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 In this LMScast, Kimba Cooper-Martin, a gamification specialist from Kimba Digital, discuss how course designers can make learning more enjoyable and interesting in this podcast episode. In addition to discussing the drawbacks of “over-gamification,” which can put strain or stress on certain students, Kimba explores the psychology behind well-known platforms like Duolingo and explains why its leaderboards, buddy hunts, streaks, and badges function. She presents the concept of many player types achievers, socializers, explorers, and killers and explains why it’s crucial to comprehend these characteristics before introducing any game elements. Kimba also emphasizes the significance of ethical gamification, ensuring that users are aware of what they’re getting into and that the mechanics really help them achieve their objectives rather than controlling them. She goes on to describe how Kimba Digital, her firm, assists course and membership owners in determining the motivation types of their audience, enhancing completion rates, boosting engagement, and including well-considered gamified components. In order to increase attendance, keep viewers interested, and motivate them to do their assignments, Chris and Kimba conclude the session by going over real-world examples, such as utilizing badges in LifterLMS, including comedy or themes from your business, and utilizing Easter eggs or live challenges during Zoom trainings. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest from across the pond. Her name is Kimba Cooper Martin. You can find her@kimbadigital.com. While you’re over there, check out the freebies. You can find those on her menu of her oversight. But Kimba is an expert in gamification. We’re gonna get into how to make learning fun. Again, and like all kinds of cool things you may not have thought about that you can do to make your courses and training programs more fun, more engaging. But first, welcome to the show, Kimba.  Kimba Cooper-Martin: Oh, thank you for having me, Chris. I’m really glad to be here. I’m excited to no doubt with you about gamification.  Chris Badgett: Awesome. We are definitely gonna do that. Let’s set the stage with an example instead of a high level, like what is gamification question. Let’s just provide an example that people would know. Potentially from Duolingo. I know that’s that’s really relatable. Language learning is a, a niche within online education and a lot of people have tried it or seen people doing it. What makes Duolingo fun, addictive, and, compelling to continue with.  Kimba Cooper-Martin: Oh, okay. Ang is a great example, but it’s also controversial. So I’m very excited to talk about this one. And I love to use it as an example because they use lots of different game elements. They steal lots of things from the game world and put them into their learning platform. So things like streaks. Every day you log in, you keep a streak for a long time. I’m at 1050 days with my Spanish streak, which is I dunno if that just shows that I’ve addicted or whether they’re very good at what they do. They do things like friends quests, where you work towards small challenges with a friend, a small mission, which is very similar to the games world. They do lots and lots of different things, badges, rewards, leaderboards, all sorts of different things. The controversial part though is that I have known people to stop using Duolingo because it’s over gamified. Okay? They joined it because they wanted to learn a language, and what happens is they end up with this massive feeling of stress and I have to log in every day. I have to do X, Y, and Z. Or, I’m competing because I want to get up to the Pearl League, when actually what I want is to learn this language. And I know that for some people it is over gamified, but that’s something really important to discuss as well, because, adding gamification into whatever it is that you’re doing, whether it’s a course or a launch or a community whatever it is that you are gamifying, it’s really important to think what is it that my users are hoping to get out of this experience? Every time you’re gonna add something, because that will hopefully avoid you doing what some perceive GA Duolingo to have done, which is over gamifying. Now, this comes down to personality type as well. So for me, I just avoid the features that I’m not interested in. I don’t think about them, I don’t worry about them, but for some people, they can’t not think about those things. It’s part of their nature that they want to tick all the boxes, they wanna achieve all the things. Even if that is at the detriment of what they actually wanted to be there for in the first place. So they are a really good example if you wanna go and have a look and see some kinds of different mechanics being used, game mechanics, and just see how they get you to take more action than you might have wanted to Anyway, just play for that a little bit longer. Just do that one more lesson that you might not have done if you weren’t being gamified.  Chris Badgett: Let’s drop into the psychology a little bit because, gamification in many contexts is covered topically. It’s oh, you just want your people to have some dopamine and the therefore they’re gonna be addicted and they’ll keep coming back, or whatever. But all of these things like streaks or leaderboards, they play different. They play on different psychology or. Just human desires, like what’s in this mix of the human mind that gamification taps into. And of course you could use it in a maybe not so ethical way, but done well. It’s a beautiful thing. So there you always have to be ethical, but what are we triggering in people’s brains?  Kimba Cooper-Martin: Oh my gosh. Okay. So that’s two very big separate topics. So let’s cover one, and if I don’t remember to come back to it, we’ll cover the other one. Start with personality and psychology, and then we’ll come back to ethics, if that’s okay. Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Kimba Cooper-Martin: Personality and psychology, right? So gamification. I talk of it being a motivational tool and. It’s not one thing, it’s not as simple as, a mouse or a hammer or something where it’s one object and it does one thing. Gamification, steals things from learning and market learning, development, marketing management, and the idea is that it improves on existing systems and processes to get better results. It is a tool and it is a tool set more than one tool, and those tools are best used for different personality types now. The way that I work and the way that my business works when we gamify things is we use Richard Bartel’s player types as a gentle called Richard Bartel. He wrote some player types in the eighties, I can’t remember exactly which of the eighties, but in the eighties, and it was designed around video game player types. And he doesn’t really like the fact that we all use it for gamification, but we do so tough. So the four main player types that he talks about. Are achievers. They are people who like to achieve things. They are motivated by achieving things. So that could be the people who love to get a badge. They’re the people who love to get to the top of a leaderboard that I, I’m one of these, if you give me a sticker, I’m gonna do more, gonna do more because I wanna achieve that sticker. They like it when you get a title, when you achieve something or a certificate. Next up is your socializers. These people aren’t motivated by achieving. They don’t care about achieving. They’re there because they want to socialize with other human beings. They wanna help other human beings. In a game scenario, they’d be the ones who would help someone else to achieve what they wanna achieve because they’re more interested in socializing and networking. Next one is explorer. These are your kinds of people who will spend time going all around the game world, looking for hidden things. They want to know. They want the hidden experiences, the Easter eggs. They want the things that are. Not the most obvious. They’re the ones who are gonna be finding the cheat codes. They’re the ones who are finding their way around. They are what’s that phrase? They’re the grammar Nazis in your world. They’ll spot all of the little intricacies and they love that, and they’re motivated by that. And the final one doesn’t sound good, but it’s just a bad name. It’s, there’s nothing actually wrong with this player type. They’re called killers. So they are the people that if you are playing a game, they would. Be the ones that wanna get to the top of the leaderboard, not because they wanna achieve like the achievers, but because they don’t want anyone else to get to the top of the leaderboard in a game scenario. They might kill the other people on their team because they wanna get to the X, Y, and Z. And I’ve talked about this on podcasts before, and somebody said to me I’m not a killer because I’m, I don’t fit with any of the profiles, but I’m not a killer because I’m not killing. I’m not trying to achieve things in spite of all of the people. It’s just one of the person. So I just, this and I said to them, you are a killer. Like my, I know so many people like that where they’ll play a game and they’re normally a le achiever personality. They wanna achieve. But when a specific person is playing, they want, I have to win this game. So this other person doesn’t win. It’s the same thing. So when you are designing a, these are top like level player types. I think there’s 16 in total. Those are the kind of main ones. And like any personality framework, you’ll be a bit of all of them and you’ll be different ones in different scenarios, and you might feel like you don’t fit into any of them, and that’s okay. But generally speaking, if you can create, gamification that fits the kind of people in your particular audience and figure out, are they achievers? Are they socializers? Socializers are gonna hate it if you put them up in competition against each other. But killers and achievers love that. So you need to figure out, like in your course launch, if you’ve got a community as part of your course, what kinds of personalities are in there? And you need to design to motivate those kinds of people. Because if you put the wrong game elements in, you are gonna switch people off, which means they’re not gonna get. The most out of your course or whatever it is that you are doing, it’s the opposite of what you want. Now, built in with all of that is what everyone talks about, and I shouldn’t roll my eyes, but it’s the first thing people say is, I wanna make this more fun. I wanna add more dopamine. I wanna do X, Y, and Z. But fun is different for everybody. Motivation is different for everybody, and not everybody needs dopamine. Dopamine to get things done. It’s different. People want different things. So that’s the kind of personality side of it and the kind of psychological side of it. And there are lots of psychological different things depending on the. Game mechanic that you’re using, each one will have a different thing that it switches on in your brain. But anything with these things, a lot of it is test and learn and a lot of it is common sense as well. People have come to me and they’ve said, I don’t wanna add gamification into my membership or my course, or my. Free challenge, whatever it is, because I don’t want, I, because I don’t wanna add a challenge in, for example, I know my audience hate that, and I think that’s the only gamification there is with leaderboards and streaks. And so we redesigned their, their whatever project that was to work for socializing explorers, because we surveyed their audience. We found out that was the majority of the player types they had. You really need to think, actually, my gamification doesn’t need to look like Duolingo. My gamification. Needs to look right for the kinds of people that we’ve got. So that’s the personality, psychological kind of side of it. Ethical gamification. This is my absolute bag. This is my, I love this. A while back I did a live video and it’s probably gone from Facebook now ’cause they deleted them where we played a game of evil or not evil, where I talked about some of the big brands and how they’d use gamification. And I simply told the scenario information that’s freely available on the internet, and I asked the audience, do you think that’s evil or not evil? Fun game. The thing is that. In every scenario, it can be argued both ways. The big brand is doing what they think is right to motivate their staff. Or their team, or their students. And motivate themselves to achieve X, Y, and z. And you can’t guarantee when you put something into the world, how people are gonna react, how it’s gonna actually work in practice, and the length people will go to achieve X, Y, and Z. And so in some of these scenarios and some of these bigger scenarios, it was causing, actual physical problems for staff. It was causing sickness and all sorts of different things. Wasn’t the intention, whether or not. The brand’s got consent of the people taking part beforehand would be my biggest question as to whether or not it’s actually evil. I talk about gamification ethical, gamification all the time and I start with consent. Are people signing up to this, knowing what they’re getting into? And you don’t have to use the word gamification. Sometimes that puts people off. I have had people join my courses and my memberships and say, I’m not taking part in this gamification mark. It’s not for me. Absolutely fine. Does not bother me. I’d rather that you get what you need to get out of this scenario. But having that buy-in, making sure you really understand why they’re there, what they wanna achieve, and making sure that it’s boundaried and that people can opt out of different things. Is really crucial, especially if you’re gonna do things like putting people to compete against each other, if you’re gonna do those kinds of challenges, things where can people compete for prizes? Make sure that it’s opt in or give people a chance to opt out and that it won’t affect their final completion of their course or anything like that. It’s beneficial to them. It will keep everybody happy and help them to achieve what they wanna achieve at the end of the day. But the ethical gamification thing, it’s so easy. Nobody sets out to be evil, as far as I’m aware. But it’s so easy to think I’m gonna do this thing. It’s gonna be so fun. And then out of the end of it pops something that you weren’t anticipating and all of a sudden you look evil and you were just trying to help everybody out. So you’ve just gotta, I think the best way to avoid this really is always to do the minimum viable product thing. Trial things, test things, get people to have a go and be honest with people about the fact that you’re testing things, because if your intentions are good, that makes all the difference, I think a lot of the time. Chris Badgett: Much to dig into there. Before we go deeper though, tell us more about Kimba Digital. What do you do, what do you offer at Kimba Digital?  