected areas you can select which course or membership someone needs to be actively enrolled in. In order for that content to display on the screen. So basically we have solved the issue that WordPress has had for a very long time about the media library being public, and we don’t fault WordPress for that. It started as a blogging platform. So when people would add images to a blog post, there was no reason to protect that image file and it was just publicly available all over the internet. So if you’ve ever used Google search and done an image search, a lot of times you’re just surfacing media files from the WordPress media Library, which is not protected by default. But Lifter, LMS has solved that with protected media. We have other innovations as well. Where, when you’re creating a course, let’s say you’re creating a quiz and you’re putting images into the quiz questions, all that stuff is automatically protected outside of the WordPress media library. So the only the enrolled students in that specific course or membership can see that particular media. So we’ve given you both smart media protection that’s happening, where it should be at a global level. Also giving you the ability to restrict content anywhere on your website to specific courses and memberships. And by content media files. So that’s something you should know about how the WordPress Media Library works, and it’s always been important to us to help course creators, coaches, education entrepreneurs, school administrators. Protect their media assets. So we’ve locked that down to the maximum ability that you can, and there’s a lot more in lifter LMS 9.0, but I just wanted to highlight some of the top security innovations there. And also just do a solo episode around security. Why it matters, what it is, how it works, why is it important, so for example. Lifter, LMS has a password strength setting that you can choose to make super strong, make it medium strength, or make it weak. Now, the, one of the most important things about website security is having particularly a site that has a lot of users on it, not just you as a WordPress administrator. Or a couple people that work on the site. But if you have hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of users, every user account, ideally in a perfect world, would have a very strong random 16 character password that’s only ever used on that one website. It’s not also that person’s. Bank account login or email account login or social media account login. Strong passwords are really important, and if you want to enforce that on your site, lifter, LMS, because people are creating accounts as they enroll in courses and memberships. They are, they’re essentially creating a user, a WordPress user on your website with a login. So you can enforce that, Hey, you really need to have a strong password. Now, keep in mind that there’s also a concept of permissions. So in WordPress there’s a lot of different user roles, like the person who can do everything. The site owner is called the administrator, but there’s actually several other default roles like editors and authors and subscribers and so on. In default, WordPress Lifter, LMS has roles too, the LMS manager, the student the instructor and these different levels have different per permissions. So all I’m trying to say here is even though your student has the lowest levels of permissions, ’cause they’re just a user that can log in and consume their course or membership content. That doesn’t mean that if their pass, if their account got compromised, that somebody could come in and, start changing plugins or looking, doing, changing the website and stuff like that. The permissions are already way reduced to the necessary permissions for that user role. But even still a student is entitled to their, privacy and security. So even if you know your community of students or learners or clients are not security experts, you can still enforce a stronger level of security by using strong passwords. Now, if you’ve been on the internet for a while. Like myself, with over 15 years of being a power user, I probably have something like 3000 accounts in different apps and websites and logins and things, stores, whatever, on the internet. Because of that, I use a password manager. I particularly like one password. And what that allows me to do is I don’t have to remember all my. Super strong, at least 16 character random passwords. My password manager, which has its own levels of security on it allows me to quickly create new logins that are always unique, always strong, and I can always log in from all my devices, from my phone, my laptop, my desktop, and so on. This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells in guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. Chris Badgett: So if you’re old school, like we all were one day, you might’ve kept us. Spreadsheet, or even before that, you would write ’em down on a piece of paper, right? And then as you start getting more passwords, you start creating a spreadsheet, and then ultimately you graduate to using a password manager. And your whole world just gets so much easier, and you’re being a much more secure citizen of the internet by not reusing passwords, by always using strong passwords. So I highly recommend that you start using a password manager. Like One Password or LastPass, and there’s some other ones out there. The other thing when it comes to security is you should always look at your users on your website. And particularly there’s a filter for who are all the administrator users on my website. And when you look at that, you can see. Okay, there’s me, there’s a freelancer I work with, there’s my business partner and so on. But what happens over time with some people is, particularly if you are hiring out a lot of different people to work on your website, is you start handing out administrator passwords and they just exist on your site. And maybe it wasn’t even. The business owner of who you were working with, it was a team member who worked there, maybe they’re not working there anymore, and so on. So it’s always good to review the administrators on your website. And if there’s anybody on there that you know is probably a great person but doesn’t need to be on there anymore go ahead and