Kimba Cooper-Martin: Okay. So yeah, gamification consultancy. We work with online course creators online membership owners, people who launch those kinds of things. So that might be someone who runs online summits or online affiliate launches. Online challenges and social media. We do social media, gamified, social media templates as well. But we work with those people one-to-one to. Improve what they’ve got in a way that makes sense for their audience. So people might say, as I’ve already discussed, Kimba, can you make my online course more fun? But fun isn’t a business objective, so we’d have to dig into what’s actually happening. Do you want. More people to complete the course. Do you want more people to engage with your online community? If you have a community as part of your course, do you want more people to si sign up or to convert from the end of it into upsells? Are you looking for more of them to give you testimonials without your input? What is the thing you’re trying to achieve? And then we’ll gamify that. But first we’ll send them a survey, figure out who the player types are. Then we’ll do the consultation part, and then they’ll go away and implement that. So that’s what we do. And we have, like I say, we have templates and things, and we have a free Facebook group, the big business game as well. But our main bread and butter is working with people. Hand in hand to get those marginal gains. Especially, if somebody’s been running a successful course for a while and they’re like, I’m at a point or an on, or an online membership. We’re at a point where we really need to do something, but we’re not sure what we think the gamification might be the answer more than likely would be able to help them.  Chris Badgett: That’s great. I wanna talk to the person listening that’s new to all this. So just to use a basic example, like in LifterLMS, there’s achievement badges that can be triggered. You can set ’em up to trigger off of certain things getting completed, like lessons or entire courses or passing a quiz and things like that. Nice. And I’ve always thought that achievement badging is underused. And. You can be serious. You can be extremely funny and playful with it. Like I remember in MailChimp, it’s not really a achievement badge, but right before you hit send on an email, there was like this nervous monkey thing that would happen. And I always just thought that was fun, but that’s silly. So you can be serious or silly. If somebody’s I don’t know if achievement badges are for me. What’s another way for them to explore that avenue?  Kimba Cooper-Martin: Do you mean to encourage them to use badges or to look at a different just badges,  Chris Badgett: like to stay on badges  Kimba Cooper-Martin: Okay. I think that there’s a natural it’s very natural for somebody to think gamification isn’t for me. Badges isn’t for me. I’m not fun, or my business isn’t fun, or my industry isn’t fun. What I would say is if your industry isn’t fun and you start being fun, you’re gonna stand out. And if you are, like I said earlier as well, everyone thinks different things are fun. So you can make your badges thematic to what you do or who you are. So one organization that we worked with. The lady who ran the, it was a membership but the lady who ran it was really into Disney, and so the thing that she was selling was nothing to do with Disney, but all of her audience knew she was really into Disney. So we themed everything in that membership, including things like badges and rewards. To be Disney focused, but it wasn’t just any Disney focused, it was things like, we made a little gif of her, like waving with like Mickey Mouses, make it fun and silly, but related to either the brand that’s running it and or inside jokes that’s inside. Inside Jokes are great for the explorers. They love being part of an exclusive kind of community, and it also builds that. That sense of community as well makes it stronger. It doesn’t have to be all singing and dancing. It doesn’t have to be posh. It doesn’t have to be perfect. If you’ve got it already built into the LMS, then that’s even better because a lot of the work is done for you, and I think you can over badge. So start out small if you are concerned. Then you can always try and then take it away if it didn’t work. And I would say a good place to start, absolute best place to start is reward them for starting. It sounds so obvious, but it’s. It’s the hardest thing to get started, especially with an online course. And reward them for the most minute step at the beginning, creating their profile or watching the intro video or whatever that might be as a positive reinforcer. It’s great for the achievers, it’s great for those explorers who are looking for those kinds of little things as well. It doesn’t have to be serious. It doesn’t have to be patronizing. That’s another thing I hear a lot is people saying, oh, it’s condescending. I’m an adult. Why would I want a badge? People like the most surprising people, love a badge. Absolutely love it. So if you don’t wanna make it condescending. You don’t have to do that either. It don’t have to be a well done for doing it. It can be even a progress check-in. It can be you’ve created, you’ve done this. It can, you can still say, well done. You’ve done this first video, but it doesn’t have to be a, you get an award for doing something minor. They don’t have to see it like that. There’s lots of ways that you can reframe it. So it’s still rewarding without being patronizing. But I would say. I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve had lots of people come through my. I don’t have a membership open at the moment, but I have had two memberships for a long time and courses. And of all of that time, I maybe count on one hand the amount of people who didn’t like it or weren’t interested in it Once they got on board, I would just say, give it a go. Honestly, it’s if it’s a tool that’s already there and people aren’t using it, Chris, I’m very surprised they should be getting on it because it’s an easy tick off box and it’s not something, it’s not it’s not like competitional, scarcity or FOMO that could be off-Putting a badge is just a badge. It’s just a, it’s like somebody giving you a bunch of flowers. It’s not gonna, nobody’s gonna be annoyed by that.  Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s awesome. The, the other context I wanted to talk to you about with courses, you mentioned gamifying events. So if somebody’s doing a cohort based course and they’re like delivering those sessions live on Zoom. With slides and talking head or whatever. How do you gamify while you’re doing live delivery? What could you do. If you’re doing all right, in this week’s lesson we’re going to get into X, Y, and Z. How do I gamify that in Zoom?  Kimba Cooper-Martin: We always bring it back to what is it that you’re hoping to get ’em to achieve. So I let’s say  Chris Badgett: the first thing we wanna achieve is we want the people that signed up to come to the live class. Like we, we want a high attendance rate, number one. Number two, we want them to stay to the end. Okay. And number three, we want them to do the worksheet or the action steps that come with the training for that week. Kimba Cooper-Martin: Okay. The easiest one to do, to get them to do all three of those things is to offer them, if they only people who attend live have a chance of winning X. That would be revealed at the end.  Chris Badgett: Yeah.  Kimba Cooper-Martin: And then at the end you say, this is the winner. We were gonna give another one of you something if you do the homework. But the other thing that you can do, which I think we talked about when we met Chris, actually, is hiding Easter eggs. Yeah. So I love doing this in live training. It’s one of my favorite things to do to get people to pay attention all the way through. So if you are doing, I would never advise doing long training as part of courses. Chunking is really important, doing things in small doses, but sometimes you do have to do it right. So if I was to do that, and I have done this before, I hide things in my background for people to find and if I can, I change those things throughout and I’ve done things before. I dunno if I’ve got a sign up here. No, I think I’ve bend it, but like this wall is blank behind me for a reason because I like to put posters there that say things that I like. What is the word subconsciously? No, it’s where like they accidentally go into your brain when you’re not paying attention. So if there’s something that I’ve noticed that people in my course are all complaining about in terms of they don’t understand it or they don’t know I have to, they have to do it, or maybe they’re all struggling with something, I will try and put something up there that is to do with that and maybe the first person to mention it. I will give them something. There are lots of things you can do with this. I went, I actually did I actually did a gamification course once where I was the student and every week they had a different letter in the background and they had the bookshelf rearranged every time. And at the end of the course you had to guess what it was that they were saying. I never worked it out. I consider myself to be pretty smart and I never worked it out, but lots of people did and especially that’s gonna really. Keep the attention of your explorers and your achievers and possibly your killers. The people who aren’t gonna be brought on board by that as socializers, they’re not gonna care about that. So it might be an idea to get them to buddy up with somebody to come to the call and say that you’ll be. They’ll have to do the homework together. So it’s almost a, in a nice way, a kind of guilt, trippy, you should come along ’cause your buddy’s gonna be there and you need to work on this together. There’s lots of things you can play with, but I love an Easter egg. Absolutely. If you’re going to do the rewards, if you’re gonna do the incentivizing, stay to the end and you can win x, make sure it’s related to what they want to achieve. None of this iPad for the sake of an iPad Spa day, for the sake of spa day. If you’re teaching it, make it, it related. If you’re doing. Knitting courses, making it knitting related, make it related to something that will help them get the outcome they wanna achieve. Does that make sense? Chris Badgett: And it’s a big thing in this community is people often build an online community on all kinds of different platforms to accompany the training. How do you gamify an online community to make the socializers happy?  Kimba Cooper-Martin: Oh, that’s a big question. There’s lots of things you can do. There’s lots and lots of things you can do. I would say the most simple thing would be building some networking events. Really give them opportunities to get to know each other because a forum or a Facebook group or wherever you are hosting that community is great, but there’s only so much actual connection you can get from a profile picture. So set up networking events set up. And they can be online opportunities, a Friday coffee catch up, or opportunities for them to get together and chat through things. And I wouldn’t mix them up. So I’d have some that were purposeful. Somewhere you come in, there’s an agenda, they’re gonna learn something, and then they get to socialize, which is gonna attract your achievers, your killers, somewhere you’re gonna reveal some big thing you hadn’t talked about yet, which is gonna attract your explorers. And then some that are just a coffee chat for the socializers. If they want to talk about the course, they can, but they don’t have to. And you could even. Yeah, that’s a good idea. You could even I’ve given myself part of the back, I haven’t even told you what it is yet, so you could even praise some of your, and reward some of your best students by giving the opportunities to host some of these sessions, which achievers, they get a title of being one of the best students and running a session. Yes, please, socializers get the opportunity to run a session and have everybody know who they are. Yes, please. It’s gonna, it’s gonna be a great thing for a lot of people. That would be the first one, and I think that’s gonna help as well, because if any of those people post in the forum, post in the group, the people that have networked with them will recognize their name, will have an association with them, and will be more likely to interact with them in the group. You might think that’s not gamification, that’s just setting up a networking event. Lots of people say that to me about lots of gamification. It’s like I say, it is a plethora of using the right tools to encourage the personality types to do the thing you want to do. And if you can get those people to be super happy in that community, they’re gonna share more. They’re gonna learn more, they’re gonna help each other more and more of them will complete the course. So it’s a massive win-win, which I talk about quite a lot. I’m not sure if that’s the kind of thing you were looking for, Chris, Chris Badgett: This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my LifterLMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. that’s, that was exactly what I was looking for. And I think I’m gonna drop the hardest one on you here, but I’m probably wrong. You’re probably gonna pat yourself on the back again, and with an answer for this one, which is, there’s courses and we talked about adding community. But let’s say there’s also like a private coaching aspect. So it’s like a expensive offer that has a course plus coaching. How do we gamify the actual coaching aspect, which is just, the expert and the client or the student. Can we gamify coaching either to encourage, you’re probably gonna say what do, what job are we trying to accomplish here? It’s probably. The first level is they gotta schedule their first coaching session and get it on the calendar. And then they gotta show up and then they gotta take action on the coaching. So it’s really similar, to the same thing with a live event. It’s just one on one.  Kimba Cooper-Martin: There’s a few different things that you could do, and it really comes down to understanding the person you’re coaching because some of these are risky. Yeah. So somebody I know. Once upon a Time, ran an event where all of the people who came along, it’s an online thing, needed to achieve something within a certain period of time, and so she said, this is the cost to come along. If you do all the things and get to the end, you get half of it back.  Chris Badgett: Oh, yeah. Yeah.  Kimba Cooper-Martin: If you don’t, I keep your money. So there is that as an option for the people who are, ’cause not everyone is rewards focused. Not everyone is going to, some people don’t care. I’ll give you a chocolate bar if you do this. I can buy myself a chocolate bar. I don’t care. So some people are much more stick than carrot focused. So that’s a possibility. The other thing is a progress tracker. So these are the things you’ve gotta do. Tick box exercise, sending them a, congrats. Well done. It doesn’t even have to be a congrats. Well done. You’ve done 10% of what you need to do to get through this series of six coaching sessions. The first four steps are onboarding. So those are things that you can do. It does really depend on who that person is, and I think. For a lot of people, the hard part is gonna be getting them not to turn up to the coaching. They’re getting them to do the things they said they were gonna do. I think that’s the hardest part because people, they wanna turn up and have a chat with you and they come away with all these ideas and then they come off the call and then they’ve gotta deal with the kids and they’ve gotta make tea and they’ve gotta, they’ve got a they’ve got other responsibilities and all of a sudden these things come out of the. They aren’t possible. So then you need to build in and I would do this in discussion with them, a system whereby either you add in accountability and you could do that based on, again, on their personality type. So you could build an accountability where they buddy up with someone else to get that work done. You could build an accountability where if they do it by such and such date and submit it to you, you’ll review it for them. That could be for the achievers, or if they do it by this date, you will feature them in your email list. That’s a great one for Killers and Explorers, because the killers want to get it above everyone else. If they get it in first and the Explorers want something that’s exclusive, there’s lots of little things you can do like that to motivate people. But at the end of the day, I think you also have to accept that not everyone is gonna do all the things. Life happens, things happen. Sometimes people can’t do the things, but it’s definitely worth having a conversation with those people and saying, look, we can try any of these things you want to try. What do you think’s gonna be most motivating for you? Because I want you to get the most out of this as possible. I talk about feedback quite a bit, and feedback doesn’t isn’t just one way. Having the conversations, doing those surveys. Having group conversations with people, just figuring out what works for them and what isn’t working about what you are doing at the moment, because they might actually, I’m a, I’m an achiever and I don’t need any of those things that, that I’ve just suggested. If I’ve signed up to do coaching with somebody, I’m gonna do the work because that’s my nature. I wanna get to the end of it, having achieved the thing. So yeah, it’s a conversation. And feedback. And then, there’s probably a billion other ideas that I could throw your way, but there’s a bunch just there. Chris Badgett: I wanna go a little bit macro and just look at what about introducing an entire game as part of a learning experience? For example, we met at a conference and there I, it was like a kind of bingo and you had to find somebody who did, had a podcast, somebody who had a course about X, y and Z or whatever, and it filled out like a card. Then there was a drawing from, for the people that actually completed the card. So it’s, it was like a full game that those who wanted to participate could win something. And, but more importantly, the job that it solved from my perspective was it helped people get the most out of being at a conference in terms of networking, talking to people, introduction to ideas, like maybe you should start a podcast or whatever. All that stuff. It was like a whole game within an event.  Kimba Cooper-Martin: Yep.  Chris Badgett: So tell us about like that, like creating a whole game that’s part of an exper a learning experience.  Kimba Cooper-Martin: Yeah. I love this. So we do this quite a lot. We’ve done bingo as part of pretty much every course and launch that we’ve ever had. And we’ve done snakes and ladders as well. And trying to think what other things we’ve done, like things that are like similar than that and pick cards that give you tasks to do automatic card, automated card pickers. The main thing to think of when you’re doing that is exactly what you said. So when Mike put together that, that bingo, he thought, what do the conference people want to get out of this? They want to network with other people. What do I want from this? I want people to network with other people because then people get to know each other and it, they get what they want out of it, which means I’ll be able to sell more tickets in the end. So when we build a bingo, if we’re building it for a course, say, and what I would do is I would look at where in the course people are struggling, where people tend to fall off. And I would look at the feedback. ’cause you’ve gotta be surveying your people all the time and figure out. What they’re struggling with, what they find boring at the moment. And I would be adding those things into Bingo. So I’d be giving them a or the Snakes Matters, or whatever it is that you do. And giving them a square four onboarding and giving them a square four, completing task three, if that’s the one that’s really hard, giving them a square four, helping someone else. What is it that what are the, it’s a behavioral change thing is gamification. So what is the behaviors that you want ’em to change? Do you want ’em to engage more in the community? If they have a community, do you want them to. Ask publicly for help because none of them are, and then they fall off. What is it that you are hoping that they’ll achieve? Are you wanting them to share when they’ve learned something new? Are you wanting them to submit coursework? Can you include those into the Bingo card, but also include the things that they wanna achieve? And that is an, and this is something I say all the time. People are, don’t all join your course to learn the thing that you’re teaching. Some people will join your course because they want to network with other people. They’re the socializers. But some people will join the course ’cause they wanna network with you. The person who’s running the course, they wanna be in a space and see how you run it. Some people will join your course because they want to be in a room with other people who can afford a course of that cost. Because they think that might be their ideal customer. People will be there for all sorts of different reasons. It’s not always just, you are teaching me how to get leads from TikTok, so that’s what I wanna learn. It’s, they could be just looking at how you run a course, how you interact with your customers. They could be looking at all these sorts of things. So what can you build in to help people achieve different things within a remit? You don’t wanna give everyone everything away. That will help them to achieve what they wanna achieve. The socializers will it give an opportunity for them to network and get to know other people or help other people and also. Some of the boring stuff that they have to do no matter what. So have you read the rules? Have you done the, they’re quick, easy tick offs, but it means they’ve actually done it. And you can pair those up as well. So you could pair that bingo board up with a quiz, so you could say, or a form. So you could say, oh, you’ve done your bingo. Amazing. Here’s the quiz for you to like, confirm your answers so that you can check that they’re not just saying they’ve done it all. And then at the end. It can get, put them into a price draw. You can elongate it and add things. But always come back to the, what is the purpose of this? Don’t over gamify. Simplify it if you can. So if the bingo board on its own is enough, then just leave it at that. Yeah there’s loads of things you can do. There’s lots of mini games you can do. Learning is really good match with gamification and games specifically. If you’re going, trying to get them to learn new terms, you can get I don’t know any off the top of my head, but there’s loads of websites where you can make matching games where you match words to each other. They do that in Duolingo as well. There’s lots of. Little game software and apps online, which you can use to make your content more interactive, make it more fun. So it’s not just 70 videos and PDFs, how can you break it up? Especially if it’s a concept that they need to embed, repetition needs to retention, but that repetition doesn’t have to be, here’s another video saying the same thing. It can be, can I now? We showed you this four videos ago. Now here’s a game for you to play to embed it, and then we’ll add in something else later to embed it away again in a different format. Repetition really does lead to retention, so if you can mix that up, if you can add some novelty it’s gonna work much better. Chris Badgett: Question for you, I’m gonna ask it in the nerdy psychologist way first, and then I’ll ask it to you in plain language. So the nerdy way is. I see a big opportunity with helping transform courses where people have extrinsic motivation to intrinsic. Put simply, if somebody let’s say a nurse has to take, get 20 credit hours to keep their nursing license, they have to take it so they sign up for their continuing education credit courses. How could one gamify that so that they no longer felt like they had to take it? They felt internally that they wanted to take it because it was fun or maybe they don’t even know why they like it now, but they’ve been captured by gamification in an ethical, positive way. And I think you’ve already covered a lot of the ways we could do that, but I just want to try to. A way for people who design training for people that have to take it to maybe get the benefit of pushing them over to they, they’re motivated from the inside too.  Kimba Cooper-Martin: Okay. This is a great question. The example that I love to give for the other way around. To play devil’s advocate for a second of adding gamification to something that somebody’s already intrinsically motivated to do, is I’m gonna eat chocolate. Okay? I like chocolate. If somebody says that, if you eat chocolate every day for 30 days, at the end, I’ll give you a hundred grand. I’m gonna eat chocolate every day for 30 days, but then on day 31, there’s no longer a reward. They’re not gamifying it for me anymore. I’m probably not gonna eat chocolate. I’ve eaten chocolate every day for the last 30 days, even though I like eating chocolate. So there is a, I would definitely not advise gamifying things that are intrinsically motivating, things that people are already naturally ga intrinsically motivated to do. The other way round is a question of why should they care? And this is very individual,  Chris Badgett: I would say with a nursing example, that they should care because the training is supposed to make them better nurses so that they can provide better care to the patients.  Kimba Cooper-Martin: It’s more of a, that five, five why’s question framework where I’m sure everyone listening and watching this will have heard of it before where you say, but why do you care about that? Why is that important to you? Why does it matter to you? And I think you might don’t think this is a gamification answer. I think that this one is a, for you personally, as the person doing this course. What will happen if you don’t take it? How will that affect your life? Like why? So I would probably put together, yeah, I think that’s what I’d do. I’d probably put together a survey first to ask him the five, five Wises framework. Really get in with that. Or maybe have a conversation with them. One to one to, depends how many nurses you’ve gotta get through this course. And then I would build that into the program. So when they achieve the first lesson at the end of it, I’d be like, that’s amazing. Remember you are doing this because your great-granddad really, you promised him you’d be a nurse before you died. You know you are doing an amazing job. He’d be so proud of you. You are gonna take that next video right when it’s, if it’s personal to you, you’re gonna do that next video. I would also say that if people who really want to do it. I really wanna be. Nurses aren’t doing that course, even though they know it would be beneficial. There’s something wrong with the course. That means that gamification isn’t gonna help. You need to fix the problems with the course first. Maybe it’s too long, maybe it doesn’t explain things properly. Maybe they don’t have enough time to do it and you need to chunk it down much smaller than you originally thought. Maybe it’s out of date. Maybe the software is glitchy. It could be a whole range of things. And as a gamification consultant, I shoot myself in the foot by saying this, but you sometimes need to fix the thing before you can gamify it. It needs to be working before it can be gamified. So if they’re not intrinsically motivated to do it, maybe it shouldn’t be an online course. Maybe there’s an issue with the course. Maybe they need to be doing it in a different format. People learn in different ways. So it could be that nurses are hands on people, maybe they need to do. Hands-on training, maybe an online course isn’t gonna work for them. And recognize that’s not the answer you wanted, but unfortunately, sometimes that’s the truth. Chris Badgett: That’s a really important point. ’cause it’s, don’t just start adding gamification. Like how people sometimes will just turn on a Facebook group and hope for the best. What’s the strategy? What’s the core issue? What’s, what are we doing? What jobs have to happen here? Yeah. That’s Kimba Digital. Tell us again, like how people can work with you. I know you’ve got some freebies available for the course building community. Where can people go who are falling down the rabbit hole of gamification and getting excited here?  