delete them, delete that user off the site. Pro tip, when you delete a user, you can assign all their content to yourself or somebody else. You definitely want to do that. If that person was, creating content on your website and WordPress prompts you with how to do that. Another thing you can do is you can just reduce somebody’s role from being an administrator to being a subscriber. So if somebody comes back, a freelancer you worked with, and they’re like, Hey. Let’s do another project together, and it’s been a year since we’ve worked together. You still have them as that lowest permission level as a subscriber, and you can just move ’em back up to administrator. Obviously, the most secure thing you could do is just delete that user and when you work with somebody, again, create a new admin user or whatever role user you need for them to work on your website. Another part of security is having backups. So if something goes wrong, you need to be able to revert your site to basically restore your database and files. Now there are a lot of WordPress plugins that can help with things like backups, but the reality is, particularly in the WordPress learning management system, niches. This is like table stakes for good hosting. So you should always have a good web host that is doing daily backups, even monitoring your site for anything that looks off or things not loading or the site is down. And you should also always have a web host that if there is an issue, even if you’re not a developer, all you have to do is call or send an email. They can fix your site or restore it for you. So when you’re selecting web hosting, I highly recommend the middle to upper tier. Which does mean it’s more expensive. It’s gonna come with more of these security features built in. Blocking bad traffic for you so that you don’t have to do it as much on your own website. And also. They have a quote, disaster recovery plan if something were to go wrong and you needed to restore your site. Another thing that lifter LMS does is it has a setting called copy protection. So if you turn that on, what that does is that allows you to. For your users not to be able to copy and paste stuff off of your website. So if you have text content inside of a lesson or some members only content, they literally won’t be able to copy and paste. They get a little message if they try to do that. So that’s just another level of security. Now it’s important to note that. There’s only so much you can do. If somebody wants to pull out their phone and take a picture of what they see on your website while they’re a paying customer and logged in, there’s nothing you can do to stop that. So security is a game of just do as much as you can, but people are people and if you have downloadable PDFs and you’re. Training, somebody may share that with a friend, and there’s only so much you can do about that. And another pro tip for you, a lot of course creators and membership site owners are using a tool called Vimeo for their videos. I highly recommend Vimeo. It’s very popular among the course creator and membership site community. But there’s a feature that not everybody knows about. Vimeo Pro where you can set a website domain where the video is allowed to be playable. If you have a video, you put it inside your lesson and in Vimeo you say, Hey, this website is only, or this video is only playable on the website, my academy.com. If somebody were to somehow find the link. To that video, they’re not gonna be able to play it through vimeo’s protection of that intellectual property through the domain level protection. So that’s just another layer of security that you can add to your WordPress LMS website. It’s one of the things that makes Vimeo great, and that’s super easy to set up and even set up as a preset. So whenever you upload a video. To Vimeo, it will always have that protection on by default. So it can only be playable on your website. And if it’s only playable on your website and the video’s only published inside of an area like a lesson or a membership protected page, you’ll be protected in that way. So Lifter LMS has long been known as the most secure. Learning management system for WordPress 9.0, which just released, has taken that to a whole new level to protect you, to protect your users, to protect your intellectual property, content, and media. So definitely check out lifter LMS 9.0. If you have any questions about that or about security in general feel free to reach out to the lifter LMS team. I hope you enjoyed. This solo episode on security, I want to see you keep your WordPress LMS website secure follow best practices. It is okay to be human like. So let me give an example. If you enforce really strong passwords but your audience is particularly let’s say like older generation maybe not as good with passwords and they’re having trouble even just creating a strong password or knowing what that is. ’cause it needs special characters, numbers, capitalization, lowercase, and all this stuff. There are times when it’s okay to reduce your security stands to a medium strength password. Just to make sure your users can actually get into your site. But so it, you do wanna accommodate and not make things too hard. But I always like to err on the side of being as secure as possible to make sure everyone’s protected, you, your users, your website, your content, and so on. Thank you for checking out this episode of LMS Cast and engaging in this conversation around security. If you have any questions on any of that, just reach out to us and I hope you have a great rest of your day. Take care. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post WordPress LMS Website Security With Chris Badgett appeared first on LMScast.

Victor Julio Coupe, a sales and SEO expert, shares his innovative strategies for selling in today's oversaturated market. He emphasizes building genuine relationships over aggressive tactics, advocating for authentic communication to foster comfort with clients. Victor discusses the differences between B2B and B2C sales approaches and how cultural nuances impact strategies. He also touches on the importance of personal authority in online sales, showcasing how authenticity can greatly enhance engagement and success in selling courses and memberships.