Kimba Cooper-Martin: Okay, thank you. Yeah, kimba digital com is our website. We have a bunch of freebies. Go to the navigation bar and the freebies are there, but the one that’s specific for course creators is seven big mistakes. That I see when people are trying to increase course completion. Specifically, I know a lot of people struggle with that. They have low cost completion rates. It’s just a PDF but it’s got lots of interesting things. So it’s got what I see, the issue is what you should do instead, and then a question you should be asking yourself. So it’s. Much more than just a down a list. Like it’s not a blog post, it’s quite interesting. We also have a quiz which you can find on there as well. And our free group, the business game on Facebook where we saw all things, gamification of business. It’s not just course focus. There’s lots of different people in there using gamification for interesting things. So definitely worth checking that out. And we are committ everywhere. Like all the platforms, all the social places. Come and say hello and it’ll be lovely to see you there.  Chris Badgett: Awesome. Kimba, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been an awesome conversation. You out there watching her listening, head on over to kimba digital.com, check it out, connect with Kimba. But thank you so much Kimba, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.  Kimba Cooper-Martin: Thanks, Chris. It’s been loads of fun. Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post How To Add Gamification To Your Online Course With Kimba Cooper-Martin appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In this LMScast episode, Chris Badgett shares details about the biggest sale of the year for course creators: LifterLMS’s all-November sale (Black Friday through Cyber Monday), which runs from November 1 through December 1 (Cyber Monday). It’s our biggest sale in 12 years, and it’s live now on Black Friday Deals page. This year, LifterLMS is offering 60% off any bundle or add-on, plus $4,000 in bonuses. The event is intentionally spread over the entire month to reduce one-day pressure. Use coupon code BLACKFRIDAY25 to enjoy 60% off all LifterLMS products. Chris emphasizes switching from closed, expensive SaaS platforms (Kajabi/Teachable/Thinkific) to open-source WordPress + LifterLMS, which is fully extensible and configurable so you control your site, data, pricing, and feature stack instead of building on “rented land. Existing LifterLMS users can take advantage of the season to upgrade (for example, from the Universe Bundle to the Infinity Bundle) by emailing team@lifterlms.com for a special proration coupon that combines the sale discount with credit for their current license. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Chris Badgett, and today we’re doing a solo episode called A Season For Course Creator Freedom. So it’s that time of year again, this is the Black Friday, all November sale that LifterLMS runs this time of year. We like to reduce the pressure of Black Friday sales, so we actually just open it up for the whole month of November. This is our biggest sales event of the year, and it’s really a time for course creators, coaches, education entrepreneurs, and the WordPress professionals and agencies that serve this industry to get the best learning management system for WordPress at the best price during our sale. On any new order, you’re gonna get a 60% discount, and you’re also going to get $4,000 worth of bonuses, which I’m gonna go over in detail on this episode. So if you haven’t moved over to LifterLMS yet, perhaps you’re using a hosted course platform like Kajabi or Teachable or Thinkific or some kind of what we would call a. SaaS, LMS, it’s a software as a service. They have really expensive monthly fees and a very limited feature set that you cannot extend. This is a great time to move over to WordPress, to open source software and a learning management system that’s both customizable, affordable, completely extendable, gives you full ownership of the platform so you’re not creating. Your online education business essentially on rented land, basically on somebody else’s website. If you’ve been in the LifterLMS community already, perhaps you’re using the free LifterLMS Learning Management System plugin. That’s great. This is a great time of year to upgrade and get some of the advanced features that are available in our paid plans. So you get the 60% discount. Best time of year at the best price for the best tool. And I want to go over a little bit about what’s new, this LifterLMS, black Friday, all November sale. It’s wild to think about. We’ve actually done a Black Friday sale for 12 years at LifterLMS, which is pretty incredible. But we always try to level up the. Value we create when we do our Black Friday all November sale. So one of the ways we do that is by figuring out what we can do for bonuses and really over deliver on bonuses. So if you make a purchase of any new bundle during Black Friday, all November, so basically from November 1st through December 1st, which is technically Cyber Monday. You get a 60% discount and $4,000 worth of bonuses. So let’s talk about the bonuses. If you’re here, you probably already know how awesome the LifterLMS software is and who doesn’t want a good deal and a great price. So there’s the discount, but let’s talk about the bonuses. The first bonus, which. Adds a ton of value, is a $2,000 course that we created called The Perfect Offer Playbook. Now, this course was delivered live with a live audience several months ago, and we put a lot of work and effort into solving some of the biggest core foundational challenges that course creators and education entrepreneurs have. That makes or breaks the difference between a platform project, an education company being successful or not. So at the core of every course or coaching program or internal training site or continuing education program, there’s a very specific offer that everything else is built on. So regardless of your what learning management system tool you are using. If you do not have the offer fully dialed in and the best offer, you can present it either. In the worst case, it can just lead to a failed project. But as we go out the spectrum, you could be not charging what you could, so a lot less profit. Your students aren’t gonna be as happy with what you’re offering, so you’re going to have low conversion rates and things like that. So we really went into the art and science of Perfect Offer Construction. That’s why it’s called the Perfect Offer Playbook. It’s 11 lessons. They’re very good. They’re very in depth, and it is the one primary thing holding back most course creators and coaches and community builders and online education providers. From creating something that works. So if you get the offer right, everything else gets a lot easier. It’s more straightforward, it’s easier to sell, it’s easier to attract students. It’s easier for students to enjoy your program and get the results you promised in the marketing or in the learning objective. So the perfect offer playbook is a huge bonus. If you order a new order of lifter LMS today. I would recommend you jump into the Perfect Offer Playbook today and get started on that. ’cause a lot of people get distracted into software tools and automation and video cameras and the website and all these things, but none of that matters unless you get the offer, that’s why we created the Perfect Offer Playbook, and you can get that as a bonus while getting LifterLMS at the 60% discount. I also wanna mention if you are an existing LifterLMS customer, you can also take advantage of the sale and the offer. This is the best time to upgrade to a bigger bundle, which we’ll talk about in a little bit. But if that’s you, if you’re already a customer and you’re like, this sounds great, I’m really ready for the Infinity bundle, which is all the software we make. I want to get at a great discount and get all these bonuses. Just send an email to team@lifterlms.com and let us know what you’d like to upgrade to, and we’ll give you a special proration coupon that will give you an even bigger discount for the for the sale, but also pro rating the existing value of your license so that you can save even more money and move forward with an upgraded bundle and all the bonuses. So bonus number two is the YouTube traffic system. So one of the best ways for course creators and education entrepreneurs to get leads to build a lead generation machine for their course or membership site is to make some very strategic videos. Now, here’s the thing. A lot of us may be good at video content creation because we’re used to doing that. As course creators making videos, delivering live trainings on Zoom and so on. But we don’t really have the time or the desire to become a full-time YouTuber and create a YouTube channel with thousands of videos and all of that. But you don’t have to get the benefit of YouTube, we’ve actually distilled it down to three specific strategic videos that any education entrepreneur can make. To create a YouTube lead and sales machine on I autopilot without spending money on advertisements, like promoting your YouTube videos and ads. So we’ve built this, we’ve built this system that you can use and all you have to do when you go through the training is learn how it works and then create the three specific types of videos, put them on YouTube. Follow the processes in the video of how that translates from people watching your videos to enrolling in your courses in memberships. It’s a very valuable bonus. If you want more leads and sales and you want marketing that doesn’t cost much, but about one day’s worth of your time to make three specific videos, you’re gonna love the YouTube traffic system. The next thing we offer, which is another reason. To get the Black Friday bonuses as soon as possible is the Black Friday Sales and Marketing 1 0 1 course. Now what that is it teaches you how to do event based marketing so that you can leverage existing buying behaviors that happen naturally in different niches and so on. As an example. In the software world, a long time ago, we realized that the way people would shop for Christmas at a mall, say for Christmas presents on Black Friday we, a lot of these retail establishments will use that event and do some of the biggest sales of the year. Software industry figured that out. WordPress product companies figured that out. That we could tap into this same desire to get discounts and good deals during the Black Friday season. So we, like I said, I’ve been doing this for 12 years because it works. But here’s the thing. With LifterLMS, we typically make three to five times the amount of money that we make in a normal month during the Black Friday season. So how do we do that? This free co, this course, which normally costs $500 you can get at any time, comes as a bonus during our Black Friday all November sale. If you wanna learn how to do event-based marketing and even learn what we have to teach you and implement it fast, you can even get going this Black Friday season as of this recording. That’s still like more than three weeks away. So you could learn, implement, and do event-based marketing. And instead of taking decades like we have to figure this out and how it works, you can do it in days by doing our compact training on how to do event-based marketing around holidays like Black Friday. We give you all our secrets in the Black Friday Sales and Marketing Online 1 0 1 course. So the next bonus is the online education company startup checklist. This is super powerful going back again to the classic mistakes that course creators make. People building education companies, especially if you’re early on or even if you’re established, there are a few decisions and actions to take so that you can. Set up your online business correctly. We go into business formation, how to think about the banking, how to think about all the key aspects that go into building an online education company. Me personally, I never went to business school. I never, I didn’t grow up in a family of entrepreneurs, so I had to figure all this stuff out and what the online education company startup checklist does for you. Is it will give you the key items that you 100% need to check off the box. And even if you’re an established company, whether you have an education company or you are building LMS websites for clients, if you miss any one of these things, it causes a big headache and problem later. So again, with this bonus, we are condensing decades into days. So you can. Get set up the right way. Avoid the classic mistakes, fix any, online education company, business essentials that you may be missing. The next thing we’re offering is a bonus live event with myself and our live team with, it’s a bonus office hours mastermind call. So this is a live call on Zoom if you have. This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my LifterLMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. The universe bundle or the LifterLMS infinity bundle. You have access to a call like this every single week. It’s one of the ways LifterLMS is different. We actually appreciate and like talking to our customers and users live and helping them. So that’s our bonus. One hour call. You can come with specific questions. It’s also a mastermind. So what do I mean by a mastermind? It’s a mastermind because you’ll meet other people who are doing similar things to you that have challenges and are looking for strategy or technical support or help. So you can kind of network with other education entrepreneurs or LMS website building professionals just like you. And sometimes even if you don’t have a specific question. This is one of the great things about a call like this. Just by coming and listening, you can learn a lot. You could learn about a problem you didn’t even know you had, or an opportunity that you didn’t even realize was there right in front of you. So there’s a lot of learning and connection. People have even become business partners and work together after meeting on calls like this. So it is very valuable. So no matter what you get from LifterLMS, during Black Friday, all November, we’re hosting a special. Live office hours mastermind call. So that’s a great bonus. And the next thing is a gamification resource for you, which is an achievement badge and certificate background set. So what do I mean by that? So achievement badges allow you to add little popup gamification, icons as students. Do certain actions on your site that you design. So maybe if they complete a certain section of a course, they get a certain achievement badge. The certificate, background sets, LifterLMS has a full certification engine, so if you want to create a certification program. You can do that and it can be completely automated. The certificate generation system with LifterLMS. Before that, you want to have a nice looking certificate background, so when a student earns the certificate, they, it’s presented in a way where used to seeing in the offline world, similar to a graduation dis diploma. Now the challenge with achievement badges and certificates. Is that it requires graphic design skills. So what we’ve done in this bonus is we’ve actually given you a collection of achievement badges that you can use to get started right away, as well as certificate background so that you can design the certificate logic in LifterLMS, like when somebody completes this course or this series of courses in a membership. Or a course track, we call it, they can earn a certificate. But it’s, you need a good certificate background to go with that. And we’ve given you a set that you can just start using without having to pay a graphic designer or figure all that out yourself. If you haven’t thought about gamification or you haven’t thought about certificates, I would encourage you to just take a second look at those things, even if you’re not doing something like. Er LMS continuing education where people have to, get a certain number of credit hours during a year to keep their job or, and things like that, or to keep their license. Certification is very powerful. So you may have a certification opportunity that may be more informal or just another way to motivate your learners. Or give them a sense of accomplishment and so on. So check those out. And if you’re new to the LifterLMS pricing, we have three bundles. There’s the earth bundle, the Universe bundle, and the Infinity bundle. So the earth bundle is our cheapest bundle, and what that includes is all the automated e-commerce features. If you want to be able to sell access to your courses or memberships, or create recurring revenue or one-time payments or any pricing model you can think of, you’re gonna want our Earth bundle, which integrates you with best in class payment processing through tools like Stripe and. PayPal as well as others like authorized.net, or you can integrate with the WooCommerce ecosystem through their shopping cart as well. All that’s included in the Earth bundle, so the Universe Bundle gives you all of that. Plus it gives you our theme called Sky Pilot, which is the only modern. WordPress LMS theme with exclusive focus on creating beautiful learning sites that students find engaging and easy to use. So if you’re at a point where you want to use modern WordPress and you want to have as few tools from as few companies as possible, you’re gonna love our Sky Pilot theme. The Universe Bundle also comes with some of our integrations, like with the form plugins, like Gravity Forms. It comes with integration with popular email marketing platforms like MailChimp or Kit, formerly known as ConvertKit. So that’s the universe bundle. And then our top bundle is called the Infinity Bundle, which includes everything that we’ve just talked about, but also a ton of advanced feature add-ons. For example. If you want to do advanced quizzing with grading and more question types, you’d want our advanced quizzes add-on. If you want to add an online community to your website that’s similar to a Facebook group, but on your website you would like our social learning add-on, if you want to add coaching to a learning experience, like a course you would, like our private areas add-on. We have. Many different add-ons to fulfill many different use cases like private site, which helps turn your LMS into a completely private internal company training portal type site. That’s LifterLMS private site. And the great thing is, and there’s many more, but the great thing about these add-ons is we launched new ones. So for example, we’re getting ready to come out with a continuing education add-on that you’re gonna love. If you’re in the continuing education niche, some of our most successful users of LifterLMS offer continuing education in niche scenarios like for nurses or some kind of license they need to keep or for some kind of just continuing education or professional development. In the medical field and all kinds of different niches. You’re gonna love that one. That one’s literally about to release. As we’re making this video, and I should also mention, one of our most popular add-ons is called Groups. And what groups allows you to do is offer training at scale into groups. So you can offer courses and memberships to individuals, but you can also offer them. At scale to entire groups like companies, so a company could buy your a hundred seats in your course, and then it gets its own part of your LMS where that group buyer can invite in team members and managers, and it’s all front end reporting. The people never log into the back of WordPress. It’s a very popular advanced way to use LifterLMS so that you can make more money. Or drive greater impact by offering training at scale in the groups like companies, schools nonprofits, or really any kind of organization or group that you can think of. So the Infinity Bundle has everything we make, all the e-commerce, all the integrations, our theme and all the advanced add-ons. And what typically happens this time of year. Is a lot of new people will get the infinity bundle ’cause they want it at the best price and they want everything and they want all the bonuses. And existing LifterLMS customers take the opportunity to upgrade into the Infinity bundle from a lower bundle so that they can get, unlock all the features and capabilities of LifterLMS. If you’re listening to this and this looks interesting to you, I would encourage you to go to lifter lms.com/black-friday. If you go to our website, you’re not gonna miss it. There’s a little banner where you can click through to the Black Friday landing page, and that goes over all the details. Gives you the coupon code and the links to purchase LifterLMS during our biggest sale of the year. In terms of your bonuses, instantly after purchase, you’re gonna receive an email that has a link to either enroll in those paid courses that we talked about in the bonuses, but for free. And you’ll get download links to the resources that are downloadable. So I would encourage you to go to lifter lms.com/black-friday. This is our biggest sales event of the year. These bonuses are great. We really tried to overdeliver and just add as much value and solve as many of your problems as we could, not just by providing the best software, but also giving you some great bonuses to help you on your journey. So if you want the best LMS at the best price, go to LifterLMS today. Take advantage of the Black Friday all November sale. You’ll instantly get access to the bonuses. The sale is only valid through the end of November, basically the end of December one, and it will be gone. So if you like to save money and you want these bonuses, take action today. It’s great to be with you on the journey. Thanks for listening to this episode, and we will catch you in the next one. Take care. And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post A Season for Course Creator Freedom: LifterLMS Black Friday appeared first on LMScast.

This episode is brought to you by Popup Maker Boost Your Website’s Leads & Sales with Popup Maker Get started for free or save 15% OFF Popup Maker Premium—the most trusted WordPress popup plugin to grow your email list and increase sales conversions. Get Popup Maker Now In this LMScast, According to Matt Medeiros, The WP Minute is changing profoundly from being a WordPress news and community site to a resource for agencies and freelancers that is more value-driven and instructive. At first, The WP Minute concentrated on reporting on upcoming WordCamps, community conversations, product releases, and WordPress-related information. Though such information is useful, Matt found that just a small percentage of people roughly 10,000 English-speaking WordPress aficionados worldwide are really interested in this kind of “inside baseball” news regarding Automattic, leadership changes, and local politics. Matt made the decision to return his attention to the primary audience WordPress freelancers and agency owners with whom he had initially established a connection through his previous project, The Matt Report, after realizing the limits of that specialized audience. He wants to help these professionals navigate challenges in today’s landscape, especially as artificial intelligence and economic pressures change the way agencies and independent creators work. The first course created using LifterLMS for The WP Minute, which focuses on assisting users in selecting the best WordPress hosting company, was released as a result of this development. By actively assisting individuals in learning and applying the knowledge he shares, online courses allow Matt to develop a deeper connection with his audience. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide Here’s Where To Go Next… Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website. Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS. Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014. And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week. Episode Transcript Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m a little rusty because I’ve been doing a lot of solo episodes, but he’s back on the show. I think this is appearance number six, seven, or eight. It’s Matt Maderis. He’s from Gravity. He’s from the WP Minute. Matt has a lot of projects and has been a big personality in the WordPress community and entrepreneur community for a long time. Before we get into it, just first welcome back on the show, Matt.  Matt Medeiros: Thanks for having me, Chris. I was here on episode 500. I think we were talking about podcasting and the value of that. So excited to dig into a different topic today.  Chris Badgett: Yeah. I noticed you launched a course with lifter LMS on the WP Minute. I believe it’s the first course on the WP Minute. It’s about. Hosting and how to choose the right and best WordPress host. Before I summarize it, why don’t you tell us all about it? What’s the story? Why courses for the WP Minute, which has always been more of news newsletter kind of stuff, like where did this need for courses emerge? Matt Medeiros: Yeah, there’s a few challenges at play for my business at the WP Minute, and of course with WordPress content and with WordPress. And so I’m trying to tackle all of that with this slow, methodical shift with what’s happening at the WP Minute. But you’re right, it’s always been about more like that community focus, like what’s happening in WordPress. A lot of it lent to news. A lot of it lent. To what the community’s up to what’s happening at Word Camps, product updates, et cetera. But WordPress News Media is a challenging space to say the least. The WP Minute was supposed to be a reprieve for me. When I got into back into the workforce page, Lee Casto and now gravity Forms, I was trying to dial down all of the overhead of running. A bunch of content while having a day job and having kids. And it started off really small and then as I do with a lot of things, it just piled on the snowball effect of rolling down the hill and doing more content, doing more media started to expand. And the challenge with WordPress news and content is not a lot of people really care about it, right? Not a lot of people really care about. The inside baseball of what’s happening with automatic and leadership and what’s happening to the community. Those of us that do care, really care. But I’ve always said there’s like this 10,000 English speaking people across the world who actually care about the type of content that I’ve been producing With the WP Minute for the last, I don’t know, three and a half-ish years, four years. There’s been this shift halfway through the year of getting back to, or a little bit more than halfway through the year, getting back to the roots of what I was doing with the MAT report, which was like really focusing on. The WordPress freelancer and agency owner and diving back into that space because when I started the MAT report, the big thing that was happening and why I was really covering agency life and WordPress was massive financial crisis in 2007 and 2008, and a bunch of people started getting into services and WordPress. And WordPress was really becoming this. Go-to CMS now. The, I don’t wanna say threat, but the big thing happening now is of course ai. And what does that mean, not only for the freelancers business or the agency’s business, what does that mean for WordPress? So I really want to turn my attention of content and effort back into number one, unapologetically supporting WordPress. Like why we should all use WordPress at its core and its fundamental use case. Two how do we get back to talking to agencies and freelancers again to encourage them to use WordPress in the face of AI and in the face of continued economic challenges? So the course is a piece of that. My overall strategy, I’ve never been an, I think you and I have talked about this a lot. I have never been really good or focused on SEO. Or paid ads or like any kind of gray area promotional sources. For my content, it’s always been I’m just gonna publish content and keep doing that and hope people come to engage with it and it’s worked, right? So it’s worked for, the last whatever, 12 years. But now with. Content being so competitive and AI being able to serve up answers or even news updates really quickly, and so many WordPress content creators out there. My only thing to help the business forward is how do I even get clo? How do I get even closer to the audience, right? This is why I do the blog, the newsletter, the podcast, the videos, and I have the community, the course to me. Is, how do I get closer to that person to actually help, educate them and they’ll just care a little bit more about the total offering that I’m putting out there. So I’m trying to lean into that real like human approach. We have some more courses coming soon and some other ways to get education and stuff like that, that I have noodling around. But this is me saying. I want people to care more and I want to get closer to them and help educate them and solve their problems with the WP Minute and the community and the courses and such. So that’s the quick overview of like how we’ve got there over the last four years.  Chris Badgett: Awesome. And just a quick side question. You mentioned there’s about 10,000 people in the English speaking world that care about WordPress, community news and content. Do you have any sense on the size of the freelancer market that is somehow related to WordPress? Like how much bigger of an opportunity do you think that is?  Matt Medeiros: On the freelancer side, the freelancer or agency side, in my opinion is far greater. Than than that number, but a lot of them, don’t really care about. They don’t really care about the automatic and WP engine lawsuit, right? They often don’t care about the word camp event happening or who’s speaking and, what’s the interesting angle on that? Like a lot of people because they’re so busy or they’re not aware of it, they just want to use WordPress. They know and love the tool. They just might not be exposed to the community yet. And WordPress is, again, it’s just that tool to get the job done. So I think that number is far greater. I think it’s the people like you and I who fall into the ca into my own category of the 10,000 people, and I work that number backwards from whatever the 50,000 people that are in wordpress.org, slack. Then you work that back towards like how many people we see in the post status Slack, how many people go to Word camps and who’s showing up on podcasts and Listenerships like that, who really care about, what has Matt said today? And what’s automatic rolling out for a new like feature on wordpress.com? There’s only so few people who care about that. But lots more people to your point, who care about, how does this affect my. Freelance business, or how do I launch this new website with lifter LMS or whatever.  Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So why is how to choose the best host for WordPress the first course you did and you also did it with Eric Kovac, did I say his name right? Yeah. Yep. And you also chose to I mean you have an intro video and stuff, but it’s e mostly Eric’s content.  Matt Medeiros: Yep. Yep. So Eric is the instructor as lifter, LMS puts the title on. And I do the intro video of who this course is for. And I do the there’s a final video there that, like how you can apply this to your agency or freelance business. I ran an agency for a decade worked at a, worked at Pagely for three and a half years, and I’m two and a half years into Gravity form. So I know the ecosystem really well, so I’m. And then Eric has 20 plus years of being a web designer and freelancer runs his own freelance agency. And this course is the business side of hosting Andrew Agency, not like the gigabytes and bandwidth side of hosting. So we are looking at it from the perspective of how do you evaluate. Your WordPress project, just a tiny little five page site. Like where should you host this? That if all of a sudden you’ve got this, medium to large size business knocking on your door and they’ve got these real customer requirements, what, where should you host that type of customer? If you have this big learn lifter at Learn Learning site, e-learning site with WooCommerce and Lifter, where should you host that kind of site? So we’re putting that into the perspective of the business owner. Because we really feel that the bad rap that a lot of clients have with WordPress is mostly rooted in hosting too Slow it, it got a security breach. Too many popups like, every time I logged in, it just took forever for the screen to load. These are all rooted in hosting issues, and we wanna solve that. WordPress client experience with the boots on the ground who are deploying these sites, right? That’s how we see that. So we teach people how to level up their game, how to build these relationships with clients, and how hosting is very important to that whole paradigm. So that’s why we started with this course first. And yeah, in terms of like how we do things at the WP Minute, Eric is my editor at the WP Minute he puts, does a lot of content for us. And he’s always wanted to teach and be like a coach deal. So yeah, it was his opportunity to build the course and be the instructor. And I just come in as the guy that sells it on the front end and closes it out with like how I would apply this in my agency. But we both collaborate on it for sure.  Chris Badgett: I wanted to ask why you made it free, and if for those of you out there listening, particularly if you’re a freelancer or run an agency and help clients with websites, I recommend go going to the wp minute.com, find their courses and enroll. But why free? Why not a paid course and try to monetize your brand or that the WP Minute audience?  Matt Medeiros: Yeah. I don’t know if I’m ready for so if I just look at like how I run. A content business with the asterisk that I do this on the side. This is a side hustle. It’s not full time right now. The revenue stream for the WP Minute, and the best way for me to create content is through sponsorship. It just so happens that a lot of our sponsors are WordPress web hosts and I’m constantly pushing. Our, our own abilities to provide more value for our sponsors. So it’s not just the podcast ad read, it’s not just the logo in the newsletter. Now we’re trying, like I said before, we’re trying to get closer to the WordPress user with education. So it’s a, so the course is free because sponsors. Appear in logos at the bottom of each lesson. This course, the hosting course, hosting Decoded is not we don’t point to any one of our sponsors. We’re not showing any dashboards from our sponsors. We’re not saying use this coupon code for, pressable, GoDaddy Kinta, whatever. We’re just saying that this content is supported by these great hosts. Maybe you want to check them out. Maybe you go and find a host that fits, the needs for your projects. Like we’ve taught you. It’s free because that’s like the model that I’ve been on so far with doing sponsored sponsored supported work. And it, that’s what’s working for now. We do have some ideas for paid courses, maybe some cohort learning in the future. And I’d rather focus my time on paying for those types of services versus me trying to sell, a $200 course, at least at this stage in the game. Not, never say never but, that’s where we’re at right now.  Chris Badgett: So you mentioned you have a day job and. It’s interesting what I’ve seen you do with the WP Minute in terms of bringing in other personalities and personal brands and thinking about the WP Minute as not just Matt Madeiras tell us about that line of thinking and how you got to that place of having multiple people working on a project from abr personal branding standpoint. Matt Medeiros: Yeah, so that’s always been a challenge. So as I mentioned before, and people that have. I’ve seen my work before. No, I started a podcast called Mat Report. I did that for 10, 12 years or whatever, and it just became at some point in my life right around COVID, I was like, I’m an artist and I like to just destroy my art. I like to build it up and just say I’m done with that, and now I want something else. And that’s that like moment where I was, I really started to say, look I’m doing this thing called myPort. It’s got my name in it. It’s fun. I really enjoy it. It’s valuable, but it’s not a standalone like business asset. Like no one wants to own MAT report. But if you do call me up and so I was just like, Hey, look I, if I’m gonna keep doing this content thing I want to, I wanna really see if I can do this as a sustainable business. So the brand ma the brand WP Minute took over those efforts. And of course it was supposed to be much smaller but it expanded which was great. And the challenges has become, has. Has been like, how do I continue to produce this content? But also, like I said, providing value for sponsors and finding new sponsors. And finding, and like in thinking about the business and how to like, grow the revenue. So you have the memberships, you have classified ads, you have sponsorships and stuff like that. But it just doesn’t sell itself. And at some point, like you start, like I bring on Eric. He’s my biggest expense, of course, and it’s, paying him to create the work and or create the content, and he helps me produce a lot of the podcasts and the newsletter and all this stuff. He’s taking on more responsibility, he gets paid more, and I need to keep continuing to build that funnel, right? Or just build that support. So stuff like the Agency Action show that we just launched, which is with Kurt and Toby Kres, Kurt v Onan, and Toby Kres. That’s another step forward in saying. I wanna serve agency owners again, but I haven’t sold a website to a client in, I don’t know, seven years, right? Like I haven’t run an agency in about seven years and I want to put out valuable content that people trust. So I brought those two guys on to talk to that audience. ’cause I trust their work with agency and freelance life. They’re doing it day to day and they’re going to speak to that audience. So that’s like that. Sort of first expansion of, I don’t wanna call it a podcast network, but it’s a first expansion to address that audience. I don’t want I don’t want to talk about agency life right now ’cause I haven’t done it in seven years. Do I talk to agency owners all the time? Yes, I do. Every week I talk to an agency owner and, or a freelancer, but I’m not writing contracts and doing deliverables anymore. So I don’t want to say that I’m the expert in that anymore. So it’s just how I, I’ve approached tho those topics. Chris Badgett: You mentioned future courses. I don’t know if you want to get into some ideas you have, but I really admire in a given topic area, the best courses are built around pain. And there’s a lot of pain in like the hosting, like you mentioned, creating challenges for clients and straining the client agency relationship. And as a former like yourself, agency owner, I remember a lot of pain. Like I could find a lot of different topics to maybe zero in on. Yeah. But can you speak to the future courses or even just some of the pain areas of agency life or freelancer entrepreneurship that you find particularly challenging and needs a fresh take and some training around? Matt Medeiros: Yeah, certainly. You know that was the reason why we started with hosting because I was a system ad administrator. 25 years ago, and I was, running cPanel servers when cPanel first came to the market. And then I took that knowledge and brought it to my agency and I was like, oh, I’m gonna, now that I run an agency, I’m just gonna run the hosting myself. ’cause I, I know what to do. And it was fine in the beginning. You have a dozen customers or 20 customers and you’re like, oh, look at this. I’m making, nearly a thousand dollars a month in hosting. And if I just. 10 x this or a hundred x this, like this is gonna be great. And then, as soon as you start having the first security breach on your VPS server or there’s you have to update MySQL and PHP and then you realize, oh wait, I’m the one holding the bag here. And if. All of this fails, which it did a few times. Like now your customers are looking at you going, you told me, five nines of uptime. And I’m like, I’m just a, I’m just a WordPress agency. I’m not a web host. So I learned those lessons early on and I wanted to make sure that of course, technology’s different these days, but I wanted to make sure that folks. Know that experience for your customer really makes or breaks a deal. You’ve already built the website fine, but if you want to, them coming back and, growing as you grow your agency, you gotta make sure that this whole experience is good. So that’s like the pain point that we’re trying to solve too with the hosting course. The next course will be about running that agency. And much more from the pre-sales process. That’s always been a huge issue that I’ve heard with other freelancers and WordPress agency startups is how do you, like, how do you do pre-sales? How do negotiate with the customer? How do you present to the customer? How do you qualify them as a lead? How do you follow up with them, like this whole pre-sales process? At least I haven’t found a lot of content around that. And that’s one thing that we want to help freelancers and agency owners understand when a lead comes in, what happens next is do you just sell it and you think that’s it? Do you just give them one price? Do you give them multiple prices? So we’re gonna approach that topic and that probably won’t come until, after Thanksgiving. ‘Cause what we found with this hosting decoded course, it took about, I wanna say two and a half months from Hey Eric, we’re gonna do this together to, hitting publish on. The courses page on the WP Minute site and then realizing oh my God, I don’t have a login link on the WP Minute. ’cause it was never meant to be, a membership site. So it was like, oh God, I gotta do all that now. I have to set up the emails, I gotta set up the login link, I gotta do all this stuff. So what we’re finding, it’s, that first process was, two to three months and hopefully, based on what we know, maybe this one will take a month or so. So  Chris Badgett: I think that’s really smart. I like to think about a niche audience through time. And like the hosting challenge is at a certain point in time, a lot of a question I ask on this podcast all the time to serve, particularly the agent agency, the builder, the WordPress blue collar professional, as you call it, is how do you get clients? And I think that lead generation. Is a topic that’s covered a lot. There’s all these different things, but as you were talking, I was listening to oh, the presale. We’ve got some leads, like what do we do here? And Matt also comes from a offline sales background. So you have you’re a great salesperson. Matt sold lifter Old Mess on Pagely. We’re still there. That was like seven years ago. But helping agencies close is like a, that is underserved the more I think about it. Yeah. And you don’t need general sales closing, objection handling advice. That stuff’s important. And you can read about that in bookstores and articles, but let’s talk about the blue collar WordPress professionals specifically. There’s some unique variables there. Yeah, so exciting.  Matt Medeiros: Yeah. I’m trying like again, like I’m, we’re always pushing for value. I won’t go on the soapbox of WordPress media and WordPress content businesses here, but we’re always trying to push for that higher level of value for our sponsors and our, and the members of our Slack community and, web hosts. Love agencies naturally because they bring sticky customers and they bring big accounts. And multiple customers and mul and multiple customers. It’s not rocket science. Anybody who knows like the networking space in WordPress like web hosts have or tend to be the ones that sponsor a lot of outlets and we really appreciate ’cause they help us get the work done. So if I can create content that helps them and their customers, like how to choose web hosts. ’cause remember, we’re only partnering I’m not partnering with every web host. Certainly. There’s a lot of web hosts that come to us that Hey, we wanna be on. And it’s no, I don’t. I don’t think you’ve, you meet the criteria for a lot of WordPress professionals that are looking for great hosting the WordPress way. So we only partner with those types of hosts. And now if we can also bring in the agency owners and put them side by side and put them literally in the same virtual room, then like everyone wins because the hosts get to talk to these agency partners. Agency partners are always looking for more leads. Hosts have leads, right? And then like somewhere in the middle, since we know a lot of people in the WordPress space now, the product people are also in the WP Minute, and all three of these parties are congregating in the WP Minute. And that’s the secret sauce right there. Bring folks in get them talking to each other. Hopefully our work that we do at the WP Minute is raising value for all three of those parties. Chris Badgett: This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert. I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells, and guiding users to helpful content. Popup Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level? Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version. Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode. A question about your course. I noticed you added a certificate or certification at the end of the course. I feel like I’ve thought this for a long time in the LMS space certification is totally underused. It’s not just about getting continuing education credits or doing some kind of micro credential like you can certify, you can gamify like a lot of different things. On a full level of a full spectrum of completely serious corporate business to, we’re just having fun here and this is like a game, but what, tell us about the decision to add a certification to the free hosting course. Yeah. What’s your vision for the freelancer agency owner to be able to do with that? Like why do that? Matt Medeiros: Yeah. It’s weird ta talking to you about it since you’ve, you’re the mastermind behind the software. Yeah, but I’ll show you, I’ll tell you how I’m thinking about it. And actually we did two things two kind of like unique things, right? So obviously the cert certification is there, and that’s like a built-in feature to your product, which is great. But on the checklist side. We don’t have to talk about this right now, and I, but I’d love to hear a little bit more about it. We have a, one of the lessons is a checklist in, I think resources, I forget what the title is. ‘Cause we were thinking like, how do we make the course tangible other than the certificate? So before you go through the whole thing, pass the quiz and get the certificate. What else can we provide as tooling or like utility around this education. So I built a. Hosting calculator using automatics, nut telex, ai, block builder. And a user can go in and put in the requirements for their particular WordPress project, and at the other end of the calculator, it’ll spit out which level of hosting is going to be the best fit for the requirements entered into the calculator. So that was really cool. But to answer your first question about the certification. Yeah, right now it’s fun. Like Eric and I talked about it. We’re like, Hey, we should, at the end of this, you should, we should have a little little certificate that somebody earns by passing a quiz. I thought about it for a little bit. I was like, I don’t know if I want to do that. ’cause it just becomes fun. Just becomes a fun thing. But then the utility of that sort of dawned on me like, you know what, there’s a lot of WordPress companies. Specifically agencies and product companies. When you’re the size of like gravity forms at my day job where you have 50 plus people working for you, not everyone knows everything about WordPress, right? These, a lot of like developers that you hire or project managers. It’s not like they’ve been in WordPress for 15 years. Wouldn’t that be great? But a lot of them don’t understand and they’re just coming from other parts of the technology world. Can the WP Minute. S certifications serve as a training tool for other agencies and other WordPress product companies, right? Hosting again, is super important. If you’re a bigger agency or you hired somebody as like a project manager and they don’t know anything about WordPress hosting, but they’re talking to your clients and, potentially your clients are asking them like, where should I host this site? Don’t you wanna make sure that your project manager or the face of your business understands. Some fundamental lay of the land in WordPress. So I’m hoping, I’ve already started talking to a handful of WordPress agencies to say, Hey, bring your staff in. It’s free, right? And have them pass the certification. And if they show you this certification, maybe you buy them lunch or maybe the WP minutes, splits a lunch with you or whatever. We’ll buy them like a GrubHub card or whatever, like some way to bring, the company’s already in WordPress, leaning on the WP Minute as a resource for fundamental, WordPress training, which, you’d have to be in the space for 20 years to really understand. Chris Badgett: I love that. I think that’s a great opportunity to explore for certification. Like I think about, I began with the end in mind, and I think about in your future course about pre-sales. If somebody is on a sales call with a prospective client and they’ve taken your course, they’ve printed it out, it’s in a frame in the background behind them on Zoom, and they’re certified in WordPress hosting, they’re certified in like customer experience, happiness or whatever. And you know what other, what whatever other like tech or sector innovations that this agency does, could be marketing automation, could be. Graphic design could be a lot of different things that even though it’s not like an official accredited school, that certification is really valuable. And you’re literally helping your people close deals. Yeah. And become better at what they do in the process. Who doesn’t want that?  Matt Medeiros: Yes. Yes. That’s the. That’s the hope anyway.  Chris Badgett: You mentioned wanting to go back to something about the checklist or Yeah. What were you thinking there? What’d you want to explore?  Matt Medeiros: Yeah, just like the calculator. So that was fun. That was, we’re just trying to find ways. Of course we have the slide deck which. PDF, whatever. It’s 90, 90 slides across the entire, course. But we were just trying to find ways of like, how can somebody, how can we tangibly get somebody to interact with this course so that they could. Because I’m a visual learner, I’m a hands-on learner. That’s pretty much how I do it. So like how do I apply these concepts? And this is a very beginner level course. Like I think anyone who’s been in WordPress for more than five years might understand how to, pick the right host. But if you’re brand new to this, like you might not know that, a customer may eventually ask you for. A specific SLA when they get to their host. I didn’t know, and I ran an agency for a decade, not until I got into Pagely, 15 years into my WordPress career that I ever hear. A web host customer say, yeah, and we’re gonna also need to modify your SLA and give you our terms on, like, how are you gonna support turnaround? I was like, wow. It’s gonna come with a lot more zeros at the end of that hosting bill to do that kind of thing. But it’s certainly a thing that happens in bigger enterprise, more bespoke solutions. So yeah we came up with that calculator idea as something that was a tangible way to interact with the course. Chris Badgett: Just to brainstorm on that, this is a beautiful thing. This is why I like to use the metaphor of putting your customer at the center of your business, not your product. So if your product, in this case is a free training course, there’s only so much you’re gonna think about, but when you put the customer at the center, they’re like they need training. They need videos, and I love that you also have some text with your videos and stuff, but you did something really cool, which is provide a tool. A tool is not content, it’s not a video, whatever. It’s like its own type of thing to learn with and get results. You have a quiz, which is like a knowledge check and a certificate that’s like something else that helps them, but you could provide templates like in your future pre-sales course, like having call scripts. Things like that. Those are templates that people could use. Yeah. Even things like perks, like discounts, like coupon codes that you negotiate with vendors that they’re likely to use. There’s so much you can do besides just course content. Coaching, you mentioned potentially some cohort based stuff. That’s a whole other thing.  Matt Medeiros: Yeah.  Chris Badgett: And if you really map it out, you could probably come up with 20 different types of things that could be helpful in addition to just content. Yeah. ’cause people are coming for transformation and learning and content isn’t really the only thing there. Plus you layer in the learning styles where. Some people are more tactile learners, which means they want to get busy with their hands and like they some are visual and auditory and all that, but the tactile learners I’m sure they love the tool and like giving people an assignment like, go do this. Or if I was doing a marketing or outbound sales course would be like, before you go to the next lesson, do three cold outreach emails. I don’t care how sloppy it is, just do it. So I’m like getting the learner taking action. Oh, and by the way, there’s a template here to make your first attempt like probably go a little smoother.  Matt Medeiros: Yep. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. Those great ideas we’re definitely gonna apply some of that stuff in the future course. Chris Badgett: Yeah. Now you got my brain going, so I gotta turn it off. But invoicing stuff, invoicing templates, and milestone markers and common objection handling, cheat sheets, like all kinds of stuff there. Speaking of that, one of the things that I’ve always been impressed by you over the years, decade plus that I’ve known you is your versatile on your content types. Podcaster YouTuber, course creator, blogger, newsletter writer. You’re a vibe coder. You’re an agency guy, and do you build sites, you do your own, you do great design. So you have like. All these different skill sets, and you’re putting it around your ideal customer and the niche and all that stuff. And I think that’s truly unique because a lot of times people will lock on to, oh, I’m a course creator, I’m a newsletter entrepreneur. Or I’m a podcaster, I’m a YouTuber. I’m a coach. But you do all that. And I was just looking for some advice you would give somebody on. Maybe getting outta their comfort zone, but trying on these different channels for size. What, how do you think about that? I think you do it naturally just ’cause you’re interested in a lot of things, but maybe one of those things feels harder to you than the other. Or you have more fun when you do video or something like that. I don’t know.  Matt Medeiros: Yeah, it’s a great question. I was actually thinking about this, and I’ve thought about this in the past before, but I was definitely thinking about this yesterday because. I did a video that I specifically, I only put on LinkedIn. This is a bit of a tangent, but hang with me. It’s a video that I put specifically on LinkedIn for Gravity Forums. We launched a new podcast called Crew Collective. It’s about storytelling and we interview a lot of people who are filmmakers, authors, musicians. It has nothing to do with software and tech has everything to do about like space, but creators and how they made that piece of art, right? So I did this whole like behind the scenes video of how we came up with the cover art. How that cover art in branding transcends the rest of the website, right? Like how it affects the episode images, how we use our guest images in that cover. Art, and Travis and team did a fantastic job with it, right? I’m not the designer behind it, but I wanted to tell that story of what it’s like to launch. A podcast that is virtually unknown and how to do it the right way. ’cause we were asking people that have like agents to be on the show. Like not AI agents, like media agents that we had to go through because they’re, they’re not a-list celebrities, but some of ’em are b’s, and a couple C’s. So we had to knock on the door of a publicist or an agent. And we can’t just be like, we’re a software company with a podcast. Come on. Like we needed to show them. Our own artwork to say we’re a legitimate entity. Asking your customer, your client, to be on our podcast to talk about their stuff. So I went through this whole behind the scenes thing. The point of that is, is I show people off how we did that and what our approach was, yada yada, as supplemental content to the podcast. And I just started thinking social media and algorithms has no idea where to place me. Which is my big, which I’ve, this is the point to your thing is I do so much that social media has no idea how to amplify my stuff. Because on one day I’m talking strictly about WordPress. The next day I’m talking about how to do a branded podcast. The next day I’m talking, I’m like sharing my insights of whatever marketing at gravity forms, it becomes a challenge, but. I can tell you with certainty that being able to launch this course that we just did with Lifter, I have never felt the thing that I’ve always missed in a lot of these areas because I’m a utility player. Let’s say I’m a, I don’t wanna say I’m a generalist, but I, okay, call me a generalist. The thing that I’ve always missed is the thing to, to say, here’s what I sell, here’s what I offer. And yeah, the podcast like, come and listen. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Join the newsletter to say stay subscribed to the WP Minute. Okay. But the course has built so much confidence in my ability to clearly say we’re helping the WordPress professionals. Now my customer might be a web host for sponsorship, and I can use the course. With my sponsorship customers, like I feel way more confident now saying, please support the WP Minute. Please sponsor the WP Minute because I have this course. And on the audience side, I feel more confident with a call to action to say, come on in. We’re helping educate you. It’s not just me saying, follow the podcast. Join our newsletter. Come on in. Take the course, join our community, which is also now free. And let’s get better at WordPress together. So at least on the WP Minute side, launching this course has anchored me in a more confident way that I feel like I provide value to the sponsors and to the audience, if that makes sense.  Chris Badgett: That does make sense. And I think one of the cool things that course creation will force you to do is. They’re bigger content items than like an episode or a newsletter or a single video. And then you have to, it forces you to be like, what’s the learning objective here? Who’s the ideal learner? What’s the shortest path to outcome without overwhelming them? I’ve been in this industry 20 years and I have this giant cup, but my student may be a newer freelancer and their cup is smaller in terms of what. They can absorb and what they need to hear. So it just forces you to create something that’s, it’s more complex, but it’s also in some ways more complete than a one-off newsletter or video, even though those things may fit in a broader offer. The other thing I wanna mention here is I’m a huge fan and it’s totally underused of the free course lead magnet, right? Yeah. You can do a PDF or a white paper. Or even like the tool you built, you could create like a calculator tool and somebody has to opt in to get the answer. But when you do a full training and just give that away for free. And if you’ve built a brand and an audience that already knows, likes, and trust you, and you have some longer form content, which tells you they have the attention span to invest in a course is so powerful. A free course lead magnet shouldn’t be your only lead magnet. But, and it’s not just to get leads, but it’s very powerful when you have a tight audience tied off or a tight pain point problem you’re solving. Yeah. So I think that’s smart and always encourage people to give away more than they’re free for, free than they’re comfortable. Also, somebody may not hire you, but could still work with you and get benefit from a free or paid training. I could go in a lot of directions here, but in my opinion, every company is a media company or sorry, an education company. They are a media company and they know that, that’s why they have blogs and podcasts and YouTube channels and whatnot. But they’re also an education company. And making some of that education very free is super powerful. And in software specifically like hosting or. Any tool, like there’s training and we all used to unfold, like you get something and you unfold that little thin white instruction manual that sucks and you can’t read, like you have this huge opportunity with an online course to make something way better than that. The digital version of that little paper thin instruction manual that doesn’t really do the job.  Matt Medeiros: Yeah. And immediately I was able to close deals. This is gonna sound like a testimonial for a lifter, but I have no problem giving you a testimonial. But I was immediately able to close deals with hosting sponsors when I launched the course. Which I knew was, it was part of the strategy here. It, I was able to, people, I had two customers sign up, for the for our sponsorship spots that are hosts. Because I launched the course and they were like, they saw the, my existing sponsors alongside the course and they were like we wanna be there too, alongside these other hosting companies that you have. How do we get that? And it’s just oh, okay, here’s, here’s the path to, to getting sponsorship, which was, fantastic. So when you do put out good. Great valuable content. When it’s free, it raise it depending on what your industry is, it raises some eyebrows and helped me close deals ’cause my model is sponsorship. So people didn’t wanna miss out with that. And this is not my first rodeo. I launched academy.caos.com using Lifter. When I was at CAOs, I launched learn.gravity.com, which is lifter. When I first joined Gravity this is the first time that I, I did it under my own brand of stuff. But I’ve been using Lifter a lot to do a lot of this stuff.  Chris Badgett: You’re exceptional in that, you’ve, you’re just such a great content creator and you’re doing it and you’ve done it before, like inside other companies like Gravity and Casto and so on. But in most of the case, most software companies, the best training on the software is made by some independent party. So if I look at the hosting decoded course, if you ask the question, why hasn’t this been made by the hosting industry or a player in there? It is an interesting question. One, they’re biased to their own solution, so they, that’s just an issue. So they’re not really incentivized to do the bread basket of let’s look at all the options and stuff like that. Some of that is a limited limiting belief, but for the entrepreneurs out there listening, there’s a huge opportunity to create training. On your favorite softwares and those companies, like you mentioned, getting sponsorship will help promote it, promote you. It’s needed. It’s needed. We all know as, particularly as agency and freelancer folks, sometimes when we talk to a company for support, we know more about the tool than the support rep we’re talking to. Yeah. And if you’re, if you find yourself in that position, maybe you could create a training on your own for that. Yeah. Whether it’s free or paid or whatever.  Matt Medeiros: Yeah. And a lot of, the hosting companies to be fair, ’cause again, I worked at Pagely, so I totally know, like a lot of that marketing and advertising is spent on saying things like more gigabytes than the competition, or faster support time, because their buying cycle or their customers in that buying cycle moment okay, this is the one I want. Or it’s here, first. Year is 50% off and next year, the price goes up. We looked at it as, okay, that’s great. And certainly, look at the gigabytes and the disc space and the data centers and all that stuff. But at the end of the day, how are they supporting WordPress? And through that, is that helping your agency and your customer? One, I don’t know what we have for time left, but I do have a bonus story on we had the course name and we launched it and I emailed it, and then I was contacted that I had to change the name. Oh. And we had we had to change the name the next day of launching the course.  Chris Badgett: Because it included a name that there was already a course about or something, or what was the.  Matt Medeiros: No. I was contacted that from Automatic, or yes, I was contacted by Automatic that it infringed on the trademark because the course name was WordPress hosting Decoded. Yeah. And that was clearly against the terms and conditions of the trademark. So for the course creators who are out there, who are watching, luckily. I definitely would’ve lost my mind if Eric wasn’t helping me put this whole course together, because there’s a lot, like you might just see free course, nine modules, a quiz, that’s it. But there was just a lot of stuff that went into play, including all, like the copy, the slides, the featured images, and all the course I had to go through and change all those the next day. So all of that stuff that, went into launching a course, I had to like quickly redo it again over the, over a weekend. And change all that stuff up, change that links and things like that. But yeah, so we couldn’t use that name WordPress hosting, so we had to change the whole name, which caused us to go through and change all of our assets. So definitely keep all of your course stuff and your assets organized and easily changeable. I guess if anything like that happens to you,  Chris Badgett: First. Welcome to my world, Matt. So with with plugin names and things like and when you, a lot of plugins involve multiple brands for example, like a CRM brand but we’ve learned over time through automatic and other companies and other I don’t know if it’s a cease and desist letters or whatever, but if you’re gonna make a course about some other brand. Putting for that brand at the end, like you have pivoted to here, you tend to be all right. Yeah. But if you start with the brand name, yes. You get you’re rolling on the dice. But I also want to admire you for something I noticed that all successful course creators have, which is forward and perfect action. So you didn’t get hung up on the name forever and all that. You did it. Oops. You crossed a line you didn’t realize was there. You got a letter, you corrected it, you’re fine. But that’s how it goes. This is entrepreneurship, this is life. Matt Medeiros: Yeah. That, yeah, it was certainly something that I definitely wasn’t gonna battle use it as a training lesson. And, it’s the part of the entrepreneurship stuff and it was to, it’s fine. And in fact maybe even the course name ends up being better in the long run for visibility and. Searchability and all that stuff, but definitely like when you’re you first launch, you send it out to your mailing list, you put it out on social, you’re hyped up, you do a podcast episode about it, and you’re like, you’re way up here. Then all of a sudden it’s you gotta change the name and you’re like, like there goes all that energy, out of the room. But it’s fine. And I am feeling a lot better about it now.  Chris Badgett: Just to close it out with one final question, and it could be I’ll challenge you to. To put it down to one word, but if you need three or four sentence, it’s fine. One of the things I notice with successful course creators and content and creator entrepreneurs is that there’s some kind of through line, yeah, you do a lot of things. You set, podcasting, YouTube, you work at these companies, you do all these projects and stuff. You collaborate with all these people. What would you say is the through line? Because I see people come and go in different spaces and that’s fine. Maybe you enter a new season of life or your interests or focuses change. But what’s your through line? Because I’m really glad just to see you continuing on the journey and just being around and your different forms and evolution. But what’s the through line for you?  Matt Medeiros: The through line is definitely WordPress, right? It’s the only thing that has kept me. Kept me going and in various firm forms, right? So it started as an agency, as an agency owner. Then it turned into like the podcast stuff. Then it turned into a more official career as I, transitioned from Pagely to Casto, which is a WordPress company as well to where I’m at with GRA gravity forms. And that’s the thing that makes me continue to put out this content. If it was something where, had I been a agency coach 15 years ago, would that have lasted the stand of time for me? Probably not. Like the foundation for me is WordPress for what it stands for in open source and what it empowers people to do. And that’s my foundation. Then I have these different art forms, on top of it, over the course of many years. So that’s what’s kept me, consistent and kept me going because I do love WordPress and what it can do for an individual. Right now.  Chris Badgett: That’s Matt Maderis. Go to the wp minute.com. You’ll see the course on there. Hosting Decoded, how to Choose the Best Host for WordPress. Thanks for coming on the show, Matt. Really appreciate it. And I love what you’ve built here. I’d encourage anybody listening to go check out the course and can’t wait to see your future courses and how this evolves. Matt Medeiros: Thanks, Chris. Thanks so much. Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode. 2025 WordPress LMS Buyer’s Guide Exclusive Download! Stop wasting time and money researching online course and membership site tech. Download the Buyer’s Guide The post Create Impact And Revenue From Free Courses With Matt Medeiros appeared first on LMScast.

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

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. 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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 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.